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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

A Critical Examination

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is an ambitious attempt to answer one of the oldest philosophical questions in contemporary cognitive-scientific language: how can human beings live meaningful lives after the collapse of the traditional metaphysical world-picture?

The 50-part YouTube lecture series, originally released in 2019-2020, ranges astonishingly widely. Vervaeke moves from shamanism and the Axial Age to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Christianity and Neoplatonism, the Scientific Revolution, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Jung, before turning to Buddhism, cognitive science, mindfulness, wisdom, insight and what he calls a “religion that's not a religion.”

There is much to admire here. Vervaeke takes seriously a problem that both scientistic materialism and conventional religion tend to mishandle. But the very breadth of the project is also its central weakness. His historical genealogy is often too smooth, his cognitive-scientific concepts sometimes carry more explanatory weight than the evidence warrants, and his attempt to reconstruct spirituality from naturalistic premises risks reproducing precisely the kind of grand synthesis that he believes modernity has lost.

The result is an impressive intellectual map—but not necessarily a demonstrated theory of the meaning crisis.

The meaning crisis as more than nihilism

Vervaeke begins from an intuitively powerful observation: contemporary Western societies possess extraordinary scientific and technological knowledge while many people experience alienation, anxiety, purposelessness and disconnection. He explicitly connects the problem not only with individual psychology but with wider environmental, political and cultural crises.

This is important because “meaninglessness” is often treated as a private emotional problem. Vervaeke instead asks whether something has gone wrong with the cultural conditions under which human beings determine what matters.

His central concept is “relevance realization”: the cognitive capacity by which an organism selects what is salient from an effectively unlimited field of possible information. Human beings cannot attend to everything. Intelligence therefore requires mechanisms for determining what deserves attention, what can be ignored and how apparently unrelated things can be connected.

This provides Vervaeke with a bridge between cognitive science and existential philosophy. Meaning is not merely a proposition saying my life has purpose. It is embodied in the way an agent encounters the world.

That is one of the strongest aspects of his project.

But it also introduces a problem.

From relevance to meaning

Relevance realization is undoubtedly important for cognition. Yet the move from “the mind must determine what is relevant” to “this explains meaning” is not straightforward.

A thermostat realizes relevance: temperature differences matter to its operation. A predator realizes relevance: movement in the environment may indicate prey. A human being realizes enormously more complicated forms of relevance because humans possess language, autobiographical memory, social cognition, long-term planning and cultural learning.

But explaining how organisms discriminate relevance does not by itself explain why something is meaningful in the existential sense.

There is a difference between:

“this information is relevant to achieving my goal”

and:

“my life is worth living.”

The first is a cognitive-functional relationship. The second involves values, commitments, relationships, mortality, identity and normativity.

Vervaeke sometimes appears to move too easily between these levels.

The cognitive machinery underlying meaning is not necessarily identical with meaning itself. Explaining the mechanisms by which humans navigate significance does not automatically settle what human beings ought to regard as significant.

This distinction is crucial. Otherwise “meaning” risks becoming another name for successful cognitive orientation.

The four ways of knowing

Vervaeke's most useful conceptual contribution may be his distinction between four forms of knowing:

• propositional
• procedural
• perspectival
• participatory

Propositional knowing concerns knowing that: facts and statements. Procedural knowing concerns knowing how: skills and capacities. Perspectival knowing concerns what becomes salient from a particular situated perspective. Participatory knowing concerns a more fundamental form of engagement in which the knower is transformed through participation in what is known.

This is a valuable corrective to the caricature that rationality consists exclusively of collecting propositions.

Someone can know everything about meditation physiologically while being incapable of meditating. A person can know every rule of chess without being a good chess player. Someone can possess extensive theoretical knowledge about friendship while being incapable of sustaining a friendship.

Vervaeke is therefore right to emphasize embodied and participatory dimensions of human intelligence.

But here again, a useful taxonomy can easily become an ontological hierarchy.

The four kinds of knowing do not necessarily constitute four fundamentally different epistemic realms. They may instead be different descriptions of interacting cognitive capacities. Procedural knowledge, for example, can be explicitly represented propositionally; perspectival knowledge can be trained procedurally; and participatory knowledge can involve extensive propositional understanding.

