From: jimruttshow8596
This article explores the significant role of Friedrich Nietzsche in understanding the historical progression of the meaning crisis, as discussed in John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis YouTube series. The discussion also delves into Vervaeke’s concepts of “meaning cultivation,” “relevance realization,” “religio,” and the distinction between “sacredness” and “the sacred” as potential pathways forward. John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto [00:00:55].
Nietzsche’s Role in the Meaning Crisis
Nietzsche is presented as a pivotal figure in the historical development of the meaning crisis [00:01:35]. His declaration that “God is dead” is not merely an espousal of atheism, but rather an announcement that humanity’s ability to make the axial age worldview intelligible and viable, along with the experience of sacredness and directedness within it, is over [00:04:10]. Nietzsche viewed himself as a prophet, comparable to those in the Old Testament, writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra to compete with the Bible’s prophetic books [00:03:51]. He recognized humanity’s profound state of kairos—a critical, opportune moment—where the functionality provided by the axial age’s two-worlds mythology has been lost, and a worthy replacement has yet to emerge [00:05:02].
Nietzsche’s Complex Relationship with Nazism
While it is inappropriate to identify Nietzsche directly with Nazism, parts of his philosophy, such as radical romanticism and the veneration of will to power, resonated profoundly with the Nazis [00:02:27]. Nietzsche’s influence on existentialists, who were philosophical opponents of Nazism, highlights this complexity [00:02:38]. The connection stems from Nazism being a pseudo-religious response to the meaning crisis that Nietzsche prophesied [00:04:04].
Vervaeke’s Critique of Nietzsche
From Vervaeke’s perspective, a shortcoming in Nietzsche’s thought is his failure to adequately address the “machinery for dealing with self-deception and essentially raising the capacity of the human” [00:05:46]. Nietzsche’s thinking, deeply permeated by Christianity, merely inverts it [00:06:16]. Instead of conforming to God, he proposes conforming the world to one’s will to power, replacing “the way of love” with a romantic notion of “will to power,” leading to the ubermensch [00:07:25]. This ultimately secularizes Pauline Christian ideas of transformation and new birth [00:06:35].
The Politicization of the Quest for Meaning
Nietzsche’s prediction of a profound kairos culminated in the 20th century with the clash of pseudo-religious movements like Marxism and Nazism [00:08:04]. These movements exemplified the “complete politicization of the quest for meaning” [00:08:37]. They proposed that the political arena was where ultimate meaning in life and history would be resolved, with ideologies replacing the comprehensive machinery previously held by worldview attunement, religion, culture, ritual, and transformative practices [00:08:54]. Nazism, in particular, is described as a Gnostic response to the advent of “domicide” in Europe, promoting the idea of a “true self” and a “master race” [00:10:44]. While Nietzsche himself did not see a political solution, these pseudo-religions led to immense trauma, which continues to be forgotten today as society returns to mutually incompatible politicized worldviews [00:12:06].
The Axial Age Legacy and Moving Forward
Despite the challenges, the axial age way of thinking still persists, with a significant percentage of people in Canada and the United States reporting belief in God or a higher power [00:13:17]. Vervaeke argues that while critiques of religion are important, simply being an atheist is insufficient [00:14:34]. What is needed is to understand the functionality of religion and to replace, renovate, and recreate it, rather than turning to past forms out of nostalgia [00:14:38].
Augustinian Model of Stability: The Three Ns
The Augustinian model of stability provided an “extraordinarily rich sense of stability” [00:15:14] through three “Ns”:
- Narrative Order (Nomological Order): The sense that one’s personal autobiography fits within a larger story, providing a sense of purpose [00:15:50]. This connects to “authorship” and “authority” [00:16:02].
- Normative Order: An account of how self-transcendence makes sense, enabling individuals to become “more real” and cultivate wisdom, contributing to a sense of depth or significance [00:16:28].
- Nomological Order: An account of the relationship between agents and the arena, forming a “meta meaning system” that makes the world coherent [00:17:09].
These three orders, when integrated, afford the fourth and most important factor: mattering [00:17:32]. Mattering signifies how connected one is to oneself, the world, and other people [00:17:51]. Christianity, through its integrated account, stories, rituals of transformation, and cultivation of wisdom, provided a well-architected “memeplex” that offered this functionality for a long time [00:18:00].
