The Creation of Meaning:

Epistemological Reflec­tions on Acts of Initiation

 

 

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

 

 

      How important is the first sentence of an article or book? We all know it is very important, at least when it comes to the level of interest a piece of writing will generate in the reader. A dull, lifeless first paragraph sets a boring tone for the whole piece—a tone that is difficult to change later on, no matter how interesting the topic may be. But why should the first sentence or paragraph be any more signif­icant than the others? Is there anything about what comes first in life that makes it somehow more meaningful—or perhaps, meaningful in a different way—than other, subsequent events? This, in its broadest sense, is the question of initia­tion.

 

      There are many ways to investigate a complex topic such as initiation. It has profound implications for sociology, poli­tics, religion and philosophy, to name just a few relevant areas. Being primar­ily a philosopher, I shall limit my discus­sion in this short article to a small set of philo­sophical implications concerning our ex­periences of initiation. My concern will be to determine the epis­temological status of initiatory acts and words. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, or of how we come to have knowledge. So the key question we shall address is: What role does initiation play in the process through which our words and actions take on meaning?

 

      Before answering this question, let us take note of just how important initia­tion really is, by looking at several exam­ples. Consider your first impression of Hong Kong Baptist University. For most of us, that first impression will have es­tablished a certain perspective, or "way of looking at" this institution, through which many of our subsequent experiences will have been fil­tered.

 

      My first contact with HKBU, for ex­ample, came in response to a letter of in­quiry I wrote almost nine years ago, about the possibility of getting a job here. In my letter I mentioned that a mutual friend had recommended that I apply. To my sur­prise, the person wrote back telling me to write him again, in a more formal style, without mentioning any prior "con­nec­tions". This struck me as being a rather strange request, but I complied and, of course, was eventually offered the job. I knew almost nothing about this institu­tion, yet my first impres­sion left me thinking "administrative pro­cedures over there must be  very compli­cated". I had been initiated.

 

      Another experience of initiation came on the first day I walked onto the college campus. There was a huge hole in the ground where the Au Shue Hung Centre for Film and Tele­vision now stands. I had to walk through a wooden tunnel to get to my office. I couldn't help being impressed by the mess and inconvenience caused by this con­struction, nor by the care that was taken to insure nobody would be hurt. I'm sure this initial experience had some influ­ence on my developing perception of the ad­ministrative structures of the university, which, like the buildings themselves, have been constantly changing during my eight years in Hong Kong.

 

      Few, if any, departments at HKBU have experienced more administrative changes that Religion and Philosophy. Our department has had six changes of Department Head in the past six years. Having a different leader every year has proved to be quite taxing on the lecturers in many ways. Sometimes we discover in department meetings, for example, that our understandings of "department policy" can differ widely, depending on which year we treat as initiating a certain deci­sion. But I'm sure most of my colleagues would agree about one observation.

 

      I've noticed that the style of a Depart­ment Head is usually established in his first few days (or weeks) in office. One head likes to write memos nearly every day; another rarely writes anything. One head likes to have regular department meetings; another tries to avoid them as much as possible. One head initiates communication with the staff on a regular basis; another expects the staff to initiate communication with him. The interesting thing is that an objective comparison of these different department heads would probably reveal that the real differences have not been as great as the perceived differences. Why not? I believe it has to do with how their first few acts coloured our perception of their entire term of office. Students, no doubt, experience a very similar phenomenon the first time they are taught by each new teacher.

 

      A good illustration of how initiation colours our subsequent perceptions comes from the tourist industry. Most foreign visitors to Hong Kong are "initiated" by an experience that is nearly always very exciting: the sudden turn planes must make just before touching down usually makes the landing at Kai Tak airport feel like a roller coaster ride. No wonder most tourists leave Hong Kong talking about  how "exciting" it is here! Is Hong Kong really any more exciting than other Asian cities, or is it that a tourist's initiation to Hong Kong tends to be more exciting?

 

      A few more examples will illustrate that acts of initiation not only colour our future perceptions, but also make a sym­bolic statement about our past perceptions (or those of our tradition). I still remember the grand ceremony at which HKBU con­ferred its first two honorary doctorate de­grees: one to Billy Graham and one to Sir Run Run Shaw. Clearly, this initiation into the world of doctoral education was highly symbolic. One Westerner and one Chinese were honoured, thus representing this institution's commitment to an inter­nationally respectable approach to educa­tion—one that respects both Eastern and Western values. Moreover, one man is known for his spiritual contributions to our heritage, another for his financial contributions. This again symbolizes the university's open recognition that prayer and payrolls are both important for the success of an institution such as this.

