6 Meaning
6
Meaning: Discovery or Invention?
‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’1
Thomas Nagel
The astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934–96) once remarked that science ‘counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts’.2 Sagan and I seem to have ended up with a set of quite different working assumptions about life. But we both seem to agree that it is important to retain a sense of openness, a willingness to admit that we might be wrong. I like to think of this as a strength of character, rather than a weakness of intellect. It invites me to enter into the mindset of someone else, and try to understood what they believe and why – and to force myself to take their views seriously. And if we’re going to carry these ‘alternative hypotheses in our heads’, we need to be exposed to these, and to be free to consider them.
Why We Need to Take Alternative Perspectives Seriously
As I have discovered from some rather depressingly sterile conversations, not everyone likes Sagan’s idea. Dogmatic atheists and fundamentalist religious believers don’t seem to like taking any intellectual possibilities other than their own seriously. People who are just intellectually lazy or who are aware of the vulnerability of their beliefs get round the problem by dismissing those with alternative viewpoints as deluded fools. To take the ideas of such people seriously, they argue, would simply contaminate their own intellectual and moral purity. We already know they must be wrong, so why waste time reading their ghastly books? They’re little more than the infantile ramblings of stunted intellects.
The rest of us, of course, do not consider ourselves to be lesser human beings for failing to embrace these fundamentalist certainties, which generally turn out only to be ‘certain’ within their own ideological and cultural bubbles – bubbles that everyone knows will one day burst. Such fundamentalists already know that they are right, so they regard the exercise of even thinking about ‘alternative hypotheses’ as pointless and debasing. ‘Don’t insult me by asking me to consider such a ridiculous idea.’
Not surprisingly, both anti-religious and religious fundamentalists seem to have lists of ‘safe’ authors and books, and treat everyone else as heretical, deluded or just plain stupid.3 Bullying rhetoric implies that anyone taking these ideas seriously is a traitor, a liar or a simpleton. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead reading such rubbish!’ is presented as if it were a moral or intellectual virtue, when it is little more than a rhetorical fig leaf covering an embarrassing ignorance, culpable lack of curiosity, or a suppressed intuition that my own ideas might be wrong. Yet within these bizarre fundamentalist bubbles, this vice is seen as a virtue. This, of course, is exactly how cultural ‘in-groups’ work. Both the New Atheists and religious fundamentalists tend to demonise anyone they regard as a threat. They may each use their own vocabulary, but the same basic strategy underlies them both: portray your opponents as mindless, mad or evil.
Sagan was right: it may be intellectually uncomfortable, but we need to respect other perspectives, and avoid demonising those ideas, or those who hold them. It makes polemics difficult. But that’s how universities work. That’s how science works. And that’s how religion should work as well.
Let’s look at science, and see why this matters so much. The phrase ‘scientific orthodoxy’ sends chills down my spine. Why? Because it has come to mean the dominant scientific view of an age, which self-importantly believes it is correct, and seeks to exclude alternative perspectives – for example, through the high degree of control exercised by peer-reviewed journals, which generally select articles favourable to the status quo. It is notoriously difficult to publish an article which questions a widely accepted theory, or presents data that is anomalous in terms of current understandings. Yet science works so well precisely because it changes its mind in response to evidence and theoretical development, which means abandoning what one generation believed to be ‘orthodoxy’.
There are just too many examples of this for comfort. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker pointed out how many scientists routinely betray the core values of science in order to align themselves with ‘morally progressive’ ideas. In doing this, they abandon any pretensions to objectivity and neutrality, and become ‘moral exhibitionists’, denouncing their fellow scientists who fail to conform to their social and moral values.4 Ideas are not evaluated in terms of their truth, but in terms of their consistency with the prevailing progressive ideas of racial and gender equality. Failure to conform to this orthodoxy means you aren’t a member of the ‘in-group’.
