On Meaning-Creating

Man always lives in a world which is full of meanings, and the meaning of the world is endowed by man, man’s consciousness creates meaning and endows the world with meaning.Zhuangzi considered that the progress of civilization was embodied on the accumulation of meaning bestowed on the world by man, and was equal to the course of man straying from TAO and of man’s virtue becoming corrupted. Hegel believed that history was progressing, and the progress had been concluded by Hegel’s philosophy system, and meaning had exhausted all the possibilities of its development. Wangyangming considered that as subject, consciousness a priori created things as object, things were subjective thing which was endowed with meaning. Kant distinguished thing-in-itself and phenomenon, and considered that man can only understand phenomenon; phenomenon was the product of a priori form of understanding systematizing experienced material, and only after creating a object can man understand the object, and as a object, phenomenon was unity of meaning constructed by man. Husserl held that material of consciousness was meaning bestowed on object, and Auffassung was equal to putting senses in order and creating a unity of meaning as an object.Hume maintained that ration was assisting passion in establishing moral rules, and it was passion that chose ends and made moral judgment, ration only support a means to an end. Through unconscious habit man produced and observed rules. Weber held that man’s social action must be studied from the angle of the meaning of action, and the meaning of action came from man’s belief; disenchantment didn’t clear up the belief in objective meaning, and even if man didn’t believe in objective meaning, man can believe in the meaning which was chosen or created by man. In the developed capitalism society, end-ration had defeat value-ration ,and political man must believe ethic of responsibility, and use his charisma to create meaning, and save the deadish world of meaning. Oakeshott thought the theory of liberty didn’t need a metaphysic base, and the world of political action was a independent and self-sufficient ideal world which need no foreign support, and its incoherence suggest us to adjust it to become more consistent, so political action must be conservative, and mustn’t radically reconstruct the society as a whole according to an ideal. Hayek considered that civil society was so complicated that nobody can know all the facts as a whole in it, so every body need be allowed to use the decentralized knowledge about what he knows. Because they abide the same general and abstract rules, their decentralized actions can be harmonized into a spontaneous order. Abstract rule only prescribed the abstract character of the order of social action, and didn’t determined the particular detail of it, so agents observing the abstract rules bestowed abstract meaning on the world, and predicted the type of the consequence of their action exactly. The universal and abstract rules which bring about and maintain the spontaneous order of action are also spontaneous, and they are the consequence of man action, not the product of conscious design.The spontaneous order that we can only understand abstractly, which isn’t the result of our design and can’t be controlled by us, is alien to us. It is the result of man’s action, but become into an independent force that controls man. In the communist society, united people will possess the sum total of productive forces, and society control production, voluntary acts unified with the production of material life, and man change into true man, create meaning consciously and voluntarily.