© Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Ratio (new series) XVIII 2 June 2005 0034–0006

LIFE AND MEANING

David E. Cooper

Abstract
This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim
about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of any-
thing owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a
claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the
effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can
life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to
life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two
ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered
and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of
life’s meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The
author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between
the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of
a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished
from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with
which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen
thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the
position is the proposal that the ‘beyond the human’ which
enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and ‘intimate’ with
life itself.

In this paper, I reflect on a tension between two claims for each

of which I have previously argued (Cooper 2002, 2003). To put it
less autobiographically, I want to consider the relation between
two kinds of claim neither of which is unfamiliar, even if their con-
junction may be. There will be some readers, of course, who do
not find these claims in the least attractive, in which case they will
not be exercised by the issue of whether they can be reconciled.
But there will be other readers who find them, if not compelling,
then at any rate deserving of serious attention. Neither claim, as
I said, is unfamiliar or idiosyncratic, and each has been argued
for in important philosophical traditions.
Both are claims about meaning: the first concerns the con-
cept of meaning in general, while the second concerns the
126 DAVID E. COOPER

meaning of human existence. Here are summary statements of

the two:
(1) Meaning is ‘appropriateness to Life’. (Here, ‘Life’ is not
to be taken in a biological sense, but in the one intended
in Wilhelm Dilthey’s use of ‘Leben’ – Life as what he and
others, including Wittgenstein, refer to as the human ‘life-
world’ or the human ‘form(s) of life’.)
(2) Human existence is meaningful only if it is ‘answerable’ to
what is ‘beyond the human’.
Even when left in these unpacked, unexplained forms, the two
claims certainly look to be at odds with one another. According
to the first, Life is, as it were, the terminus of explanations of
meaning: it is that which, at the end of the day, enables anything
– a word, gesture, picture, natural object or whatever – to have
meaning. According to the second, human life itself can only be
meaningful in virtue of a relation to what lies beyond the human
world. What we seem to have here is a version of a familiar diffi-
culty: how to speak of Life as a whole as meaningful if meaning-
fulness is a function of the place or role that things have within
Life.
Before I proceed to ask how, if at all, the two claims might be
reconciled, I need to unpack them and briefly indicate the lines
of thought behind them. Let’s begin with the notion of meaning
as ‘appropriateness to Life’. This phrase summarizes or sloganizes
three thoughts. The first is that to explain the meaning of any
item is to relate it to something outside of or larger than itself.
(‘Explain the meaning’, that is, in the sense of enabling under-
standing of an item: in a different sense, that of showing how the
item comes to have its meaning, one may of course appeal to its
components, rather than to what is outside of or larger than
itself.) A sentence, for example, is meaningful because it com-
municates a state of affairs, say, or expresses an attitude; a certain
sequence of sounds is significant because it contributes to a larger
musical whole; a hammer’s significance owes to its role within
activities like carpentry – and so on. Second, the best name I can
think of for this relation – which is not a causal or physical one –
is ‘appropriateness’. The sentence means what it does because it
is an appropriate vehicle for communicating or expressing what
it does; the sounds constitute a significant phrase through appro-
priately contributing to a piece of music; and the hammer owes
its significance to its appropriate use in such and such tasks.

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Whenever we talk of an item being meaningful, I am suggesting,
we can – sometimes, admittedly, only at a pinch – render such talk
in the vocabulary of appropriateness.
The third thought sloganized is that it is always, in the final
analysis, a relation of appropriateness to Life that confers
meaning on any item. Life, as Dilthey puts it, is the ‘whole’ to
which all meaning ‘belongs’ – the ‘permanent subject’ of
meaning (1979: 220ff ). Of course, as he recognizes, everyday or
‘elementary’ explanations of meaning need not, and typically do
not, invoke a whole form of life: it may be enough, say, to point
to an object or to mention a ritual to enable someone to grasp
what a certain word or gesture signifies. But this is because
‘elementary’ explanations rely upon a massive, implicit, back-
ground understanding of the ‘whole scene of our language-
games’ (Wittgenstein 1969: §179) and practices that constitutes a
form of life. A local informant can enlighten the puzzled tourist
by simply telling him that, in his country, a gesture unfamiliar to
the tourist signifies a greeting: but imagine how much more he
would need to tell a visiting Martian unfamiliar with human ways
at large. The informant would need to educate the Martian about
gesturing, greetings, friendship, community, and so on in order
to enlighten him. The third thought, I take it, expresses the
wisdom encapsulated in Heidegger’s point that explanations of
signification eventually refer us to the ‘for-the-sake of-which’
which is nothing short of ‘the Being of Dasein’ (1980: §18), of the,
or at any rate a, human form of life.
Let me now turn to the second claim: human existence is mean-
ingful only if it is ‘answerable’ to something ‘beyond the human’.
Those last four words will later be taken as indicating what is
beyond conceptualization and articulation: the ineffable or mys-
terious, in effect. For the moment, however, I intend them to be
heard less provocatively, as referring to what, if anything, lies
beyond human practices, purposes, perspectives, evaluations and
whatever else constitutes our distinctively human existence. The
claim, then, is that human existence is meaningful only if answer-
able to what lies beyond such practices etc., beyond in effect the
form or forms of human life.
How might this second claim be defended? As I see it, the ques-
tion of the meaning of life presses in when people critically reflect
on their purposive activities – writing philosophy books, say, or
making cars, or raising families – struck, as they sometimes are,
by the possibility that these are pointless, a waste of a life. (One