The categories are illuminating precisely when treated flexibly. They become less convincing when they are made into a grand architecture of cognition.

The historical story: from cosmos to crisis

The first half of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis offers an enormous intellectual genealogy. Vervaeke argues that Western civilization gradually lost the metaphysical framework that once integrated knowledge, morality, spirituality and the structure of reality.

The ancient world provided one form of integration. Christianity provided another. Neoplatonism attempted an especially ambitious synthesis of rational philosophy, spiritual transformation and metaphysics. The Scientific Revolution subsequently transformed the intellectual landscape by replacing the older participatory cosmos with an increasingly mathematical and mechanistic conception of nature.

Eventually, modernity inherited scientific knowledge without the older framework that had supplied an overarching account of human purpose.

This is an attractive story.

It is also too neat.

The danger is what might be called the declension narrative: once there was an integrated world of meaning; then modernity fragmented it; now we must somehow reconstruct the lost integration.

Real intellectual history is messier.

Ancient societies were hardly unanimous about meaning. Greek philosophy contained profound disagreements between Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics. Christianity generated competing metaphysical, theological and political visions. Neoplatonism was not simply “the” solution to the problem of meaning. And modernity did not merely destroy meaning. It also generated new forms of human agency, scientific understanding, individual autonomy and moral universalism.

The historical transition from medieval cosmology to modern science was therefore both a loss and an achievement.

Vervaeke knows this, and his narrative contains many qualifications. Nevertheless, the overall architecture tends to make history look like a sequence of meaning catastrophes followed by increasingly sophisticated attempts at repair.

That makes for a compelling story. It does not necessarily make it historically adequate.

The “meaning catastrophe” thesis

The phrase “meaning catastrophe” is one of Vervaeke's most evocative concepts. He identifies major historical transformations in which established relationships between human beings, nature, society and transcendence were disrupted. The loss of the old cosmological framework is therefore not merely an intellectual change; it changes the conditions under which people can experience themselves as situated in a meaningful world.

There is something genuinely insightful here.

Scientific modernity did not simply add new facts to an existing worldview. It changed the background picture of reality itself.

But Vervaeke occasionally treats this historical process as though science were responsible for a kind of existential dislocation that science itself cannot remedy.

That raises a difficult question: was the problem really caused by science, or by the attempt to extract existential conclusions from a particular interpretation of science?

Science tells us that the universe does not appear to contain the traditional medieval hierarchy of heavens, angels, purposes and cosmic essences. But that does not logically entail nihilism.

It only entails that meaning cannot simply be read off from an inherited cosmic hierarchy.

That is a challenge—but perhaps also an opportunity.

The secularization of spirituality

Vervaeke's response is particularly interesting because he does not advocate a conventional return to religion.

Instead, he proposes something like a “religion that isn't a religion”: a secular ecology of practices capable of cultivating wisdom, insight, self-transcendence and transformation. In episode 39 he explicitly presents this as tentative rather than an attempt to establish a new movement.

This is probably the most original practical dimension of the project.

Vervaeke takes seriously practices associated with Buddhism, Stoicism, meditation, contemplation, dialogue, flow and philosophical reflection. The objective is not merely to believe something but to transform the cognitive processes through which one encounters reality.

That is a much more interesting proposal than simply telling modern people to “find a purpose.”

But the question remains: why call this religion at all?

If meditation, philosophical dialogue, contemplative practice, psychological training and community can be understood without supernatural beliefs, perhaps we have discovered something important about human flourishing without having to resurrect the category of religion.

“Religion that isn't religion” may therefore indicate less a new solution than an unresolved terminological problem.

The perennial temptation

This is where Vervaeke comes close to a broader tendency in contemporary intellectual culture.

There is an understandable desire to reconcile science with spirituality without returning to supernaturalism. The result is a vocabulary of emergence, cognition, transformation, consciousness, wisdom, self-transcendence and participation.

Much of this vocabulary is legitimate.

The danger is that the scientific terminology can become a new metaphysical language.

