I do get that I'm a bit of a radical, but I try not to be too strident about it. Anyway, bear in mind, you can only successfully condescend down, and I don't think you're at sufficient altitude.

Then you go off on a mystical tangent, and try to drag physics along with you. For me that's an unjustified overextension. — Banno

Nowadays it's common knowledge, there are many reputable popular books on the subject (e.g.). I'm arguing that there are powerful trends within both physics and cognitive science that undermine scientific realism (and by implication, materialism and scientism.) You will often agree with me on the evils of those attitudes, but when it gets down to the philosophical analysis of them we seem to part company.

Oh of course. I've found current academic philosophers whom I think have philosophically profound things to say, and a genuine passion for saying it. But the demands of the profession are such that they have to withstand the scrutiny of their peers, which often makes them very difficult for the lay reader. (I find Lloyd Gerson like that, I very much like what I can understand, but his books are so dense with allusions and references to competing interpretations that they're a really hard slog.) On the other hand, there are some breakout popular philosophers who write from outside the halls of academia - Ryan Holliday, Jules Evans, Alain de Bouton and Bernardo Kastrup come to mind. They manage to combine erudition with popular appeal (lucky them!)

Indeed, the mind is not yours or mine. We are all part of a community of minds - biological, cultural and linguistic. Consciousness in that sense is collective. But whatever is real, is real for some mind, it has no stand-alone or intrinsic reality independently of mind - that's what I mean by anti-realism, i.e., no material particular possesses inherent reality. And I think modern physics has confirmed that intuition.

That's why I keep stressing the point that one can be an empirical realist but also an idealist. I'm not saying the world is 'all in the mind' that idealism is often taken to entail.

Is this more an academia problem? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s a cultural issue. That excerpt basically says that academic philosophy is no longer concerned with deep philosophy, but with the minutia of technicalities. Myself, I got drawn to philosophy for what would generally be considered the wrong reasons - something like ‘mankind’s search for meaning’. When I actually enrolled in undergraduate philosophy, I was taken aside by a kindly lecturer, David Stove, who said ‘I can sense what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t find it here’ after which I majored in comparative religion (although I never looked like having any kind of academic career). That was nearer my interests in some respects. Over the ensuing decades I have learned to discern certain threads in the tapestry of philosophy which I continue to pursue but I admit my overall orientation is not academic.

I think @javra is making a solid point. Nietszche foresaw the upsurge of nihilism due to the death of God - which was not, according to David Bentley Hart, a paean to the triumph of atheism, as a Dawkins would have it, but a lament over the loss of the foundational values tied to belief in God.

I also agree that antinatalism is an obviously nihilistic attitude. It’s basically ‘it would have been much better never to have been born.’ The fact is, we have! We have discussed many times the sense in which soteriological paths seek to transcend the inevitable suffering of existence, but antinatalism and nihilist philosophers seem have no belief in or interest in it. It seems to me they turn their back on the prospect of any genuine remediation.

I’ve been listening the last two years to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Vervaeke is professor of Cognitive Science at University of Toronto. It’s a series of 50 lectures on the basis of the sense of meaninglessness that afflicts many humans in today’s world, tracing it right back through the history of culture and civilisation, whilst still trying to stay within the bounds of natural science. I recommend a listen.

The missing foghorn between your ships passing in the night is that Banno thinks that idealism entails solipsism, unless I have misunderstood. — bert1

:ok:

For the "world" yes but for the Universe, no—as far as I know this is not correct for Heidegger at least (who I studied extensively at one time).I believe that Heidegger acknowledges the existence of the extra-human universe, but that is not what he is concerned with when he deals with being (being-in-the-world) or Dasein. — Janus

But one may be an empirical, without being a metaphysical, realist.

Check out Is Reality Real?

1) Why would you pursue romantic love and familial life in the first place and not just enlightenment? — schopenhauer1

Yeah, well, life doesn't come at you pre-divided into neat paths. Usually it's a mix of conscious motivations, circumstances, accident and planning. But to get back to the main point, the consequence of the kind of self-awareness that humans possess, doesn't necessarily entail endless suffering, although it can.

