Meaning and time: Understanding the existential agent
A clock and sculptures of angels above the Casino de Monte-Carlo, in Monaco. Photo: ElinaXX1V/Shutterstock
University of Queensland. March 25, 2021.
Existential psychology must develop an understanding of how human minds operate to make choices and direct action in their environments. Other animals deal with the physical and a simple social world, but human life is far more cultural and complex. The human agent makes meaningful choices, in a limited amount of time, and directs its actions in an interpreted world – indeed, perhaps several worlds: physical, social, cultural.
How does the existential agent operate in these worlds defined by meaning and time? Psychology has long grappled with both meaning and time, though usually separately, and only with spotty success. Both of them, however, constitute crucial aspects of the reality in which the human being thinks, feels, and acts. The human mastery of meaning, starting with language, far surpasses what other creatures have managed. Meaningful thought also enables the human mind to bring past and future into the present, and use them to guide action.
Clockwise from left: Being and Time (1927); Martin Heidegger; The view from his hillside chalet in Todtnauberg, a small German village in the Black Forest, where he wrote most of Being and Time.
The title of this article—“Meaning and Time”—is an homage to one of the great books of the twentieth century: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). As Heidegger observed, “being” is time-limited. Every existence starts existing at some point in time and ceases to exist at a later time. Immediate, direct experience of the here and now is all that is assuredly real, and all else is an inference—a mental representation deduced from immediate experience. Everyday experience is full of direction, appraisal, caring or not caring, here-to-there, and plenty more.
Remarkably, Heidegger used zero mentalistic terms: no mind, consciousness, thinking or thoughts, simulation, imagery, inference. But in psychology, we use mentalistic terms; or, at least, we have since we recovered from our ascetic behaviorist phase. So, from that mentalized lens of psychology, we can consider some ways to better understand human existential agency.
Does the human agent have free will?
Questions of agency bring up the much-disputed issue of free will. Let’s get the free will question out of the way quickly. I lost much interest in the free will debate when I realized it was mostly semantic. Proponents and opponents of free will largely agree that the human mind acts in ways, and for reasons, that are qualitatively different from the other apes: it talks (extensively) and it incorporates abstract ideas, morality, economic calculations, and advanced theory of mind into its causal processing (e.g., what will they think of me tomorrow if I do X today?). They mainly disagree as to whether all this evolutionary advance deserves to be called “free will.” I don’t care. The important thing is to understand these advanced powers of the human agent. Another way of framing this is that the human self is like nothing else in nature, and part of its uniqueness is in how it understands situations and makes decisions that guide behavior. That’s what needs to be explained. Either that’s free will, or that’s what’s mistaken for free will — but in either case, that’s where the action is.
“Either that’s free will, or that’s what’s mistaken for free will — but in either case, that’s where the action is.”
Agents Who Use Time
Meaning and time are two big parts of the evolutionary advance that produced the existentially sophisticated human agent. Let me start with time. Apart from a few borderline special-case exceptions, all the non-human animals live entirely in the here and now. Their brains may use lessons learned from the past but they see the present just as it is, and they mostly can’t mentally represent past or future. Short-term expectancies are the limit of their future and it’s not clear they even have a conscious image of what they are expecting.
Images clockwise from bottom left: Destina/AdobeStock; LuckyBusiness/AdobeStock; HansonLu/Unsplash
In contrast, the human agent lives in the past, present, and future, sometimes all combined. People who do Christmas shopping are mindful of an impending future cultural occasion and preparing for what they will do then, including its impact on important others in their social world. That future event symbolically celebrates a past event, which supposedly occurred over two thousand years ago (but perhaps not on the specific day that is now observed), the annual celebration of which rests on the understanding of the earth’s physical orbit around the sun.
The human mind thus evolved far beyond the primate mind in its conquest of time, not just being able to represent and quantify future and past, but also to understand them collectively so we all know what various dates mean. Among other advantages, that’s why, for example, you can make an airplane reservation for a particular time and date many months from now, whereupon you and many other people you have never known and will never see again converge at a particular place, pile into a metal tube, fly through the sky to another specific place, and then all go your separate ways.