A good example of this cultural bias is found in the initial responses to Edward O. Wilson’s classic Sociobiology (1975), which was widely interpreted on its publication by leading scientists and cultural commentators of the late 1970s as colluding with (if not actually openly advocating) racism, genocide and slavery.5 Pressure mounted for these views (and Wilson himself) to be excluded from university campuses. That political posturing now lies in the past, even if other views are now demonised in this way; nevertheless, it is a disturbing reminder of how a group-think can emerge, even within what many hope might be the most open-minded of disciplines: science.
In science, as in most other areas of life, certain ‘alternative hypotheses’ that ought to be kept open as genuine possibilities are rejected for social and political reasons, in that they do not conform to cultural norms – as if these were somehow arbiters of truth. It’s all too easy to become a slave to intellectual fashion, letting transient cultural norms determine what’s right through a process of alignment with individuals who are seen to embody cultural virtues of the moment. As the German poet and essayist Hermann Hesse pointed out, that was what happened in Germany in the 1920s. Everything was reduced to conformity to the latest intellectual fashions and ‘transitory values of the day’.6
One of these ‘alternative hypotheses’ which I keep turning over in my own mind is this. What if meaning is simply something that we invent? In other words, it is something that I – or we – construct, reflecting my own personal interests, powerful voices that I feel the need to respect, or the views of the social groups to which I belong? Although I believe that meaning is something that we discern, can I entirely reject the idea that it is something that we make up?
It’s an important question to ask. For a start, it raises the question of how someone can, with integrity, hold to a view which cannot be proved to be true, but which is nevertheless believed to be right. People regularly adopt a moral, social or political belief on the basis of some moral or social intuition, and then offer post hoc justifications for such views. The beliefs came first; only then were rational arguments made up to defend them.7
This raises deep questions about the boundaries of reliable human knowledge and the limits of human capacity to reason. Diehard rationalists who believe that you only accept ideas that can be proved to be right find themselves both frustrated and irritated by the human preoccupation with questions of meaning, which inevitably and necessarily transgress the limits of reason and evidence. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) once remarked that, because human beings existed in the world, they were ‘condemned to meaning’.8 He seemed to be rather depressed by this thought. But that’s just the way we are.
Given the importance of meaning to life, there is a clear and present danger that we might fabricate ideas to make ourselves feel better, or to conform to the ‘group-think’ which emerges within any human organisation – such as political parties, churches, the New Atheism, or groups of celebrities. How can we interrogate such ideas, to ensure we are not deluding ourselves? I am disturbed at how little today’s defenders of the polity of the ‘Age of Reason’ fail to confront the fact that rationalism – as we find it, for example, in Nicolas de Condorcet – can serve a blatantly ideological function, in that it tries to justify the power of cultural élites over others.9 It can easily become a form of narcissism, in which a self-proclaimed rationalist finds it ‘difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself’.10 This form of rationalism easily degenerates into a celebrity group-think, where an individual’s cultural acceptance results from her publicly declared conformity to the ideas of a powerful individual.
Few people now read Howard Margolis’s Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition (1987).11 Yet its basic thesis must be noted by anyone reflecting on human nature, and especially human judgement – especially those who remain locked within the outmoded and discredited rational certainties of the ‘Age of Reason’. Margolis noticed that people made political judgements, or came to political beliefs, on the basis of what is generally a tenuous or highly selective grasp of the evidence. It seemed as if human beings often provided rational justifications for beliefs that they had actually arrived at on other grounds. Above all, humans were very good at providing post hoc rationalisations of judgements or beliefs arrived at intuitively, not rationally.12 The interconnection of human emotions and rationality is complicated, not least on account of the many neural sub-processes involved in human decision-making.13 What makes a belief seem ‘rational’ requires far more nuancing than the philosophers of the ‘Age of Reason’ appreciated.
So how does this relate to the question of whether there really is such a thing as meaning in life? Let’s begin by looking at the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), a German philosopher whose ideas had a significant impact on Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (whom we’ll consider later in this work).