When is it subjective? If the construction of our eyes is such that the cones carry the photo pigment and communicates with the brain when light waves enter, which causes us to see colors, then how is that subjective? — L'éléphant

It is subjective in that there is a subject to whom the colour appears. As to whether that is erroneous in principle is another question, and besides, colour perception is only a very narrow and specialised instance of perception generally - we perceive a good many things other than colours.

But other than that, the question you're touching on is the age-old one of reality and appearance - whether the world is as it appears, or different, how so, why, and so on. A good deal of philosophy (and nowadays even a lot of science) is concerned with such questions.

I maintain that there is stuff that is true even if we don't know, believe, or whatever, that it is true. — Banno

Plainly - I don't even know most of the people in my street. But that's not the point. The point is the overlooking of the fact that even so-called objective knowledge is the possession of subjects, the significance of which is not generally not considered, and who are explicitly left out of the account by metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism insists that there are objects that are just so, the same for all observers, and that these are fundamental. Whereas the 'antirealist' is saying that how we categorise and sense these objects and interpret their meaning, is just as fundamental as the objects themselves. Constructivism may not be the whole story, but it's inextricably part of it. Realism will generally insist that 'the world' is just so, and would be just so, whether there was anyone in it or not. But as I keep saying, even that relies on an implicit perspective.

So my argument against mind independence *is not* that the entire cosmos is dependent on the existence of my mind, which is how you appear to be interpreting it.

Anyway I have to sign out for a few hours, back tomorrow.

I would take that remark seriously if you demonstrated any grasp of the point I'm making. — Banno

You appear to believe that I must insist that nothing can exist outside my knowledge of it, that, according to what I'm saying, there can be nothing new, or nothing I'm mistaken about, on those grounds. But that is not entailed by the kind of antirealist argument that I'm advocating. I am criticizing mind-independence as the criterion for what is real - what is said to exist outside of or apart from any experience. That is what I take realism to be defending.

As per the OP

1. There exist objects that are mind-independent

2. We can grasp the features of objects external to our mind

3. We can justify our knowledge of objects external to our minds — Sirius

I have no dog in this fight — schopenhauer1

I was responding to the point of yours that I quoted, about how to reconcile the apparent unworldliness of the desire for transcendence, with the actuality of life as living individuals with attachments to significant others.

It is a paradox. — L'éléphant

No kidding. Just the kind of thing that will trip up your average "realist".

Deleted for excessive sarcasm. (I'm trying to avoid it.)

The point I'm trying to make is that there is a kind of 'dual perspective' at work in understanding this question, which is deep question. There's common sense realism, in which we are just individual subjects in a vast world. But there's also the philosophical understanding of the role of the mind in constructing the world. It doesn't mean literally constructing the physical earth, but the 'meaning-world' which provides the framework for judgements about what is real.

My take is that when Wittgenstein refers to the world he is referring to the world of human experience and judgement. He's not referring to the extra-human Universe. — Janus

But again - how do you see the 'extra human universe'? Even if you're an astrophysicist aware of the vastness of the Universe, you are providing the perspective within which that is meaningful. That is also a feature of the 'umwelt' or 'lebenswelt' of phenomenology. Wittgenstein’s remark that "the subject is a limit of the world" (Tractatus, 5.632) aligns with the idea that the Umwelt represents the horizon of what a subject can perceive and engage with. The subject does not appear in the world as an object but constitutes the horizon or boundary within which the world appears.

Similarly, in phenomenology (e.g., Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty), the world is not an objective domain "out there" but is always encountered through the structures of embodied, situated being.

He stepped beyond the solipsism that traps you. — Banno

I would take that remark seriously if you demonstrated any grasp of the point I'm making. There is no way that I support, suggest or endorse any form of solipsism.

What was the significance of the remark Wittgenstein made 'I am my world?'

