I began my studies in religion with the idea of learning about the beliefs of groups of people so that I might take an objective look at them and in some fashion bridge the gaps that often plague people. One such gap exists in the philosophic world, and it is a common gap expressed on this blog. It is the uncommon ground often marked by the existentialist and the determinist or fatalist. Being the existential type I have often said of my counterparts that they hold their beliefs because their lives are in such despair that they cannot bear to take responsibility for the life that they have created. While responsibility is a major point of contention between the two groups I no longer feel that it is the primary point of departure for the two schools.

I realized that the reason people latch on to a philosophy like fatalism is because they wish to see significance in everything. The path to fatalism begins with the belief in a priori significance. They view the existentialist with a look of pity, because in the existential world they can find no significance. I feel that this attitude is a distortion of, primarily, post modern ideas, and secondly, a distortion of existentialist ideas. As I begin graduate school I am tackling the problem of significance in my profession (Archives and Preservation Management). I will show how my model fits professionally momentarily.

Does the existentialist find significance in the world? Yes, however, it is not a priori. The significance of any event that happens in the world is created by the observer. The physical world on its own contains no significance, however, our interaction with that world, and mainly, with each other can have great significance. The piano sits in a room. It is a collection of ivory, wood, steel, and brass. We have defined a set of meaningless things and organized them in a manner that is significant. However, even the piano is only significant to a handful of people, and completely insignificant to another group. This is because they have not learned to play the piano, or they have not learned to appreciate the piano. To them it is a collection of ivory, wood, steel, and brass.

Does the post-modernist find significance in the world? Yes, but only in the real world that we really live in, as opposed to the world of concepts. To a post-modern philosopher there is no significance in philosophy. It is an academic exercise which involves the creation and pondering of unanswerable questions. Philosophy explores esoteric concepts, she tries to understand the world through a series of abstract models that are supposedly representative of the world. The post-modernist realizes that the abstract models are just that, abstract models. This does not rule out the possibility of significance in the world. The things in the world that are significant are those things which abstract models cannot capture. Interactions with peers, friendship, love, and maybe a Beethoven piano sonata play a vital role in our lives, and to try to abstract them is to lose the meaning their significance.

As an archivist I protect the collective memory of society. I do so by maintaining access to documents, letters, pictures, video, sound clips, etc, etc, etc. These things on their own have little or no significance. They become significant in a created context. Letters are meaningless on their own, but when you discover who wrote them, and who received them, and see them within a collection of other letters a glimpse of their importance shines through. Their significance to the originators is different that their significance to the researcher. The content is viewed through a different set of lenses, and a new, perhaps greater significance is created by the new observer, who is seeing the document in a specific, created context.

I have not sought to define significance, it is a unique term, married in a certain way to others like quality, value, and meaning. It exists, and it may even exist as an a priori. If it is an a priori though, it is only in the observer, never in the observed. The fatalist looks at the existentialist with pity. Their search starts at the same place: significance. The paths do indeed diverge slightly, but it seems as though the roads might be closer to one another than we like to admit.