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thinks, for example, of how the Buddha and Tolstoy were struck
by this possibility, or certainty, with regard to their respectively
princely and literary activities.) What they then seek is something
to which such activities might be answerable, some ‘measure’ that
might show them to be ones that, after all, do matter. The idea –
a surprisingly popular one (see, e.g., Taylor 1988) – that our activ-
ities and purposes are meaningful provided only that we invest
meaning in them through our commitment to them strikes me as
incoherent. (As, for similar reasons, it strikes John Cottingham
(2003: 12), who rejects what he calls the ‘endogenous’ concep-
tion – ‘the idea of Man as the creator and generator of the
meaning of his own life’.) No one concerned whether his or her
purposes mattered could be persuaded by being told ‘See how
much you’ve invested in them!’, since the person’s problem is pre-
cisely whether all that investment was worth anything.
Once this reflective concern is underway, it cannot stop short
of asking whether life as a whole is meaningful, answerable to
something: for, as Robert Nozick put it, when it comes to looking
for meaning in how we live our days, ‘we want meaning all the
way down. Nothing less will do’ (1981: 599). An activity whose
point is to contribute to something that itself turns out to be
pointless retrospectively inherits this pointlessness. Writing phi-
losophy books may serve to spread philosophical knowledge: but
if doing that is a waste of time, so is writing the books. Ultimately
we need assurance that human existence answers to something in
order for any of the activities and purposes that belong to human
life to be meaningful in a manner which is relevant to allaying the
reflective suspicion that these may all be pointless. If human life
is not answerable, then it wouldn’t matter if it – and our actual
practices and purposes – had gone very differently. And if that
wouldn’t matter, how can it matter that we engage in the prac-
tices and purposes we in fact do?
That, very briefly, is how I would defend the second claim.
Clearly this defence involves a number of contentious moves, but
in this paper my aim is not to defend these, rather to reflect on
the apparent tension between this second claim and the notion
of meaning as appropriateness to Life. We’re now in a better posi-
tion to be more precise about that tension. Life, according to
claim (1), is the totality to which, ultimately, anything must relate
in order to be a meaningful item. But it doesn’t seem total enough
to serve as the terminus of the reflective questioning that gener-
ates the issue of the meaning of human existence itself. Such

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questioning leads to the requirement that human life as a whole
is meaningful, something which it can only be if it is answerable
to what lies beyond the human – beyond Life itself, therefore.
Something, it seems, has got to give: either the insistence that
meaning, quite generally, is appropriateness to Life, or the con-
viction that, to be meaningful, human existence must be answer-
able to what is ‘beyond the human’.

