Mysticism as Seeking and Finding Meaning

The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret. This is the big question-the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure. The more we concentrate our critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude us, or to evaporate as any intelligible question. For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. The basic idea of the question of life's meaning is depicted, to rethink the age-old question again, in this article by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question and basic categories of the answer.

Tattva - Journal of Philosophy, 2018

This paper examines the different aspects of meaning in life from a theoretical perspective of philosophy and psychology. It deals mainly with the dynamism ofmeaning in life on the basis of contextual perspectives and its emergence from different sources. In this regard, religion plays an important role in the formation of meaning in life, especially in relation to its competence. Moreover, the praxis of meaning in life is processoriented and is different from the purpose of life. It also remains as a connector between the existential vacuum and the reality of life, promoting stability in life. The expression of meaning in life can be based on both low and high levels. Above all, meaning in life can be seen from two different aspects of presence of meaning and search for meaning, specifically from the empirical and Indian contexts.

hcommons.org, 2023

The idea of “Will” is critical, because it does clearly indicate a “drive” – not an intellectual pursuit or philosophical discussion – meaning of course that as Eric Klinger and other psychologists point out emotions are pivotal in meaning as well. The prominent social psychologist and author, Roy Baumeister spoke of a very pervasive and powerful drive to understand, and need for meaning that was essential for human beings to thrive, as well as being indispensable for society and culture. Baumeister emphasizes that human culture and society are all about meaning – and what makes human culture possible is the transmission of meaning across generations. When you get down to it, society as well as religion are in substance and function Meaning Structures or meaning systems. The anthropologist, Clifford Geertz emphatically stated “The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs. And, this being so, it seems unnecessary to continue to interpret symbolic activities --- religion, art, ideology – as nothing but thinly disguised expressions of something other than what they seem to be: attempts to provide orientation to an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.” (p.140) Dr. Paul Wong, a prominent psychologist and author mirrors Geertz’s views: “The quest for meaning is a biological imperative.” (p. 635 quest). It is noteworthy that Geertz highlights the importance of “orientation – which reflects somewhat Mannheim’s emphasis on ideology as a “mode of thought” or “state of mind.” That would also possibly reflect Steger’s emphasis on meaning as performing an integrative function. Michael Steger perhaps provides a good synopsis of the role and function of meaning in human consciousness when he states that “meaning is, at its heart, an integrating factor for people. Meaning pulls together people’s ideas about who they are, the kind of world they live in, and how they relate to the people and environments around them. Meaning incorporates these elements into people’s aspirations and overarching aims. (Quest p. 169) As the psychologists, Gary T. Reker and Dr. Paul T. P. Wong, remark, “[G]lobal meaning functions as an effective buffer of life stress (health protecting) and as a generalized enhancer of psychological well-being, and self-esteem (health promoting). (Quest p.443) Reker and Wong go on to say, “individuals develop personal meaning orientations that individually and collectively contribute to positive psychosocial functioning. (p. 444) Peterson and Park, who echo Reker and Wong, observe, “Both an orientation to meaning and the presence of meaning were positively associated with life satisfaction and positive affect and negatively associated with depression and negative affect.” (Quest p.289) Carl Jung observed, "Man cannot stand a meaningless life." Later in the Zarathustra Seminar (p. 1105) Jung rather brilliantly observed, "Life that doesn’t overcome itself is really meaningless: it is not life; only inasmuch as life surpasses itself does it make sense." Similarly, the Nobel Prize winning French biologist, Francois Jacob emphasized that, “What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.” The famous anthropologist Clifford Geertz stated, "The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs." (p.140 – my italics) Geertz emphasized that art and religions, are, at the core, essentially expressions of a very powerful Need for Meaning which, as he noted, is a drive as imperative as any other "biological need" such as hunger or sex. The human need for meaning shouldn't come as a news flash to psychologists in light of the fact that roughly two thousand years ago, Aristotle was the first to 'officially' make note of man as a meaning seeking animal in his observation that “All men by nature desire knowledge.” Viktor Frankl had a profound effect on existential and positive psychology and largely due to his influence have conducted hundreds of studies and experiments on the role of meaning in human consciousness and in peoples’ lives. which have convincingly demonstrated the vital role of both meaning and spirituality in human lives. As one positive psychologist noted, “The growing scientific attention to the construction of meaning within the psychological landscape, and especially within the two significant frameworks of positive and existential psychology, provides a fertile ground for a fruitful dialogue.” (p. 95 positive)

