Meaning and Self-Consciousness: From Vital Significance to Ontological Structure

This paper does not regard meaning as a purely ideational product that arises only after the emergence of human self-consciousness. Instead, it analyzes meaning as a process that begins with the way living beings distinguish the world according to survival-based significance and expands, within human self-consciousness, into an ontological structure. Living beings do not experience the world as a neutral collection of matter. The world is already differentiated according to distinctions related to the possibility of survival, such as food, danger, approach, avoidance, protection, and territory. This paper does not identify such survival-based significance with human or symbolic meaning, but understands it as a primordial condition for the emergence of meaning. In other words, vital significance is not the completed form of human meaning, but the minimal relational condition through which something ceases to be irrelevant to a living being. In this paper, meaning refers to a relational structure in which an object, event, emotion, or relationship acquires position, relation, direction, and significance within the world of a being. Meaning is not a fixed property inherent in an object itself, but a structure of position formed between a being and the world. The same stone may be experienced as a threat, a memory, an object of mourning, a symbol, a work of art, or a gift because meaning does not reside within the object itself, but emerges within a relational network connecting the object with a being, body, memory, relationship, society, time, and symbol. Therefore, meaning is not merely an interpretation or a subjective impression, but a structure that organizes what a being regards as important, what it moves toward, what it avoids, and what it seeks to preserve. However, human meaning cannot be explained by survival-based significance alone. Through self-consciousness, human beings take themselves as objects and become conscious again of the fact that they exist within the world. At this point, human beings come to question their own position, time, death, contingency, the gaze of others, the reason for suffering, and the direction of life. Self-consciousness is a capacity that allows human beings to perceive the world more broadly, but it is also a capacity that makes them experience themselves as a problem within the world. Accordingly, human meaning expands beyond simple survival-based distinction into an ontological structure that enables individuals to endure and organize the problems of self-position and finitude generated by self-consciousness. This paper distinguishes the emergence of meaning across three levels. First, the condition of vital meaning refers to the level of survival-based significance through which living beings distinguish the world into what should be approached, avoided, consumed, protected, or guarded against. Second, self-conscious meaning refers to the level at which human beings take themselves as objects and come to ask about their own position and the direction of life. Third, symbolic, religious, and philosophical meaning refers to the level at which human beings endure the burden of self-consciousness and construct their position within the world through structures such as God, love, art, record, mission, truth, and narrative. Through this distinction, the paper seeks to avoid both reducing meaning to biology and explaining it as something that suddenly appears only after the emergence of human self-consciousness. In addition, this paper interprets God, symbol, narrative, love, education, thinking, certainty, and identity as different modes through which meaning structures operate. Here, God is examined not as an object whose existence is to be judged, but as a symbolic structure through which self-conscious human beings give meaning to death, contingency, suffering, and moral anxiety. Love is understood as an event in which another person acquires a special meaning position within one’s wor