muffled resonances

Charles Taylor:

To get farther with this, and bring out more what it involves, we have to venture on some phenomenology, and this is always hazardous. How to describe this sense? Perhaps in terms like these: our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.

This is the kind of lack which can show up with adolescence, and be the origin of an identity crisis. But it can also show up later, as the basis of a “mid-life crisis”, where what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it. The things which mattered up to now fail.

This is just an attempt to give some shape to a general malaise, and I recognize how questionable it is, and how many other descriptions could have been offered here. But the malaise also takes a number of more definite forms, in terms of defined issues, or felt lacks.

One way of framing this issue is in terms of “the meaning of life”, Luc Ferry’s “le sens du sens”, the basic point which gives real significance to our lives. Almost every action of ours has a point; we’re trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we’re doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight. So a successful doctor may desert a highly paid and technically demanding position, and go off with Médecins Sans Frontières to Africa, with a sense that this is really significant. A crucial feature of the malaise of immanence is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning, analogous to the existential fragility we always live with: that suddenly an accident, earthquake, flood, a fatal disease, some terrible betrayal, may jolt us off our path of life, definitively and without return. Only the fragility that I am talking about concerns the significance of it all; the path is still open, possible, supported by circumstances, the doubt concerns its worth.