Throughout the history of mankind, people have been extensively preoccupied with existential questions, such as: Why are we here? What is my purpose? What do I stand for? What is the meaning of life? These universal questions deal with the core concern of what it means to be human and have inspired various myths, religions, arts, and philosophies, in different cultures around the world and across time and traditions. Today, in an age of knowledge explosion and an instant-success culture where "better, faster, higher" are sacred values-issues, such as the nature of meaning, its sources and expressions, emerge more forcefully.

Zygon®, 2010

Informal essay, 2021

This article critically evaluates the notion of the meaning of life. I suggest that life's meaning has to do with a personal, subjective interpretation, and that religion is an essentially intersubjective interpretation that consists of systematic anthropomorphism. With recourse to anthropological insights, I attempt to understand why meaning becomes a problem for human animals in the first place, how this problem has been historically resolved under the aegis of religion, and what this resolution entails (re: nihilism) for the topic in general as it stands today.

Chapter examines the nature of meaning and its ontogenesis by first exploring ontological and epistemological strategies that function as background to a broad understanding of the concept of meaning. In essence, the argument is that different ontological and epistemological strategies-here referred to as isolationist and systems strategies-for how to approach the "I mean"/"it means" matrix lead to different understandings of the fundamental nature of meaning. Further, it is argued that these strategies lead to alternative theories of mind; specifically the computational and the embodied mind.

University of Chicago, 2022

List of Figures iv Acknowledgments v Many conversations with many people have shaped the way I think about things discussed here. Without those conversations and, more importantly, those people, this dissertation would not be what it is. So, insofar as anything good is done in this dissertation at all, many thanks are in order. First off, I'd like to thank my committee members: Michael Kremer, Malte Willer, Jim Conant, Bob Brandom, and Jason Bridges. Michael and Malte were everything one could ask for in a pair of dissertation advisers: available, encouraging, supportive, and, perhaps most importantly for an advisee like me, clear-headed and pragmatic. Michael's Sellars course was what first really exposed me to many of the Sellarsian lines of thought pursued here, and taking courses with Malte, realizing how rich the world of contemporary semantic theorizing is and can potentially be, is what led me to pursue these lines of thought in the way I do here. Though Jason played a more back-seat role in advising, I've benefited greatly from each and every conversation I've had with him. Among my committee members, the two who've exerted the most influence on this project (and on my thinking in general) are, without a doubt, Bob and Jim. The influence of Bob's work is, of course, quite explicit in the text, but Bob's personal guidance and enormous intellectual generosity, both while I was a visitor at Pittsburgh and continuing afterwards, has been critical in the shaping of this project. Jim's work, and conversations with Jim, have been no less influential to the shaping of the project, even though Jim's name appears just a few times in the text. It would not be an exaggeration to say that much of my basic conceptual repertoire, the class of concepts with which I now do philosophy, is owed to countless hours of working with and talking to Jim.

Review of General Psychology, 2018

This is a stand-alone reflection on meaning written by two scholars who recently edited a special issue on that topic. The first of four organizing questions concerns the nature of meaning. The meaning of signs (e.g., words) consists of nonphysical connection (e.g., symbolism) and potential organization. Meanwhile, existential meaning (meaning of life) involves purpose, value, mattering, continuity, and coherence. The second question concerns how meaning affects behavior. Answers are diverse and multifaceted, ranging from efforts to grapple with uncertainty and unknowns to engaging in significance-seeking violence and self-regulating in light of abstract values and standards. To the question of whether meaning is made or found, the authors propose that finding meaning is prevalent, while the creation of new meanings is only supported in a limited sense. Although often portrayed as a constructive process, accessing meaning normally involves relating target stimuli to what is already ...