For Wittgenstein, the "world" is understood as a logical space in which facts exist, defined by the relationships between elements. When he says "I am my world," he is not referring to a literal equivalence but rather to the philosophical idea that the boundaries of a person's experience and understanding constitute their subjective world. Here he distinguishes between the "subject" as a metaphysical entity and the "self" as a part of the world. The subject, in his view, is not a thing in the world but rather a limit of the world. As he writes in Tractatus 5.632, "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." The world, in this sense, is shaped and defined by the subject's perspective and capacities for representation. This remark resonates with a solipsistic tendency in his early thought—the idea that one's experience is fundamentally bounded by one's own perspective. However, his solipsism is nuanced: he does not claim that the external world does not exist but that it is only knowable through the structures and limits of the subject's representational capacities.

Which pretty much what I mean by it, also. (I refer to Wittgenstein because I know you're familiar with his writing.)

The realist view that most take (usually unawares) is a perspective outside perspective: seeing oneself as an individual in 'the vast universe'. But where does that perspective exist, if not in the mind?

But you know that this is mostly crap. Realism/idealism is a false opposition. — Banno

No it isn't, although I know from long experience it is not a distinction that makes sense to you. Which is why you keep rabbiting on about cups and saucers. That's where the simplistic shite is.

But again, resolving a bad case of Cartesian anxiety is probably not on anyone's agenda, philosophically -- if by "resolving" we mean actually finding certainty of the sort Descartes longed for. — J

There's a section of The Embodied Mind, Thompson et al, named after it. It's not a matter of resolving it in the sense of providing the longed-for certainty, but critiquing the conceptual and cognitive framework which gave rise to it.

There is no one obviously correct story. — J

No 'meta-narratives'. I get that. Although one little-known book I read about five years does a great job explicating it, Defragmenting Modernity, Paul Tyson.

Science relies for its practice on no particular metaphysical beliefs. — Janus

If you're familiar with philosophy of science, E A Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, in particular, you will see that this is completely mistaken. The 'metaphysical belief' in question being early modern science's division of primary and secondary attributes, overlaid on the Cartesian separation of mind and matter. It's metaphysical through and through, but then 'metaphysics' is consigned to terra incognito, so the way in which it is metaphysical becomes one of the things we're enjoined to ignore.

Similarly, I think I know what you mean when you talk about the early-modern quest for certainty; there's no doubt that epistemological concerns have characterized much of philosophy since Descartes. — J

Ever come across the expression 'the Cartesian anxiety?'

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard J. Bernstein coined and used the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis,

such talk is no longer philosophical discourse, in my understanding — J

For the greater part of Western cultural history, philosophy was woven into a fabric which included poetry, theology, fiction, art and drama. It's the 'fragmentation of being' which has given rise to the separation and specialisation charateristic of modern philosophy.

The person pursuing love/in love would fight you tooth-and-nail if you were to say that this was just an attachment. The surge of hormonal response to someone who has won at love, would rebel to such a degree, that your nothingness would be thrown aside for the sweet embrace of eros-turned-philia that a stable long-term relationship might take. — schopenhauer1

Consider early Buddhism - Gautama said to be of noble birth, who renounces home and family life in pursuit of liberation. (The meaning of the name of his son, Rāhula, who joined the sangha and was also considered arahant, was 'fetter'.) This is axial-age philosophy - similar in some respects to the contemporaneous Gnostic sects in the Middle East who likewise depict wisdom and liberation as being entirely other to wordly life.

But with the advent of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the meaning of liberation is altogether re-envisioned. One of the Mahāyāna texts is the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, the subject of which is a wealthy silk-trader who's insight into śūnyatā is so profound that the other disciples are afraid to debate him! One of the revolutionary insights of Mahāyāna was the non-difference of Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra, whereas for the earlier tradition these were utterly separate realms. (There is an aphorism associated with early Mahāyāna, 'Saṃsāra is Nirvāṇa grasped, Nirvāṇa is Saṃsāra released', although it is of course true that these are the kinds of teachings that Theravada Buddhists don't accept.)