II

In this section, I consider two proposals as to how one might

attempt to relieve the tension just identified, and argue that these
should be rejected. On the first proposal, one could and should,
quite cheerfully, build an exception into the general claim that
meaning is appropriateness to Life. There is no need, it’ll be said,
to give up the idea of meaning as appropriateness, nor indeed
that of meaning as appropriateness to Life except, of course, in the
one case where Life itself is the item whose meaning is to be
explained. And since that is such a very special case, making an
exception for it is nothing that it is worth going to the wall for in
order to resist, for making the exception would not impugn the
general approach to meaning encapsulated in claim (1).
I am less sanguine about making this exception to the general
idea of meaning than when, in an earlier work, I spoke of not
losing any sleep over doing this (Cooper 2003: 141). Two worries
now keep me awake. First, the suggestion comes uncomfortably
close, it seems to me, to wanting to be rid of all talk about the
meaning of life. For where would the real, substantial difference
lie between saying, on the one hand, ‘In the exceptional case of
Life itself, meaning cannot be a matter of appropriateness to Life’
and saying, on the other, ‘It makes no sense to speak of Life itself
having meaning’? After all, according to my first claim, our very
understanding of the notion of meaning is given in terms of the
appropriateness of items – words, art works, rituals or whatever –
to Life. What can remain of that understanding when, all of a
sudden, we are presented with an item, Life itself, whose meaning,
we are told, cannot be given in such terms? How, if at all, can we
deploy our understanding of how, for example, words and ges-
tures are meaningful, so as to grasp what is being said when
meaning is ascribed to this exceptional item? Since I do not think
we can be rid of the idea of the meaning of life, I cannot there-

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fore endorse a proposal that appears tantamount to urging that

we should be.
I have a second worry about the proposal, although quite why
it is a worry won’t emerge until later. It is a proposal which is liable
to encourage metaphysical pictures that, to me at least, are unwel-
come. To identify an item’s meaning, I held, is to relate the item
to something larger than or outside of itself – to something, there-
fore, distinguishable from itself. Now suppose we try to apply that
formula to Life itself. In that case, the meaning of Life will need
to be something, beyond the human, that either ‘contains’ it (the
cosmos or whatever) or is something transcendent to it (God,
say). But I don’t like either of those options. I don’t think that
there is anything which ‘contains’ Life, or that there is anything
transcendent to it. The reasons why I don’t think either of these
things will come out in due course: my present point is simply
that, if I do reject these options, I must also reject any proposal
which encourages us to entertain them.
There is another proposal that might be made for relieving the
tension between my two claims, this time focussing on the second
of them. Someone will suggest that the real force of the argument
behind claim (2) is the contention that human life must be
answerable to something beyond the human – in which case
there’s just no real need to express the claim in the vocabulary
of meaning. To speak of human existence as meaningful in virtue
of a relation to what is beyond the human is a dispensable,
and perhaps misleading, way of saying that it is answerable
to – has its measure in – something beyond itself. If so, claim
(2), now stripped of its superfluous semantic terminology, does
not conflict with claim (1), since it isn’t really one about meaning
at all.
This proposal is in line with familiar attempts, not exactly to
dismiss talk of the meaning of life altogether, but to treat it as a
dispensable and rather unhappy way of talking about something
different – about, say, how we ought to live. John Cottingham
is, of course, correct to remark that ‘talk of “meaning” in life is
inescapably evaluative talk’ (2003: 20). Nothing would get
counted, surely, as ‘the meaning of life’ – the number 42, for
example – which didn’t bear on the worth of life. But it does not
follow from this that the issue of the meaning of life can be
reduced to that of how people ought to live. Even if Cottingham
is right to hold that a meaningful life must be ‘commendable’ and
cannot be ‘radically immoral’ (21), it does not follow, as he

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himself makes clear, that moral commendability is sufficient for
meaningfulness.
I am not myself sure whether it is even necessary, for, as I
remarked earlier, the meaning of life issue looms, in my view, less
when people worry as to whether they are living well or badly than
when they worry as to whether everything they might do is point-
less, a waste of time. To risk an analogy, their worry is less like the
worry of a person working in some respectable craft, such as car-
pentry, whether he’s doing things properly than that of, say, an
avant-garde installation artist as to whether, in that area, anything
could count as doing things properly or otherwise. The angst-
ridden figures who stalk existentialist novels, after all, are not con-
cerned, primarily or perhaps at all, with whether they’re living
immorally or uncommendably, but with whether they, and every-
one else, are living absurdly. But in that case, the demand for
answerability and measure is inseparable from the search for
point and significance. There is no need, it is true, to employ the
specific word ‘meaning’ in order to express my second claim: but
by leaving it out, one won’t have dispensed thereby with the
notion of meaningfulness if, as I’m suggesting, it is thinly con-
cealed within, and in effect serving to drive, the notions of
answerability and measure.
So I don’t want to relieve the tension between the two claims
in the ways that some might propose – by fiddling around with
them, in effect, either by adding something (an exception clause)
to claim (1), or by subtracting something (the terminology of
meaning) from claim (2). Indeed, perhaps I don’t exactly want
to eliminate the tension at all, but rather to invite you to hear the
two claims as gesturing at different aspects of a delicate meta-
physical position situated at the limit of what is sayable. Before I
issue this invitation, however, I need to distinguish this ‘delicate’
position from a kind with which it might be confused.

