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| Ethical Perspectives |
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| Issue : 6/3-4 (December - 1999) |
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| Two Questions about the Meaning of Meaning |
| Bart Pattyn |
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Page : 215 - 219 |
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It would seem obvious to assume that nothing enters our consciousness that does not have a `meaning'. Feelings, customs, prescriptions, gestures — all these are involuntarily interpreted and valued in function of various historical, social and cultural conceptions and circumstances. This is why philosophical considerations about justice, ethics and rights nowadays are linked with the concrete `meaning' of goods, customs, institutions and persons. Walzer is no exception when he situates his moral and political reflections in the `meaning' that goods, customs and institutions have in a particular culture at a particular time.
Though the importance of meaning is seldom overlooked, this does not prevent there from being opposed theories about it. Two of the current theories about how meaning is created give rise to quite divergent views about what founds ethics. Because I am curious about which of the currents Walzer would subscribe to, I will briefly sketch both of them.
In contemporary philosophy we see, on the one hand, those who assume that the meaning of a person or a thing is the result of an interpretation based on reference narratives, ideologies, novels, articles of faith, cultural patterns of expectation, scientific models, and other sorts of interpretative frameworks. Alongside their attention to linguistic expressions and narratives, and contextual, historical circumstances, these thinkers also take into account something which, in their opinion, escapes reference, something that appears more in a negative than a positive experience. On this view, it is assumed, when speaking for example about human rights, that although there exist various cultural modes of interpretation, phenomena such as `human dignity' refer in one way or another to something that various cultures aim at. In every culture, the infringement of this underlying principle gives rise to some form of outrage which is expressed in an original way within the particular cultural context.
Others claim that customs, narratives, practices, etc., cannot be considered as media that make meanings `interpretable' and communicable, but rather they should be seen as signs that establish meaning by virtue of their relationship with each other. Sometimes the structuralists who defend this notion are accused of giving the impression that we are all wanderers in a Kafkaesque dictionary labyrinth, moving from one entry to another without ever seeing the light of day. The critics say that language and signs play an important role, but ultimately reality consists of concrete people, concrete landscapes with houses, trees and roads, populated by plants, animals and various sorts of objects.
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