Thanks for writing this, Matthew! I agree that life just is meaningful. If the crisis isn’t meaning itself, then part of the crisis is that very feeling of loss of meaning.
With a family man who is also a successful businessman who commits suicide, that’s not for lack of meaning. There are plenty of sources of meaning in such a life, but none of them did the work they needed to do.
We need the meaning to grip us and guide us in a certain kind of way. Belief may be key here.
However, there are many kinds of belief that undermine meaning. There are Christianities and Marxisms that undermine the meaningfulness of the present, fallen (alienated) condition. They leave us thinking that meaning only lies in a utopian hereafter.
We need a belief that reinforces meaningfulness rather than undermines it. I guess I am uncertain that it is belief itself that does this work.
I love that you bring up Freud and psychoanalysis here. Though, I can't help but wonder whether it is the attitude of suspicion characteristic of psychoanalysis that is feeding into our problem. It implies a distinct (yet similar) crisis of belief: we no longer take ourselves to *be able to* speak to our beliefs.
I.e., I have a feeling or a thought, and rather than feeling or believing it, I can't help but doubt it. Is this really what I think? Is this really love, or is it self-deception, a recurrence of some primal conflict?
How is this different from what you argue? Well, it seems to me that you take a more epistemic approach: talk of counterpoints and certainty. But if the problem is not epistemic but hermaneutic (and this makes sense, after all, we are talking about meaning) then it begins to look as if the issue is one of widespread self-alienation.
And we are alienated precisely via the sort of thinking your piece begins with! A doubt that when we say we have a crisis of meaning, we mean a crisis of meaning.
I'm not sure, maybe I'm misreading you somewhere. Either way, excited to read your response and continue the conversation.
Psychoanalytic theory plays a prominent role in my writing, and it has often been blamed (along with Marx and Nietzsche) as being a source of this modern suspicion which has undermined some pre-modern goods. However, I don't think that we should be seeking to return to a (mythic) state of immediacy without any negativity or reflexivity -- I actually think that true freedom involves alienation (see Žižek's book Freedom: A Disease without Cure), so I don't think we can simply do away with critical or reflexive philosophy. Instead, we keep moving through, and I think Hegel's dialectics is one good example of how to do this.
However, I do think there is something to the idea that an excessive fixation on thought is already an indication of deeper dysfunction or disconnection from our world. To turn away from action and intuition and to retreat into the world of imagination and speculation is a narcissistic turn which can cut us off from the true source of learning, which is active engagement with the world, with difference. If, as Hegel maintains, each moment is the Absolute determining itself, shouldn't we be trying to get into the flow of what the Absolute is up to?
I agree with you that alienation is somehow important (counter-intuitively-so) to being free, and I read your second paragraph as an attempt to come to terms with this. Surely *some* sort of fixation on the internal is mistaken or pathological, but it is almost equally guaranteed that not all internal turns are problematic. Some are important: the success of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment is evidence of this enough.
Once we start talking about the problem in these terms, though, I start to lose sight of the issue. Is one way of cashing out the 'crisis of belief' you discuss in the piece precisely this inward turn along with, at the same time, a withdrawal of oneself from her beliefs? Or is that a different issue?
I mention at the end that I'm more interested in the problem of beliefs than of meaning because I'm trying to orient more towards action -- how do we act differently? Meaning cannot answer this for us, because it's inherently polyvalent. While the ludic work of playing with meaning is necessary for the discovery of values and the creation of new forms of life, to remain within the realm of meaning alone can morph into a hall of mirrors. I'm interested in how we can live differently, and I'm postulating that some kind of belief, as opposed to abstract "meaning," can provide an undergirding for that. We have to believe certain things, bet on certain realities, summon certain possibilities, if we have any hope of living in a way that is truly free and life-giving.
Hmm. I hesitate. I think my problem is that it is at least not obvious (and a bit implausible, but I think that is just a vibe right now) that the people having felt experiences of 'meaning crises' are simply believing some discretely wrong thing. Rather, it seems much more plausible that they are believing things in the wrong sort of way.
The hyper-critical approach to our beliefs you discuss seems to me more of a faulty mode of believing.
But maybe you're saying that: maybe the mode IS a refusal to believe anythng certain...
I don't think I'm claiming that people just have wrong beliefs -- I think that there is something deficient about our ability to believe at all in our present moment. As you said, "believing things in the wrong sort of way."
