Meaning Making as First-Personal Appropriation of the Third-Personal
of Why is Jonathan Pageau so Hard to Understand for Many
Meaning is an appropriation of the third person to the first person.
News item in Sacramento: teacher in foothills school hears gunshots from a road-rage incident, worries with students, says to newsperson "we were trying to figure out what it meant"
Meaning making (sense-making in the @rebelwisdom language) is taking that third-person knowledge (shooter out on the highway) and asking "how do I take third-person knowledge (hearing gunfire) and use it to act with respect to the students I love..."
The children hear gunshots, are scared (that's sense-making that the third person sound of shots might impact the first person, potential pain and interruption of personal-narrative-progress moving forward in time) but as children don't process this very consciously.
In two conversations between @PageauJonathan and @RationalityRule and @Friended4Ever there was a lot of frustration in meaning making. Pageau confuses and frustrates people and it's not clear to many people to explain why.
Perhaps a way to figure out @PageauJonathan is to see him as approaching the world from the first person perspective rather than the third person.
Ever since the Enlightenment the third person perspective is the one that is sanctioned for public life and governance. The scientific image is the one privileged for the public world. 3rd person is public. 1st person is private.
Now in the recession of Modernity @PageauJonathan re-prioritizes the first person perspective. That was most clear in his exegesis of Genesis 1 on @jordanbpeterson 's posting
Every time @PageauJonathan says "the world lays itself out" he is invoking the first-person perspective. This is more accessible application of the development in philosophy of phenomenology.
Of @vervaeke_john 4-Ps of knowing the propositional is third-person but the participatory, procedural and perspectival are much more first-personal.
Meaning making is the transjective frame-switching between the third-personal and the first-personal. Third-personal applied to the first-personal leading to first-personal knowing and acting.
You are living up to your reputation as the Francis Schaeffer of the YouTube generation! Schaeffer was often criticized – even openly mocked – for mispronouncing names of prominent figures, specialized terms, and even failing to properly ‘show his work’ in the form of citations or even simple nods of acknowledgment to those whose ideas he relied upon so much . . .
Yet, his effect as a popularizer of otherwise impenetrable and obscure intellectual esoterica – and that on an entire generation of otherwise ghettoized fundamentalists – can hardly be denied.
So, in the spirit of trying to make sense of the complex efforts of intellectual elites to themselves accommodate (i.e. make sense of!) the greatest amount of complexity within their theoretical frameworks – and perhaps hasten the ‘trickle down’ effect (that Schaeffer often spoke of) to the rest of us – I offer you this:
The single greatest insight in the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is the basic phenomenological distinction between naïve experience and theoretical thought. In other words, our thoughts about reality are not necessarily the way reality is. While this may seem obvious, it is often overlooked by both the learned and unlearned alike; wrecking untold havoc on life and thought 'up from below and down from above' (to borrow one of your turns of phrase).
Your point about the monarchical vision is well-taken. ‘Science’ is not univocal precisely because it is not monolithic. Scientism, which perpetuates this myth of the monolithic and univocal 'voice of science', is just another naked appeal to an unexamined authority. The sleight of hand rendering it acceptable, while qualitatively identical religious appeals to 'the word of God' are roundly rejected, relies upon little more than an arbitrary (almost aesthetic) preference for the ‘secular’ over the ‘sacred’.
It simply will not do to try and rehabilitate modern people’s aesthetic preferences, so they might once again prejudicially embrace – what amounts to – a superstitious appeal to authority, but this time a religious authority (like they did in the good old - enchanted - days). You seem to observe this yourself when you point out the commonality between ‘new atheists’ and ‘Christian fundamentalists’ in their insistence upon a monarchical vision.
Indeed, the ‘Bible’ is often understood in a similarly mythological way – not with regards to its interpretation – but rather its basic constitution. Biblicism could be defined as ascribing a univocal voice to Scripture by insisting on viewing it as a monolithic totality that unambiguously constitutes the revelation of God. In this way, Biblicism is the mirror image of Scientism, sacred and secular forms (respectively) of prejudicial and unexamined appeals to authority.
So, the contemporary Christian (desiring an unprejudicial and non-superstitious religious philosophy) must navigate dual temptations, as they seek a perspective informed by both (popularly construed) ‘sacred and secular’ approaches to knowing. The pressure to submit to an unexamined totalizing authority, thereby devouring any hope of what Schaeffer called a 'unified field of knowledge' is profound. Yet, rejecting these simultaneous temptations is essential to achieving an intellectually satisfying (never mind formally justifiable) form of Christian thought.
I believe that the best (and possibly only) way to argue for the truth of Christianity, is to demonstrate that it uniquely affords the opportunity to be:
Unconditionally loving in life
and
Uncompromisingly critical in thought
The former is not so much an ‘argument’ as an existential witness – but – the latter is (and must be) intellectually demonstrable, if we are going to credibly contextualize the gospel and winsomely commend Christianity to a critical age (the defining mark of 'a secular age' Christianity itself largely inaugurated in the West through Protestantism).
Christianity sneezed (epistemically speaking) and the whole Western world has caught cold. I submit to you that you are – somewhat ironically – well positioned to address the disease of the meaning crisis, rather than treat its symptoms, since you are charged with modeling the great physician within the very tradition that has gestated our collective disease – namely: the Christian malaise itself.
You frame-switch into the second-personal. The fancy-vervaeke-word 'transjectivity' has never been so graspable. You are filled with gratitude for Paul's explanation. You click the heart and finish writing your comment. You realize the relevance of story and find peace in it. The world lays itself out and you live into that story, via the imaginal. So where do you want to go next? You need an adventure man. Want to confront dragons lurking in the dark? --> Close your internet browser to sort out that pile of paperwork and backlog of e-mails. Want to be king-of-the lost boys? --> Click over to YouTube and mindlessly consume skeptic, materialistic, propaganda.