III

Let us return to claim (1). I resisted the proposal, recall, to build

into this claim an exception clause for Life itself as a bearer of
meaning, since this could encourage the attempt to identify some-
thing transcendent to, or containing, Life which might serve as
its meaning – God, perhaps, or the cosmos. This attempt is not
one to encourage, I asserted, since there is nothing that ‘contains’

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or is transcendent to Life. Or, to be more circumspect, there is

nothing identifiable – conceptualisable or, to borrow Kant’s useful
expression, discursable – beyond Life. Put differently, any world
– physical and/or divine – that we could articulate and concep-
tualize is a ‘human world’: one that is the way it is only in rela-
tion to human perspective, purpose and preference, and not one,
therefore, which is that way ‘in itself’ or ‘anyway’, independently
of such human factors.
This ‘humanist’ or ‘anti-realist’ assertion is not one I have the
leisure to defend here (for a defence, see Cooper 2002: Ch. 8
especially). Rather, I want first to emphasize that my reluctance
to abandon or amend claim (1) is intended to reflect my com-
mitment to that assertion. The claim is to be heard both as a pos-
itive one – about the meaning of words, gestures, rituals, art works
or whatever – but also as a negative one, to the effect that there
is no discursable reality beyond Life to serve as Life’s meaning.
Meaning is appropriateness to Life – period!, as it were. And I want
to point out, second, an implication which my ‘humanist’ asser-
tion has for claim (2). Whatever it is, if anything, that human
existence is answerable to, this must be ‘mysterious’, ineffable.
A discursable cosmos or a discursable God cannot provide the
measure for human existence since, precisely because it is dis-
cursable, it is already invested with the perspectives – reflective of
purposes and values – that are constitutive of what we are seeking
measure for, human existence. Given the inseparability of our
conceptions of things from our form of life, then those concep-
tions are part and parcel of what should be in question when we
ask what, if anything, human existence answers to. One fails prop-
erly to call these into question by appealing to a discursable
cosmos or God that merely reflects back to us those very con-
ceptions. One could not, for example, regard a life devoted to sci-
entific enquiry as answering to the nature of reality – not, at any
rate, if one holds that reality does not have the nature science
depicts it as having independently of the practices of scientific
enquiry itself.
The conjunction of a ‘humanist’ or ‘anti-realist’ view of the dis-
cursable world with the idea of an ineffable realm ‘beyond the
world’ is not an unfamiliar one. It is to be found, inter alia, in
Kant, Schopenhauer, Bergson and Shankara, at least on some
interpretations of their positions. With all these philosophers, one
finds the thought of an ‘absolute’ or ‘in itself’ reality that is to be
distinguished from a ‘phenomenal’ or empirical world that

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crucially owes to what William James called ‘the human contri-
bution’. And with all of them, I think, one also finds the thought
that, undiscursable as the former is, it can nevertheless provide
some sort of measure for this human contribution. The person
who enjoys an ineffable vision of Brahman will see that much of
what once mattered to him in the everyday world should not have
done. The person who recognizes that there is an indescribable
noumenal self or will, mysteriously related to the empirical ego,
will also recognize that much of what ordinarily passes for the
moral life is nothing of the sort. And so on. (Certainly it would
be wrong simply to assume that what is ineffable can provide no
measure: at the very least one could maintain that life which is
led in the absence of any sense of the ineffable is, for that reason,
failing to answer to reality.)
So is my position the same as the ‘two levels’ approach, as we
might call it, of the philosophers just mentioned? If it were, my
position would not, after all, be the ‘delicate’ one I announced
that it would be. More important, it would render puzzling my
reluctance to abandon claim (1) in its unadulterated form. For
why should I then be unwilling to say ‘Life itself has meaning
through its relation to the “absolute” or “in itself ” ’? Why, that
is, should the fact that what is beyond the human turns out to
mysterious – rather than a perfectly effable cosmos or God –
constitute a reason to stick with the claim that meaning is appro-
priateness to Life, period?
So my position must be different from the ‘two levels’ doctrine.
But why, quite, do I want to distance myself from that doctrine?
It is indicative that many ‘two levels’ theorists are tempted to refer
to the empirical world as one of ‘appearance’, and perhaps as
‘illusion’ or ‘maya’, even if they then hurriedly reassure us that it
is not mere appearance or illusion. What this indicates is their con-
viction that so decisive is the human contribution to the consti-
tution of that world that, as Deleuze puts it when elucidating
Kant’s metaphysics, it is we – and not objects independent of us
– that are ‘giving the orders’ for how the world is experienced
(1984: 14). How, exactly, those orders are given varies among the
many different versions of the ‘two levels’ approach. On some ver-
sions, the human mind has an a priori structure through which,
as if through a sausage-machine, anything must pass in order to
be shaped into objects of experience and thought. On other more
Promethean versions, it is purposive human activity through
which a world is ‘projected’ or ‘constructed’. We ‘carve’ objects