Meaning Cultivation
Since humanity cannot “go back” to past structures, the path forward involves “meaning cultivation” [00:18:41]. This concept moves beyond both the empiricist “blank slate” model and the romantic “empty canvas” model [00:19:04]. The cultivation metaphor implies an active process of doing while also being responsive to external processes, like cultivating a plant. This framework aims to re-engage with meaning in ways that are not bound by non-functioning, decadent versions of empiricism or romanticism [00:19:24]. Meaning cultivation aligns with the cultivation of insight and flow states, which cannot be “made” or “received” but must be fostered through intentional actions that increase their chances of developing a life of their own [00:19:50].
Relevance Realization
Relevance realization is proposed as the underlying engine that supports general intelligence [00:47:25].
The No Free Lunch Theorem
Newell and Simon’s early work in AI suggested that all problems are fundamentally the same, leading them to search for a general heuristic [00:21:00]. However, this view fails to account for “ill-defined problems,” such as educating a child to be a useful and happy adult [00:23:32]. The No Free Lunch Theorems (Wolpert and Macready) mathematically prove that there is no general problem solver or search algorithm that works universally for all problems [00:32:43]. This implies that solutions are always context-dependent.
Relevance as a Mechanism, Not an Algorithm
Relevance cannot be defined by an algorithm because the category of things found relevant does not possess an essence [00:35:40]. Similar to Darwin’s theory of adaptivity, which is constantly being remade and redefined due to an unstable environment, relevance realization is a dynamic mechanism [00:37:50]. It is a process where options are varied, selected down, and new variations are generated, much like biological evolution [00:38:46]. This constant evolution and recreation of adaptivity is at the core of relevance realization [00:39:52].
Grounding in Bioeconomy and Affect
Relevance realization operates at a “bioeconomic” level, below semantics and syntax [00:51:31]. Organisms face an “infinitary predicament” with limited time and processing resources, alongside growing opportunity costs [00:51:46]. Every act of relevance realization involves commitment, risk, and is “affectively laden” [00:53:08]. The brain’s capacity for cognitive adaptation to a constantly changing environment relies on mechanisms analogous to evolution [00:38:35]. The autonomic nervous system, with its sympathetic and parasympathetic biases, constantly calibrates arousal levels, demonstrating how deeply embodied these processes are [00:45:00].
Relevance Realization and Attention
Attention is closely related to relevance realization, acting as a process of prioritizing signals [00:54:41]. It functions in a simultaneously bottom-up and top-down manner, constantly evolving through the interplay of variation and selective pressure, trading between default and task focus [00:54:49]. Vervaeke proposes that relevance realization is an underlying process that is organized up to attention [00:55:24].
The Phenomenology of Relevance Realization and Spirituality
Vervaeke’s Episode 33 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis attempts to explain the phenomenology of relevance realization in terms of meaning-making and its relation to spirituality [00:56:06].
Defining Spirituality
Vervaeke defines spirituality by stipulating core features often pointed to when people use the term [00:57:56]:
- Self-transcendence: The capacity to go beyond one’s current state [00:58:03].
- Deep connectedness: Being dynamically coupled to the world [00:58:08].
- Primordiality: Being deeper than conceptual, normative, or experiential levels [01:00:02].
- Sapiential: Affording the cultivation of wisdom, but also driving self-deception [00:58:32].
These capacities are explainable and implied by relevance realization, which drives complexification and qualitative development, leading to moments of self-transcendence or “insight” [00:58:59]. The act of “mattering” is itself an instance of relevance realization [00:59:47].
Religio: The Binding Aspect of Meaning
Vervaeke uses the term “religio” (from the Latin for “binding”) to capture the constant, mysterious, primordial, and binding way in which humans are livingly bound to themselves, their bodies, and the world through relevance realization [01:00:51]. This choice of religious terminology is intentional, aiming to bridge spirituality and science, suggesting that what was once called “sacredness” was ultimately about these underlying functional aspects, not necessarily about a supernatural God [01:04:00].
Secular Wonder and the Mystery of Religio
Paulo Costa’s idea of “secular wonder” suggests that meaningfulness is not a focal object but an “atmosphere” that we are within and breathe [01:08:47]. Wonder, an atmospheric state of cognition, allows for the cultivation of appreciation for the process by which things become meaningful [01:09:51].
