Introduction
Bishop Berkeley offered a challenge to those who believe in an external world, and this extended to those who describe the world as being made up purely of a mathematical skeleton separate from human consciousness. The group of people still challenged by this today are called Empiricists. The view he challenged is still around today and is encapsulated by your standard, run-of-the-mill science-y view: the tree you see is not a tree; it is x wide, y tall, z deep; devoid of “objective” colour or texture. This stands as a brief explanation to give some context of the landscape of thought, not an exhaustive overview.
Berkeley’s challenge was to say, “Imagine that true.” No really, imagine it. Try to imagine a tree with no colour or texture or extension in space. It’s impossible. Is your mental tree clear? It has taken on the colour of your imaginal background. It has no texture? That’s called smooth. It has no lines of extension? You are not imagining a tree.
From this, he concludes that it is silly to imagine a depersonalized world because you can’t conceive of it. There is no “objective world” external to us in the form of bodies described by math. The world we interact with is the world. And the world is colourful. The world is shapely. The world is textured.
I find this argument genius. How can we have a whole tradition of people claiming to be strictly empirical, which is a reliance on the data presented by the five senses, yet also believing in a made-up realm of pure math that they never interact with, see, or participate in? Furthermore, this conceptual realm is posited to be the “true” reality and our perceptual realm is thought to be inherently deceiving because our perception is untrustworthy. This falters, though, as H.H. Price says in his Given that we have to assign at least some level of trust to our senses, because if we render them untrustworthy, then that means our scientific findings — which are validated by our empirical senses — are also untrustworthy. This includes our mathematical world.
I think Berkeley succeeds in his argument that the world has colour and shape and brightness. And now I am stepping in with my desire to take it even further. I remember reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and he says that, “If the world has no meaning, then we would not have found that out.” In other words, if the world has no meaning, and that is a meaningful statement, we could not conclude it has no meaning; the conclusion is that the cosmos is teeming with meaning.
A Personal World
I am going to attempt to synthesize these two great thinkers, offering a worldview I think aligns with Orthodox Christianity. My goal is to demonstrate that personability is a fundamental aspect of the cosmos; and personability contains certain powers which entail meaningfulness.
My first proof is that you cannot conceive of a world that has no meaning. You can try to do it, but you shall soon find that you fall back into Berkeley’s argument. Say, in your conceptual realm of meaninglessness, you take a “hard” stance of meaninglessness. This may mean complete nothingness; pure black/darkness/colourlessness, pure chaos, no extensions in space or forms of objects. I would contend that sense data is present as you have some perception of colourlessness. In your attempt to neutralize colour, you are imagining some colour and reasoning by analogy that this represents a colourlessness. You cannot imagine no colour. Likewise, pure chaos can be signified by a symbol or a feeling — both of these are sense data and convey meaning. The attempt to do this exercise presupposes sense data itself, as you are standing outside of your creation looking in, so in your mind you are present spatially. That means you have been caught by Berkeley on the presence of sense data. You aren’t able to imagine nothingness, as a ‘nothingness’ thought simply would not be tainted by ideas of imagination, as our imagination uses sense data.
If you take a “soft” stance of meaningless, which can be that you spot objects but you halt judgement of them and act as though they are meaningless, there is too an admittance of sense data. In either case scenario of meaninglessness, sense data is present. This means a world with no sense data is inconceivable.
Where I take this argument further is that in our imaginings, the presence of sense data means personability, which entails intelligibility. A person is receiving sense data, and this is a fundamental aspect of the equation. I argue this because Berkeley’s argument doesn’t end at sense data; it entails us. The conversation that was started by Berkeley about our perceptible world being the world suggests that meaningfulness is built into the cosmos. Because persons are talking about sense data, and persons have intelligibility, it is illogical to exclude ourselves from the picture and preclude our abilities from bearing on the cosmos. This is why my point that sense data is ever-present is so important.
Following the same line of logic that Berkeley spelt out, if sense-data is indeed proper to the world, then so is our personhood; we cannot imagine a world devoid of person. Therefore, a non-personal world is an inaccurate account of the world.
Data’s presence in the form of sense data has already been demonstrated. What is interesting is that in our attempted creations of meaninglessness, there is both the presence of data, and this data is always processed into information. The notion of meaninglessness is inherently “datafull” or else it could not be communicated. “Nothingness” signals blackness; “colourless tree” forms distinct borders and a focal point in the mind’s eye. The reverse is true also: the sense impression of a tree is automatically processed as “tree.” No one is thinking, “Brown-textured-large slowly tapering as it moves up with textured out-lines that attach to gr– oh yes, a tree!” Therefore data — intellectual or sensible — is always interpreted and rendered information by virtue of our God-given power of intelligibility. The very fact that the agents, tasked with imagining a world both without sense data or meaning, are people, is a proof that the cosmos is inherently personal. To fit this takeaway into the larger whole being presented: not only is the world colourful, it is also personal and therefore intelligible.