Believing What We Want? The Views of Ludwig Feuerbach
Why do people believe in God? The answer is far from simple. Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists treat God as some kind of object within the world, whose existence should be demonstrated by reason or scientific proof. Since no such proof is forthcoming, God is declared to be non-existent. Religious believers respond with a certain degree of exasperation to this unperceptive approach, pointing out that they do not think of God as a ‘thing’ or ‘object’ within the world. Rather, they take the view that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which is not conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of the universe that we actually observe.14 The English theologian William Inge, who later served as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, put this point rather well:
The real defect of rationalism or exclusive intellectualism lies in its attempt to prove Faith, or, I should rather say, in its belief that it has succeeded in demonstrating what cannot be demonstrated. Rationalism tries to find a place for God in its picture of the world. But God, “whose centre is everywhere and His circumference nowhere,” cannot be fitted into a diagram. He is rather the canvas on which the picture is painted, or the frame in which it is set.15
Dawkins and Inge both agree on the importance of the rationality of belief systems. Yet they understand this notion in different ways. For Dawkins, a rational belief is one that is capable of being proved. Now this is an important view that needs to be taken seriously. Yet it too easily morphs into the view that reality is limited to, or defined by, what reason can prove. This turns out to be a rather narrow and constricted world. For Inge, the Christian faith provides a deeper understanding of rationality which acknowledges and explains the capacity (and limits) of human reason in the first place, offering a ‘big picture’ of our world which makes sense of its intelligibility and coherence to be understood. It is the eye of the needle, through which the world’s threads are found to pass.
We shall return to consider issues of rationality later in this work. But let’s return to that question about why people believe in God. What if we do so because we need to? Because we cannot bear the thought of a meaningless world? Because we are incapable of coping with the existential strain of living pointless lives in a pointless universe? Religious people will find this ‘alternative hypothesis’ unsettling. But it must be confronted.
Let’s imagine someone explaining to us their grounds for belief in God. ‘I hope there is a God! I don’t want there to be no God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ The obvious danger here is that we simply invent the universe that we would like to inhabit. This objection to belief in God was given classic formulation in the writings of Feuerbach. God is an objectification of our deepest longings, the reification of our heart’s desire, a projection of our feelings and aspirations onto an imaginary transcendent screen. There is no God. Our idea of God thus originates within us, and corresponds to nothing, save what lies within us. Although Feuerbach is usually regarded as an atheist, there is a sense in which he is actually an ‘anthropotheist’ – someone who believes in the divinity of humanity. Our concept of God does not arise from an external being, but from within us. We are the creators and origins of our own divinity.16
If Feuerbach is right, we ourselves create our notions of God. Given that there is no God (and we must emphasise that this presupposition is essential to the internal logic of Feuerbach’s analysis), the idea can only come from within the depths of the human imagination. That’s a challenging ‘alternative hypothesis’ for a religious believer, which was developed in different ways by Marx and Freud.
So what do I make of this? Well, I must take it seriously. A refusal to engage with this view would amount to an implicit admission that my worldview cannot cope with it. (That’s one of the reasons why the New Atheism prefers to ridicule religion, rather than engage with its ideas seriously.) So let’s begin to open this up for discussion.
First, I would agree with Feuerbach completely that nothing exists, nor needs to be true, because we feel it is true, or want it to be true. We need to come to terms with awkward yet verified truths, which some prefer to ignore, and others simply to deny. ‘As an old philosophy lecturer once told us as fresh-eyed undergraduates in our first year at University: if something has been proven to be true, you just have to accept it, whether you like its implications or not. “It makes me feel bad, therefore it’s false” is not an argument.’17 I have no doubt that some would like there to be a God, and that this feeds into their reflections. Yet it’s important to appreciate that others would equally like to live in a universe in which there is no God. I opened this chapter with a revealing admission from the philosopher Thomas Nagel: ‘I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’18 Nagel’s philosophy is easily pilloried as a retrospective intellectual validation of a belief that had already been determined on emotional grounds – a good example of what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes as the ‘emotional tail’ wagging the ‘rationalist dog’.19 Nagel offers a post hoc intellectual justification of beliefs that merely express what he would like to be true. And he’s not on his own here.