This is an interesting topic of discussion and I think it is very important and relevant to the modern situation.
I've been exploring a similar set of topics starting from a different point of view and using different foundational frameworks.
I find that it is usually enlightening to see similar topics from different perspectives. So this article gave me a lot to think about.
But I'm left with a lot of questions unanswered on the journey and thus feel like your solution feels premature.
Firstly I'm unclear who is proposing this idea of a crisis of meaningfulness? Is it random people on the internet? Professional psychologists? Continental philosophers? Sociologists? Perhaps some subset of these groups?
Secondly because the word meaning has multiple meanings, forgive the pun, and the world meaningfulness has yet more meanings. I'm really unclear what the proposed crisis of meaning is actually about. It feels really nebulous and vague?
Because I don't know who the original propoents of the topic are and its not clear what is their argument and your argument, its also not really clear if you are strawmanning or steel manning the original argument.
And it's also not really clear when you move on to your own perspective or where you are exploring areas of the topic that the original propoents overlooked.
I think the core of my comment here is that if this is a topic that you really believe is important, then from my perspective it would be worth exploring in more depth. To really pull it apart and analyse each component of the argument before putting them all back together again. You don't necessarily need to believe in it enough to die for but if you believe in it enough to spend the timeenergy to write about then perhaps you believe in it enough to write about it again.
I'll give some expanded thoughts in a second comment so I don't run out of space.
Hey, Pete! Your comment signals to me that I should have made some of my editorial decisions a bit more explicit, but I think I was writing this more to people who were already familiar with the 'meaning crisis' discourse which is unfolding within various internet subcultures. If you want to start learning more about where these conversations are talking place, I'd point out most of what happens under the 'metamodern' heading tends to address this meaning crisis, as well as prominent thinkers like John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau who I think popularized this meaning crisis conversation space (although I haven't done an in-depth genealogy on it).
So building off of my first comment, I thought that I might contrast a different perspective on the topic and see if it provides some clarity. Perhaps it will not.
So in my project I chose to centre on what I call the Knowledge, Values, Decision, Action loop.
It's a simplified framework that gives an easy but useful way to approach the connection been ideas such as knowledge, meaning, belief, motivation, intention and action.
From this framework and with the added perspective of your mention of Nietzsche, it seems that perhaps one part of the crisis of meaning is the some perhaps many people want an external authority to give them their knowledge maps and value systems.
To tell them what is true and real and what is important and good and beautiful.
But now there is no central authority telling people knowledge maps and value systems.
Or there are millions of authority figures telling people knowledge maps and value systems.
But who to trust? The preist? The politicians? The scientist getting funded by big pharma or the military industrial complex? The random internet talking head?
But why would we trust these people on the topic of knowledge maps and value systems? Do they actually have fully true answers to these questions? Are they trustworthy when they are clearly getting paid either with money or social capital to say certain things?
Or should people build their own knowledge maps and value systems?
This would lead to the most self sovereignty and self dependence. But then you need methods, techniques and tools to build your own knowledge maps and value systems and you need ways to validate that the knowledge maps actually reflect reality and the value system leads to actions the produce positive results for individuals or communities.
Then you also have a meaning crisis in communication.
If everyone has different knowledge maps and value systems then when communication happens there are lots of underlying assumptions that are different and clash so when person A says something person B interprets their meaning as something different from what person A intended.
Then there is the added problem of belief. Perhaps person A was intending to be manipulative and they didn't really believe what they said. Or perhaps they did believe it and person B interpreted them as being manipulative.
Then there is the problem of meaningfulness. If god didn't create people for a purpose then why live at all? Perhaps person A can be a good soldier and die for their country. Perhaps they can be a good family member and live to make their family or community flourish. Perhaps they can climb status hierarchies, or collect money and status symbols. Perhaps they can collect sexual conquests. Perhaps they can become and admired thinker or writer. Perhaps they are just a meaningless lump of atoms in one tiny corner of the universe.
How to decide which course to take? Value system and knowledge map will determine this. But does this mean you need to believe in that knowledge map and value system? Or do you just need to put them into action in your decision making process?
How can we decide to believe in a material universe, a simulation theory or a theory of gods creation?
Is there any valid method that can determine this with absolute certainty?
Isnt belief then just a choice between knowledge maps and value systems that cannot be proven to have absolute truth value.
So belief then would just be an arbitrary choice or an aesthetic fashion choice.
