(Today’s article is by guest writer Josh Fink. For a brief bio, see below.)
The role of ego in meaning-making
We are the component of the universe capable of assigning, creating, and judging meaning. Humans are the universe’s organ for creating art, experiencing love and sorrow, and living in relationship. This task comes naturally to us, but in an alienated world the pull of meaninglessness is all too strong. Nihilism is a phenomenon with which most of us are at least passingly familiar.
When we hear a phrase like “We are the meaning-makers,” it’s a short leap for an ego (one’s self-story, the center of I-feeling) to assume this responsibility, to take ownership of the task of assigning, creating, and judging meaning. Meaning must be questioned, put to the test, justify itself. For a non-theist, we usually don’t have an externally derived metric to measure meaning against; there’s no God who can authorize the value of my life. The nihilistic ego will peck value to death, rendering everything pointless under its judging gaze, with no ground to halt the descent into abyss.
Imagine an internal dialogue:
“I want a nice pair of shoes.”
“Why?”
“For fashion, and so my feet don’t hurt”.
“You think that matters? Fashion is performance, which has no inherent value. You’re just peacocking for others. And who cares if your feet hurt? You’re gonna die anyway. Just get cheap shoes, nothing matters.”
This sounds a bit ridiculous, but at later stages of nihilism it can be a commonplace logical structure. On examination, all meanings are dependent on supporting meanings. We can follow the chain of “why does this matter?” until we get to a root-level value, which we can then devalue, and thus the whole project is ruined. It feels like wisdom and realistic thinking while this is happening.
This is the trap waiting for us on this side of the death of God. Having lost the external source of value, we take on the mantle of providing value for ourselves, only to argue our way into nihilism. The conscious ego cannot create value. It can, however, affirm it.
Meaning is a subjective sense. What we care about isn’t really up to us; it appears unbidden, and then the ego examines it. Meaning is emergent, granted by our entry into the symbolic order (the web of meaning we inherit from culture and language). It is self-authorizing and exists prior to egoic examination. The words you’re reading right now already carry symbolic value that you didn’t have to create, just perceive.
In that same conversation about shoes earlier, a healthier ego choice would have been to accept the justification – fashion and foot health are perfectly acceptable reasons to want good shoes. The ego’s place in this conversation is to find the root-level value and to affirm rather than condemn it.
In the same way that the reward for washing your clothes is clean clothes, the reward for building relationships is relationship. The reward for affirming innate, discovered meaning is meaning itself. We are the meaning-makers, but not consciously. Meaning arrives as a felt sense. We care about people, ideas, and objects simply because we care about them. The nihilist fumbles meaning because they misunderstand the role of consciousness in the whole project. Consciousness perceives and confirms discovered meaning; it does not generate it.
Discovering root-level values
In order to affirm our core values, we need some way of identifying them. In the midst of nihilistic quagmire, this is not always easy; meanings are discarded fairly regularly, or are found to be in conflict with each other. We may not know what we care about, because our values seem to cancel each other out.
In the first section, we said that meanings are supported by other meanings. Under the shoe example, we find a person that cares about themselves and wants to present an appearance they enjoy while remaining comfortable. They clearly have a competing value around authenticity, which may be in conflict with the desire to present an enjoyable appearance. However, the mere presence of the conflict is a clue toward emergent value; the fact that we’re talking about it at all means we care. The conflicting desires for fashionable shoes and authenticity tell us something about who we are.
There are higher- and lower-level values, with the higher built on top of the lower. A value for fashion may support a value of a specific style, perhaps hiking shoes in this case. The lower-level value authorizes and justifies the higher level, whereby the question “Why do you like hiking shoes?” can be answered with “I find them fashionable and comfortable”. Higher values are further from inherent meaning, and are more likely to shift over time.
The key here is: discovering root-level values and affirming them allows more ambient subjective meaning in our moment-to-moment lives. The phrase “It’s the little things” comes to mind here. A nihilistic ego can destroy the “little things” by failure to affirm root-level value, but an ego that accepts that it is not the source of meaning has the opportunity to live in a more meaningful world.
Transition from demand to desire
Higher-level values can often become very specific. To extend the shoe example: “I want good shoes” → “I want hiking shoes” → “I want this specific brand and model of shoe”. If I’m too focused on the uppermost level, I may either miss better opportunities to actualize my lower-level value (e.g. there’s a better shoe more in my price range) or I may be overly impacted by the lack of having this value fulfilled (e.g. the shoe is sold out forever, I may never get one).
By refocusing from the higher- to the lower-level value, we can transition from a static demand to a more dynamic desire. Desire can push us toward what we truly want, without being overly prescriptive about how it is fulfilled. Desire isn’t a bad thing; we want good food, meaningful work, positive relationships, security, and comfort in general. Desiring and working toward these things is inherent to human life; we all want to create our lives in a way we find pleasing.
By making this cognitive shift, we give ourselves a chance to naturally exit nihilistic thought loops and become looser, less at odds with ourselves. Rigidity and preoccupation give way to flexibility and presence. We can give ourselves permission to be the people we are, and care about what we care about, because it was never really up to us in the first place. We are the meaning-affirmers.
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Bio: Josh Fink is a software engineer interested in spirituality, psychology, and culture. His Substack can be found here.
I appreciate this approach to dealing with a natural tendency toward nihilism, but I disagree that meaning is necessarily emergent or based on feelings. I believe we can (and should) consciously and intentionally construct meaning.
For sure! If meaning is accessible and something that feels constructible, I don’t see a problem with taking ownership of it. I think I’m speaking to a sense of emergent meaning that gets destroyed during nihilistic rumination, and offering a way to affirm what’s already there prior to egoic inspection.
For myself, I see all meaning as necessarily emergent, something experienced phenomenally rather than something I need to create. But I’m just one person!