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... shed or magnified, according to the historical circumstances. The third example - originally brought up by Douglas Hofstadter in his magnificent opus "Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid" - is the genetic material DNA. Without the right "context" (amino acids) - it has no "meaning" (it does not lead to the production of proteins, the building blocks of the organism encoded in the DNA). To illustrate his point, he sends DNA on a trip to outer space, where aliens would find it impossible to decipher it ( = to understand its meaning). By now it would seem clear that for a human activity, institution or idea to be meaningful, a context would be needed.
Whether we can say the same about things natural remains to be seen. Being humans, we would tend to attribute to ourselves a privileged status. As in classical quantum mechanics, the observer actively participates in the determination of the world. There would be no meaning if there were no intelligent observers - even if the requirement of context was satisfied. In other words, not all contexts were created equal.
A human observer is needed to determine the meaning, this is an unavoidable constraint. Meaning is the name that we give to the interaction between an entity (material or spiritual) and its context (material or spiritual). So, the human observer is forced to evaluate this interaction in order to judge the meaning. But humans are not identical copies, clones. They are liable to judge the same phenomena differently, dependent upon their vantage point.
They are the product of their nature and nurture, the highly specific circumstances of their lives and their idiosyncrasies. In an age of moral and ethical relativism, a universal hierarchy of contexts is not likely to go down well with the gurus of philosophy. But we are talking about the existence of hierarchies as numerous as the number of observers. This is a notion so intuitive, so embedded in human thinking and behaviour that to ignore it would amount to ignoring reality.
People ( = observers) have privileged systems of meaning. They constantly and consistently prefer certain contexts to others in the detection of meaning and its set of possible interpretations. This set would have been infinite were it not for these preferences. The context preferred arbitrarily excludes and disallows certain interpretations (and, therefore, certain meanings). The benign form is, therefore, the acceptance of a plurality of contexts and of the resulting meanings.
The malignant form is to adopt (and, then, impose) a universal hierarchy of contexts with a Master Context which bestows meaning upon everything. Such malignant systems of thought are easily recognizable because they claim to be comprehensive, invariant and universal. In plain language, these thought systems pretend to explain everything, everywhere and in a way not dependent on specific circumstances. Religion is like that and so are most modern ideologies.
Science tries to be different and sometimes succeeds. But humans are frail and frightened and they much prefer malignant systems of thinking because they give them the illusion of gaining absolute power through absolute, immutable knowledge. Two contexts seem to compete for the title of Master Context in human history, the contexts which endow all meanings, permeate all aspects of reality, are universal, invariant, define truth values and solve all moral dilemmas: the Ratio and the Affect (emotions). We live in an age that despite its self-perception as rational is defined and influenced by the emotional Master Context.
This is called Romanticism - the malignant form of "being tuned" to one's emotions. Romanticism is the assertion that all human activities are founded on emotions or emotionally directed. This relatively novel approach (in historical terms) has permeated human activities as diverse as politics, the formation of families and art. Families were once constructed on purely totalitarian bases. It was a transaction, really, involving considerations both financial and genetic.
This was substituted (during the 18 th century) by love as the main motivation and foundation. Inevitably, this led to the disintegration and to the metamorphosis of the family. To establish a sturdy social institution on such a fickle basis was an experiment doomed to failure. Romanticism infiltrated the body politic as well. All major political ideologies and movements of the 20 th century had romanticist roots, Nazism more than others. Communism touted the ideals of equality and justice - while Nazism was a quasi-mythological interpretation of history.
Still, both were highly romantic movements. Politicians were - and to a lesser degree today (see the case of Prince Diana), are - expected to be extraordinary in their personal lives or in their personality traits. Biographies are recast by image and public relations experts to fit this mould. Hitler was, arguably, the most romantic of all leaders, closely followed by other dictators and authoritarian figures. It is a clich to say that we use politicians to re-enact our relationships with our parents. Politicians are patrician (or merely father) figures.
But the Romanticist virus drove this transference mechanism into new troughs of infantilism. In politicians we want to see not the wise, level headed ideal father - but our actual parents: capriciously unexpected, overwhelming, powerful, unjust, protecting and awe-inspiring. This is the romanticist view of leadership: anti-Webberian, anti bureaucratic, chaotic. And this set of predilections, later transformed to social dictates, had a profound effect on the history of the 20 th century. Romanticism manifested itself in art through the concept of Inspiration. An artist had to have it in order to create.
This led to a conceptual divorce between art and artisanship. As late as the 18 th century, there was no difference between these two classes of creative people, the artists and the artisans. Artists accepted orders of commercial nature including delivery dates, prices, etc. His art was a product, almost a commodity and was treated as such by others (examples: Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Goya, Rembrandt and thousands of artists of similar or lesser stature). The attitude was completely businesslike, creativity was mobilized in the service of the marketplace. Granted, artists used conventions - more or less rigid, depending on the period - to express emotions.
They were trading emotional expressions where others were trading spices, or engineering skills. But they all were trading and were proud of their artisanship. Their personal lives were subject to gossip, condemnation or admiration but were not considered to be a precondition, an absolutely essential backdrop. The romanticist view of the artist painted him (or - more and more - her) into a corner. His life and art became inextricable. Artists were expected to transmute and transubstantiate their lives as well as the physical materials that they were dealing with.
Living (the kind of life, which is the subject of legends or fables) became an art form, at times predominantly so. It is interesting to note the prevalence of romanticist ideas in this context: weltschmerz, passion, self destruction were considered fit for the artist. A "boring" artist would never sell as much as a "romantically-correct" one. Van Gogh, Kafka and James Dean epitomize this trend: they all died young, lived in misery, suffered self-inflicted pains and ultimate destruction or annihilation. To paraphrase Sontag, their lives became metaphors and they all suffered from the metaphorically correct physical and mental illnesses.
Kafka developed tuberculosis (the punishment as part of an on going trial), Van Gogh was mentally sick, James Dean died appropriately in an accident. In an age of social anomie's, we tend to appreciate and rate highly the anomalous. Munch and Nietzsche will always be preferable to more ordinary (but perhaps equally as creative) people. Today there is an anti-romantic backlash (divorce, the disintegration of the romantic nation-state, the death of ideologies, the commercialization and popularization of art). But this counter-revolution tackles the external, less substantial facets of Romanticism. Romanticism continues to thrive in the flourishing of mysticism, of ethnicity and of celebrity worship.
It seems that Romanticism has changed vessels but not its cargo. We are afraid to face the fact that life is meaningless unless WE observe it, unless WE put it in context, unless WE interpret it. We feel burdened by this realization, afraid of making the wrong moves, using the wrong contexts, making the wrong interpretations. We understand that there is no constant, unchanged, everlasting meaning to life, and that it all really depends upon us. We denigrate this kind of meaning. A meaning that is derived by humans from human contexts and experiences is bound to be a very poor approximation to the TRUE meaning.
It is bound to be asymptotic to the Grand Design. It might well be - but this is all we have got and without it our lives will indeed prove meaningless.
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