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"Significance" requires analysis in "objective relativist" terms, because it makes it makes no sense to talk about x's being significant in itself, in entire abstraction from abstraction from someone or something or somethingjor whom or which it's significant. At the same time, the  the relativity essential to the meaning of the concept cannot be merely de factowithout  without making at least some prominent uses of the word unintelligible. There's nothing s nothing odd or contradictory, for example, in a theological teacher's replying to a . student, "You don't find Rudolf BulbnannBultmann's theology significant? Well, you jolly well jolly well ought to find it significant!" decisive st.et?ficance for us-de jure as well as de facto !-provided we so experienced it tha~ecame the explicit authorizing source of the same answer to our fundamental question implicitly authorized by ultimate reality itself.

My thought, then, is that "significance" involves the same kind of objective of objective relativity as "value," as analyzed, for example, by H. R. Niebuhr. Indeed Indeed, the two terms seem but verbally different ways of saying essentially the same the same thing, if not also expressing the same concept. 

As for the implications of this analysis, events of the past are significant in general in general because of our present interests and preoccupations. Insofar as the interests the interests and preoccupations are cognitive or somehow involve cognition, we may we may say that past events are significant because or insofar as they express or imply or imply answers to the questions arising from our interests and preoccupations. 

At the root of all our interests and preoccupations, arguably, is one having to having to do with the ultimate meaning or worth of our existence. Because this fundamental this fundamental interest and preoccupation involves cognition in a very  very broad sense of sense of the word, it gives rise to a question to which some past event could conceivably could conceivably express or imply an answer, thereby becoming more or less significant less significant for us in a correspondingly fundamental way. 

Such an event, then, could be rightly said to be of decisive significance for us—de jure as well as de facto !—provided we so experienced it that it became the explicit authorizing source of the same answer to our fundamental question implicitly authorized by ultimate reality itself.

n.d.; rev. 24 August 20032003