Many people do not want there to be a God, so that they can be the masters of their own destinies without having to worry about any divine interference. C.S. Lewis is a classic example of someone whose early atheism reflected his desire for autonomy, safe from being troubled by the ‘Great Interferer’.20 Historians often point out how the origins of modern atheism reflect a longing for humans to be able to do anything they want, rather than work within a divinely given moral framework.21 A desire for total human autonomy was expanded into a desire for the elimination of perceived obstacles to such freedom – including the notion of God.
Feuerbach’s ‘given’ is that there is no God. Feuerbach does not prove this core belief, nor offer any warrants for believing that it is right. Yet this core assumption becomes the driver for his engagement with religion. Since there is no God – Feuerbach’s fundamental axiom – it follows that the observation that many people believe in God implies that they are misguided or deluded.
A Christian ‘given’ is that there is a God, and that human existence originates from and finds its fulfilment in God. As Augustine of Hippo put this, using the framework of a prayer to God: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’22 This theological framework immediately suggests the entanglement of desire and reason, offering a framework which explains why we long in the first place, and what we really long for in the second. Like Feuerbach’s approach, this proves nothing, save the internal consistency of the framework itself.
Both Augustine and Feuerbach actually offer a ‘logic of desire’ – that is, a rational explanation of our sense of longing, how it arises, and what it intimates. Yet they understand the nature, origins and goals of this desire in quite different manners. For Augustine, God is there to be discovered and encountered; for Feuerbach, there is no God, and some compensate for this apparent deficiency by inventing one to meet their own expectations or desires.
What if Feuerbach is right? What if there is no transcendent realm as such, but only a set of ideas or values which we ourselves have constructed, and choose to treat as if they are transcendent? What would it be like to inhabit such a world?
Making Up Meaning
Feuerbach’s elimination of a transcendent realm from thinking about religion, morality and meaning raises the question of the origins of these notions. If Feuerbach is right – and that, by the way, is a massive ‘if’ – then our ideas about values and meaning must be recognised as purely human constructions, without any transcendent ground or warrant. Humanity creates its own values and ideas, and is not accountable to any external objectivity in doing so, precisely because there is no such transcendent reality that need be acknowledged or referenced.
That was certainly the view of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was convinced that the world had no intrinsic meaning. We could either learn to live with meaninglessness, or invent our own meaning and impose it on the world and our lives. Nietzsche argued that the collapse of any belief in an objective truth about the world was liberating, in that it set human beings free to create their own ideas of meaning and value.23 For Nietzsche, there are no objective facts; just subjective opinions.
This fashionable (though deeply problematic) view is widely affirmed within postmodern philosophy. For Jacques Derrida, the notion of la différance expresses the ultimate undecidability of all meaning. Resolution of the question of meaning is endlessly deferred and is therefore never fixed.24 A similar view is expressed by the philosopher Richard Rorty, who teased out its inevitable implications. ‘There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.’25 We invent meaning – including our ideas of identity, purpose and value.
Some people will find this idea to be unsettling, where others may find it liberating. Yet it is only an intellectual possibility. Our emotive reaction to this possibility is no indicator of its truth, although it will inevitably shape its reception. We can be like Feuerbach, and make subjective emotional resonance a criterion of truth. ‘I like this – therefore it’s right.’ It’s a highly narcissistic view that appeals to those who see themselves as arbiters of truth, as well as fashion. Most, however, are likely to feel that such a self-serving and self-justifying view just can’t be right. So what possible responses might be developed to Rorty’s suggestion that we invent meaning and morality to conform to our expectations and aspirations? After all, there is ample evidence that people do this all the time.