Accordingly, the Bodhisattva ideal introduces a profoundly different dynamic:

There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer. Regarding the first, due to ignorance, negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. This is the way ordinary beings circle incessantly through existence like the turning of a wheel*. Even under such circumstances ordinary beings can engage diligently with a positive aspiration in virtuous practices in their day-to-day lives. They familiarise themselves with virtue that at the time of death can be reactivated providing the means for them to take rebirth in a higher realm of existence. On the other hand, superior Bodhisattvas, who have attained the path of seeing, are not reborn through the force of their karma and destructive emotions, but due to the power of their compassion for sentient beings and based on their prayers to benefit others. They are able to choose their place and time of birth as well as their future parents. — H H The Dalai Lama

* That description loosely approximates Schopenhauer's diagnosis of 'world as will'.

I'm not quoting this to evangalise belief but as an illustration of the way that Mahāyāna Buddhism reconciled the reality of life in the world with the higher truths of their religion. But for me, personally, it provides a satisfactory philosophical framework within which to accept the vicissitudes of existence.

Yes, that's right - no-thing-ness, not a thing, neither this nor that (neti neti). Basic to the terminology of Mahāyāna and Vedanta. Since the Renaissance, Western thought has been characterized by a focus on objectivity, substantiality, and the reification of "things." This emphasis was cemented by Cartesian dualism, which sharply divided subject and object, and later by the rise of scientific materialism, which framed reality as a collection of discrete, independently existing entities. In this framework, being was often equated with "being a thing," obscuring more dynamic and relational understandings of existence (which is, however, now starting to burst through all the seams, so to speak.)

There's a book I've been aware of for a long while, and Vervaeke frequently mentions in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It is Religion and Nothingness, by Kitaro Nishida. Nishida was a member of the Kyoto School which was a group of Japanese scholars who intensively studied Western philosophy and compared its insights with their native Zen tradition.

In Religion and Nothingness, Nishida critiques Nietzsche's nihilism as incomplete because it fails to fully realise the meaning of "absolute nothingness." Nishida appreciates Nietzsche's effort to reject metaphysical absolutes, such as God or the Platonic realm, and sees his proclamation of the "death of God" as a profound acknowledgment of the collapse of traditional values in Western culture. However, Nishida finds Nietzsche's response to this nihilism—embodied in the ideas of the Übermensch and the will to power—insufficient because it does not go beyond the duality of self-assertion and negation (or self-and-other).

For Nishida, Nietzsche’s nihilism remains trapped within the Western metaphysical framework of oppositional thinking, which understands nothingness as mere absence. In contrast, Nishida, drawing on Zen, sees "absolute nothingness" not as mere absence but as the ground of reality itself, 'the nothing which is everything'. This nothingness is dynamic and relational, allowing for the dissolution of dualities such as self and other, being and non-being. But realisation of emptiness involves a kind of death - 'dying to the known', as one teacher puts it - and the abandonment of self-concern.

It's not "useless" unless you feel there needs to be a "use", and that presupposes "something" about what you think philosophy must conclude, no? — schopenhauer1

Not useful in a utilitarian sense, but more in the sense of virtue being its own reward. Philosophy is love-wisdom - not the love of books about philosophy, although that's surely a part, but a state of love-wisdom, which I think is incompatible with the pessimism we're discussing. As you note, Schopenhauer himself was not ultimately pessimistic, although this seems to have escaped many of those who comment on him.

Why do you suppose it is important for you that there be a salvation of some sort? — schopenhauer1

Very flattering that you think I've invented the history of world religions.

"Nihilism" again, is a shifty label that itself is pointless. — schopenhauer1

But that is Zappfe's self-description, and you brought him up. Nihilism is variously the view that nothing matters, nothing is real, reality is empty appearance with nothing behind it, etc. In the Buddhist world, nihilism is the view that at death, the body returns to the elements and there are no consequences for actions taken in life.

Our capacity for self-awareness of existence, has enormous capacity to open up the Suffering entailed in existence. — schopenhauer1

':

Quote from wiki entry on Zappfe: "I am not a pessimist. I am a nihilist. Namely, not a pessimist in the sense that I have upsetting apprehensions, but a nihilist in a sense that is not moral".

Why bother with it? How is it philosophy? Nihilism is the negation of philosophy. Not interested in discussing him.

Of course these posters oppose the kind of radical pessimism and antinatalism I speak of.

