07 • Orders of Meaning
The three interconnected axes of the space of meaning: coherence, purpose, and significance.
Before we can look into the cognitive machinery that we use to make meaning, we have to ask ourselves a self-referential question:
What does “meaning” mean?
First of all, “meaning” is a metaphor. That is not that surprising, if you are aware of how much of our language and understanding are structured metaphorically.
When people use this word "meaning", it's a metaphor. They mean that there is something in their life that is analogous to how a sentence has meaning. The pieces fit together in some way, they make an impact on your cognition, and connect you to the world in some way. There is something about our lives that is analogous to the way sentences have meaning.
What, then, exactly are the pieces that fit together, make an impact on our cognition, and connect us to the world, when we experience meaning in our lives?
Meaning of in life
When I'm talking about meaning I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life — that's some sort of metaphysical claim. Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure.
And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness — connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world. A particular kind of connectedness, you want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you.
Now the question that comes up for me… well, there's two questions. One is: Why is that at risk right now? And secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is: Why is meaning so important? Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self-destructive behavior?
The first answer I give you is: It's that sense of connectedness. And people often express it metaphorically, they want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally. I mean, if I change you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, "Oh, now my life is so fulfilling!" So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say they want to be connected. They want to be connected to something real. They want to make a difference and matter to it.
And one way of asking them what's meaningful is, "Tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore? And how are you connected to it? How do you matter to it?" […]
If it contributes to your life being meaningful, you're connected to it in some way. It matters to you, and you matter to it, in that you make some difference to it. That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good, and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life.
Mirror of the Self — A test for meaning
Do you see how Alexander’s Mirror of the Self test is precisely trying to tease out not how much you like something, but how much meaning something has?
When you look at an object, or when you compare two objects and do the Mirror of the Self test with them, trying to feel which of those objects is a better representation of your self, this is about judging which object is more meaningful. To you, of course. But also to other people. And to the world.
It is very easy to confuse this with just your personal, idiosyncratic, egocentric opinion you have on a particular object. Your opinion is just about you, your preferences, your concerns. It does not really matter, even if it appears to matter a lot to you.
That is not what Alexander is asking for, as he tries hard to explain. What he is asking for instead is your sense of connectedness to these objects, how they matter to you and how you matter to them, how they make a difference to you and how you make a difference to them. He is asking for their real meaning.
It is not surprising that in our world today, we have almost completely lost the ability to tell these two kinds apart.
The three components of meaning
With that fundamental framing in place, we can now look closer and go deeper: what characteristics can we find that make the concept of meaning more graspable? How can we even better understand what meaning really is?
We know from current cognitive science that the three components of meaning that people talk about, the things that contribute to meaning in life — and this is [Samantha] Heintzelman's work and others — are a sense of coherence (I'll explain what this means in a minute), a sense of significance, and a sense of purpose. […]
The more coherent, the more intelligible, the more things fit together for you, the more real they are, the more meaningful you find your life. That's the nomological order. How things fit together and make sense in a coherent fashion.
What about significance? Significance is this: how valuable, how deep in reality, how good are the elements of your life? That's the normative order.
Purpose? Does your life have a direction? Is it moving in a course? That's the narrative order. […]
Martela & Steger (2016)1 summarize the three facets of meaning (based on prior works of King, Heintzelman, and Steger) in the form of this table:
As Vervaeke clearly prefers alliterative structures, he refers to the three facets or dimensions as orders:
Nomological order = coherence (comprehensibility, understanding)
Narrative order = purpose (direction, motivation)
Normative order = significance (value, evaluation)
All of these things have to be in place for us to find meaning in life. We need to be able to make sense of the world (nomological order). We need to existentially connect to what is good and valuable (normative order). And we need to have a sense of direction and purpose in life (narrative order).
Coherence, purpose, and significance in objects
Back to the Mirror of the self test — do the three dimensions of meaning help us make sense of Alexander’s practice of judging the meaning of an object?
Can an object be coherent? Can we make sense of it? Do we understand what it is, what it does, how it works, just from looking at it?
Of course. Any object that doesn’t confuse us or makes us question why it exists, any object that is obviously making sense to us in its environment is coherent. Alexander’s fifteen fundamental properties are essentially recurring patterns in the structure of physical objects that make them more intelligible, more comprehensible to us.
Can an object have purpose? Does it have a function (or many)? Is it useful? Does it afford certain behaviors or events?
Of course. Useful objects afford good things to happen. Up to a point that we find them so useful that we wouldn’t know what to do without them. And it applies to small, handheld tools like a pen or a knife as much as it does to large, inhabitable structures like buildings or cities.
Can an object be significant? Can it be fundamentally good? Has it been, is it, and will it be important?
Of course. Objects of significant importance carry an aura of awe and make us experience anything between respectful fear and blissful wonder. They don’t just exist, they radiate their significance with their presence.
Each of these three dimensions of meaning is different. And yet they all contribute to the same sense of meaning we have of something. And we can sense each of these dimensions.
This is what makes this quality so difficult to describe: It is not a single property that makes something meaningful. It is a complex combination of countless different properties on three different dimensions of meaning that together make something meaningful, that make something whole.
Alexander switches between all these dimensions of meaning when he discusses many of the examples in all four books of The Nature of Order. When he focuses on form, the static geometric structure of a place or object, and notices the fifteen fundamental properties in it, he focuses on coherence. When he talks about function, the dynamic behavior a place supports and possible events and interactions that a space enables to happen there, he talks about purpose. When he describes the sense of awe induced by the beauty of a tile, a sculpture, or a painting, he describes its significance.
Wholeness comes from the dense presence of all three dimensions of meaning in its geometric structure, in its afforded functions, and in its ingrained importance.
We sense meaning, or — as Alexander says —have to rely on our feeling, because (as we will see) the cognitive mechanisms we use to determine meaning are pre-conceptual in nature. They operate below the analytical, self-aware, conceptual level of our consciousness that itself emerges from these more fundamental levels.
Three axes of the meaning space
All three orders of meaning together form “the three axes of the space of meaning”. Vervaeke argues that historically we have had a sophisticated version of a worldview that supported all three of these orders of meaning to exist in our life in an integrated fashion around the time of Augustine in the 4th century, which lasted for more than thousand years into the Middle Ages.
What we have — and we'll come back to the cognitive science — what we have is a very long and powerful history that tells us how our culture has articulated the Axial Revolution. How it has given a grammar, a way of understanding, what the Axial Revolution has given us. It has given us a system for interpreting and inhabiting a worldview in which meaning and wisdom, as understood by the Axial Revolution, have been developed and have been articulated in a sophisticated and compelling fashion.
Meaning is to have a nomological order that connects us to what is real.
It is to have a normative order that connects us, not intellectually but existentially to what is good, so that we can become better.
Meaning is to have a narrative order that tells us how we can move forward through history, both collective and individual history.
But what I've tried to show you is that these are not three separate things. They are like the three dimensions of a space — the space of meaning. They are the three axes of the space of meaning.
This is a beautiful synthesis. It's the culmination of tremendous amount of historical development. It's profound. And it's not just an intellectual thing; it is — as I've tried to show you — it is simultaneously a scientific thing, a spiritual thing, a therapeutic thing, an existential thing. This is why this is going to last a thousand years. Because it is such a powerful and enriching vision. [continued below]
Taken from episode 19 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, this is the positive climax of the historical review, which the first half of the series is about. In the following six episodes he will conclude the historical review with a detailed description of how we systematically dismantled this profound synthesis on our way to industrialism and modernism to where we are today.
Fundamentally disconnected
The modern world became increasingly more secular as we rediscovered science, invented commerce, and established strong separations between science and spirituality, state and church, rationality and faith, reason and love. As we separated all these concepts from each other, we systematically disconnected us from ourselves, from the world, and from each other.
Science offered us a form of coherence. It seems that we know much better now what is real than we ever did before. But do we really understand what makes something real? The mechanical worldview leaves us disconnected from the meaningless, inert machinery of the universe. We can’t connect to the propositional beliefs that are supposed to describe the world as it really is.
Capitalism offered us a form of purpose. Surely, not the only source for direction in life, and a simplistic one at best, but now wealth is equivalent to power and we have successfully gamified modern society into relentless consumerism. We don’t connect to mass-produced, replaceable products, nor to the equally as replaceable people who are involved in making them.
Religion offered us a form of significance. It provided normative standards of what is good. But many of us no longer practice religion, and it seems ridiculously outdated today to suggest that we should. Instead we search for significance in terms of individual spirituality and through participation in smaller and more fragmented communities of shared ideology.
We decide what we believe, because the grand scientific theories of the universe don’t make much sense to us in everyday life anyway. We decide what we do, as long as it is productive, it benefits us, our wealth, our career, our influence. We decide what is good, and others are free to join us and become our friends, or join “them” and become our enemies.
We are fundamentally disconnected, our communities fragmented, our spirit of belonging disintegrated, our sense of meaning has collapsed. We are not “at one with the cosmos”. We are on our own, trapped in our own mind, without comprehension or understanding, divided and polarized, following shallow constructs of post- or pseudo-religious ideologies that promise us meaning, but at best connect us to people who exclusively think exactly like us, and at worst drench the world in blood.
[continued from above]
Imagine, if you could... what if I could offer this to you and make it deeply historically, scientifically, and intellectually viable for you? What if I could offer to you a worldview that had the deepest scientific legitimacy, totally integrated with the most profound spirituality, no antagonism, no irrationality in it, conjoined seamlessly with a personal project of therapy, of therapeutic change and healing and sapiential education — the cultivation of genuine wisdom and self-transcendence, in community with yourself, your world, your culture, and other people.
Would you not want this?
So here's the question you now have to ask yourself:
Why don't you have it?Because we know from the science, that's what you want. We know from the history that that's what our culture has, our foundational culture from the Axial Revolution, built for us.
Why don't we have it?
Is it irredeemably lost?
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness
Frank Martela & Michael F. Steger (2016).
The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance.
The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11:5, 531-545, DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623