Hi folks!
I’ve taken a deep dive into the work of John Vervaeke’s ‘Awakening from the meaning crisis’ and ‘After Socrates’ series. I find them life-changing, and he shifted my fundamental framing towards connection, love, and spirituality.
Because I’m really deep-diving into his perspective and could be stuck there, I’m wondering if any of you have counter perspectives, criticisms of Vervaeke’s work, and sources that counterbalance his viewpoint?
I also find it absolutely fascinating and so refreshing compared to almost anything else. For me it’s the entire eco-system around Vervaeke and not just him.
Bonnitta Roy’s work has critiqued JV’s work in the past. She’s got some uploaded videos of this on her substack.
Hi Ola. Can’t directly find a video where she criticizes Vervaeke. Could you find the video for me?
Vervaeke and Roy are both presenting at this online conference this weekend.
I’m also a big Vervaeke fan and I’d also be interested to see criticisms that discuss Vervaeke directly.
The approach I’ve been taking so as not to get ‘stuck’ is to read around the areas he talks about - for example you can read different interpretations of the particular philosophers and religious traditions he talks about in part 1 of the meaning crisis series. And in part 2 he’s quite good at referencing other cognitive science work, e.g. on wisdom and rationality that present different perspectives. The ‘great rationality debate’ between e.g. Kahneman and Gigerenzer is useful thing to explore here. And since he touches on neuroscience too, alternative takes on the neuroscience, e.g. Mcgilchrist and the ‘active inference’ approach of e.g. Karl Friston offer counterweights here.
Not sure which one exactly. Maybe reach-out to Bonnie and make a direct request.
@ijscooman (and others) a good starting point to look for critiques would be to try to summarize Vervaeke’s views and key claims and how these then relate to general open questions / debates.
On the more nuanced side you could pick a particular talk in e.g. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and go look for an expert in that area (or read the literature).
As one example, IIRC, Vervaeke draws quite heavily on the Winkelman hypothesis about the role of shamanism in the upper paleolithic transition. AFAIK this isn’t a widely shared view in the academic literature (though this is necessarily a very speculative area).
Dave Snowden is not a Vervaeke fan.
I’ve learned things from both Snowden and Vervaeke. Just bringing this in because of the ask for Vervaeke criticism.
I noted how Matthijs @ijscooman was careful in asking for critique of Vervaeke’s positions, not John himself. Good move! Building on that, maybe it would be most fruitful to identify particular views and point to criticism of them? E.g. what views does Dave Snowden actually criticise? I could probably discover that in an hour’s research, but if someone here does the work and posts it for everyone that helps the rest of us! Other views similarly.
In the article linked above, Snowden critiques the empirical basis for the idea of a crisis of meaning.
I asked ChatGPT to provide specific individuals who have come up with criticisms of Vervaeke, and it came up with some fairly interesting results:
Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, a Lutheran theologian, has critiqued Vervaeke’s interpretation of Martin Luther, arguing that Vervaeke misrepresents Luther’s theology by framing it through a cognitive science lens. Cooper contends that this approach overlooks the theological and doctrinal nuances of Luther’s work. YouTube
Philosopher Gage Greer has expressed skepticism about Vervaeke’s concept of the “meaning crisis,” suggesting that Vervaeke’s framework lacks empirical grounding and leans heavily on speculative interpretations of historical and cognitive developments. Greer argues that Vervaeke’s solutions may be more philosophical than practical. Medium
Benjamin Cain, writing on Medium, critiques Vervaeke’s attempt to create a “non-religious religion” to address the meaning crisis. Cain argues that this approach may oversimplify the complexities of existential meaning and could inadvertently replicate the structures of traditional religions without their foundational beliefs. Medium
In a Substack article, Matt Whiteley discusses the challenges of applying Vervaeke’s ideas in practical settings. He suggests that while Vervaeke’s theoretical models are intellectually stimulating, they may lack clear pathways for implementation in everyday life, potentially limiting their real-world impact. Substack
Thanks for summarizing the critics. I’m more of a Vervaeke fan. I’m not keen to refute the critics (who no doubt have reasons for their views). Rather, here I’d like to express personal appreciation for the work of Vervaeke and his associates, from my own “participatory and perspectival” lens.
