Meaning, knowledge, truth

I've always been fascinated with meaning, and how meaning is created, refined, discovered and reinvented by the human mind.
Meaning is not a human creation - animals appraise the way various stimuli will impact on their world, if they will be positive or negative for their life, and have instinctive and learnt reactions at those stimuli.
Yet meaning reaches a complete new dimension in a rich cognitive life of a human being. Meaning comes both out of truth and knowledge seeking, and out of our aesthetic pleasure and style of interpretation. Sometimes shaping the facts in our life in a more beautiful meaning can give us immense satisfaction, it can motivate us to take action or change course, it can give us that deeper level of understanding that we long for.
In many ways, meaning guides our lives and our behaviour. Interpreting the events that happen to us in a certain way determines the decisions that we will make. We tend to interpret the art/music that we come in contact with based on the meaning and importance that we assign to various experiences in our lives. That is why the meaning of great art is sometimes so ambiguous, having a different nuance for each receiver (and active interpreter). Great art carries enough reference points into meaning to involve us into a new way of perceiving and interpreting, yet little enough detail, or enough vagueness to flexibly accommodate the interpretation bestowed upon it by various minds, with various experiences, impulses, obsessions, joys, sorrows.
Some of us search in art for a transcendence to a deeper form of meaning, one that will take our perception of our own experiences to a new level. We search for a new perspective, a new point of reference, a new way of perceiving the world, or just one singular event. We search for it with the same  craving as we search for new knowledge, or new truth.
In a sense, new knowledge has very much the same function in our psyche - it is a rediscovery of the world, a re-understanding, re-inventing. It shifts our perspective. It changes it or transcends it. Sometimes it muddies the waters, and a new point of view that we gather through an (artistic) experience can have trouble coexisting with our other attitudes or cognitive takes on life. Sometimes it clarifies everything, integrates different types of understanding, and gives us the pure exhilaration of transcendence.
From a cognitive stance, meaning is an extraordinary product. It comes from perception, interpretation, previously-held knowledge, emotional approach, processing style and current mood, all added together.  It is a synthesis, the bit of magic which sometimes we have and other times we lose, which we strive for. Anchored into meaning, and its complex, sometimes contradictory layers, actions can be understood.
Yet I can't help but wonder, what is the difference between the human search for truth and the human search for meaning? Pure truth - just fact - has to be shaped to be integrated within our meaning, which tries to be a metatruth (an integration of previous true experiences, parts of truth which we have gathered) that comes in the colouring of what that particular truth means to us.
Yet people can reject the truth and prefer something that has more meaning. Accepting the truth can come at the huge emotional and cognitive cost of having to abandon previously held meaning, lose our understanding, and carve our way into organising all the information that we have in a new form. We do not always afford to do that.
But in a way, finding truth and finding meaning is supported by the same drive. Our drive to understand - the world around us, ourselves and others. Meaning has the added bonus of a very high level phenomenological flavor - we like tasting certain types of meaning, we have an aesthetic preference for them.
If it would come to a choice and we could only have one, when would our quest for meaning and when would our quest for truth thrive?




©2012 Ana-Maria Olteteanu