 

      Two departments in the Arts Faculty have recently been given permission to ac­cept students for Ph.D. studies. It will be interesting to observe the events that sur­round the momentous decision as to who will be the Faculty's very first doctoral candidate. Will the student be male or female? Chinese or Western? Studying Mu­sic or Chinese Studies, Language/ Litera­ture or Religion/Philoso­phy? In one sense, the answers to such ques­tions might seem totally unimportant. In ten years, few people will remember who the "first" doctoral student was; he or she will be lit­tle more than a number on a page of statistics. Yet in another sense, that first student will be more important than all the others put together, for he/she will sum up what has gone before, and point the way towards the future. Those who appreciate the significance of insuring that acts of initiation take place properly are sure to keep a careful watch on this developing situation: for each department, that first student will initiate a way of being-in-the-university that will be difficult to change thereafter.

 

      The foregoing examples should make abundantly clear how highly significant the effects of initiation can be on how we perceive what we claim to "know" or  "experience". The key question, then, is: how can we explain, epistemologically, the difference between what we know by, through, or during the experience of initiation, and what we know after or as a result of initiation? To answer this question, let us briefly examine the framework of epistemological terms put forward by one of the most influential Western philoso­phers, Immanuel Kant.

 

      Kant proposed two distinctions, on the basis of which he believed every item of knowledge could be assigned a definite classification: analytic vs. synthetic, and a priori vs. a posteriori. Analytic knowledge draws its truth from its conceptual form, whereas synthetic knowledge draws its truth from its intuitive content. A priori knowledge can be known to be true with­out referring to any particular experiences, whereas a posteriori truth requires such references in order to be known. By putting these two distinctions together, Kant was able to define four possible epistemological classes: analytic a priori, synthetic a posteriori, synthetic a priori,  and analytic a posteriori.¹ In the next four paragraphs I shall give a brief description of each of these four types of knowledge.

 

      The "analytic a priori" defines the realm of logical truth. If you say, for in­stance, "The rain is wet", then I do not need to touch or see the rain ("intuit" it, as Kant would say) in order to know your sentence is true. Rain would not be rain if it were not wet. The concept "rain" al­ready contains the concept "wet" (i.e., it is analytic), so I can verify your statement without referring to any particular experi­ence of rain or wet things (i.e., it is a pri­ori). Notice, how­ever, that such logical truths always as­sume that we already know the meanings of the words in­volved. For this reason, we can be sure that initiation does not fit into this episte­mological category: acts and words of ini­tiation create meaning, as we have seen; therefore, they cannot be merely logical reflections of what we al­ready know.

 

      The "synthetic a posteriori" defines the realm of ordinary experience, or empirical truth. If you say, "She is the Arts Facul­ty's first Ph.D. student", then I will need to look at much more than just its logical form in order to know whether your statement is true; I will need to appeal to various (synthetic) facts gathered  through sensible intuition. I might have to look into the past and present records to find out (a posteriori) whether or not she really is a student, what degree she is actually registered for, and what date she first took up that status. In other words, this epis­temological category also requires us to look back at what has gone before, so it cannot be the best place to locate initiation.

 

      The "synthetic a priori" is a new cate­gory, first introduced by Kant. Previous philosophers, such as Hume, had claimed that all human knowledge must fit into one of the two categories described above: in order to be true, a statement must be either logical/mathematical or factual/scientific. But Kant argued that there is a third and very important class of knowledge, pecu­liar to philosophy. Philosophers ought to be concerned, first and fore­most, with the task of discovering what must be true about the world in general (hence, what is a priori), yet is somehow based in fact (or intuition; hence, what is synthetic), rather than being merely a logi­cal truth. One of his most famous exam­ples of such a truth is: "Every event has a cause." This must be true, he argued, oth­erwise experience itself would be impos­sible; yet there is nothing in logic that makes it true. Kant proposed that such truths are "transcen­dental conditions" that make possible, or initiate, the most general features of our experience of the world. We seem now to be getting closer to identifying an episte­mological category for initiation. The problem is that the kind of initiation acts mentioned earlier are particular events, not just general principles.

 

      The "analytic a posteriori" was re­jected by Kant, and so also by nearly all post-Kantian philosophers, as an impos­sible contradiction in terms. How could something be both analytic (true by virtue of the meaning of the words) and yet a posteriori (true only on the basis  of some particular experience)? The conventional answer (almost always given without any argument) has been that this cannot hap­pen. However, I have argued elsewhere that there is a place for this epistemologi­cal classification after all.² Rather than re­hearse those arguments here, I shall sim­ply explain how I think this much-neglected epistemological category can shed light on the nature and functions of our acts and words of initiation.

