Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Meaning

3 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Sinn

The objective significance and purposiveness of personal life. The question of meaning is a fundamental question of the person and points to the question of the ultimate ground of all that is. Meaning is not something the person arbitrarily posits or invents, but something she finds — in the encounter with objective values, in the gift of self to other persons, in the orientation toward truth and goodness.

The person is the only being that can ask about meaning. This capacity belongs essentially to the third dimension of personhood — the dimension of self-transcendence, in which the person reaches beyond herself toward that which surpasses her. The ontological relation suchetSinn (“seeks meaning”) expresses that the person is essentially oriented toward meaning: not as an optional pursuit, but as a fundamental enactment of personal life.

Meaning is grounded as an objective value in being itself. It is not reducible to subjective well-being or the feeling of pleasure. Even suffering can be meaningful when it stands within a larger context of personal self-gift and maturation. Radical meaninglessness — the experience that nothing has significance anymore — is therefore one of the deepest crises of the person, because it threatens the fundamental orientation of personal life.

The question of meaning ultimately points to the question of Absolute Being — of an ultimate ground that is itself no longer in need of meaning, but gives meaning. In the Thomistic tradition the connection between the contingency of finite being and the necessity of an ultimate ground becomes apparent here. The person who asks about meaning implicitly asks about that which sustains her being and all being.

Ontological classification

Ontological relations:

The search for meaning as a fundamental enactment

Ontological relation: The human person seeks meaning. The search for meaning is a fundamental enactment of personhood, grounded in the rationality and self-transcendence of the person. The person asks not only about the what and the how, but about the what for — about the meaning of her existence and her acting. This question is not an optional luxury, but belongs to the spiritual nature of the person.

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 275, 281, 306 (meaning and truth).

Further sources:

  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3 (contingency of finite being and the ultimate ground)
  • Spaemann, Robert: Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand” (1996). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. (the search for meaning as a fundamental personal enactment)

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