So then following the path of belief would lead us back to a crisis of meaning. If there is no external authority who has intention and is giving us a knowledge map and value system. Then we either need to choose these ourselves or copy someone else. Then we need to think about what value system is motivating our choice of value system and knowledge map. Is it personal gain? Benefit to humanity? Fitting in with fashion trends? Rebelling against fashion trends?
But then we have a crisis of meaning. We need a value system to choose a value system, so you just get stuck in an endless feedback loop, or you choose fairly arbitrarily.
Feels a bit like asking an empty room. I’m following Pete here, in a way.
Not sure where crisis is too.
Now, I know folks who don’t see meaning in things, yes. Many of them are young, or adults with some emotional injury that colors life as blasé. But it’s quite common to see it, the blasé part, as just that - a part. Even Disney presented it well with the Ennui character in “Inside Out 2”.
So, I think beliefs are not tautological with meaning at all. Loss of meaning is a temporary confusion, when there is noise and lack of clarity. You mentioned that, we have almost too much stuff. Watching twenty TVs with twenty movies one cannot follow. We will build up these skills though, to learn how to focus. Just like we learned how to use a mouse, a pen, a spear and a sharp rock before it.
I think that loss of meaning indicates that something new is happening, something radically different or alien is trying to erupt in our experience, and it needs to be engaged from the perspective of exploration to give it shape and voice. My aim is that this process would eventually yield certain beliefs that we might be able to act on.
I think when Matthew says “meaning-making is literally what we are constantly doing” that this is a tautology for belief. The way he uses it, belief contains embodied action a la “faith without works is dead.”
Re: your observation about watching twenty TVs instead of one, and learning to take meaningful, effective action based on them, I think you have a point, but I also think there are practical limits to the complexity any given organism can process, unless we start seeing organizations as agentic, as egregoric god-forms where our true power as humans manifests
I am not optimistic about our ability to "focus" or positively adapt to our inclusion in the massively networked nervous system called the internet. McLuhan saw this, that with the construction of global infrastructure for the instantaneous movement of information we built and hooked ourselves into a new nervous system.
Thanks for writing this, Matthew! I agree that life just is meaningful. If the crisis isn’t meaning itself, then part of the crisis is that very feeling of loss of meaning.
With a family man who is also a successful businessman who commits suicide, that’s not for lack of meaning. There are plenty of sources of meaning in such a life, but none of them did the work they needed to do.
We need the meaning to grip us and guide us in a certain kind of way. Belief may be key here.
However, there are many kinds of belief that undermine meaning. There are Christianities and Marxisms that undermine the meaningfulness of the present, fallen (alienated) condition. They leave us thinking that meaning only lies in a utopian hereafter.
We need a belief that reinforces meaningfulness rather than undermines it. I guess I am uncertain that it is belief itself that does this work.
I love that you bring up Freud and psychoanalysis here. Though, I can't help but wonder whether it is the attitude of suspicion characteristic of psychoanalysis that is feeding into our problem. It implies a distinct (yet similar) crisis of belief: we no longer take ourselves to *be able to* speak to our beliefs.
I.e., I have a feeling or a thought, and rather than feeling or believing it, I can't help but doubt it. Is this really what I think? Is this really love, or is it self-deception, a recurrence of some primal conflict?
How is this different from what you argue? Well, it seems to me that you take a more epistemic approach: talk of counterpoints and certainty. But if the problem is not epistemic but hermaneutic (and this makes sense, after all, we are talking about meaning) then it begins to look as if the issue is one of widespread self-alienation.
And we are alienated precisely via the sort of thinking your piece begins with! A doubt that when we say we have a crisis of meaning, we mean a crisis of meaning.
I'm not sure, maybe I'm misreading you somewhere. Either way, excited to read your response and continue the conversation.
Psychoanalytic theory plays a prominent role in my writing, and it has often been blamed (along with Marx and Nietzsche) as being a source of this modern suspicion which has undermined some pre-modern goods. However, I don't think that we should be seeking to return to a (mythic) state of immediacy without any negativity or reflexivity -- I actually think that true freedom involves alienation (see Žižek's book Freedom: A Disease without Cure), so I don't think we can simply do away with critical or reflexive philosophy. Instead, we keep moving through, and I think Hegel's dialectics is one good example of how to do this.
