The Meaning of Life: Thoughts on Vervaeke’s Agent-Arena Relationship

(Cross-posted from my substack: https://thewiderangle.substack.com/)

The phrase ‘meaning of life’ raises eyebrows. It’s common to feel that while understanding the meaning of life would be great, it’s just not the kind of thing we can even hope to understand - especially not by means of a rigorous, scientific approach.

But in fact the situation is far from hopeless. Recent decades have seen a surge of insightful work on the meaning of life in both analytic philosophy and cognitive science.

Works in analytic philosophy like What is this thing called the meaning of life and Meaning in Life and Why it Matters do a great job of showing how the things that we mean when we use that phrase (or its cousin ‘meaning in life’) tie up with tractable issues in other areas of philosophy and science.

And books like The Psychology of Meaning or The Experience of Meaning in Life show a growing focus on the topic within mainstream cognitive science and clinical psychology.

John Vervaeke’s recent work on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis stands out for me as an exemplar of philosophically-informed cognitive science in this area.

His work is multi-faceted, covering topics such as wisdom and rationality as well as meaning. In this post I want to zoom in on a particular conceptual framing Vervaeke uses to approach the question of meaning, namely the ‘agent-arena relationship’.

I’ll also suggest how this framing offers a fresh angle from which to approach the key questions associated with the meaning of life in recent analytic philosophy.

The Agent-Arena Relationship

Vervaeke introduces the agent-arena relationship with the example of a professional football match played in a literal ‘arena’ or stadium. The ‘agent’ in this context is an individual football player.

And the idea is that playing football is also an excellent example of meaningful activity, in that it’s experienced as making sense in an especially coherent way:

If a football player steps onto a football field, he knows intimately how to interact with it and involve himself in it. It presents itself coherently to him

So it seems that the arena here - the football pitch and its associated rules - is constitutive of the player’s experience of meaning.

But notice also that trying to play tennis in a football stadium would be the opposite of a meaningful experience: it would seem absurd and futile.

This implies that the experience of meaning derives not only from the arena, but also from the agent and his or her stance towards the arena. The agent’s plans and intentions - to play tennis or football - must fit the arena.

Many traditional approaches to the meaning of life assume that such meaning must be either objective - in the world or arena - or subjective - in the subject or agent.

On such approaches it is often argued that the world revealed by natural science is lacking in meaning, with the result that we’re thrown back on our ‘subjective’ selves in our search for such meaning.

But the agent-arena framing shows this up as a false dichotomy.

It’s not only that meaning requires a fit between agent and arena. It’s that agent and arena are mutually interdependent.

The arena becomes an arena in virtue of being organised in such a way that the agent knows how to act in it - the football pitch has clear boundaries, within which specific rules must be followed by players.

And the agent becomes an agent in virtue of being in an arena: you just can’t be a football player if you’ve never set foot on a football pitch of some kind.

A cognitive science of meaning

Aside from the way it grabs hold of the experience of meaning in the way we’ve discussed, the appeal of the agent-arena framing is that it lends itself to naturalistic explanation, by means of a cognitive science of meaning.

In the second half of his lecture series, Vervaeke goes on to sketch such an explanation, using ideas from dynamical systems theory and embodied-enactive cognitive science.

This embodied-enactive approach understands cognition in general in terms of the interaction of an organism with its environment, for example through sensorimotor feedback loops.

You can already start to see the connection to Vervaeke’s framing here: the organism is the agent, the environment the arena.

Where Vervaeke takes this quite common approach a step further is in understanding experience and consciousness in general in terms of dynamical networks that support what he calls ‘relevance realisation’ - where relevance is a concept closely bound up with significance and meaning.

To go back to the football example, we might say that the football player’s experience of a meaningfully structured arena for action can be understood further as involving a dynamic, ever-changing search for and realisation of relevance. The specific arc of the incoming ball, or the subtle cues that an opposing player is about to turn left, become intensely relevant in the flow of the footballer’s experience.

The Meaning Triad

So Vervaeke sees the ability to sync up with a hard-nosed scientific account as a strength of the agent-arena framing, and I agree.

But I also think that this framing neatly captures what we have in mind when we consider the ‘meaning of life’.

