We cannot escape our human understanding of the world. We find meaning in life, in the universe, within the parameters of our human senses. Meaning itself is, as we know it and experience it, a human invention. This is not to say that there is only human meaning; cetaceans and avians may well have, at last among their smartest members, a sense of meaning unique to them. But for us it would seem that there is only our own sense of meaning. Were we able to talk with a dolphin, say, and discuss at length with that dolphin her sense of meaning, our understanding of that dolphin’s sense would still be a human one. We can never know what it would mean to be a dolphin understanding meaning.

Yet I am moved by what Steve Talbott says:

No one will deny that we experience meaning everywhere in nature. To sit in a quiet glade with the sun streaming through the trees; to endure the shattering power of a fierce thunderstorm; to enjoy the early greening of spring or the warm, rich colors of autumn; to stand beside a quiet pond or the rapids of a stream; to climb toward the summit of a high peak; to watch the unfolding drama of a sunset; to lie down and gaze up at the stars – every setting we encounter comes to its own meaningful expression within us. Everything speaks an inner language.

As I read those words the first time, I had what I humbly would describe as a moment of satori, or as a moment of pure, Zen-like Dasein. I was struck by the perception that my human sense of meaning does in fact interface with meaning in-itself, free of any particulars. The universe, life, means something. As a human being, however, the universe (which includes “life” in it) means something human to me and can’t really mean anything else or other, or can’t mean something some other way, because as soon as I start thinking about it I do so in my own human terms, within my human framework. I am aware of this. But there is nonetheless a wordless intimation that at the point of touching meaning in-itself there is a certain universal quality (not to say universality) that, even so frustratingly fleetingly, seems to be perceptible in what I will call a meta-human way (n.b., there is no metaphysical woo-woo implied in this). I am reminded of what Roberto Calasso noted in his Literature and the Gods: “In the Greek language the word theos, ‘god,’ has no vocative case…. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens.” The Greeks were very perceptive. You can’t point to “god” in the moment, you can’t address “god”, but you can say that the moment itself was “god”. So, then, when we are truly in the moment — what happens? That is, what is it we are perceiving when it seems to us that meaning in-itself is unfolding? Might it be said that there is no vocative case for meaning in-itself and, if so, that meaning in-itself is an essence that precedes the existence of any unfettered example of it we might name? Is finding meaning inherent in us?

Meaning bears the ideas of sense, significance, and, depending on circumstance, intention. It is, as we understand it, a quality to some thing, idea, or experience that makes sense, yields significance, or reveals intention to us in a comprehensible way. I suspect that the problem we run into with meaning in-itself is found in the fact that intention may be suggested by meaning. Words are meant to make sense, to yield significance, to reveal intention; words are meant to be understood. As our intelligence enabled us to flourish in the world, meaningful words propagated across the seemingly limitless spectra of human experiences. Vocabularies blossomed as human beings attempted to better meaningfully communicate with each other about themselves and the world they found so meaningful. But no matter how much or what our words are meant to mean, in themselves they are in fact meaningless. A banana is not a plátano a plátano is not a weegbree. Although the words refer to the same thing, they are obviously not the thing in-itself; you cannot peel and eat the word in any language. In fact, there really is no word for the thing in-itself. I do think it’s fair to assert that from the raw, wordless experience comes the description in words. But can it with equal force be asserted that from the raw, wordless meaning in-itself comes the meaning implied by words? Of that I am not so certain, and it raises other questions.

Did non-onomatopoeic words descend, as it were, from onomatopoeic ones? I ask this rhetorically because it points, I think, to a basic problem for us here. An onomatopoeic word, it seems to me, must be quite close to the experience that created it because it is intended to convey, as a copy, if you will, the experience of hearing the event in question. If our words developed from our reactions to and experiences in and of the environment, then they more or less were intended, like onomatopoeic words, to reflect them. Hence, the meanings we found in the world were encoded over time in words, as a byproduct of our experiences, as we learned to better express ourselves. So today we can be told in great detail what it’s like to climb Mt. Everest, and we likely can relate, to some degree experientially, to what we are told because words bear general meanings that most people can relate to, yet the actual experience of climbing Everest will never be known to any but those who’ve climbed it. Put another way, the collective meaning of the words cannot possibly capture the meaning of the actual experience no matter how eloquent and accurate those words are in their description.

When we speak of some experience and its meaning, the meaning in-itself is like a package of silence wrapped in descriptors. We can’t address the meaning in-itself; we can only point to it. However empathetic a person may be, he will not be able to grasp the meaning of my moment. After long description and explanation, clarification and honing in, in the end he will take away a map of some detail that shows where the meaning lies, but the meaning in-itself will not be contained in the map any more than a building is contained in its address.

What I have written here is evidence of what I mean.

The universe seems to me to be ripe with meanings that are inherent in its existence. Yet there is no way to capture these meanings in themselves, and they are not even necessarily the same for any two people. As a product of the universe, I sense that the meaning of the universe is equally inherent in me and you and rocks and trees and plastic eggs and paper and so on. In the moment of wordless being, the meaning of the universe is clear and perfect and accessible. So maybe it’s not that the meaning is different for each of us. Perhaps the meaning in-itself is the same… because, like everything itself, it’s us. Maybe it can’t be captured in language because it is all words at once, or the possibility of all words all at once. Maybe it’s everything and so beyond any particular word or dictionary that it can only be registered as silence.