On the question of is there a meaning crisis - I believe the idea of a meaning crisis resonates with people who have experienced something like that on a personal level. The idea likely sounds most plausible to someone who has exited traditional, modern, or postmodern views and is actively meaning-making to find a more compelling framework. That’s certainly my personal case. I distinctly recall my Keganesque “in over my head” experience in the globalized and postmodern milieu of my undergraduate and early graduate work at large west coast US universities in the 1970s and 1980s. “Meaning crisis” is a decently good term for what that felt like. My values were torn in a million directions at that time, and I’ve been trying to integrate all that ever since. Vervaeke’s personal story seems to have some parallels, as do many others’ who participate in forums such as this.
On cog sci vs religion - at one point I took an interest in the cognitively-oriented Jesuit theological Bernard Lonergan. (Here is a summary: https://lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/articles/Dunne-Method_in_Theology_-_A_Summary.pdf). Rereading Lonergan’s method just now, it strikes it would work as decently well as a treatise on “method for 2R” as it does for a “method for theology”. Maybe I’ve been effectively practicing this for the past 40 years or so. Most of the steps in Lonergan’s process could be performed skillfully by scholarly atheists. But to do theology (as opposed to philosophy, history, social theory, etc.) requires a series of “conversions”. https://lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/lectures/What%20Does%20Bernard%20Lonergan%20Mean%20by%20Conversion.pdf
Although I well understand what religious conversion means on the institutional level of changing one’s religious affiliation, Lonergan’s deeper senses of personal authenticity and self-transcendence eluded me. If I was going through any processes like that, I was not able to give theoretical account of what such processes might be, in any case. It strikes me that in many ways Vervaeke picks up where Lonergan left off and fills in some of the gaps and problem areas with Lonergan. Lonergan’s method always drew me in - but the conversion part always seemed like special pleading. Why does the intuition of unlimited love lead to a specifically Catholic (not to mention, Jesuit) commitment? Why not Buddhist or beat poet or shaman or something else? For me, Vervaeke’s “participatory” and “perspectival” knowing fill in that picture. Vervaeke sketches out a process for transcendence-seeking without prejudging what the destination of such journey will be in advance.
On the question of is Vervaeke practical - from my POV, heck yes! I practice it all the time. Or more to the point, I’ve been practicing it my whole life, but it looked more random and crazy than systematic and I did not have words to describe the process. Thanks to Vervaeke, I can now perceive some method in the madness. The whole business is likely what Layman Pascal and Alexander Bard call “shamanoid”. Not everyone in the world is built that way, so not everyone is going to get what Vervaeke is up to. But a practice it very surely is.
First off, I want to echo what others have said Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and After Socrates have been truly impactful for me as well. Vervaeke’s ability to weave cognitive science, ancient philosophy, and practical psychotechnologies into a coherent response to modern disorientation is rare and genuinely valuable. His work has clarified and deepened some intuitions I’ve held for years but couldn’t quite name. I’m deeply grateful for the intellectual generosity he models. At the same time, as I watch and reflect, a number of questions and tensions come up, not from a place of opposition, but from curiosity and a desire to expand the conversation. Here are a few thoughts I’ve been sitting with, offered as part of the dialogical space Vervaeke himself invites.
The idea of a “meaning crisis” feels deeply true in many modern Western contexts. The breakdown of inherited narratives, the disintegration of communities, and the rise of instrumental rationality have left many feeling unmoored. But I wonder if this framing is more culturally specific than it’s sometimes presented.
Across the Global South, and within Indigenous, Islamic, and other non-Western traditions, the sense of meaning is often still grounded in community, ritual, and spiritual cosmologies; despite the pressures of globalization. For many, the crisis isn’t an internal vacuum, but an externally imposed dislocation. Colonialism, extractive capitalism, and cultural erasure have disrupted older meaning systems, yes, but these are not the same crisis Vervaeke describes.
That doesn’t invalidate his project. But it does raise the question: Is this a universal human predicament, or a culturally situated crisis within the Western intellectual lineage? And if the latter, how might deeper engagement with other ontologies (beyond Buddhism and Neoplatonism) enrich or challenge the framing?
Vervaeke critiques Enlightenment rationalism as a driver of fragmentation, and I think that’s fair. But I also believe rationality doesn’t have to be reductive. What we may need is not less reason, but a wider and more integrated rationality: one that includes the body, intuition, emotion, and aesthetic insight. A rationality that listens, that feels, that transforms.
In that light, his discussion of relevance realization is especially powerful. It captures how cognition is not about passively representing the world, but about discerning what matters; what stands out, what guides action. Yet even here, I’d invite a broader comparative lens. Much of what’s framed as cutting-edge cognitive science resonates strongly with older spiritual traditions… not only from the East, but from places often omitted from these dialogues.
Sufi epistemologies, for instance, have long engaged with attention, salience, and embodied knowing through practices like muraqabah (watchful presence), dhikr (remembrance), and tafakkur (contemplative reflection). These aren’t just devotional acts, they’re systematic psychotechnologies of cognitive transformation. And yet, they’re almost entirely absent from this series.
It raises the question: Why do certain traditions (e.g. Zen, Stoicism) get academic and cognitive validation, while others remain “too religious” or culturally distant to be included?
One of the most valuable parts of the series is the call to recover ancient psychotechnologies; practices designed not to give us information, but to cultivate wisdom. I agree this is crucial. But I’m also cautious about how these tools are being revived in the broader culture.
When mindfulness becomes a productivity hack, or Stoicism gets filtered through YouTube hustle culture, something essential is lost. And when these practices are lifted from traditions without context (flattened, rebranded, and marketed) they risk becoming simulations of transformation, rather than its vehicle.
I also think there’s a blind spot in which traditions get mined for these tools. There’s a well-worn trail between ancient Greece, Buddhism, and modern neuroscience, but what about West African divination systems, Andean cosmologies, or Islamic mysticism? Not just as cultural references, but as full systems of embodied wisdom?
Reviving ancient practices in modern life is powerful, but it must be done with attention to lineage, context, and epistemic responsibility. Otherwise, we risk turning sacred technologies into lifestyle accessories.
The language of “awakening” carries deep resonance, and Vervaeke uses it to point toward a kind of lived transformation, a shift in the way one perceives and participates in the world. I appreciate that. But I also notice how easily this framing can slip into hierarchy: the awakened and the asleep, the conscious and the lost.
While I don’t think this is his intent, I do think any such model has to be careful. Awakening, if it means anything, has to remain plural, contextual, and grounded not only in self-insight, but in ethical relationship and social transformation. Otherwise, it risks becoming a kind of spiritual meritocracy, a ladder of enlightenment that too easily maps onto existing cultural privilege.
Ultimately, I’m moved by Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It’s a serious, generous, and needed intervention in our cultural moment. None of these reflections are meant to diminish the immense value of it, quite the opposite: they are offered in the spirit of appreciation and inquiry. Vervaeke has opened a rare and vital space in the contemporary landscape, a space that bridges science and spirit, cognition and care, philosophy and practice. But perhaps the next step is not only deeper integration across disciplines, but across cultures and histories.
If meaning is to be reawakened, it cannot be only through recovering what we have lost but also through listening, receiving, and building relationship with wisdoms that were never lost in the first place. Many of these traditions are still alive, sometimes marginalized, sometimes endangered, but carrying insights, technologies, and ways of seeing the world that are essential to any serious project of cultural renewal.
In that spirit, I offer this reflection not as a conclusion, but as a question:
What would it look like to make Awakening from the Meaning Crisis not just a Western intellectual journey, but a truly global, intercultural, and reciprocal dialogue; one in which many wisdoms, many lineages, and many ways of knowing are invited to co-create the path ahead?
Thanks Naeema, I think the spirit of this is very important, especially the idea of pushing further in the direction of intercultural dialogue. Vervaeke does discuss Sufism in Episode 48 of Awakening from the meaning crisis and no doubt elsewhere, but I think you’re right that there’s more of a focus on Buddhism and Christianity as religious traditions, and it sounds like the specific practices you mention would be an interesting avenue to explore.
One could say in Vervaeke’s defense that any serious effort along these lines will inevitably end up focusing more on certain traditions than others simply because of the context - both social-historical and intellectual - in which the thinking occurs, and that to some extent it is appropriate for a thinker to connect to the traditions that are live within their own context (and this links to the point about the risk of ‘appropriation’).
And that doing research in this contextually rooted way may be the best way to serve a global, intercultural and reciprocal dialogue, in which each participant is rooted in this way.
But this last point points to the fact that there is still a kind of abstract ideal of intercultural objectivity that is being aimed for in such dialogue, of egalitarian fairness and respect to all cultures and traditions, which to me connects to another aspect of Vervaeke’s project, namely the scientific side. The search for cultural objectivity and fairness is a central part of social science, and indeed the cognitive science Vervaeke’s work is rooted, where it is methodologically important to ensure that cultural biases do not distort empirical results.
