An A–Zdo, or deliver, meaning of itself. It sits on the wrong side of the
subject/object, fact/value, material/spiritual divide. The Faustian
pact with which our world fl irts is trusting the results of science
and its method above all others for fi xing truths. The paradox
is that this culture of certainty produces anxiety because, at the
end of the day, to be certain is to be in denial about what it is to
be human. We aren’t sure of much. Thus we live more health-
ily but not more happily; we live more magnifi cently but not
more meaningfully; we live with more knowledge but not more
wisdom.
Secular philosophies suggest that meaning can be found within
this frame nonetheless. One possibility is to argue that the big
questions of life are overblown or mistaken. The moral imperative
of how one should live should be rephrased to the more manage-
able one of how one might become more cultivated, more ethical
or simply less demanding of life. The task of knowing thyself is
mitigated by the commonsensical comment that most of the
time, in most situations, one probably knows oneself enough to
get on with matters in hand. When climactic moments come,
like death, one should just accept them, not question them.
Faith offers another possibility as a source of meaning. The
thought here is that, if meaning is subjective then, for it to rest
assured, there must be an absolute source of subjectivity for
it to rest assured on, namely, the personal God. Some believe
that this ‘meaning of meaning’ is manifest in the Bible or the
church. Other more subtle believers would say that it emerges
like shapes in the dark: that it seems shadowy is merely a refl ec-
tion of our inability to see clearly, not of its objective reality.
Agnosticism offers another possibility: meaning as mystery. At
one level, this is almost to assert a cliché. It is not unless one is
prepared to ‘step out into the unknown’ that one’s life expands,
deepens and grows. Similarly, it might be thought close to tau-
tologous: ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut
up from human curiosity and enquiry,’ was Hume’s phrase,
implying that meaning, inasmuch as it depends only these ulti-
mate things, will remain mysterious too.