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out of a shapeless whole, on one metaphor, or, as in Roland

Barthes’ image, we transform raw material in the way a chef trans-
forms the dumpy potato into pommes frites (1989: 355) – and we
do so in a way, of course, that is a function of our needs, goals
and tastes.
Whatever the version, however, the ‘two levels’ approach is, in
my judgement, incoherent. Notice that, on this approach, a very
major exception is made to the general claim that the discursable
world depends for what it is on human beings – on the a priori
structures of mind, on ‘constructive’ activity, or whatever. That
exception, of course, is human existence itself. As Jonathan Lowe
observes, confronted with the claim that the empirical world is
the result of our ‘filtering’ or ‘projective’ activity, ‘we must ask:
what place can we ourselves have in such a world, seemingly so
much of our own making? For we can hardly be supposed to make
ourselves, in the objects of which we speak’ (Lowe 2002: 113f ).
On the pictures being offered by ‘two levels’ proponents, we, so
to speak, are already there, up and running, as the filters, sieves
or chefs responsible for the world taking on the contours it does.
But this makes no sense. Our existence is ‘being-in-the-world’: it
is the existence of creatures, that is, whose being – whose prac-
tices, moods, structures of thought, ‘form of life’ – cannot be even
notionally separated from the world in which we are engaged.
How the world ‘discloses’ itself to us, to speak with Heidegger,
cannot be ‘our handiwork’ (1977: 18), for apart from such a
disclosure – apart from a world in which we ‘always already’ find
ourselves – there is no We to work, whether with our hands or
with anything else.

IV

In this final section, I want to pursue some consequences of the

shipwreck of the ‘two levels’ approach and, in the light of these,
try to clarify how I want to understand claim (2)’s talk of what is
beyond the human and how, finally, that claim relates to claim
(1). The first consequence, close on the heels of the point about
‘our handiwork’, is that if one is to speak – as ‘two levels’ philoso-
phers sometimes do – of a world ‘arising’ or ‘presencing’, then
what should be intended by the word ‘world’ is the-world-and-us,
an inseparable unity, not the world as something which arises or
presences for creatures already in place, already up and running.

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This, I take it, is the point made by the Kyoto philosopher, Nishida
Kitar o, when he speaks of ‘self and other’ as ‘co-originating’. If
there is a sense in which the world is an ‘expression’ of ourselves,
we are no less an ‘expression’ of it: the relation is one of ‘mutual
interexpression’, as Kitar o puts it (1993: 60). A second, and
related, consequence is that one should eschew a picture that is
inevitably encouraged by ‘two levels’ talk of the ‘absolute’ or ‘in
itself’ as something which, in conjunction with ‘the human con-
tribution’, ‘causes’ a world to be for us. This is the picture of the
beyond the human as a sort of stuff or force that might have been,
and might have continued on its own ineffable course, irrespec-
tive of whether we were around to transform it into a world, to
make pommes frites out of it, as it were. Once we ourselves are rec-
ognized as inextricably belonging to the world that arises, the
image of that world as a joint product – the outcome of a sort of
causal interaction between us and what is beyond us – collapses.
It is, therefore, a poor and misleading metaphor which depicts
objects of experience as pommes frites that appear on our plates
after potato-stuff has interacted with the chef’s knife and frying
pan.
What I am urging that we attempt to get away from is a vision
or rhetoric of the human world – of the-world-and-us – as dis-
joined from what is beyond the human, and to encourage instead
one of their entire intimacy. The point is not that there is just the
one term – the human world – and nothing else. We really do
need, or so I hold, to invoke the idea of what is beyond the
human. The challenge to the philosopher, or the poet, cannot of
course be to describe this mystery, for then it would not, in the
relevant sense, be a mystery. Rather, the challenge is, in part, to
devise a vocabulary that might attune one to the vision of inti-
macy. This is a challenge to which thinkers from various traditions
– Daoism and Zen Buddhism, for example – have risen: whatever
the Dao or ‘emptiness’ is, it is not a ‘cause’ of the world, not any-
thing transcendent to it. Instead, it is spoken of by thinkers from
these traditions, and by those indebted to them, like Heidegger,
as ‘presencing’, ‘epiphanizing’, ‘advancing’ or ‘emptying itself’ as
the world, and as ‘giving’ or ‘sending’ the world. Some people get
impatient with such rhetoric. But its self-conscious strangeness is
at least an antidote to the pictures conjured by the less strange,
but in consequence misleading, vocabulary of cause, interaction
and joint production. And we need to remember that the point
of the rhetoric is not to lend dramatic or poetic expression to