Which is why I think you’re basically right that this search for intercultural richness and fairness is an important direction to take Vervaeke’s project, and one that can be rooted within his own scientific framing.
Thanks @JonahW this is such a thoughtful and generative response. I really appreciate the way you’re holding the integrity of Vervaeke’s context while also opening space for the kind of intercultural dialogue I was gesturing toward.
I deeply resonate with your point about the value of rootedness. There’s something powerful, perhaps even necessary, about each participant in a global dialogue speaking from within their own lived traditions. It helps avoid both the pitfalls of appropriation and the flattening effect of abstract universalism. In that sense, you’re absolutely right: grounded engagement may be the most honest and generative path into a genuinely reciprocal conversation across cultures and wisdom traditions.
I also appreciate your linking of this to the scientific side of Vervaeke’s project. The effort to identify and minimize cultural bias, so central to both cognitive science and the broader social sciences, actually strengthens the case for more deliberate intercultural engagement. This isn’t a departure from Vervaeke’s core methodology, but an extension of it. In this light, the call for epistemic pluralism becomes a deepening of the project’s own internal logic.
That said, I want to acknowledge that Vervaeke is already moving in this direction. Just a couple weeks ago, he hosted a livestream conversation with Khalil Andani as part of his Silk Road monthly seminar series, an initiative explicitly designed to engage scholars and practitioners from across spiritual and philosophical traditions. It’s heartening to see that the project is evolving in real time, opening up more space for intercultural and interfaith exploration.
And in the spirit of transparency, I’ll admit that my inner trickster was definitely at play when I wrote that reflection. Part of what prompted it was noticing that so many of us in this community are devoted admirers of the series (myself included), and that there wasn’t a ton of constructive critique circulating. So I leaned into dialectical mode not to dismantle, but to stretch. Sometimes deep respect asks for hard questions.
It feels to me like we’re circling something vital: how might projects like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis remain contextually grounded and intellectually rigorous, while also participating more fully in the global ecology of wisdom traditions… especially those historically excluded from academic and philosophical canons?
Would love to hear where others see this dialogue unfolding, or how we might help seed it more intentionally.
First @Naeema I generally admire your many prior points in this thread. TL:DR - yes, the “meaning crisis” was spawned in the west and is more or less inflicted on everyone else. And yes, Vervaeke (and the vast majority of liminal web theorizers) are more situated in western identities than they generally acknowledge. I’m quite western as well - but I own it - and your challenge to seriously incorporate global views on their own terms is one I took up decades ago.
For example, lately I find myself hanging out with the local Baháʼí community and celebrating holidays like Naw-Rúz, which a couple years ago I did not even know existed. To grasp the devotional rhetoric of Baháʼu’lláh, I find myself going down rabbit holes about Persian and Arabic antecedents and wondering how the authentic 12th imam might be distinguished by the faithful from false pretenders to that role. None of this is because I am especially interested in becoming Baháʼí (nor do they especially care if I do), but simply because the Baháʼí community sponsors the best interfaith conversations in town, and that’s all my catnip, so of course I’m diving right in. (Good example of Vervaeke’s “participatory knowing”.)
On a more theoretical level, going 100% global is not exactly an easy trick. Case in point: Jürgen Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, vol 1. In that work, Habermas asks very seriously what makes ancient Greek philosophy different than all the other Axial Age outbursts (Hebrew prophecy, Dharma, the Tao). I love the book and I love the question. Just one problem - Habermas (no intellectual slouch) had to really on secondary sources for Chinese and Indian content. He reads the western languages and sources in the original, but everything eastern is through a filter. How could it be otherwise? Adding Sanskrit and Mandarin to Greek, Latin, and multiple modern European languages would be pretty steep ask. In my own recent studies, I’ve learned through various sources that the Quran fails to convey full meaning unless experienced in the original Arabic. I don’t doubt that. But I don’t imagine ever learning Arabic just to check it out. Multiply the same problem by dozens of world languages and hundreds of indigenous cultures and the picture becomes very clear.
The best answer I’ve been able to come up with for global dialog is for everyone to delve into their own roots and situations, and then branch out to form relationships with others coming from different places. If there is a pan-human perspective to come from this, I imagine it will be more like the Tao that cannot be spoken than any list of propositions that all must adhere to.
