The Other Sense Of Meaning

On the long crusading route that took Christian pilgrims to the farthest reaches of the East in the 12th century, an expedition stopped off at the palace overlooking the town of Al-Zahra in Syria. There, as the guards occupied their leisure time playing dice, the notable travellers wondered who, if not the hand of God, decided the final position of the dice, since they were thrown by infidel and heretical hands? Thus was born the notion of chance, which from then on referred to anything that was not determined by the hand of God.

Human thought has come a long way since those distant and pious times, and it has become commonplace in popular belief to admit that there is no such thing as chance and that everything that happens is bound to have a meaning, if you know how to read things in the right way. But it's a question of direction if we extend this questioning to more technical fields, such as science or behavioural psychology. Whether in physics or biology, and even more so today with quantum physics, there are two concepts that dominate the researcher's thinking: chance and necessity. To put it simply, there are a number of phenomena that occur by chance, and it's only afterwards, through observation, that we give meaning to these occurrences, which we call necessity. It's a bit like finding a rock in the jungle and then finding multiple uses for it: the rock wasn't created to crack nuts, to stun animals from a distance, to be carved and then cut, it was there by chance and it was only afterwards that we invented a necessity for it.

If we are not aware of this inversion of the meaning of things, in other words confusing cause and effect, we run the risk of having to face a number of complications in our relationships with others and with the world in general. So the next time someone comes up to you and explains that nobody loves him or her, ask yourself: can this person really inspire any compassion in anyone, or does he or she only see, and provoke around him or her, that which will confirm his or her belief?

The reality is no less real (and sometimes brutal). But if we are aware of the primordial influence that we ourselves, as individuals, as beings of reason, have on events and their meaning, we can, even to a lesser extent and by the force of our thinking, give things a favourable twist, a meaning. The other sense of meaning, for example, would have us say: "It's not because it's difficult that I don't dare, it's because I don't dare that it's difficult".