 

      To initiate means to begin something new. We do this every time we name someone or something. What happens in the act of naming? Naming is a particular event (a posteriori) by which a specific concept (analytic) is stipulated as being necessarily attached to some person, place, or thing. The truth of such a stipu­lative act cannot be verified by any amount of logical reasoning, nor is it verifiable by appealing to various facts in the world. Because of its character as a particular event, it also cannot be verified by any Kantian-style transcendental arguments. The only way to verify a name is by being there to witness the naming-event. This is why ceremonies such as baby-naming (e.g., in the form of baptism or a dedication ser­vice) are so important. In a very real sense the initiatory act creates a new meaning—one that will be attached to the person, place, or thing forever after.

 

      Once a name is given, that name (as well as the thing it names) enters into the body of "facts" about the world that can be examined by scientists or analysed by logicians. However, naming is only one example of how the analytic a posteriori operates, just as it is only one example of initiation. Far too many forms of initiation exist to be examined in this short essay. Instead, let us conclude by considering briefly what lessons we can learn about initiation, once we recognize its epistemo­logical status as analytic and a posteriori.

 

      The first lesson is that acts of initiation are analytic, and so also, conceptual. In other words, they are not objective facts that exist independently of the person(s) involved, but are rooted in subjective thought-processes that determine their va­lidity. Someone who claims to have been "initiated into" a certain club or society or way of thinking is (or at least, should be) referring to a subjective event that has taken place. That is, initiation is not pri­marily something that happens to us, but something that we make happen to our­selves. Viewing it in this way enables us to accept responsibility for who we are and what we do (i.e., to "take initiative"), yet without requiring us to give up a reli­gious outlook on life. Too often, religious people view initiation rites in a totally passive way, as something God is doing to them, so that the individual's respon­sibility is projected onto God. Such a su­perstitious approach to religious acts ig­nores the fact that (according to Genesis 2) God has given us the power of naming!

 

      The second lesson is that acts of ini­tiation are a posteriori, and so also, to a large extent spontaneous and unpre­dictable. Naturally, an initiation ceremony can be planned; but the true initiation (which does not always happen at the same time as the ceremony celebrating it) will always carry with it new and surpris­ing implications that could not have been foreseen. This fact should encourage us to be more careful, not less so, in how we conduct ourselves during times of initia­tion. We should be at once watchful for those new and unexpectedly meaningful events that might surprise us, while watching out for any tendency on our part to stifle the creative potential of the mo­ment by depending too heavily on past tradition.

 

      Thirdly, in spite of the above, it remains true that initiation is and must always be rooted in a tradition. Even the newest and most unprecedented act of ini­tiation will derive much of its character from the other three classes of knowledge, the transcendental, logical, and empirical. Ultimately, these three must always work together with initiatory knowledge to make us who we are. With this need for balance in mind, we should always be on the lookout for discovering the true names of things, so that the actions we initi­ate will be constructive, even if they seem to go against the tradition. Do we wish to
initiate community-building and grace-giving actions, or actions that are divisive and vengeful (even if done in the "name" of that tradition)? This is a challenging question we should all ask ourselves at times of initiation.

 

      Finally, although acts of initiation are in one sense very individual acts, they must at the same time be expressed in a com­munity. If the creative meaning origi­nated by such an act remains private, if I alone am there when it takes place, then it quickly loses whatever meaning it might have once had. The significance of an ini­tiatory act is therefore determined by the response it evokes in one's commu­nity. If, for example, only one or two members of a department (or students in a class) re­act positively to the first few acts of a new Head (or teacher), then the effects of those acts of initiation are less likely to be long-lasting. But if all or most members (or students) respond positively—if the whole community absorbs the implica­tions of the new act(s)—then we can say the initiator has truly cre­ated a distinctive new mean­ing for the community.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

¹I have introduced these four epistemological classifications in Chapter IX of the textbook I use for the Introduction to Philosophy classes I teach here at HKBU. See The Tree of Philosophy, third edition (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1995), pp.59-60. For a more detailed treatment of the same subject, see Chapter IV of my book, Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic in­terpretation of the Critical philosophy  (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).

 

²I have given a more detailed treatment of the na­ture and applications of the analytic a posteriori in the following publications: "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (II) Naming, Necessity and the Analytic A Posteriori", The Review of Metaphysics 41:2 (December 1987), pp.255-282; Kant’s System of Perspectives, pp.22, 24, 117n, 119n, 129, 134-7, 139, 233n, 234, 237-9, 251-2, 272, 279n, 282n, 313, 315n, 363, 367-8.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published version of this essay.

 

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