However, I do think there is something to the idea that an excessive fixation on thought is already an indication of deeper dysfunction or disconnection from our world. To turn away from action and intuition and to retreat into the world of imagination and speculation is a narcissistic turn which can cut us off from the true source of learning, which is active engagement with the world, with difference. If, as Hegel maintains, each moment is the Absolute determining itself, shouldn't we be trying to get into the flow of what the Absolute is up to?
I agree with you that alienation is somehow important (counter-intuitively-so) to being free, and I read your second paragraph as an attempt to come to terms with this. Surely *some* sort of fixation on the internal is mistaken or pathological, but it is almost equally guaranteed that not all internal turns are problematic. Some are important: the success of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment is evidence of this enough.
Once we start talking about the problem in these terms, though, I start to lose sight of the issue. Is one way of cashing out the 'crisis of belief' you discuss in the piece precisely this inward turn along with, at the same time, a withdrawal of oneself from her beliefs? Or is that a different issue?
I mention at the end that I'm more interested in the problem of beliefs than of meaning because I'm trying to orient more towards action -- how do we act differently? Meaning cannot answer this for us, because it's inherently polyvalent. While the ludic work of playing with meaning is necessary for the discovery of values and the creation of new forms of life, to remain within the realm of meaning alone can morph into a hall of mirrors. I'm interested in how we can live differently, and I'm postulating that some kind of belief, as opposed to abstract "meaning," can provide an undergirding for that. We have to believe certain things, bet on certain realities, summon certain possibilities, if we have any hope of living in a way that is truly free and life-giving.
Hmm. I hesitate. I think my problem is that it is at least not obvious (and a bit implausible, but I think that is just a vibe right now) that the people having felt experiences of 'meaning crises' are simply believing some discretely wrong thing. Rather, it seems much more plausible that they are believing things in the wrong sort of way.
The hyper-critical approach to our beliefs you discuss seems to me more of a faulty mode of believing.
But maybe you're saying that: maybe the mode IS a refusal to believe anythng certain...
I don't think I'm claiming that people just have wrong beliefs -- I think that there is something deficient about our ability to believe at all in our present moment. As you said, "believing things in the wrong sort of way."
this is great! loved the ‘mean-ing’ point, English is nicely subtle about that
Thank you for reading and commenting! It means a lot.
This is an interesting topic of discussion and I think it is very important and relevant to the modern situation.
I've been exploring a similar set of topics starting from a different point of view and using different foundational frameworks.
I find that it is usually enlightening to see similar topics from different perspectives. So this article gave me a lot to think about.
But I'm left with a lot of questions unanswered on the journey and thus feel like your solution feels premature.
Firstly I'm unclear who is proposing this idea of a crisis of meaningfulness? Is it random people on the internet? Professional psychologists? Continental philosophers? Sociologists? Perhaps some subset of these groups?
Secondly because the word meaning has multiple meanings, forgive the pun, and the world meaningfulness has yet more meanings. I'm really unclear what the proposed crisis of meaning is actually about. It feels really nebulous and vague?
Because I don't know who the original propoents of the topic are and its not clear what is their argument and your argument, its also not really clear if you are strawmanning or steel manning the original argument.
And it's also not really clear when you move on to your own perspective or where you are exploring areas of the topic that the original propoents overlooked.
I think the core of my comment here is that if this is a topic that you really believe is important, then from my perspective it would be worth exploring in more depth. To really pull it apart and analyse each component of the argument before putting them all back together again. You don't necessarily need to believe in it enough to die for but if you believe in it enough to spend the timeenergy to write about then perhaps you believe in it enough to write about it again.
I'll give some expanded thoughts in a second comment so I don't run out of space.
Hey, Pete! Your comment signals to me that I should have made some of my editorial decisions a bit more explicit, but I think I was writing this more to people who were already familiar with the 'meaning crisis' discourse which is unfolding within various internet subcultures. If you want to start learning more about where these conversations are talking place, I'd point out most of what happens under the 'metamodern' heading tends to address this meaning crisis, as well as prominent thinkers like John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau who I think popularized this meaning crisis conversation space (although I haven't done an in-depth genealogy on it).
Thanks for clarifying that.
So building off of my first comment, I thought that I might contrast a different perspective on the topic and see if it provides some clarity. Perhaps it will not.
So in my project I chose to centre on what I call the Knowledge, Values, Decision, Action loop.
It's a simplified framework that gives an easy but useful way to approach the connection been ideas such as knowledge, meaning, belief, motivation, intention and action.
