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If a life has a place rather than a meaning, what happens when the place is unjust?

Keisha Monroe Fellow
· 6 replies · 205 views
Meaning of lifeAfrican & AfricanaIndianLatin AmericanFeminist philosophyPhilosophy of liberationB. R. AmbedkarMenciusSimone de BeauvoirW. E. B. Du Bois#liberation#meaning-of-life#oppression#social-roles
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I've been reading discussions of how different traditions answer "does life have meaning?", and one idea keeps coming up: most traditions say a life has a place rather than a meaning. Your meaning comes from your role in a family, a lineage, a cosmos, a social order. The modern European idea that you must create your own meaning is presented as the odd one out.

I teach eleventh-grade English in Atlanta, and I keep thinking about who has historically been handed a place. Enslaved people were given a place. Women were given a place. In India, caste gave people a place. In each case the place came with a story about why it was natural, even cosmic.

Anna Julia Cooper, writing in 1892, insisted that Black women had to speak for themselves because nobody else would describe their place truthfully. Du Bois described a double consciousness: seeing yourself through the eyes of a world that has assigned you a place you know to be false.

So my open question is this. If meaning comes from a given place, what do we say when the place is unjust? Does the "create your own meaning" answer, for all its loneliness, at least have this going for it: that it lets people refuse a place they were assigned? Or do place-based traditions have their own resources for criticising an unjust order from within?

I'd like answers from people who know traditions other than mine, especially where this was argued from inside.

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6 answers

  1. Deepa Nair

    Fellow

    Ambedkar is the clearest case from inside. In Annihilation of Caste (1936), the speech he was not allowed to deliver, he argued that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, and that the authority of the scriptures sanctifying it had to be destroyed. Twenty years later he led a mass conversion to Buddhism. So he refused the place and also refused to become a solitary meaning-maker: he chose a different tradition and a different community. That's a third option your question leaves out.

  2. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    In the Andes, the ayllu, the community of kin and land, gives people a place, and Mariátegui saw in it the seed of a just society rather than a backward one. Liberation philosophy, Dussel especially, starts from the person excluded from the system, whose very existence shows the order is unjust. So the critique doesn't have to come from an isolated individual. It can come from the place of the excluded, which is still a place.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Ji-woo Park

    Fellow

    Confucian tradition has internal resources. Mencius, asked about a king being killed, replied that he had heard of the punishment of a mere fellow who had destroyed benevolence and rightness, not of the murder of a ruler. A ruler who abandons his role has forfeited the place. Roles in Confucian thought are reciprocal: the place carries obligations both ways. Whether those resources were used often enough is another matter.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    Feminist philosophy has argued about this for a long time, and I don't think "create your own meaning" wins cleanly. Beauvoir showed how women are made into the Other by an assigned place, but she also showed that freedom is always situated: you never create from nothing. And care ethicists have pointed out that some assigned roles, caring for children or elders, carry real value that the liberation narrative risks despising. The question is how to keep the value and refuse the subordination.

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  5. Dima Nasser

    Fellow

    Disabled people have been handed a place for centuries: the object of charity, the cautionary tale, the occasion for other people's virtue. Al-Maʿarrī, blind from childhood, refused that place loudly, and was also called a heretic for his religious scepticism. The disability movement's answer was neither to accept the place nor to make meaning alone. It was to insist that the place itself is a matter of justice: buildings, laws and attitudes can be changed. That's a place-based answer, but the place is something we build.

  6. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    These are the answers I hoped for. Deepa's Ambedkar and Mateo's "place of the excluded" both show a way between accepting the given place and making meaning alone: you build a new place with others. Femke's point about keeping the value of care while refusing subordination is going into my lesson plans. Dima, "the place is something we build" is the sentence I'll start with on Monday.

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