That description could well apply to me, now a grandparent and effectively retired from the workforce. It's not that I'm 'opposed' to pessimism and nihilism, but that it is pointless, even by its own admission.

The philosophical point of such aphorisms is the sense in which classical philosophy gestures towards something beyond. The role of philosophy is to take you to the border, so to speak.

Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal. To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together. — Classroom Notes on Plotinus

The unity of thinking and being described by Plotinus challenges the prevailing view that knowledge is a sequential accumulation of information. Instead, it suggests that the highest form of knowledge is a direct, intuitive apprehension of reality—an eternal 'now' that escapes chronological fragmentation (per Eric Perl, Thinking Being: Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition.)

The obvious objection will be that we're dragging theology into the frame, but I would prefer to think of it in terms of philosophical spirituality (and bearing in mind the fact that whilst the term 'spirituality' carries some regrettable connotations, the current English lexicon lacks any obvious synonyms.) While the objection is understandable, it reflects a dichotomy that the ancients did not recognize. For Plotinus and his heirs, philosophy was itself a spiritual discipline aimed at the apprehension of ultimate principles—what we might call today 'philosophical spirituality.' This is not theology in the dogmatic sense but the pursuit of wisdom that necessarily transcends the empirical and the discursive (in the sense conveyed in Pierre Hadot's books). Nevertheless, modern culture, post 'death of God', deprecates such ideas - guilt by association, as it were. But in so doing it also vitiates any sense of the higher good which was essential to every form of pre-modern philosophy. Hence, the scare quotes around "Highest"!

Anything that's common must be good at existing in one way or another, or else it would not exist. So, since religion is common amongst humans, it must serve some beneficial purpose, or else people would either quit believing in it, or the believers would die out. — Brendan Golledge

This is an instrumental argument because it evaluates the existence of religion solely in terms of its utility or function, implying that its widespread presence must correlate with some beneficial or survival-enhancing purpose. This form of reasoning is described by Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason, which they say reduces all values and phenomena to their utility within systems of domination, survival, or material function (ref). By presuming that religion's existence is justified only by its pragmatic usefulness, the argument neglects the possibility of other dimensions, such as religion's intrinsic, cultural, or existential significance, and mirrors the instrumental rationality of secular culture.

As I estimate, Trump and the Trump yes-men will create a huge clusterfuck of government inability. Yes, the Trump voters just like that, but in the end nothing will happen. Trump will just have a temper tantrum because nothing has happened. He will fire people as long as there is loyal Trumpists willing to take the position. — ssu

I think the case can be made, not that anyone will listen to it, that Trump's major motivation is hatred and vengeance of those that prosecuted him - which is, basically, the Government! Trump hates the Government, he hates an independent judiciary and departmental secretaries who (as he sees it) ignore his wishes. So his major focus is on destroying the Government. Trump is 'the enemy within' that he kept ranting about pre-election. And he's been given a mandate to do it.

In another thread Socratic Philosophy I argued that because the Good is beyond being it cannot be known. — Fooloso4

The expression 'beyond being' is frequently encountered in axial-age philosophies of both East and West. I think what it means is 'beyond the vicissitudes of existence' i.e. not subject to birth and death and arising and perishing. So I think it should be expressed as 'beyond existence' rather than as 'beyond being', as I think the latter is unintelligible. And as to how what is 'beyond existence' can be known, that is the object of transcendental wisdom:

Plato (Republic, 509b):

"The Good is not being existence, but is beyond being existence, exceeding it in dignity and power."

Upanishads (Katha Upanishad, 2.2.13):

"That which is beyond all is not born, does not die; it is not from anywhere, nor has it become anything. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, and ancient, it is not slain when the body is slain."

Plotinus (Enneads, VI.9.3):

"The One is all things and yet no one of them. It is the source of all things but not itself one of the things that come from it."

Shankara (Vivekachudamani, 239):

"Brahman is without attributes and actions, eternal, without any desire and stain, without parts, without change, without form, ever-liberated, and of unimaginable glory."