I’m going to take a moment to pause and explain what I mean. Berkeley’s argument demonstrates that the world — whatever is out there — is colourful. I am taking a second to say, “Okay, data is a part of this world. What things are accessing this data? Persons. What are persons endowed with? Intelligibility. What happens when persons, endowed with intelligibility, are presented datum? It is rendered information. That means for data to exist it has to be co-mingling with meaning in some way, and intelligible creatures can discern the information. If there were no meaning whatsoever, there would be nothing to utter.” This description of what I am expressing demonstrates a few things: Persons are a part of the world. These persons can find meaning, and they can only find meaning in things meaningful. Because persons are in the world, the world has personability, and our existence is a proof of this. These persons find meaning in data through their power of intelligibility, which means that meaning exists. Essentially, I am expanding Berkeley’s claim about the ontology of sense data to a logical end: persons and their abilities.
It can be said that if data is present, then a personal world is. Because people are as essential to the cosmos as what is being presented by sense data, the cosmos — insofar as we could ever tell or conceive of — is personal. The objective account of the cosmos is that it both contains and is made up of persons, and these persons are equipped with the power of intelligibility. If the cosmos is personal, then it is intelligible. It follows from this that everything is meaningful. This is because for information to be present, there must be something with the power of both receiving something informative, as well as rendering something informative. The opposite is also true, for if there is intelligibility, then something has to be there to be made intelligible: a meaning substratum cloaked in data. Hence, intelligibility is as fundamental to the cosmos as dirt is, because we are as fundamental to the cosmos as dirt is. If there is intelligibility there is meaning, and if there is meaning there is intelligibility.
Even in the very act of saying either “Data is meaningful,” or “Data is not meaningful,” a meaningful distinction is made; it is impossible to imagine data as being meaningless. The rendering of something meaningless — or meaningful — is a meaningful distinction, and this distinction is made by persons.
Therefore, it is our role to figure out what information is about. I can see the conversation degrading into equivocation of the word “meaning,” especially considering my comment that “it is impossible to imagine data as being meaningless,” so I will attempt to describe meaning as I see it.
Meaning In Two Senses
We can quibble if information is meaningful, say the random set of numbers 118237, but this is not a discussion about meaning itself. We are only asking ourselves if select datum is meaningful, typically in service of social value. As has been demonstrated, the fact that data are present means that meaning is, we just haven’t figured out how to organize it in a way to convey meaning to each other. This is where I see the possible equivocation happening. Say 118237 is a code, that would mean its meaning is somewhat defined socially; its meaning is between people at a given time. This does not mean that it is only meaningful socially. It is data in the form of numbers. That means a world exists in which a conversation on the meaning of numbers can take place, which necessitates the conclusion that meaning is present. Recall earlier that uttering something truly meaningless is impossible. This is true for understanding the preconditions of conversation regarding the numbers: they can be manipulated, and can be grasped by a mind; they can be spoken about and communicated. Discussions can be held about relativity or objectivity of numbers. A meaningless world would present itself no data, as there would be no information to offer. An impersonal world would not even allow for the hypothetical to occur in the mind of a person; and this includes hypothetically removing oneself from the hypothetical. There would just be nothingness; no preconditions for data or information. And so, the world is personal and meaningful.
The utterance, “this is meaningless,” in common parlance is then something akin to, “I don’t see how this fits into the picture; I do not understand this thing.” Or, “This doesn’t serve my purpose.” Because data is immediately rendered information in the soul, and our internal story acts as the interpreter of information, what someone considers meaningful is going to be based on their story. That is why a Soviet and an Orthodox can look at a monastic community and walk away with different conclusions regarding the meaningfulness of monasticism. Meaning is understood in comparison with the whole, as the whole provides meaning.
That is why the organization and organizer of meaning is important. The form meaning takes on will be influenced by how it is organized. The understanding that underlying narrative and story influences how one views the meaning of an object is the important concept to grasp here. Some things derive their meaning from how they serve you and your mission.
Orthodox Practicability
Herein lies a practical takeaway. To discard your childhood toys because they are deemed meaningless misses the point. They are meaningful: they served you and your growth, they act as figures another person made, and they are a symbol of childhood joy. They taught you how the world works, how to play with others, and facts about the world. But they can also be acknowledged as not serving your mission in life now, and this where our shorthand, “this is useless/meaningless,” comes from. They simply don’t fit into your picture as you have it framed. But to disregard them fully is not the best way we can deal with them. We can acknowledge them as having played a large part in our life and being awesome for the time we used them, and recognize that their meaning to us now is an object of charity. Perhaps this is why St. Basil says that your unused shoes are the homeless’ and the poor’s; the things you count as useless or meaningless are apart of your story now, and their meaning can be reorganized to promote your Christian journey. The underlying meaning substratum is present, we just have to figure out how to manipulate and organize it.
Remember that designating something meaningless is an interpretation of its meaning. Us Christians can mobilize this knowledge by reinterpreting and retooling things thrown our way in life. The extra food given to you is not luck; it is a blessing from God. The clothes you no longer use are not yours to bin, but awaiting a body in need of adorning. The struggles in life are not torments and hardships, but crosses to bear and lessons to transmit. Everything is able to be retooled to serve our higher purpose.
Therefore, this thing us Western folk love to do of imagining the “objective” world is the least objective thing we can do. Why attempt to depersonalize a world that, as far as we are ever able to tell, is personal? Why would the removal of ourselves in conceiving the cosmos form a so-called “objective account” of the cosmos, when the true objective account is that we are indeed apart of this cosmos? And furthermore, why would we rid the world of its meaning? The very fact that we are here, are intelligible, and can discern meaning means that the world is meaningful. We cannot reason out of this with our imaginations, as the “objective” world is the world that includes us.
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