Three Pines Press, 2019

A collection of essays that explores the many dimensions of the mystical, including personal, theoretical, and historical. Kohav, a professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and the editor of this collection, provocatively asks why mysticism is such an "objectionable" topic and considered intellectually disreputable. Borrowing from Jacques Derrida's distinction between aporia (or unsolvable confusion) and a solvable problem, the author suggests mystical phenomena are better understood through the lens of mysterium, that which is beyond the categories of reason and can only be captured by dint of intuition and personal experience. In fact, the contributors to this intellectually kaleidoscopic volume present several autobiographical accounts of precisely such an encounter with the mystically inscrutable. For example, in one essay, Gregory M. Nixon relates "the shattering moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world and not in my head." The religious dimensions of mystical experience are also explored: Buddhist, Christian, and Judaic texts, including the Bible, are examined to explicate and compare their divergent interpretations. Contributor Jacob Rump argues that the ineffable is central to Wittgenstein's worldview, and Ori Z. Soltes contends that philosophers like Socrates and Spinoza, famous for their valorization of reason, are incomprehensible without also considering the limits they impose on reason and the value they assign to ineffable experience. The collection is precisely as multidisciplinary as billed. It includes a wealth of varying perspectives, both personal and scholarly. Furthermore, the book examines the application of these ideas to contemporary debates. Richard H. Jones, for instance, challenges that mysticism and science ultimately converge into a single explanatory whole. The prose can be prohibitively dense--much of it is written in a jargon-laden academic parlance--and the book is not intended for a popular audience. Within a remarkably technical discussion of the proper interpretive approach to sacred texts, contributor Brian Lancaster declares: "For these reasons I propose incorporating a hermeneutic component to extend the integration of neuroscientific and phenomenological data that defines neurophenomenology." However, Kohav's anthology is still a stimulating tour of the subject, philosophically enthralling and wide reaching. An engrossing, diverse collection of takes on mystical phenomena. - Kirkus Reviews The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of “meaning” itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism’s meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor’s Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity’s origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism’s formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy’s relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and “supernormal meaning” engendered by certain mystical states; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors’ contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains thirteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States.

The metaphysics of meaning parts I and II

On Adam's Edenic task of taxonomy in relation to the modern disappearance of the author and the death of God. On language and meaning and metaphysics in a Postmodern world of "slippage" and epistemological agnosticism. On the fundamental key to all reality, the law of non-contradiction and unity and distinction in the Trinity and in creation.

From the discussion of monism versus dualism in cognitive studies, to the discussion of rationalist metaphysics in its three classical versions, Descartes' Meditationes, Spinoza's Ethica, and Leibniz' Monodology, and their importance to modern philosophies of meaning.

New Directions in Philosophy and Literature, 2019

For centuries now, science has been revolutionizing traditional domains of knowledge. The world has been thoroughly ‘disenchanted,’ and now, at long last, science has begun revolutionizing the domains of the human. Every essay in this collection is betting that this revolution will somehow bypass or redeem some traditional conception of the human, presuming some prescientific notion of meaning will either be confirmed by the science, or left largely unscathed. The present article interrogates the basis of this optimism, and the possibility that these discourses offer no proof against disenchantment. Rather than presuming the best, it considers the worst case scenario, the possibility traditional accounts of meaning turn on various, covert forms of supernaturalism. It argues that massive, systematic deception regarding the nature of meaning is every bit as inevitable as massive, systematic deception regarding nature of the world more generally. It demonstrates how the standard critiques of meaning skepticism beg the question, how the apparent contradiction of ‘using meaning to eliminate meaning’ turns on obvious sophistry. It then outlines a genuinely naturalistic account of semantic phenomena, one that allows us to parse traditional theories of meaning from actual applications of meaning talk—theoretical meaning from practical meaning. Using this distinction, it offers an account of why all our received forms of meaning, theoretical and practical, are very likely doomed.

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion