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Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: Part One: Origins
"Read their book and be illuminated; ignore it at your peril." — Jordan Peterson, New York Times bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life
"Provides a frame for lost souls." — Jonathan Pageau, renowned liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker
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 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.
Impeccably sourced and written with a perfectly paced narrative flair, Vervaeke and Mastropietro’s work is an indispensable sense-maker for our time.
"Provides a frame for lost souls." — Jonathan Pageau, renowned liturgical artist, writer, and public speaker
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 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.
Impeccably sourced and written with a perfectly paced narrative flair, Vervaeke and Mastropietro’s work is an indispensable sense-maker for our time.
424 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2024
136 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 25, 2025
A tremendous narrative of Western philosophy (plus Buddhism) that goes a long way towards explaining how we humans have lost our way. This book offers an introduction to some of the greatest thinkers of all time and how our modern worldview has evolved into its current set of paradigms and some of their shortcomings. I appreciate what John Vervaeke has accomplished in Part I:Origins and look forward to seeing Part II...
December 26, 2025
I have had the good luck to become friends with John Vervaeke and was excited to read this book after having been greatly impacted by the youtube series of the same name.
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Volume 1 covers the same ground as the first 25 episodes of his 50-episode YouTube series.
While it shares its structure and focus with the YouTube series, the book substantially tightens and clarifies the argument, with new evidence and more clarity in the conclusion and the direction forward.
The core argument, for those unfamiliar, is that the very things that make human cognition adaptive also leave us prone to delusion. As such, human society and individual humans thrive best when there is a clear sense of what Vervaeke terms the three orders: the Normative, Narrative, and Nomological orders.
Nomological refers to what structures our understanding of how things work; the scientific method is the heart of our current nomological order, while Aristotelian science was foundational in medieval Europe.
The Normative order is what guides how we should behave. That is our systems of ethics, morals, and norms.
The Narrative order is what structures and develops our identities: our shared mythos.
Vervaeke argues that due to a confluence of technological, philosophical, and scientific changes, the coherence of these three orders has broken down, leaving us particularly prone to meaninglessness, despair, solipsism, and narcissism.
We start our journey in the Upper Paleolithic with the explosion of symbolic behavior and technological advancement. Vervaeke attributes this to Shamanism which developed a set of practices, including music, dancing, fasting, sleep deprivation, and potentially psychedelics which allowed the shaman to break their own cognitive framing, and imagine novel solutions.
In Vervaeke's telling this was the first system of what he terms psycho-technologies that could be leveraged to increase our adaptive capacity in relationship to our environment.
He tracks how shamanism was destabilized by the rise of sedentary, agrarian state level societies. Which gave rise in time to development of philosophy and the major world religions following the collapse of bronze age civilizations.
Vervaeke guides us through the impact of the Greek philosophers in the west, and the Buddha in the east, before focusing on the rise of Christianity and its relationship to Neoplatonism.
He covers the development of Medieval Christian thought from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, through to Martin Luther and the protestant reformation.
Next Vervaeke turns to the early modern philosophers and the development of the scientific method, through to the breakdown of Christianity in the West and the rise of Romanticism and existentialism, before finishing with a brief review of how these currents set up the conflicts of the 20th century.
This is, of course, a massive scope, and each era and set of figures has multiple books written about them. But Vervaeke produces a clear through-line by showcasing how each era and figure struggled with, and either provided or failed to provide, coherence between these orders.
He weaves the book together through frequent references back to modern 4E cognitive science, creating a coherent history of religion, philosophy, and science as they relate to the question of meaning-making.
This is an extraordinarily profound book that I recommend for anyone trying to understand the existential, social, and technological issues we currently face.
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Volume 1 covers the same ground as the first 25 episodes of his 50-episode YouTube series.
While it shares its structure and focus with the YouTube series, the book substantially tightens and clarifies the argument, with new evidence and more clarity in the conclusion and the direction forward.
The core argument, for those unfamiliar, is that the very things that make human cognition adaptive also leave us prone to delusion. As such, human society and individual humans thrive best when there is a clear sense of what Vervaeke terms the three orders: the Normative, Narrative, and Nomological orders.
Nomological refers to what structures our understanding of how things work; the scientific method is the heart of our current nomological order, while Aristotelian science was foundational in medieval Europe.
The Normative order is what guides how we should behave. That is our systems of ethics, morals, and norms.
The Narrative order is what structures and develops our identities: our shared mythos.
Vervaeke argues that due to a confluence of technological, philosophical, and scientific changes, the coherence of these three orders has broken down, leaving us particularly prone to meaninglessness, despair, solipsism, and narcissism.
We start our journey in the Upper Paleolithic with the explosion of symbolic behavior and technological advancement. Vervaeke attributes this to Shamanism which developed a set of practices, including music, dancing, fasting, sleep deprivation, and potentially psychedelics which allowed the shaman to break their own cognitive framing, and imagine novel solutions.
In Vervaeke's telling this was the first system of what he terms psycho-technologies that could be leveraged to increase our adaptive capacity in relationship to our environment.
He tracks how shamanism was destabilized by the rise of sedentary, agrarian state level societies. Which gave rise in time to development of philosophy and the major world religions following the collapse of bronze age civilizations.
Vervaeke guides us through the impact of the Greek philosophers in the west, and the Buddha in the east, before focusing on the rise of Christianity and its relationship to Neoplatonism.
He covers the development of Medieval Christian thought from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, through to Martin Luther and the protestant reformation.
Next Vervaeke turns to the early modern philosophers and the development of the scientific method, through to the breakdown of Christianity in the West and the rise of Romanticism and existentialism, before finishing with a brief review of how these currents set up the conflicts of the 20th century.
This is, of course, a massive scope, and each era and set of figures has multiple books written about them. But Vervaeke produces a clear through-line by showcasing how each era and figure struggled with, and either provided or failed to provide, coherence between these orders.
He weaves the book together through frequent references back to modern 4E cognitive science, creating a coherent history of religion, philosophy, and science as they relate to the question of meaning-making.
This is an extraordinarily profound book that I recommend for anyone trying to understand the existential, social, and technological issues we currently face.
June 2, 2025
amen den här va kul ändå
August 5, 2025
much abstraction
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews