At the Edge of Meaning

Nietzsche once suggested that metaphysics is about as useful to the struggles and uncertainties of embodied life as would be knowledge of the chemical composition of water to a boatman facing a storm. The force of the remark is not hostility to thought but a boundary placed around it. In conditions of living and existential self-sustainment, personal and collective alike, abstraction cannot replace embodied experience, nor can it transcend or finally comprehend it. It can organise and extend what we do, but it remains derivative of the life it seeks to describe, never sufficient to contain or resolve it. Symbolic systems, causal models, and formal languages give the appearance of completeness, but this is a structural effect, a proxy illusion required for coordination. Language works by seeming to close over what it names, even though it does not and cannot. Meaning arises through a slight but persistent disjunction, a phase offset between reference and what is referred to, a topology of semantics within signalling environments that allows communication to function while never fully stabilising what it describes. Ambiguity and uncertainty are not defects to be eliminated. They are irreducible features of any complex, evolving system. Attempts to remove them merely collapse the ontology back onto itself, mistaking internal coherence — such as it is — for contact with and instrumental access to the world beyond it.

Periods of unemployment, exclusion, or cultural marginalisation bring these dynamics into view not as theory but as lived structure. What arrived for me as shock was not only material difficulty, but the withdrawal of the symbolic background that ordinarily sustains continuity and belonging. In that absence, philosophy and knowledge were not consolation in the sense of reassurance or closure, but closer to what Boethius meant: companionship under conditions of uncertainty. Meaning did not resolve, because it cannot. The human symbolic universe holds together only by referring beyond itself, indirectly and incompletely. Exclusion, in limited form, has a tendency to reveal the structural dynamics and functional dependencies of systems that remain invisible from their centres. The periphery occupies a particular role here. What is institutionally overdefined — the person, the group, the position assigned a fixed meaning — simultaneously amplifies semantic uncertainty, exposing the cost of order itself. This is the entropy of structure: the unavoidable remainder produced by logic, classification, and control. Bertrand Russell once observed that thinkers need some hardship, though not too much, and there may be a psychosocial necessity at work in this tension. The same systems that sustain civilisation generate the pressures through which identity, value, and understanding are formed. We endure within them, enjoy within them, adapt to them, and reflexively reproduce them, because they are the conditions under which meaning, and the life it sustains, remain partial, unfinished, and possible at all.