Bohm: A change of meaning is a change of being

Bohm: A change of meaning is a change of being

A dialogue with David Bohm & Renée Weber

Weber : You are more and more interested in meaning, so can we explore what meaning is; not the definitive essence of it, but why are you interested in it?

Bohm : I am interested in meaning because it is the essential feature of consciousness, because meaning is being as far as the mind is concerned.

Weber : Is meaning being?

Bohm : Yes. A change of meaning is a change of being. If we say consciousness is its content, therefore consciousness is meaning. We could widen this to a more general kind of meaning that may be the essence of all matter as meaning.

Weber : We understand the idea of meaning in the human world, but how can it apply to the non-human world?

Bohm : There are several ways of looking at it. Let’s take the notion of a cause. Now we know that Aristotle had four notions of causation; of these, the material and the efficient cause are still recognized by modern science. The other two, the formal and the final cause, are not. But if we could bring in this notion of the formal and the final cause, we might say that the form that a thing has is its cause and also its aim, its goal, its end. The two go together. If we think of the dynamics of the establishment of form, it requires some sort of end in view, so the formal and final cause must go together. This is also the basic essence of Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of the formative cause [ed. in Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation]. The formative cause is basically very similar to meaning. Meaning operates in a human being as a formative cause: it provides an end toward which he is moving; it permeates his attention and gives form to his activities so as to tend to realize that end.

Weber : All of it discrete, whereas your proposal would provide a binding whole in one large context. To return to the same question, is there meaning in the non-human world, the world of nature, and in the universe as a whole?

Bohm : That’s what I’m proposing; not only that there is a meaning to it, but rather that it is meaning. We began by proposing that human consciousness is its meaning, not to say that it has a meaning, but it is its meaning. According to what it means, that is what it is.

Weber : What it means to whom? To us? Or to some other context?

Bohm : Let’s think about ourselves for a moment. If we say something has a meaning, who is the person to whom these meanings are being attributed?

Weber : To the individual, to the subgroup, to the culture…

Bohm : What is the culture but a whole set of meanings? If you change the meaning, you have changed the culture. If you change the meaning of the life to the individual, he is different.

Weber : People get around this by saying ‘Meanings are subjective, they have a place in the human world, but not in the subatomic world or in the cosmological world.’

Bohm : We have a hidden meaning perhaps and we should explore meaning there too.

Weber : That’s what you are saying. You’re extending meaning to the large, to the small and to the in-between, which is the human scale. You say that meaning is being. One can see that in the psychological world and in the social world quite clearly, but less so in the physical world.

Bohm : If the electron were determined by a meaning, that would be its being. If there is a formative cause for the electron, the formative cause is what the electron is.

Weber : But one might question the validity of the analogy. The fact that the meaning of the human being is its being you can document, and you’ve done it with many good examples, from psychosomatic medicine, for example. But it is much harder to see in what way the meaning of the electron becomes its being, because the electron doesn’t assign its own meaning the way a human being does.

Bohm : I don’t think the human being assigns his meaning. I think it happens naturally.