What is the meaning of asking about the meaning of a thing? Broadly speaking, it is asking why one does this thing. But the purpose of a thing is often very hard to determine: the meaning of eating is to eliminate hunger, or to increase nutrition, or to satisfy taste, or perhaps to serve several purposes at once.
At the same time, meaning can be further questioned. For example, if I say eating is for the sake of increasing nutrition, then one can ask again: what is the meaning of increasing nutrition? Continuing to ask about the meaning of increasing nutrition, one might answer that it is for the sake of maintaining health; maintaining health might in turn be for the sake of living better and longer… So at what point can this questioning come to an end? This endpoint can be called the so-called “ultimate concern” — what, in the end, is everything we do for? Traditionally, religion takes God and heaven as ultimate meaning; to glorify God, or to obtain immortality, is the ultimate meaning. If one were to ask further why one should go to heaven, then no answer need be given.
However, in fact, people still often cannot help but go on supplying meaning—for instance, by embellishing all the wonders of heaven: utmost truth and utmost beauty, butter and honey everywhere, and so on. If heaven were somehow a purgatory, how could it become the ultimate pursuit? It can be seen that taking the most distant and abstract concept as ultimate meaning is still hard to make satisfactory; in the end, what people want always still has to be brought down to the most immediate level of feeling.
In my view, tracing ultimate meaning back to the “ultimate reality” that is farthest from human beings is simply to get the direction wrong.
By comparison, the following strategy for dealing with the question of meaning may be better: there are some actions that are irrelevant to meaning, that is, they have no purpose at all. For example, when I am listening to music alone, my foot unconsciously keeps time with the music, or I unconsciously bob my head and sway, wave my hands and feet, and the like—what is this for? To appreciate the music better? That seems strained however one puts it. Even if one says that only conscious activity can be said to have meaning, we can still ask: when I become aware of the movement I had originally made unconsciously and continue it nonetheless, what is the meaning of that action? In this sense, things like waving one’s hands and feet while listening to music, or humming a little tune while strolling, seem to have no purpose. That is to say, “art” activities, in their most fundamental sense, are purposeless.
Of course, we can always find a “purpose” for a thing. For example, we can say that artistic activity is for venting some inner impulse, or for increasing one’s sense of pleasure, and so on—but these are all the explanations we can come up with. And this is precisely what I mean by “ultimate meaning”: this kind of meaning is the most original, the most fundamental, the “ultimate meaning” that can no longer be pursued further. One should not take “venting some inner impulse” here and then go on to say that it is for the sake of promoting physical and mental health, and then for the sake of living better, and finally all for God or some other ultimate being. Such a line of questioning is insincere, because in the end, in order to understand that distant “ultimate being,” one will still have to turn back and appeal to our “feelings.”
And this so-called “venting of inner impulses” or “increasing one’s own sense of pleasure” can of course also be reduced to things like “desire” or “selfishness,” but these are not the best names. If such emotional appeal is called “selfishness,” then “sacrificing oneself to save others” also becomes “the venting of impulses,” and “taking pleasure in helping others” also becomes “the satisfaction of selfishness.”
I call this ultimate meaning “love.” “Love” is the unity of desire and giving, the unity of selfishness and selflessness. “Love” itself has no good or evil, no right or wrong, no beauty or ugliness. “Why are you doing this?” “Because I love.” This is an ultimate answer. We can only go on asking what, exactly, is loved, how love is to be expressed, and so on; we cannot go on asking “for what purpose does one love?”
At this point, it is impossible not to mention, as an aside, Fromm’s famous saying: “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’” Where exactly lies the fundamental difference between these two sentences? It is precisely that immature love still wants to ask for the reason for love, whereas mature love takes love itself as the reason and does not pursue the question of “why love.”
However, if one were to draw from this conclusions such as “love is blind, and does not need careful thought; love is merely a matter of emotion and has nothing to do with reason,” that would be completely wrong. Although reason cannot “derive” emotion, it can reflect on it, confirm it, see it clearly, guide it, and control it. If emotion is like water, then reason can become its container and conduit; a container cannot increase or decrease water, yet it can give water shape, it can make water gather together or disperse, it can block or guide the direction of water’s flow—although when water overflows and surges, it will often be difficult to control, still it may be made to pour out in the proper direction at the proper time. What is called a loved one is probably precisely the object toward which one can let one’s pure emotion pour out without reservation. I think of another line from Fromm: “Love does not need vows or oaths; it only requires that one give oneself without reservation, hoping that one’s love can stir ripples in the other person.”
February 18, 2008
Latest comments
- Qianji`Change
2008-03-29 20:17:20 Anonymous 220.255.7.228
So beautiful! I love this article` !
- Lin Zi
2008-06-01 10:50:28 Anonymous 162.105.220.88
Praise for “What is called a loved one is probably precisely the object toward which one can let one’s pure emotion pour out without reservation.”
- boyi
2009-02-20 09:48:21
Terms defined by the ultimate are explanations that are not rationally confronted enough, and are self-deceiving.
Didn’t understand.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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