We are talking about realism and antirealism. You brought in constructivism. — Banno

I think the term 'antirealism' can sometimes be misleading. The key point about so-called antirealism, as I see it, is that it challenges the tenet of mind-independence as the criterion for what is real—the idea that what is the case exists entirely irrespective of any perspective or knowledge of it.

I brought up constructivism because it incorporates aspects of idealism while stopping short of claiming that reality is mental or mind-like in nature. Constructivism emphasizes the role of human activity, interpretation, and social practices in constructing knowledge, reality, and meaning.

Realism, in contrast, seems grounded in an empirical attitude: the world is just so, and knowledge discloses its nature through continued discovery. Constructivism, ultimately, harks back to Kant and his Copernican Revolution in philosophy—the idea that things conform to thoughts, and not vice versa.

Let's take the knowability principle: ∀p(p → ◊Kp). — Michael

I appreciate the breakdown of the knowability principle and the use of modal logic to clarify these issues. Modal logic is a topic I’ve started to learn about through this forum, and I appreciate the rigor. That said, my interests lie more in the existential dimension—how the mind constructs and relates to reality in a lived, phenomenological sense. I see these questions as tied to insight and transformation, which may not be completely amenable to analysis through symbolic logic. Modal logic, by its nature, focuses on propositional structures, and I think that’s where the divergence in our perspectives lies.

Schopenhauer: Procreation perpetuates the "will to life" and endless striving. — schopenhauer1

Hence the association of celibacy with renunciate philosophies.

It’ll have to wait, but I will.

Constructivism is nonetheless a counterpoint to realism, is it not?

So what’s the full- strength version?

My comments about truth being a single-placed predicate are intended to show that there are uses for assigning truth to sentences outside of our attitudes towards them. I've highlighted these elsewhere -

Surprise
We are sometimes surprised by things that are unexpected. How is this possible if all that is true is already known to be true?

Agreement
Overwhelmingly, you and I agree as to what is true. How is that explainable if all there is to being true is attitudes? How to explain why we share the same attitude?

Error
We sometimes are wrong about how things are. How can this be possible if all that there is to a statement's being true is our attitude towards it? — Banno

But constructivism doesn’t entail that there are no facts outside our knowledge of them. I see the point about constructivism as being, not that there can’t be unknown facts, but that whatever facts we come to know are incorporated into the way we construe the totality of experience, our worldview. Or not, in which case we might have to change it. That we are not passive observers of an already-existing world but are active participants in it.

He will have to hitch hike to work, Shaye Moss has just taken possession of his Merc.

you simply regurgitate the unsupportable "witchhunt" claims of Trump and his propoganda machine. — Relativist

Never! Who would ever do such a thing?

Although that said I still favor constructivism which as a general approach is more characteristic of continental philosophy than Anglo.

Agree I’ve lead us off into the long grass

I haven’t grasped a form of qualitative value judgement, in keeping with an ethical discipline, in phenomenology, even if some sort of specialized perception for what is, is its objective. — Mww

Maybe not but isn’t existentialism generally concerned with ethical normativity post Death of God?

And what is the ‘third noble (aryan) truth?

My approach is based on facts; — Seeker25

Not at all. It's based on sentiment.

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Book One has been published.

WE LIVE TODAY in the aftermath of what philosopher Charles Taylor described as the “great dis-embedding.” While we once commonly understood our relationship to nature as being a part of the greater whole, we now find ourselves separate and isolated from its perpetual flow, desperately trying to inhabit an impossible Frankensteinian “view from nowhere.”

Some claim we’re above nature and capable of bending it to our will. Others diagnose our state as beneath nature, not worthy of participating in its cycles. They say we’re a scourge, and the planet would be better off without us.

This paradoxical confusion about our species’ role in the Cosmos has a common denominator.

After unknown thousands of years of faith in the inherent meaning in and of life, since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, a dark wave of nihilism has washed across our global village. We’ve mistaken part of life’s complex experience, the problems, and waved away the greater emergent whole of their meaning.

How did this meaning crisis happen?

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Origins traces the history of what led to our contemporary malaise, offering scientific, spiritual, and philosophical interweaving threads that ground us in the troubling truth of our extraordinary evolution.