The “mystery” of religio is not a theoretical one (meaning it can be scientifically explained) but a phenomenological one [01:12:47]. Just as one cannot experientially know what it is like to be dead or unconscious, one cannot get “outside” of relevance realization to observe its functionality [01:13:11]. It relates to William James’s distinction between the “I” (the observing self) and the “me” (the observed self), where the “I” remains a phenomenological mystery that can only be “been” or subsidiarily aware of, not made an object of thought [01:13:30].
Transjective Nature of Meaning
Meaning is described as “transjective,” not purely subjective nor objectively received [01:16:00]. It is that which relates subjectivity to objectivity, making both possible and grounding truth [01:16:21]. Religio is a “transjective trajectory flow state” [01:18:03], involving “transframing”—an ongoing transformative process that allows individuals to open up the agent-arena relationship and appreciate how they and the world can fit together in new ways [01:18:17]. This wonder can evolve into awe, a sense of flowing where one is not seeking a conclusion but cultivating an appreciation for the process itself [01:19:15].
Impact of Psychotechnologies
Psychotechnologies (e.g., literacy, mystical experiences, psychedelics) can profoundly impact this flow state by fundamentally resetting the parameters of relevance realization [01:19:46]. Literacy, for example, dramatically affects cognitive abilities like categorization, problem-solving, and memory recall, demonstrating its deep internalization and influence on how meaning is made [01:20:17].
Sacredness vs. The Sacred
Vervaeke draws a critical distinction between “sacredness” and “the sacred” [01:21:26], a concept originating from Schleiermacher [01:22:00].
- Sacredness: Refers to the psycho-existential aspect—the experience, realization, and transformation that occurs within individuals [01:22:12]. An example is a state of awe that becomes auto-normative, calling for self-transformation toward something perceived as “really real” and super salient [01:24:10]. It is described as a “higher-order relevance realization” that moves between assimilation (homing, protecting from “domicide”) and accommodation (exposure to the “numinous” or the “horizon of horror”) [01:25:52].
- The Sacred: Refers to the metaphysical proposal about what causes this experience [01:22:29]. Vervaeke suggests that while the experience of sacredness is constant, the metaphysical proposals (e.g., God, Dao) vary widely [01:25:06]. He argues for a shift in focus: getting clear on the phenomenology and functionality of sacredness first, then making new proposals about “the sacred” [01:23:43].
Meta Meaning Systems
Drawing on Geertz, Vervaeke explains that religion functions to create a “meta meaning system” [01:27:16]. This system coordinates the agent-arena relationship, making specific meaning systems (legal, moral, economic, etc.) possible [01:27:19]. Religion, in this sense, models and molds the world and individuals so they fit together, akin to culture [01:28:25]. Its function is to protect from absurdity, alienation, culture shock, and “domicide” [01:28:50].
The meaning crisis can be succinctly described as the failure of the Enlightenment to account for this higher-level “meta meaning system” [01:30:37]. The “Game B” movement, for example, aims to create new ensembles of social and mimetic institutions to capture this integrated sense of meaning and homeness, recognizing that these are human creations, not divinely given [01:29:06]. This project aligns with Vervaeke’s goal of understanding “religio” to enhance human experience, striving to do better than past religious models to address the metacrisis and meaning crisis [01:29:34].
Symbols and Sacredness
Vervaeke uses “symbol” in an anthropological and religious studies sense, distinct from Peirce’s semiotics or cognitive science’s computational use [01:32:21].
At the core of a symbol is a metaphor, which provokes insight by creating a “stereoscopic awareness” of similarities and differences, altering the “salience landscaping” [01:33:17]. A symbol, however, is a metaphor that allows us to hold something in mind that cannot otherwise be held, bringing us into a right relationship with it [01:34:20]. For instance, the image of Lady Justice (blind woman with scales and sword) is a symbol for “justice” [01:34:58]. The metaphor of “balance” within this symbol reactivates the cognitive machinery used for dynamic balance, enabling one to practice and reflect on justice [01:35:50].
Symbols are powerful, allowing for the compression of complex details into simpler representations [01:36:51]. However, they are also dangerous and can be easily abused, leading to “idolatry” as discussed by Paul Tillich [01:37:02]. When a symbol becomes an “idol,” its “translucency” is lost; it becomes either completely transparent or opaque, leading to automatic, reactive, and foolish participation rather than wise engagement [01:38:39]. The Nazi swastika serves as a prototypical example of such an abused symbol [01:39:37]. Manipulating the fundamental machinery of cognitive agency without proper education can be “grotesquely stupid” [01:39:51].