Moreover, and crucially, the future contains multiple possibilities (determinists deny this, but certainly people experience the future in that manner) and the human agent evolved to deal with those possibilities. Indeed, that’s what choice is all about: selecting one thing rather than another so as to steer the course of events toward a better outcome. The better outcome explains why it was adaptive to evolve agentic brains. Free will, or the human trait that is often mistaken for free will, is a further evolved version of that same basic agency: it starts with the basic animal agent that is designed to act so as to bring advantage and modifies it to operate in a cultural society with layers of meaning, morals, money, gossip, religion, laws, and more. A central problem for existential psychology is to understand how that advanced form of primate agency works.
Data reproduced from Figures 1 and 2 of Redshaw and Suddendorf (2016). The child is spontaneously covering both tube openings (A) whereas the ape is covering only one (B). The data lines represent the cumulative percentage of participants who covered both tube openings.
A recent experiment by Redshaw and Suddendorf (2016) underscored the essentially human aspect of understanding the future as a ‘matrix of maybe’—that is, a set of alternative possibilities, often several of which are attended by probabilistic contingencies. The study included human children as well as adult chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. They all learned that a treat would be dropped into the top of a long tube and would come out the bottom; if they caught it they could keep it, otherwise it would drop into a pit and be gone forever. Everyone learned to put their hand underneath the open bottom and catch the treat. Then the experimenters brought out a new tube which had two openings at the bottom, like an upside-down Y. The treat came out one side or the other, at random, so if one only covered one opening then one only caught it half the time.
Then again, one has two hands, so one could cover both openings — provided one could understand at some level that both options are possible. The human 2-year-olds couldn’t really master this, but the 3-year-olds got it, and the 4-year-olds got it right away and on every one of 20 trials. In sharp contrast, the adult apes — our smartest and closest biological relatives — never figured it out. In fact, a few of them occasionally stumbled on the solution, using both hands and getting the treat — but didn’t realize they had found the key to winning every time, and just went back to guessing with one hand.
Thus, a key evolutionary advance of the human mind was being able to think of the future as multiple possibilities, a matrix of maybe (for review, see Baumeister, Maranges, & Sjåstad, 2018). This is part of the essence of being human, of daily life, of that evolutionary step up in agency that is sometimes called free will. Regardless of whether it deserves that title, it’s one key thing we as existential psychologists seek to explain.
Agents Who Use Meaning
Now to meaning. As to whether something is real, or whether it exists (which to a philosophically sophisticated mind are not quite the same thing, despite overlap), I used to think it had to be made of matter, of atoms and molecules. But when I wrote my Meanings of Life (1991) book, in the process thinking as carefully as I could about those issues, I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that meaning is not made of atoms and molecules, yet it is nevertheless real.
Clockwise from top: Physical entities such as brains can process meaning and incorporate it into the causation of behavior (Image: SergeNivens/AdobeStock); American soldiers burn their flag in a flag retirement ceremony (US Department of Defense); American citizens burn their flag in protest against government policies (Washington Post/Getty Images).
Later, I was lucky enough to have some conversations with one of America’s greatest contemporary philosophers, Alfred Mele, and I asked him about this. He said he kind of thought reality had to be physical reality (atoms and molecules), but he wasn’t sure. He told me to ask a metaphysics expert, and suggested one at an upcoming conference. I did meet that expert, and I also happened to have a day with another metaphysics expert. Metaphysics is about what is real, so presumably they are the experts on reality. I carefully prepared my thoughts about why meaning was not made of physical matter but was nevertheless real, and hesitantly expressed them. I half expected them to say, our field has long considered your view and utterly discredited it. But instead, both professors had the same reaction, which was just to wave me off dismissively. They thought it was so obviously true as to be not worth discussing. It’s like this is something from introductory seminars in metaphysics graduate school. (And yet so many smart people in other fields refuse to believe it.) Thus reassured, I continue to make the point that meaning is real but not a physical thing.
Meaning can be understood for psychology as non-physical connection and potential organization (see Baumeister & Landau, 2018; also Baumeister & von Hippel, 2020). A symbolic connection, to be sure, differs from a physical connection but is nevertheless real and often has real consequences. For example, one can furnish a fully physical account of a burning flag, but it will likely miss a key part of the causal process: Flags are burned for symbolic reasons. And meaning is a powerful tool for organizing one’s self and one’s worlds. Systems, plans, frameworks, mathematics, and other organizing principles are made of meaning.
The use of meaning is not entirely unique to humans. Animals form mental associations and act on them. But humans use meaning far more extensively, and in more sophisticated ways, than other animals. Indeed, all human cultures have language, the optimal tool for using and sharing meaning, whereas no animal communication patterns qualify fully as language. Culture, another meaning entity, saturates nearly every human action. Some other species have beginnings of culture, but for them it is mostly an optional add-on. Humans are the truly and essentially cultural animals (Baumeister, 2005; Baumeister & von Hippel, 2020).
A perennial issue is whether ideas can move molecules. The causal power of ideas is axiomatic in many social sciences (less obviously so in psychology). Ideas and other meanings are not physical, so they lack causal power in the physical world. But physical entities such as brains can process meaning and incorporate it into the causation of behavior. That’s another crucial point about the human agent. Human brains thus enter social and cultural meaning into the physical causation of behavior.
Meaning transforms behavior, often radically. Consider even the simple behaviors found in many animals: eating, sex, mating, companionship, nurturing young, movement. Now consider how social and cultural meaning has transformed such behaviors in the human versions: holiday dinners, restaurants, prostitution and pornography, weddings and divorces, parental leaves and tax breaks, schools, train reservations, ski resorts – and all the while talking, talking, talking.
Moreover, I have come to suspect that meaning transforms the agent’s task. Physical reality is just what it is, and that’s that, but applying meaning to it introduces alternative possibilities. Even just to say something is high contrasts it with what is low – same for wet/dry, fast/slow, success/failure, and the rest. That’s essentially what meaning accomplishes, classifying what is there in relation to what’s not there. This echoes Sartre’s 1943 theory that linked consciousness to nonbeing: You can look at the desk and see that your keys aren’t there. The ability to imagine and think beyond the immediate physical reality, fostered by meaning, enables human agents to transform their environment. The human existential agent can thus look at the world and think: “It could be different, and perhaps it should be!”
This is no doubt one reason why most social but non-human animals live amid a fairly stable social organization, merely replacing members within in the same system — whereas human societies continue to change and evolve, often driven by intentional decisions to reorganize how life is conducted. Wolves, for example, are highly social creatures, but a pack of wolves out in the wild probably live much the way their ancestors did ten thousand years ago. They have not developed an economic marketplace, used science to develop technology, reinvented the roles and duties of she-wolves, or switched to democratic decision-making. Meanwhile, human societies have changed frequently and radically even in just the past century. Applying meaning to reality facilitates change — itself something that happens in time.
Use of Meaning to Master Time
Obviously, time operates in the purely physical world. But physical causality operates in very short steps. The present is the cause of what happens next, which causes what happens next, and so on. Molecules clash, join, and do other things. But physical causality does not leap across time. The present is the result of what just happened a moment ago and the cause of what will happen a moment from now; the distant past and future are irrelevant.
In contrast, human social life is abundantly connected to distant past and future. The human brain, a physical thing that learns to participate in a not-entirely-physical world (e.g., one with culture and society), uses meaning to connect to the past and future and to choose and guide behavior in the present.
“The human agent lives in the past, present, and future, sometimes all combined.”
The power of meaning to connect across time was made abundantly clear in a large study we recently conducted (Baumeister et al., 2020). We had noticed that although there are tens of thousands of prior laboratory studies of thoughts, the experimenters usually set the terms, such as by directing participants to think about a past event, present event, or future event, and rate whether doing so was meaningful to them. Hence, they leave open the question of whether people actually experience such thoughts in normal life, and whether there might be other ways that time and meaning might be related. So, we decided to take a less directive approach, to see what sort of thoughts happen in daily life. Thus, we set about designing ways to ask participants about whether their thoughts applied to the past, present, or future.
In that process, I realized that the conventional approach would be to have participants rate each thought as either past, present, or future. But that might miss something—such as the possibility that their thoughts might have been related to more than one of those “time zones.” So, instead, I suggested, let’s give them all three options ask them to check yes-or-no for each of the three—past, and/or present, and/or future. Sure enough, sometimes people said yes to two or all three, and in about a quarter of the thoughts they said no to all three. This has important methodological benefits and advantages for theory-building.