Thank you @RobertBunge I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and candor here. I resonate deeply with what you’re describing, particularly the tension between embracing global perspectives and the real-world limits of language, embodiment, and time. That image of sitting with the Baháʼí community not to convert, but because they host the richest conversations in town, that’s exactly the sort of “participatory knowing” Vervaeke talks about in the video I shared earlier.
What struck me most in that conversation is his pivot from “the religion that is not a religion” to this idea of the philosophical Silk Road. It’s not about offering a new grand framework or synthesis, it’s more like what you’re describing: a space between homes, a corridor where people from different traditions can meet without needing to collapse or fuse their differences. As Vervaeke puts it, no one lives on the Silk Road. We move through it. We visit, sometimes return, sometimes discover something we didn’t know we were looking for. And always, ideally, with humility.
That idea of a “global hallway” really landed for me; a place that’s not trying to resolve everything into a new universalism, but that still holds space for transformation through contact. And that feels aligned with what you’re doing in your own practice: staying grounded in your own background while opening to relationships that genuinely shift your view. I think Vervaeke would call that not just cognitive understanding, but something deeper… a kind of metanoia that comes not from reading or reasoning alone, but from walking alongside others on the way.
So yes, totally! We need people delving into their own traditions, but with enough openness to let those traditions breathe in relation to others. That kind of movement (both inward and outward) feels like one of the few hopeful responses to the meaning crisis Vervaeke’s been mapping out.
Thanks for continuing to emphasize this video, which induced me watch at all just a bit ago. I had not been familiar with the Ismaili community before, let alone its historical relationship to neo-Platonism, so that was all quite informative. For the longest time I had trouble choking down anything Islamic (for all the standard western-centric reasons), but lately my horizons are expanding quite a bit. The way I would frame matters nowadays goes like so:
No Islam, no scientific revolution in Europe. It’s really that simple. Moreover, if we are going to sort out world history and religion into “east” and “west”, Islam strikes me as most intimately associated with the “west”. That is very hard for Christians in particular to swallow, because Christianity was supposed to have been the last word on all matters spiritual. So the usual Greece-Rome-Christian-European-modern story has a missing chapter. Moreover, Islam has not been especially willing to fade away (no more than Christian traditions have been willing to fade away), much to the consternation of linear progressive and dialectical metanarratives of many varieties.
One final personal note. I currently find myself in the most ambiguous position possible with respect to the Christianity that is my birthright. Part of me deeply longs for what might be called my childhood Sunday School experience of Jesus and the Bible. A tidy structural package in well-defined colorful books that look and feel as objective as math or science. More recently, the deeper I dig into biblical studies and the grand sweep of Christian development, the more I feel cast out of anything institutional and more like a directionless pilgrim on something like the philosophical Silk Road. It strikes me out here in the middle of nowhere that the Holy Spirit simply cannot be contained in institutional forms. That realization makes me feel more intimate with Jesus that any number of churches ever could.
@RobertBunge thank you for such a layered and thoughtful response. Your historical framing especially the forgotten chapter between Persia, Islam, and the Western intellectual tradition, is illuminating, but what stayed with me most was your candid reflection on Christianity: the longing for childhood faith and the quiet sense of exile from its institutional expressions.
That tension, between spiritual inheritance and institutional estrangement, resonates deeply with me. I was raised at the edge of several traditions, in a context where no single spiritual lineage fully claimed me. That early ambiguity shaped a lifelong attentiveness to forms of belonging that emerge not through doctrine, but through lived, often unnameable, forms of contact with the sacred.
In the Philosophical Silk Road conversation, Vervaeke and Chris offer a vision of Christianity that felt profoundly liberating. Not as cultural posture or propositional system, but as a living path, one in which the sacred is neither confined by institutions nor erased by their absence. When Vervaeke spoke of Jesus as “the way,” not in doctrinal terms but as the embodied Logos, a presence we practice our way into through dialogos, through transformation… something clicked for me.
Chris’s reflections also landed powerfully. Especially his idea that the deepest religious experiences are not engineered or deduced, but received as a kind of awakening to love that remakes us. That felt consonant with what I’ve seen and felt in the quiet spaces outside formal religion, where people still long for contact with the real, the beautiful, the holy often in spite of the traditions they inherited, not because of them.
Your reflections make clear that this path (the road more than any fixed destination) is where the Spirit moves most freely. Thank you for making that visible. It makes the journey feel less solitary.