“Relevance realization,” for example, is a useful cognitive concept. But when it is asked to explain wisdom, insight, spirituality, self-transcendence, intelligence and meaning simultaneously, it begins to resemble a master principle.

The same thing can happen with “participatory knowing.”

The concept initially identifies something real: human beings do not merely observe the world; they inhabit it. But from this relatively modest observation one can easily move toward the suggestion that participation gives us access to a deeper mode of reality than ordinary analytical cognition.

That stronger claim requires additional argument.

Otherwise a distinction in epistemology quietly becomes a claim about ontology.

Vervaeke and the perennial philosophy

There is consequently an intriguing tension in Vervaeke's project.

He wants to remain naturalistic while recovering insights from ancient wisdom traditions.

He wants spirituality without supernaturalism.

He wants transformation without dogma.

He wants religion without traditional religion.

And he wants all of this to be compatible with cognitive science.

This is an intellectually respectable project. But it is also remarkably close to the modern perennialist ambition: the belief that beneath historically different traditions lies a common transformative wisdom that can be reconstructed in contemporary terms.

Vervaeke is considerably more historically and cognitively sophisticated than many forms of perennialism. He does not simply claim that Buddha, Socrates, Jesus and modern psychology all taught the same thing.

Yet the structural temptation remains.

The more traditions are mined for “perennial problems” and “transformative practices,” the greater the risk that their differences become secondary to the modern researcher's preferred synthesis.

Buddhism is not simply an ancient cognitive-science laboratory. Christianity is not merely a technology for socializing contemplative wisdom. Plato is not simply an early theorist of relevance realization.

Historical traditions had their own truth claims, metaphysical commitments and internal conflicts.

Wisdom versus knowledge

One of Vervaeke's most compelling themes is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

Modern institutions are extraordinarily good at producing specialized knowledge. They are much less successful at producing people capable of integrating knowledge into good judgment.

This is a genuine civilizational problem.

A person can be extremely intelligent and still be foolish. A society can possess enormous technological power while lacking the wisdom to use that power well.

Vervaeke therefore argues for a cognitive-scientific account of wisdom and connects wisdom with the capacity to see through illusion, overcome self-deception, integrate perspectives and appropriately determine relevance. His later lectures explicitly attempt to bring philosophical theories of wisdom into dialogue with contemporary psychological research.

Here Vervaeke is on particularly solid ground.

But again there is a potential category mistake.

A scientific account of the psychology of wisdom is not necessarily a scientific account of wisdom itself.

Psychology can investigate characteristics associated with wise judgment. It cannot by itself determine all the normative questions that wisdom raises.

For example: wise according to which conception of the good life?

Vervaeke's framework implicitly requires answers to precisely these questions, even when his cognitive vocabulary makes them appear more empirically tractable.

The problem of self-transcendence

Self-transcendence is perhaps the most delicate element of the project.

Vervaeke wants to explain experiences in which the normal boundaries of the self become less dominant. This includes contemplative experiences, flow, insight, awe and forms of profound connection.

There is no need to deny that such experiences occur.

The epistemological question is different.

Does an experience of transcendence reveal something metaphysically transcendent?

Not necessarily.

A powerful experience can transform one's relationship with the world without providing privileged access to ultimate reality.

This distinction matters enormously.

Meditation may reveal previously unnoticed features of consciousness. Flow may transform one's experience of agency. Awe may restructure one's sense of scale and importance. Insight may radically reorganize a conceptual problem.

All of this can be real and valuable without requiring an additional metaphysical realm.

Vervaeke's naturalism provides resources for making precisely this distinction. Yet some of his language concerning participation, transcendence and the sacred occasionally comes close to blurring it.

The paradox of the cognitive scientist as philosopher

There is another tension worth noting.

Vervaeke's authority derives partly from his scientific credentials. He wants cognitive science to illuminate ancient philosophy and contemporary spirituality.

But the further the argument moves from empirical cognitive science into historical interpretation and existential philosophy, the less scientific the enterprise becomes.

That is not a criticism in itself.

Philosophy cannot be reduced to laboratory science, and Vervaeke is perfectly entitled to do philosophy.

