There is a real sense that meaning - becomes all about slavery and mastery. To know a meaning is after all to predict the future in some manner, and to be able to use that knowledge in some manner. It is to capture a little piece of the world in ones own mind, to assume or to make it ones own. It does not matte if that bit of the world includes other individuals and their action. Read the meaning of there actions and they become merely as a scrap of matter to be predicted and acted upon.
Meaning then invents some level of control or at least prediction a some point in the series. it creates a point where freedom breaks down, and humanity becomes an open predictive book to be read and learnt. Knowledge Then defines point at which be are all the slavs of matter or the mechanics of the eye and brian: It creates a shadow world where are actions are predicted - a world in which chains can be forged to hold us all. Meaning becomes then confused with slavery rather quickly - at least at certain levels.
A slavery that need not be about knowledge as such - it might just be the claim to have such knowledge - the church enslaves just as much if not more than the test tube- it just does it less efficiently
for meaning is also of course the line of escape. If one can define the level at which the binding meaning is built as somehow suspect, if one can inhabit meaning elsewhere n the world, then of becomes free in spite of the slavery of knowledge or institution, church or science. To be free is therefore to deride the existing nets of slavery that bind up minds and holds one down - that control action. Something must be suspect in their meanings the logic runs- something that can be found and ridicules as we set our minds truly free. Meaning becomes also then the great stratagem for meaning in the world. find the level at which meaning is- and one finds a freedom that is real.
But these direction qualities of meaning are not quite so simple as all that. For the passage from slavery as it merely builds a new slavery of its own - where else is it going after all but a new meaning? a new sense of control in the world? likewise as with all slavery it founds elsewhere another freedom- as British home live was founded on west indian slavery. Meaning that escapes is then already at another level in the process of becoming slavery; slavery is serving freedoms elsewhere. And yet these are no symmterical process: The freedom slavery creates is always a freedom of being: One creates a fixed state of freedom - fixed rules. The slaver sets the bounds then in which a sector of the world is free. While the becoming enslaved of the move to freedom is a complex affair- for there are no fixed rules and possibly no iron rule. there are many ways the process might great new chains many dark places, and always the possibility that it actually works, and that at some level the walk to freedom and meaning carries on and on.
Well maybe. What is always a mistake is to simply assume that meaning of the being that implies slavery and the process of meaning as freedom that leads from one into a becoming other slavery are going in the sam direction. They are not - and that is the point and of course if you simply confuse the two or pretend they are the same (the end of history, the trimuph of the west etc) then you end forcing the becoming freedom to conform the the being free - you do so by making that very freedom a form of slavery. That is a system no one is allowed to escape or think beyond in spite of the fact that it does not and cannot work in the situation in which it is found. move that creates states as failures and government as mafia....
Freedom slavery and meaning come then in many guises and many forms.
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