A number of points could be made. To begin with, we may note that Rorty’s position is vulnerable, in that it seems to do little more than reify social practices, and treat these as being synonymous with ‘truth’, ‘goodness’ or ‘justice’.26 For Rorty, what is right, good or meaningful is determined by what we do as individuals or groups. And it is obvious that what people do changes over time. Social norms are notoriously volatile and unpredictable, and, as the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci so clearly demonstrated, are easily manipulated by those in power or with vested interests.27 Rorty thus locks himself into a shifting and unstable world, within which no ultimate resolution of the question of meaning is possible. The question may seem to be resolved, yet in reality this is simply a social consensus created and manipulated by those in positions of cultural power and authority.
The fundamental problem seems to be that Rorty’s approach is not capable of offering a criterion that stands above human practice, by which rival visions of meaning or morality could be judged.28 If we invent meaning, then we need to evaluate competitive concepts of truth, goodness and purpose in life. Yet if there is no external or objective vantage point from which this can be done, we can only make those judgements on the basis of subjective perceptions or prevailing social consensus within the group that we consider to be normative.
In effect, this is the dilemma which is embraced as a virtue by postmodernity, which declines to accept the notion of any normative standpoint or objective perspective by which ideas can be judged. Yet the downside of this approach can hardly be overlooked. What defence mechanisms does it propose to guard against delusion, intellectual manipulation by power groups and vested interests within society, and sheer personal dishonesty? As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, all too often ‘what purport to be objectively grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference’.29 Postmodernity’s failure to offer persuasive answers to these questions has led many to believe that it ‘has died in a kind of fin de siècle despair at its inability to interrogate the consequences of its own provisionality and indecipherability’.30
If we invent notions of meaning, they still require evaluation. The essentially political judgement that all such notions are of equal value or plausibility experiences serious discomfort when challenged on the grounds of its intellectual accountability. This difficulty is often met through the invention of criteria – that is, the formulation of rules by which beliefs may be judged. Yet those criteria ultimately reflect the consensus and practices of a community. They are socially constructed, not embedded within some deeper order of things, permitting them to have an objectivity and validity independent of the thinker.31 Criteria of evaluation are conventions that arise within a community. They are not etched into the glass of the ‘mirror of nature’. And sometimes those criteria are devised precisely to secure an intended outcome. What matters is securing a specific outcome; the criteria are invented with this objective in mind.
This rather leaves us floundering. If we follow these lines of thought through to their brutal end (something which understandably few choose to do), we find ourselves in an intellectual quagmire, being asked to assess invented meanings using invented criteria. Most draw back from this on grounds that are actually intuitive or emotional, rather than rational. We don’t want this to be the case; or we feel it can’t be right. Yet there is no evading the outcome of any theory of meaning that locates its origins and grounds in individual or communal subjectivity. There is, of course, a way of challenging this – but it is one that calls into question the fundamental presuppositions of this whole approach to meaning. It is to consider that there might be some objective grounds for meaning – for example, in questions of values and purposes.
This was the point made throughout her philosophical writings and novels by Iris Murdoch. For Murdoch, notions of meaning and goodness can only be stabilised through being grounded in some transcendent realm or framework.32 Goodness is not something that we invent; it is something we discover. In the light of this transcendent good, we come to recognise the deficiency of our own compromised ideas of morality, which are too often self-serving. In one sense, the basis for true morality is ‘un-selfing’, a dying to self in which we become attentive to the calls and demands of ‘the good’, which lies beyond and above us.33 We are thus accountable for our notions of meaning, in that they are grounded in something that lies beyond us, that is not under our control, which acts both as the basis for and judge of our understandings of meaning.
Murdoch’s emphasis on the importance of the transcendent in stabilising moral notions was anticipated by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Devils (1871–2), widely regarded as one of the greatest literary criticisms of nihilism. The most important character in the novel is Kirillov, who argues that the non-existence of God legitimates all forms of actions. ‘If God exists, then everything is His will, and I can do nothing of my own apart from His will. If there’s no God, then everything is my will, and I’m bound to express my self-will.’34 Since the idea of God is a pure human invention or construction, Kirillov reasons that he is therefore free to do as he pleases. There is no higher authority, to whom he is ultimately accountable, or who is able to negate his totalitarian moral self-assertion. There is no defensible alternative to an ethic of self-actualisation.
