DE Weekly: Vervaeke, Van Gogh, & The Meaning Crisis
Below is an archived email originally sent on February 10, 2025.
Vervaeke, Van Gogh, & The Meaning Crisis
Of all the ways I’ve seen existentialism explained, one of my favorites remains the following: existentialism is a profound symptom of the human condition.
Here’s how I interpret this: while existentialism is a bona fide philosophy in its own right, it’s also something innate to human beings, as innate as our consciousness and sense of self, perhaps born of the two.
The questions and feelings that existentialism seeks to answer and explore are ones we all encounter at one point or another.
Because of this, the finer philosophical points are not reserved for philosophers alone, but are explored by scores of people outside of the philosophical domain, including artists, poets, and the like.
I recently came across John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto.
Vervaeke has stated he believes the world is currently undergoing a “meaning crisis”. It’s a hard conclusion to argue––it’s one the existentialists would agree with.
Vervaeke supposes we ought to rediscover a sense of “deep connectedness” with the world, through marrying the material with the supernatural; he uses the term “metaphysical essentialism” to further explain this.
His is a philosophy worth checking out. I don’t agree with all that he says, but it’s incredibly interesting and he seems to take these questions seriously and want to explore them honestly.
One thing Vervaeke said that struck me was that, in our search for meaning, we might feel defeated and depressed at times.
For him, we cannot give in to this. Feeling defeated and depressed, he continues, is a “withdrawal from our purpose as humans”. We have no choice but to continue.
This same sentiment is echoed by Vincent van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter who also happened to be a prolific writer––of letters, mostly––whose musings equal his skill on the easel.
“That is how I look at it;” writes Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo, “to continue, to continue, that is what is necessary.”
A dominating theme in existentialism is that we must go on, we simply have no choice. In a life devoid of inherent meaning, we must make our own; the only way to make meaning in life is to keep living.
In other words, the answer to the “meaning crisis” we find ourselves in is many. For you, meaning is likely different than it is for me. For Van Gogh, meaning was likely different than it is for Vervaeke.
But the inception of the answer to the meaning crisis for all of us lies in choosing to live.
This is the foremost message, as I read it, in most of the works of the existentialists. It can be obfuscated in dense prose and beliefs stuck with terms, but rest assured this message cannot be lost.
In the face of absurdity, we must stand pat and say, “I choose to live.”
This is the philosophy I feel underpins existentialism, and thus why I do not read it as defeatist, nihilistic, or anything of the sort. I read it instead as hopeful, as rebellious, as brave.
As usual, this is no more clear with anybody than Albert Camus.
Camus’s protagonist in A Happy Death writes, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
Much more than a tongue-in-cheek quotable, this sentence is his philosophy in a nutshell.
For Camus, the meaninglessness of life doesn’t reduce each option we have to the same, nor does it reduce any choice we do make to insignificance. For Camus, the most courageous thing we can do is to revolt against the meaninglessness of life, to keep living.
Suicide is not an option.
Camus posited that rather than our life’s meaning ending at absurdity, it actually begins at absurdity. We must live our lives in spite of the fact it supposedly has no meaning, and make our own.
“Live to the point of tears”, Camus wrote.
Choosing to live is revolt, and revolting in such a manner should, at some point, bring us to tears–simply for the fact we could be so brave in the face of absurdity.
This, I think, is the answer to the meaning crisis. To continue, to continue.
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world . . . I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.” (Camus, The Stranger, 122–123).
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
For a good read check out The Letters of Vincent van Gogh.
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