Relevantism as an Alternative to Religion, Agnosticism, and Atheism p.2
Finding relevance has less to do with facts about usefulness, as in pragmatism, than it has to do with the ability to find usefulness that is relevant to oneself. More important than the right situation is the right approach to the situation. Finding the right situation�in which one can be pragmatic�is a progressive role that is secondary to the adaptive nature of realizing progress.
Adaptation has less to do with the observable tools than it has to do with the system of perceiving the tools, and giving them a meaningful role. In other words, a Relevantist is pragmatic about meaning, while maintaining that other forms of pragmatism are derivative from a meaningful system. Without a meaningful system, pragmatic action is a form of groping in the dark. There is a danger that assertiveness and opportunism could cause damage if not guided by a compassionate personal intelligence.
When experience has a meaningful role, pragmatism as a means of achieving ends becomes less relavent. The usefulness of choices then has less to do with gainful change than with the wholeness of self-nature. What is applied to experience is the reference structure of the individual, not discrete tools or strictly reactive determinations.
Usefulness cannot be derivative from experience the way a pragmatist means it, yet to accept the idea that truth comes from the individual may also be to accept that time is not the most significant factor. Existing or having the least amount of consciousness is to be in part separate from time, to have an awareness of impressions that would not be apparent without a reference to consistent qualities and constants.
When we have accepted that pragmatic choices are most strictly concerned with creating change within the unchanging, truth becomes deliberate, and not a simple reaction to the usefulness of situations in the world. By definition, the unchanging cannot be changed except through a re-conception of its nature. To reconceive of nature is to create meaning.
True pragmatism is then a progressive system of meaning, that gives usefulness to situations, whether or not they change. Pragmatism that does not create meaning seeks useful change. Yet change that does not seek a particular (unchanging) state or quality as a destination cannot be called useful, at least in a meaningful way~1. Unless usefulness is conceived in terms of meaning, there is no particular or definite form that it could take.
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Footnotes:
1. To chase the idea of a future condition without realizing the condition of the present is a hopeless mentality that will doubtless be extended into oblivion. Yet to recognize the present condition as in some respect unchanging, along with the idea of an unchanging future condition as an object, is to recognize a transformation not merely of usefulness, but of identity, or self-nature. There is no usefulness without a being for which it is useful. And we cannot say that only usefulness is true, if it depends necessarily on nature. Yet nature is concerned less with where things are going than with the way they actually are. It is convenient to say that truth is useful, that the answer lies ahead or �over there�. Certainly many people are not content with themselves, and their contentedness may only be realized in the future. But to solve the problem of unhappiness is in the first place to recognize that we do not have the right usefulness, which isn�t to say that unhappiness is not true. The realization is not that unhappiness is useful and we can make a profit on it, but rather that unhappiness is true and real, and is bad in and of itself, independent of any idea of usefulness, and that therefore happiness would be useful. But that isn�t to say that happiness is more real or more productive than unhappiness, but rather that happiness is a state of greater relevance. It is better to say that truth is relevant to the individual, that we are deserving of every opportunity, than to say that truth is useful, and that we are to blame if all our tools are rusty. But to seek relevance, the individual must know multiple paths. It is not just the reality of relevance, but the question of relevance�relevance as a quest.
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