The problem arises only when scientific terminology lends additional authority to philosophical propositions that have not themselves been scientifically demonstrated.

“Cognitive science tells us X” and “cognitive science provides a useful framework for thinking about X” are very different statements.

A critical reading of Vervaeke should therefore continually separate his empirical claims, philosophical arguments, historical interpretations and existential proposals.

The project becomes much stronger when these levels are kept distinct.

What Vervaeke gets right

Despite these criticisms, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis deserves serious attention.

Its greatest achievement may be that it refuses two equally inadequate answers to modern meaninglessness.

The first is scientism: everything that matters can ultimately be reduced to objective facts.

The second is romantic spirituality: science has destroyed meaning, therefore we must recover some deeper mystical reality.

Vervaeke searches for a third possibility.

Human beings are biological organisms whose cognition evolved in a natural world. Yet human cognition generates language, culture, values, symbolic worlds, contemplative practices and forms of self-transformation that cannot be adequately described by simply listing physical facts.

This does not require supernaturalism.

It requires a richer naturalism.

That is the most defensible interpretation of Vervaeke's project.

But is there really a “meaning crisis”?

The deepest question may actually precede Vervaeke's solution.

How do we know that there is a singular, historically unprecedented “meaning crisis”?

There is considerable evidence for depression, anxiety, loneliness, alienation and social fragmentation. Vervaeke himself begins from these phenomena.

But these phenomena have many possible causes: economic insecurity, social isolation, technological change, declining community institutions, demographic transformation, political polarization, changes in family structure, inequality, digital media and changing expectations of personal fulfillment.

It is therefore possible that “the meaning crisis” is partly a philosophical interpretation imposed upon a heterogeneous collection of modern problems.

Some people genuinely experience existential meaninglessness. Others do not. Some find meaning precisely because traditional metaphysics has weakened. Scientific naturalism itself can provide an intelligible framework for life, without requiring an additional spiritual synthesis.

The crisis may therefore be real without being singular.

Perhaps there are many meaning crises.

Awakening without metaphysical inflation

This suggests a somewhat different reading of Vervaeke.

The enduring value of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis does not depend upon accepting its grand historical genealogy or its strongest claims about relevance realization.

One can retain its most useful insights while rejecting its more ambitious synthesis.

Human cognition is selective rather than encyclopedic.

Knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

Skill cannot be reduced to propositions.

Perspective matters.

Embodied participation matters.

Insight involves restructuring problems rather than merely accumulating information.

Contemplative practices can alter cognition and behavior.

Communities and practices can cultivate forms of wisdom that individuals cannot easily develop in isolation.

And a scientifically intelligible universe does not automatically produce nihilism.

These are substantial insights.

They do not require us to believe that ancient metaphysics contained a lost solution waiting to be reconstructed in cognitive-scientific terminology.

Conclusion: a brilliant map, not a demonstrated destination

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is best understood as a philosophical synthesis rather than a scientific theory of meaning.

Its great strength is its refusal to accept the impoverished equation of knowledge with information. Vervaeke reminds us that human beings are not detached information-processing machines. We are embodied agents navigating environments, relationships, practices, perspectives and values.

Its weakness is the temptation to turn this insight into a comprehensive explanatory system.

Relevance realization may explain something important about cognition without explaining meaning in its entirety. Participatory knowing may illuminate human engagement without constituting a deeper epistemic faculty. Contemplative transformation may be genuine without implying metaphysical transcendence. And the decline of traditional cosmology may have contributed to modern alienation without making modernity a single historical “meaning catastrophe.”

The most interesting Vervaeke is therefore not the Vervaeke who promises to reconstruct an integrated worldview.

It is the Vervaeke who asks us to distinguish knowing from wisdom, information from insight, observation from participation, and intellectual sophistication from genuine transformation.

That distinction is already enough.

Perhaps the way out of the meaning crisis does not require awakening to a hidden metaphysical order. Perhaps it requires something more modest—and more difficult: learning how to live intelligently, wisely and responsibly in the one natural world we actually inhabit.

And that, ironically, may be the point at which Vervaeke's project becomes most compatible with the naturalism it is trying so carefully to preserve.