Dostoyevsky comes close to the view famously expressed by Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s Republic, who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched. Dostoyevsky takes much the same view in his 1878 letter to Nikolai Ozmidov, in which he sets out the implications of atheism for morality:
Now assume that there is no God, or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds, if I am to die entirely on earth? . . . And if that is so, why shouldn’t I (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught by the law) cut another man’s throat, rob and steal?35
The idea of God watching you, seeing what others overlook, clearly has implications for our sense of accountability!
So do we have to make a choice here? Do we have to choose between an objective concept of meaning, discerned or intuited from the world around us, or a subjective concept of meaning, which arises within us? Or might there be a way of holding these together coherently?
Objective and Subjective Approaches to Meaning
I want to suggest that meaning is something that is objectively grounded but is subjectively applied. I agree with Murdoch that we cannot just make things up; we want to feel that we respond to something that we believe to be outside us. Yet an objective truth needs to be subjectively appropriated. We need to embrace and apply our understanding of meaning, so that it impacts on our subjective experience. One of the most influential discussions of this point comes from the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who argues that truth was something that impacted upon us deeply and inwardly. It is not enough to accept that something is true or meaningful in a distant and detached manner; this meaning or truth has to be embodied in our actual lives and subjective experience. In short, he declares, truth or meaning demands ‘an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness’ if it is to become a reality within the life of an individual.36
We have already noted the views of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who points out that ‘academic philosophers do not talk much about meaningfulness in life’.37 Wolf singles out two alternative approaches to securing meaningfulness in life.
The first view is the need to ‘get involved in something “larger than oneself” ’ to secure meaningfulness.38 This view affirms or assumes the importance of ‘participating in or contributing to something whose value is independent of oneself’.39 This objective approach involves the recognition of the importance of something beyond the individual thinker, which is held to be meaningful in itself.
A second view holds that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do with your life as long as it is something you love’.40 This subjective view encourages the pursuit of what we feel to be meaningful, and judges their validity by ‘the subjective quality’ of the ‘inner lives’ of those who follow this course.41
Some may feel that this second approach risks collapsing into what C.S. Lewis termed the ‘poison of subjectivism’.42 It is, he remarked, a ‘fatal superstition’ to believe that human beings create values simply as a matter of taste, as someone might choose their clothes.43 Yet while Lewis was severely critical of self-indulgent wallowing in an experiential quagmire, he firmly believed that the quest for meaning pointed to something beyond us that nevertheless evoked a powerful and appropriate subjective response within us. Like Kierkegaard,44 Lewis held that encounter with truth necessarily changes our inner existential worlds.
Yet Wolf’s two views can clearly be seen as complementary, rather than as competitive. Suppose that I recognise something as intrinsically valuable in itself. Why could I not then make a subjective commitment to love this, and make its pursuit my goal in life? This is what I found happening to me, as I moved away from atheism towards Christianity. My initial attraction to Christianity was intellectual – a sense that it offered a fuller, richer and more satisfying account of the world than atheism. Although atheism then seemed to me to be emotionally sterile, I chose to frame this as a virtue, seeing its sheer bleakness and austerity as potentially an indication of its truth. At that stage in life, my focus was purely intellectual. When I came to the conclusion that Christianity made more sense of life than atheism, I had no sense that Christianity might turn out to have emotional, imaginative or aesthetic dimensions – or that these might be important.
Like Dorothy L. Sayers before me, I fell in love, not with the person of God, but with the pattern of Christian truth. It was an eros of the mind, not the heart. Just as Sayers suspected she had ‘fallen in love with an intellectual pattern’,45 so I found myself drawn to what I was realising to be the explanatory capaciousness of the Christian faith.
