Meaning and Being and Harmony: Losing a Member of the Band

I’ll admit it; some students, me included, may have taken the class entitled Meaning and Being in the hopes of finding a little meaning in being in a time when things seem a little nihilistic. Of course these hopes were slashed after the first reading of Husserl’s The Paris Lectures, which upon first glance just seem like some extreme version of Decartes whirlpool of doubt, sucking us down into some deep, dark void. I mean you can keep your cogitationes, Husserl, I want my sanity. Upon having Husserl’s epoche “[the] ubiquitous detachment from any point of view regarding the objective world” (The Paris Lectures, 1929, Husserl, 8) explained to us one day one classmate commented to me as we exited class, “That’s great, but where’s the meaning in all that?” It didn’t occur to me then, and it certainly didn’t occur to me when I sat down to write this paper the first time, that the "meaning" is what it’s all about. See I understand (I think) where my fellow classmate was coming from. I was still starting from the idea when you figure out what “real being” is you will find meaning in it. Maybe Husserl’s right. Maybe we should suspend any judgment on the “reality” of the world and examine the meaning we ascribe to our experiences of the world, whether real or not.

I got . . . annoyed at a friend once for describing philosophers as people who “assign meaning to everyday things.” There seemed something so arbitrary in his notion of philosophers and philosophy that I was insulted. You see I had this experience this past week. And along with this experience I had a theory about it that I thought went along so nicely with Husserl’s notion on

. . . the phenomenological attitude, with its epoche, consists in that I reach the ultimate experiential and cognitive perspective thinkable. In it I become the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life . . . The phenomenological reduction thus tends to split the ego. The transcendental spectator places himself above himself, watches himself, and see himself also as the previously world-immersed ego (Husserl, 15).

For the last few years, I’ve been begrudgingly visiting my Godfather suffering from Alzhemiers. He meant (this is just a side note, upon rereading this section of my paper, I just noticed the subconscious grammar change to the past tense, it was slightly unnerving, amendment, "will always mean") the world to me, but as of last summer the disease has finally taken over. He has no recollection of who I am or who he even was. He sits in chairs and stares out windows. That spark of life that had drawn me to him is long gone. He is just a man waiting to die. I thought that perhaps this “transcendental ego” of mine was the bubble keeping me from breaking down. It was my higher understanding of the phenomena of disease and his eventual release from suffering that allowed me to be strong. I thought it was this same transcendental ego that was going to let me write about the American flag for this paper and never actually explore the sense of loss I was feeling.

I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t at the “transcendental ego.” I was still swimming around that sea of “primordial phenomena” only choosing to look at the event in contexts less painful to myself. I was telling myself how to interpret the events unfolding in my life and I was acting in accordance to how I thought I was supposed to feel. On top of all that, I was left wondering where all the meaning in his suffering was. I was stuck imaging the short obituary that would run in some local paper upon his death.

And then it hit me,

I was looking at too much at once; I was looking at things I had no experience of--- all I know is my experience of him. I, the phenomenologist for a day, was given access to “. . . transcendental subjectivity (7) . . . I am not the ego of an individual man . . . I am the ego in whose stream of consciousness the world itself . . . first acquires meaning and reality” (8). Through my transcendent description of my experience of him I can present an explanation of how his being had meaning to me. Oliver Saks in his story, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” describes how a patient of his lost the capacity to perceive the world in the same way we do. His eyes worked fine, but his mind could only recognize and make sense of movement and rhythm. By all conventional means of perception, we were an odd pair to be so fond of each other when I was growing up. He was from a much different time and culture, but our ideas were harmonious. I suppose I shouldn’t be so pained to lose someone who has already lived so much. It’s the natural way that life works, we live and we die. But my transcendental ego lets me “know” that I’m sad because I’m losing a member of the band. Things just aren’t going to sound the same anymore. That’s not a good or a bad thing (no judgment), it’s just an observation.