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what, here at the limits of language, could be articulated in literal

terms, but to attune to a way of experiencing the-world-and-us as
– to invoke a bit of that rhetoric – a mysterious ‘gift’.
The challenge to the philosopher or poet is also, in part, to
provide helpful analogies with the intimate relationship between
the-world-and-us and what is beyond the human. These might be
sought, perhaps, in certain experiences of nature – less those of
‘wild’ nature, arguably, than of the nature with which we engage
in activities like gardening (see Cooper 2005). This is what Hei-
degger is trying to do in his poem ‘Cézanne’, where he writes of
the gardener, Vallier, who figures in several of the painter’s works:
The thoughtfully serene [Gelassene], the urgent [inständig]
Stillness of the form of the old gardener
Vallier, who tends the inconspicuous on the
Chemin des Louves (in Young 2002: 108)
Julian Young offers the following, helpful gloss on these lines:
‘The old gardener’s “tending” is his passive caring-for the earth.
And his “urgent stillness” is . . . an action-ready listening for and to
“the request made by the earth” (ibid.). What the lines invite us
to do, I think, is to regard the gardener’s response, at once passive
and active, to the earth’s ‘request’ – a response in and through
which the earth, otherwise dark and inert, comes to presence as
the earth, in the form of plants, say – as emblematic of the pres-
encing or coming to expression of mystery in the human world.
We need the idea of the ‘beyond the human’ – at least those
of us do for whom the issue of the meaning of life won’t go away.
For life’s meaning is not to be found either in a world that is ‘our
handiwork’ or in a discursable world that is the way it is inde-
pendently of ‘our handiwork’, for there is no such way. If human
existence is answerable, and has a measure, it is because it and
the world from which it is inseparable owe to mystery. Only a life
led in recognition of this could be taken by its owner to be answer-
able. So I do not want to relent from claim (2), from invoking a
‘beyond the human’ that allows for human existence to be mean-
ingful. But nor do I want to relent from claim (1): for this claim,
by making Life the terminus of explanations of meaning, serves
to militate against the temptation, evident in ‘two levels’ ap-
proaches, to countenance the idea of there being something dis-
joined from or transcendent to Life.
Perhaps my resolve to hang on to both claims, and thereby
conserve rather than eliminate a tension, reflects the need for

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what D. T. Suzuki has called a feat of ‘double exposure’ (1934:
256). Life may be indeed viewed as the encompassing framework
– the human world, in effect – to which finally, if only implicitly,
we refer words, gestures, practices or whatever in explaining their
meanings. There is no structured order of things outside of that
framework to which there could be conceptual, discursable access
and which could serve, in the same style as Life itself, as the
terminus of explanations of meaning, as Dilthey’s ‘permanent
subject’ of meaning. At the same time, Life needs to be viewed –
if our existence is to be seen as meaningful, answerable, measur-
able – as a ‘gift’, as the coming to presence of what is mysterious.
The delicacy of performing this feat of ‘double exposure’ should
not be in question. So it is not very surprising, perhaps, that I find
myself drawn, in my two claims, to speak in ways that are difficult
simultaneously to combine.

Department of Philosophy
University of Durham
50 Old Elvet
Durham DH1 3HN
D.E.Cooper@durham.ac.uk

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