From this framework and with the added perspective of your mention of Nietzsche, it seems that perhaps one part of the crisis of meaning is the some perhaps many people want an external authority to give them their knowledge maps and value systems.
To tell them what is true and real and what is important and good and beautiful.
But now there is no central authority telling people knowledge maps and value systems.
Or there are millions of authority figures telling people knowledge maps and value systems.
But who to trust? The preist? The politicians? The scientist getting funded by big pharma or the military industrial complex? The random internet talking head?
But why would we trust these people on the topic of knowledge maps and value systems? Do they actually have fully true answers to these questions? Are they trustworthy when they are clearly getting paid either with money or social capital to say certain things?
Or should people build their own knowledge maps and value systems?
This would lead to the most self sovereignty and self dependence. But then you need methods, techniques and tools to build your own knowledge maps and value systems and you need ways to validate that the knowledge maps actually reflect reality and the value system leads to actions the produce positive results for individuals or communities.
Then you also have a meaning crisis in communication.
If everyone has different knowledge maps and value systems then when communication happens there are lots of underlying assumptions that are different and clash so when person A says something person B interprets their meaning as something different from what person A intended.
Then there is the added problem of belief. Perhaps person A was intending to be manipulative and they didn't really believe what they said. Or perhaps they did believe it and person B interpreted them as being manipulative.
Then there is the problem of meaningfulness. If god didn't create people for a purpose then why live at all? Perhaps person A can be a good soldier and die for their country. Perhaps they can be a good family member and live to make their family or community flourish. Perhaps they can climb status hierarchies, or collect money and status symbols. Perhaps they can collect sexual conquests. Perhaps they can become and admired thinker or writer. Perhaps they are just a meaningless lump of atoms in one tiny corner of the universe.
How to decide which course to take? Value system and knowledge map will determine this. But does this mean you need to believe in that knowledge map and value system? Or do you just need to put them into action in your decision making process?
How can we decide to believe in a material universe, a simulation theory or a theory of gods creation?
Is there any valid method that can determine this with absolute certainty?
Isnt belief then just a choice between knowledge maps and value systems that cannot be proven to have absolute truth value.
So belief then would just be an arbitrary choice or an aesthetic fashion choice.
So then following the path of belief would lead us back to a crisis of meaning. If there is no external authority who has intention and is giving us a knowledge map and value system. Then we either need to choose these ourselves or copy someone else. Then we need to think about what value system is motivating our choice of value system and knowledge map. Is it personal gain? Benefit to humanity? Fitting in with fashion trends? Rebelling against fashion trends?
But then we have a crisis of meaning. We need a value system to choose a value system, so you just get stuck in an endless feedback loop, or you choose fairly arbitrarily.
Feels a bit like asking an empty room. I’m following Pete here, in a way.
Not sure where crisis is too.
Now, I know folks who don’t see meaning in things, yes. Many of them are young, or adults with some emotional injury that colors life as blasé. But it’s quite common to see it, the blasé part, as just that - a part. Even Disney presented it well with the Ennui character in “Inside Out 2”.
So, I think beliefs are not tautological with meaning at all. Loss of meaning is a temporary confusion, when there is noise and lack of clarity. You mentioned that, we have almost too much stuff. Watching twenty TVs with twenty movies one cannot follow. We will build up these skills though, to learn how to focus. Just like we learned how to use a mouse, a pen, a spear and a sharp rock before it.
I think that loss of meaning indicates that something new is happening, something radically different or alien is trying to erupt in our experience, and it needs to be engaged from the perspective of exploration to give it shape and voice. My aim is that this process would eventually yield certain beliefs that we might be able to act on.
Yes, that’s true. This curiosity or what Panksepp called “seeking” is a primary emotion that is supposed to help us navigate the world.
I think when Matthew says “meaning-making is literally what we are constantly doing” that this is a tautology for belief. The way he uses it, belief contains embodied action a la “faith without works is dead.”
Re: your observation about watching twenty TVs instead of one, and learning to take meaningful, effective action based on them, I think you have a point, but I also think there are practical limits to the complexity any given organism can process, unless we start seeing organizations as agentic, as egregoric god-forms where our true power as humans manifests
I am not optimistic about our ability to "focus" or positively adapt to our inclusion in the massively networked nervous system called the internet. McLuhan saw this, that with the construction of global infrastructure for the instantaneous movement of information we built and hooked ourselves into a new nervous system.