Burke’s Blog

When I use the word, “Meaning.” you might not understand what I mean. Meaning is not always agreed upon (as in: the meaning of a story), and futhermore many people today deny that there is any meaning to anything at all.

But humans do, apparently, find meaning in lots of things: stories and gifts and a smile can all have meaning. Sometimes, what we think is the meaning is not what someone else thinks it to be, but that is beside the point - because we do find beyond the story, beyond the gift, beyond the smile, and beyond each physical thing that there is another realm different from it but attached to it - the moral of the story, the love represented in the gift, and the happiness indicated by the smile.

I like what C.S. Lewis had to say about this:

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

What he means is that if we should discover that the universe has no meaning, it would be a meaningless discovery. How depressing.

Among all animals, human beings alone are aware of and can detect meaning. This is part of what makes us unique and makes our dignity and worth as individual human beings greater than that of the other animals. There are some people who disagree, thinking that the dignity of a human being is no different than that of a buffalo or an eagle (or a slug!). They are wrong, and there is proof. Human beings and other animals are scientifically observably different.

There is another, related, difference between animals and human beings. I will propose, like G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, that the main observable difference between human beings and other animals is that human beings have art. Human beings have a propensity for the appreciation of beauty, and other animals do not.

“Surely,” you say, “you must not be looking at the world! Open your eyes, man! There’s beauty in the animal world all around us! Spider webs are as intricate as a crocheted blanket, the scales of a fish shimmer, and a songbird’s chirp is pleasant to our ears.” All of these things are true, but if this is where you mind was going, you are missing the point.

All of these things: a spider’s web, a colorful fish, and a bird’s song are all beautiful, but they are all delightful to you and me; not the animals themselves. Spiders do not try to improve upon their web design; they do not have schools of architecture with a historical development. Colorful fish never wear clothes to change their appearance, and they do not have fashion awards. And although the song of a proud male bird seeking a mate is a sacrament of spring, you will never see a choir of birds singing four-part harmony or developing a piece of music together.