An Existentialist’s View of Complexity:

Art by NightCafe

In my post today, I am looking at the idea of complexity from an existentialist’s viewpoint. An existentialist believes that we, humans, create meanings for ourselves. There is no meaning out there that we do not create. An existentialist would say, from this viewpoint, that complexity is entirely dependent upon an observer, a meaning maker.

We are meaning makers, and we assign meanings to things or situations in terms of possibilities. In other words, the what-is is defined by an observer in terms of what-it-can-be. For example, a door is described by an observer in terms of what it can be used for, in relation to other things in its environment. The door’s meaning is generated in terms of its possibilities. For example, it is something for me to enter or exit a building. The door makes sense to me when it has possibilities in terms of action or relation to other things. This is very similar to the ideas of Gibson, in terms of “affordances”.

In existentialism, there are two concepts that go hand in hand that are relevant here. These are “facticity” and “transcendence”. Facticity refers to the constraints a subject is subjected to. For example, I am a middle-aged male living in the 21st century. I could very well blame my facticity for pretty much any situation in life. Transcendence is realizing that I have freedom to make choices to stand up for myself to transcend my facticity and make meaning of my own existence. We exist in terms of facticity and transcendence. We are thrown into this world and we find ourselves situated amidst the temporal, physical, cultural and social constraints. We could very well say that we have a purpose in this world, one that is prescribed to us as part of facticity or we can refer to ourselves to enable us to transcend our facticity and create our own purposes in the world.

In the context of the post, I am using “facticity” to refer to the constraints and “transcendence” to refer to the possibilities. Going back to complexity and an observer, managing complexity is making sense of “what-is” as the constraints, in terms of “what-it-can-be” as the possibilities. We describe a situation in terms of complexity, when we have to make meaning out of it. We do so to manage the situation – to get something out of it. This is a subject-object relationship in many regards. What the object is, is entirely dependent on what the subject can afford. When one person calls something as complex, they are indicating that the variety of the situation is manifold than what they can absorb. Another subject (observer) can describe the same object as something simple. That subject may choose to focus on only certain attributes of the situation, the attributes that the subject is familiar with. Anything can be called as complex or simple from this regard. As I have noted before, a box of air can be as complex as it can get when one considers the motion of an air particle inside, or as simple as it can get when one considers it as a box of “nothing”. In other words, complexity has no meaning without an observer because the meaning of the situation is introduced by the observer.

A social realm obviously adds more nuance to this simply because there are other meaning-makers involved. Going back to existentialism, we are the subject and at the same time objects for the others in the social realm. Something that has a specific meaning to us can have an entirely different meaning to another person. When we draw a box and call that as a “system”, another person can draw a different box that includes only a portion of my box, and call that as the same “system”. In the social realm, meaning-making should be a social activity as well. It will be a wrong approach to use a prescribed framework to make sense because each of us have different facticities and what possibilities lie within a situation are influenced by these facticities. The essence of these situations cannot be prescribed simply because the essence is brought forth in the social realm by different social beings. A situation is as-is with no complexity inherent to it. It is us who interact with it, and utilize our freedom to assign meaning to it. I will finish off with a great quote from Sartre:

Human reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is.

Stay safe and always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Plurality of Variety:

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10 thoughts on “An Existentialist’s View of Complexity:”

  2. Dear Harish
    Thanks for this interesting post.
    We are indeed meaning makers as are all living entities submitted to « stay alive » constraints (and for us humans also to a « look for happiness » constraint).
    You introduce the fact that meanings do not exist by themselves. A meaning (meaningful information) is indeed always creation of an agent submitted to constraints it has to satisfy. An animal submitted to a « stay alive » constraint or Sartre stating that « Human reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles » are probably about the same process of meaning generation.
    More on that at: https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-

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    • Thank you for your reply. I consider meaning as an emergent quality of paradoxes.

      As Vaihinger – The Philosophy of As If (1924) – proposes, human beings – like all beings – think and act pragmatically. #Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive#.

      We invent concepts, ideas, notions, “fictions” in thinking. We use these concepts and when we get results, we keep on using them. In the end result however, the concepts have disappeared. Like the models one used for building buildings. They’re fictions, they “work”. (In fact, both the word fiction and fact have been derived from the Latin “to make”, to work).

      Vaihinger shows how useful fiction are (also) paradoxical. They contain their own opposition and lead to infinite pro- or regression. Meaning is a paradoxical, as something “without meaning” can also “have meaning”. You cannot have no point (The Point! – Nillson).

      Concepts can be used, but don’t exist in reality. Even reality is a concept, a paradox. This universe is inherently paradoxical. I have a MSc in Physics. There I learned that reality doesn’t care about our concepts. An apple will fall, the sun will rise regardless of gravity. Meaning only has meaning for me.

      In my graduation thesis for my Master in Business Information Management, I showed – before I knew about Vaihinger – that information doesn’t exist for real. I barely passed :-). Like gravity and time, we use these as a kind of “place holders”, scaffolding our thinking.

      Data are given and information informs. If you already know something, it doesn’t contain information. Only when you’re confused, don’t know, then you’ve got information, I wrote. Off course, “la doute n’est pas une condition agréable, mais la certitude est absurd”(Voltaire).

      One acts as-if information (meaning, mind, gravity, ….) exists. Once one gets results one likes OR can explain why we didn’t get the results we liked to have, we’ve invented information.

      Thomas and Thomas (1928) showed “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” (Some) men tend to use the reverse also: if consequences are real, the definitions are real too.

      One tends to hide the fact that one’s ideas are fictions, irreal (I use this to distinguish between not real and not unreal), or should I’ve said surreal? The word “apple” is not a apple you can eat. Does a situation change, when using other words?

      I’m not implying that meaning is useless. Or that we shouldn’t use models. Like Watzlawcik – Pragmatics of Human Communication – warned: “don’t eat the menu!”.

      One derives meaning from the use of words. Years ago I heard somebody say about a politician: “he may be lying, but he is right”. (You can see, why right is right and left is wrong :-)).

      Some meaning is better then having no meaning at all, like a poor map is better then no map. Looking for meaning means a lot to me, but I’m sure we’ll never catch her.

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  3. I see what this means to me. The circularity of means (or resources) of meaning affords one to both create meaning, mind, human (being) and community. All these words containing the lemma “*men” or “to think” and “to project”.

    I use “to project” to show that words don’t contain meaning – they represent affordances or uses – AND that we cannot invent words – and meaning) at random. One projects meaning-through-use. The structure of meanings accounts for their usefulness.

    Communicatio ergo sum. Speach enables us to express meanings. Language -as tools – can be used to constrain thinking – constraining to “what-is” -, by eliminating “what-can-be”. As I wrote earlier, I nowadays avoid constructing sentences with “is”. There “is” no meaning.

    As “reality is community” (Von Foerster), many nowadays use language to define “us”: “(our) community is (our) reality”. By attributing – fixing – the meaning of words, we limit each other.

    Also, Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Caroll comes to mind: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”. And – my favourite – `They’ve a temper, some of them– particularly verbs, they’re the proudest–adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs–however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

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