Data reproduced from Study 1, Figure 6 of Baumeister et al., 2020. The black line depicts predicted values based on multilevel regression, and the blue bars show the observed mean scores.
For now, the important thing is how these related to the meaningfulness of the thought, as people rated it. We had not strongly predicted this, so it’s post hoc, but the rated meaningfulness of thoughts in each of the four possible “time zone” options differed significantly from each of the others! The no-time thoughts on average were the least meaningful. The one-zone ones (only one of past, present, or future) were more meaningful. Thoughts that combined two of those were significantly more meaningful. And the most meaningful thoughts, on average, were those for which the person said yes to all three of past, present, and future. This pattern highlights the essential function of meaning in connecting across time.
An earlier paper, likewise with post hoc results (deliberately exploratory) tried to tease apart ratings of happiness and meaningfulness in life (Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker, & Garbinsky, 2013). It too found a big difference on the time dimension: happiness was maximized when focusing on the present but meaning was maximized when thinking about the future, or more precisely, about the future in relation to the present and past. The recent data I described above (Baumeister et al., 2020) echoed that pattern: Future-oriented thoughts were the most meaningful, followed by past, followed by present, and no-time thoughts were on average the least meaningful.
All of this has implications for understanding the existential agent. Consider the potentially odd-sounding question: Does the future have a causal impact on the present? Aristotle thought so, even in the physical world, but lately no one (with possible exception of esoteric modern particle physics theorists) thinks the future can physically change the present. However, human behavior seems to be extensively based on the future. That’s because, again, meaning is crucial for making the nonphysical, organizing connection: human brains form shared understandings of the future, and they link back via meaning to the present so one can select (or do) one thing rather than another in the hopes of achieving a better possible outcome from the future-oriented “matrix of maybe.” Indeed, the process of planning often starts by thinking of the eventual desired outcome and then mentally moving backward step by step to the present, as in how to get from here to there.
The Self
Much research has examined different aspects of the human self. Theorists even argue whether each person has one self, or multiple selves – or none at all (i.e., the self is an illusion or fiction). My forthcoming book emphasizes the self as the creation of unity (Baumeister, in press). Though they have useful insights, the multiple-self and no-self arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny. But imposing unity on diverse pieces is what the self is about, starting with with the infant’s brain realizing that its arms and legs all belong to the same body — and can be centrally controlled.
Image: Hurca/AdobeStock
The adult human self has been shaped, not by some internal requirements of the individual brain, but by the requirements of sociocultural systems (see Baumeister, Ainsworth, & Vohs, 2016). Such systems are humankind’s adaptive strategy: Culture is how we humans have solved the universal problems of survival and reproduction. And cultural societies benefit from individual selves that use meaning to keep track of how they exist in time (e.g., keeping promises, paying debts, working together toward common goals, continuing to perform stable roles).
Human self-understanding often takes narrative form: People know themselves as actors in stories, and even as part-authors of their stories (McAdams, 2001, 2013, 2019). Life is lived as a story, or rather as a cluster of loosely related stories, and the stories are of course more than retrospective interpretations of what happened. They use meaning to connect across time and thus reflect the advanced powers of the human mind. They have a beginning, middle, and end. Past is prologue, the future keeps us riveted in suspense, and our actions in the present reflect the awareness of the story and are often aimed at bringing it to a happy ending.
Conclusion
Meaning and time are simultaneously metaphysical mysteries and psychological problems. I have suggested the human mind evolved to use meaning partly to enable it to construct past and (especially) future. Unlike our animal friends, human minds operate in a world defined by shared understanding of narratives that integrate one’s self across time. The future appears to us as multiple alternative possibilities, some of which will come true and some of which will never come true. The human agent evolved to use meaning and time to help steer events toward the more appealing and adaptive among those possible future outcomes.
Roy F. Baumeister is professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, as well as holding affiliations with Florida State University and University of Bamberg. Baumeister’s research spans multiple topics, including self and identity, self-regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, and self-presentation. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation. He has over 670 publications, and his 40 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, Meanings of Life, and the New York Times bestseller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. The Institute for Scientific Information lists him among the handful of most cited (most influential) psychologists in the world. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and from the International Society for Self and Identity, and most recently the William James Award, the highest honor for lifetime achievement given by the Association for Psychological Science.