Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Book One: Origins

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.

Impeccably sourced and written with a perfectly paced narrative flair, Vervaeke and Mastropietro’s work is an indispensable sense-maker for our time.