Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 46 — Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis (Summary & Notes)

“I know myself as a being whose being is in question, and knowing myself that way is also to put being into question. And so I’ve got this deep participation in the co-determining mysteries of who I am and what being is.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 45: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-45-eecc99720c3a)

Ep. 46 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis [55:57] https://youtu.be/POY3p9TpdD0

• Vervaeke suggests that wisdom is doing (especially where it overlaps with enlightenment) in order to enhance meaning in life is it’s enhancing religio, which in turn takes us into sacredness. These are all intertwined and reinforcing.
• Vervaeke will be referring to this as the Wise Cultivation of Enlightenment (W.C.E.). W.C.E. is situated within two things: a worldview as well as a co-op network of communities of practice. The latter are in a dynamic equilibrium relationship with a wisdom wiki which is compromised of researchers and practitioners.

• Ultimately, when taken together, all of this is how we can awaken from the meaning crisis—all explained and engineered from within a secular, scientific worldview. That’s not to say it’s a worldview that is hostile to religion, but it is not dependent on religion (nor a political ideology).
• We will now put this schema into dialogue with some of the central “prophets” of the meaning crisis, especially in the 20th/21st century. We won’t be discussing all the philosophers (e.g. Wittgenstein, Whitehead), but rather a network of people who have a kind of causal influence with one another (Vervaeke introduces and lays them out in diagram form but does not discuss in detail yet):

• There’s also a network that connects Heidegger to postmodernism, namely Derrida, Harman, and Han:

• There’s also a connection Heidegger has with Buddhism (along with James) via something called The Kyoto School. (Vervaeke puts Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness as one of the top five books about the meaning crisis, though it is very difficult)

• Let’s first talk about Husserl, who had a titanic influence on Heidegger and who we haven’t discussed yet. He’s famous for founding a whole philosophical movement called phenomenology. (Existentialism actually comes out of phenomenology via Heidegger) Phenomenology requires a full course but Vervaeke recommends Introduction to Phenomenology by Robert Sokolowski and Experimental Phenomenology by Don Ihde. Phenomenology was Husserl’s attempt to try and get us back to a contact epistemology. i.e. How deeply embodied and connected we are to the world, through a reflective, experimental, exploratory, probative attention to contact.
• Husserl emphasized intentionality as one pole of how to probe the notion of contact, meaning any mental directedness. This is in a direct reciprocal relationship with the other pole world disclosure, meaning a meaningfully structured environment. (i.e. an arena) Intentionality is a core kind of mental agency or perspectival knowing, and Husserl called this noesis. He referred to world disclosure as noema.
• In phenomenology, this intentionality is focused and directed on the transjective relationship. “A reflective attention paid to your perspectival knowing of the transjective relationship.”
• One of Heidegger’s main criticisms is that Husserl’s work had not really given us contact, i.e. it had not really developed an account of participatory knowing—how the agent and arena were fundamentally related together. (Which is not to say all of phenomenology fails in this way. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about embodiment and embeddedness are trying to get at this.) Also, this idea of participatory knowing had not been set inside an ontology—i.e. a proper account of the structure of being. A related criticism was that Heidegger felt Husserl was still bound within the Cartesian (he might say Platonic, or Aristotelian) grammar, keeping him from making contact.
• We can connect to the participatory knowing by directing our phenomenological realization towards our being—who and what we are. That we are the beings whose being is in question. This does not mean us as human “beings,” homo sapiens. We’re talking about what grounds this Husserlian framework in a participatory knowing.
• Existentialism says that human beings don’t have an “essence.” That who and what we are—our being-ness—is in question. That you exist before you have an essence. That your existence precedes your essence. (This is one of the things existentialism takes out of Heidegger)
• Notice that this question of “What am I?” is bound up in the question of “What is the meaning of my life? What makes it meaningful. What makes it meaningful to me?” Heidegger is trying to get you to remember the being mode, and so this as an aporitic (as in aporia—a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly irresolvable impasse in an inquiry) element to it. So rather than referring to us as “beings” Heidegger crafts a new word Dasein, which means “being there.”
• By doing this, Heidegger allows our self-knowledge to get us to our knowledge of ontology. “I know myself as a being whose being is in question, and knowing myself that way is also to put being into question. And so I’ve got this deep participation in the co-determining mysteries of who I am and what being is.”
• Heidegger is going to argue that the history of metaphysics, that whole cultural-cognitive grammar and framework that we’ve inherited from the Axial Revolution, is actually the history of nihilism. (This is why he is a prophet of the meaning crisis) So if we can understand that grammar we can link it to this to this project of the phenomenological investigation of Dasein and break free from that grammar, and deeply re-establish our contact with being.

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 47 — Heidegger (Summary & Notes) https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-47-a3cafbd5f431

List of Books in the Video:

• John D. Caputo — The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought
• Paul Tillich — The Courage To Be
• Tom Cheetham — The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
• Tom Cheetham — Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman
• Tom Cheetham — All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings
• John P. Dourley — The Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich
• John P. Dourley — Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion
• Graham Harman — Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything
• Byung-Chul Han — The Scent of Time
• Robert E. Carter — The Kyoto School: An Introduction
• Rovert E. Carter — The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō
• Keiji Nishitani — Religion and Nothingness
• Robert Sokolowski — Introduction to Phenomenology
• Don Ihd — Experimental Phenomenology
• Edmund Husserl — The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
• Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor — Retrieving Realism
• Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception
• Edmund Husserl — Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology