I wonder if there's any similarity between how my human desire to know what other people do may hide a yearning for an overarching framework that gives cohesive meaning to events and existence, and my more uxorious desire for my partner's rules rituals and other symbols of structure and authority in our relationship. Clearly my wife is an authority to me and I do find experiential meaning in our relationship and our symbols; and frameworks, philosophies, ideologies, and religions are systems of symbols that carry the weight of authority - even sociological studies surveys and statistics can have the weight of authority, if perhaps slightly less systematic in their symbology.
And this begs the question of how meaning and authority are related, and which came first; meaning might cohere through the lens of authority, or authority might arise wherever meaning is found, or there might be a more dynamic relationship including both of these with our without the addition of (an)other variable(s). And even this doesn't answer the question of why we, in our fundamental and essential humanity, desire this meaning-authority matrix so much we often don’t even recognize when and where it happens around us. At times I wonder if the very point and purpose of our existing is somehow hidden in this somewhere - which is humorous, because although I often arrive naturally at this thought through my own interior process, upon immediate reflection I realize it's not exactly a new thought, or even an uncommon one.
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[...] I said recently meaning might cohere through the lens of an authoritative framework, or the authority of a framework might arise wherever meaning is found; but it occurs to me we occasionally experience more meaning than our framework can handle. When we have such an ineffable experience, the framework, religion, philosophy, ideology must change to accommodate the new meaning from the new experience. Thus I must rather doubt all meaning comes from the coherence of the framework. [...]
ReplyDelete[...] addiction, and this I believe is the culminating point of this past week’s worth of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6): as all people have their framework symbol addictions, the particular form of my [...]
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