Although my journey to faith began with an objective appreciation of the intellectual merits of faith, it most certainly did not stop there. As I began to explore what I had embraced, I slowly came to appreciate the relational, aesthetic, emotional and imaginative aspects of faith. These were absent from my atheist worldview, and I had naturally assumed that they would also be absent from Christianity. Slowly, the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle began to fit together. God remained an explanatory principle for me then, as now. Yet I gradually grasped the importance of the characteristically Christian notion of a personal God as someone who could be known, not simply known about, and whose relationship with me could be characterised in terms of love, not simply intellectual illumination. The objective and subjective sides of my faith began to coalesce into a greater whole.
This may have been new to me; it was, however, a standard and unproblematic position for many Christian theologians. I later found this approach explored with imaginative power in C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), which affirmed the need to hold subjective and objective aspects of faith together, avoiding purely cerebral or emotional accounts of faith. A balancing act is certainly required – but Lewis himself believed that it was possible to construct a via media, a ‘middle way’ which embraced and enfolded both the objective and subjective aspects of meaning.
Relationships and Meaning
Recent psychological research has confirmed the importance of personal relationships in creating and sustaining a sense of meaning in life. Critically important terms such as ‘love’, ‘trust’ and ‘commitment’ naturally belong within the context of a personal relationship. People often define who they are and why they matter in terms of relationships. The deep human need to love and know that we are loved naturally expresses itself in a variety of relationships. In his influential work The Four Loves (1960),46 C.S. Lewis noted four broad categories of personal commitment – affection, friendship, eros and charity – which give human life its meaning and value. While these relational categories may turn out to have no ‘survival value’, Lewis remarks, they are rather something which gives ‘value to survival’.47 Loving someone – and being loved in return – makes life meaningful and worthwhile.
A relationship bridges our objective and subjective worlds. This point is often developed using the language of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In his classic work I and Thou (1922), Buber drew a distinction between two quite different kinds of relationship: ‘I–It’ and ‘I–Thou’. An ‘I–It’ relationship is that between an active subject and a passive object. It is the sort of relationship we might have with a pen, a stone or a piece of paper. We treat it as a passive object, having a certain colour, weight or size. We know about a piece of paper in an impersonal, objective way.
An ‘I–Thou’ relationship is totally different. It is about two active subjects, who freely enter into a relationship. Two lovers might know a lot about each other; they certainly know each other – personally and subjectively. Their relationship is an invisible bond between them, which changes dramatically the way in which they see each other, and the world around them.
Buber’s theory is more than just a way of helping us to make sense of relationships. Buber was critical of the depersonalising trends that rose in the aftermath of the First World War, and became particularly significant in the 1930s. The Soviet Union took a collectivist approach to life, which seemed to eliminate personal identity in order to serve the needs of the State.48 Buber’s approach helped clarify what happened in this dehumanising process, initially in the Soviet Union, and then in Nazi Germany. In the West, capitalism commodified humanity, calling into question the significance and value of the human individual beings.49 An individual human was treated as an ‘It’, not a ‘Thou’ – as a depersonalised body, whose significance lay only in its capacity to work for the State. Our importance was functional, not relational. This also allows us insights into the theology of sin, which can be understood as a relational notion, expressed in dysfunctional relationships with other people, the environment and God.
Yet Buber himself was clear that his approach did more than safeguard human identity; it also helped illuminate what was for him one of the most important dimensions of human nature – the human relationship with God. For Buber, God was the ‘eternal Thou’, who entered into a transforming relationship with a human ‘Thou’. God was not to be thought of as an abstract, impersonal force, but as a living reality who could be known, trusted and loved. To relate to God is to be loved and affirmed, and transformed in and through this new relationship, in which we become more like God precisely because we relate to God. For Lewis, we are ‘mirrors’ whose brightness is ‘wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us’.50
Meaning, purpose and value are strongly subjective ideas, which matter profoundly to people, and are probably best expressed in terms of a relationship. Yet these qualities are not merely subjective; they are vulnerable. So what happens if we lose any sense of meaning or purpose? We shall explore this challenging theme in the following chapter.