Consider first that while the concept of an arena fits especially well with the football example I’ve used, it is of course intended to apply to a very wide range of life ‘situations’. And in fact we do speak of the ‘domestic arena’, the ‘political arena’ and so on.

Whatever arena one finds oneself in, we can consider the fittedness of one’s activity to that arena as generating the experienced meaningfulness of that activity.

Possessing a sense of meaning in life as a whole would then be a matter of the fit between one’s activities or projects and the arena constituted by the world as a whole.

And this framing matches up well with the analysis given by philosophers like Stewart Goetz and Joshua Seachris of what we are really getting at when we talk of the ‘meaning of life’.

In their book, What is this thing called the meaning of life they present what they call the ‘meaning triad’. Both usage of the word ‘meaning’ in general, and questions about the meaning of life, they argue can be analysed into three related aspects or dimensions: intelligibility, significance and purpose.



Intelligibility or ‘I-meaning’ is about the activity of making sense of the world. This aspect of meaning is a key part of what is expressed in concerns about the absurdity of life, and the difficulty of understanding life as a “coherent, existentially satisfying whole”.

Significance or ‘S-meaning’ is about things like “value, mattering, importance, impact, salience and being the object of care and concern”. It comes to the fore in questions of whether our individual actions can really make a difference in the grand scheme, and whether life has the kind of value that would make it ‘worth living’.

Purpose or ‘P-meaning’ is about whether our lives have a purpose, whether individually, in the sense of ‘life goals’ - or cosmically, in the sense of having a purpose in the cosmic scheme of things.

As Goetz and Seachris point out, one approach to the meaning of life might be to focus on each of these separately - and in so doing meet half-way those sceptics who argue that ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is not really a single, coherent question.

Vervaeke’s theory of meaning, on the other hand, seems to support the more unified approach of seeking what binds the meaning triad together.

Agent-arena and the Meaning Triad

Intelligibility, significance and purpose all come together in the agent-arena relationship.

Intelligibility was introduced right at the start as a fundamental dimension of the agent-arena relationship. Where the agent’s intentions are fitted to the organising structures of the arena, the arena emerges as a coherent space in which things makes sense. And the absence of this fittedness - as in the case of the tennis-player on the football pitch - is what generates absurdity and meaninglessness.

At the wider level of life as a whole, we can speak of the coherence of an overall ‘worldview’. Vervaeke actually introduces the agent-arena relationship to describe the coherence of the Aristotelian worldview (which became central to Christianity too):

Aristotle’s cosmos provided an exceptionally coherent agent-arena worldview. His idea of character explained how one became an agent, how you could know and structure yourself to conform to your environment. By providing the geocentric worldview, he also provided an arena - how the cosmos was organized so we could meaningfully interact with it

And the absurdity or meaninglessness often attributed to life in the modern world, for example in existentialism, can be explained in terms of the break-down of worldviews such as Aristotle’s, and the perception that the basic nature of the world as revealed by the sciences is not a structure organised for meaningful interaction in this way.

One way out of this ‘meaning crisis’, Vervaeke therefore suggests, is to reinterpret the scientific worldview in a way that brings out such possibilities of meaningful interaction, including ways in which cognitive science can support broadly Aristotelean perspectives on virtue and wisdom.

Significance , as we’ve also seen, is at work in the agent-arena relationship through the process of relevance-realisation. The arena’s organising structure and rules define what counts as winning the game, and what counts as progress towards that goal. In so doing they also give relevance to specific details of the agent’s situation, such as the position, stance and alertness of the goalkeeper.

And what the agent-arena framing suggests is that ideas of ‘value’ emerge from this more fundamental space of practical engagement3. It is only within the organising context of the arena that it makes sense to speak of the value of ‘a good pass’ or ‘excellent dribbling skills’.

Similarly the football-player’s purpose of winning the match, can be seen as an emergent property of the agent-arena relationship and not the agent or arena individually.

Without the arena - the rules that define how to win, the cheering fans that make winning desirable - it is impossible for the agent to adopt this purpose. But it is also impossible to speak of the goal of winning, without reference to specific agents who have that as their goal.

What made Aristotle’s worldview so engaging was that everything in the world had a ‘telos’ or purpose, including human beings. What the agent-arena framing suggests is that we should explore how the modern, scientific worldview could evolve to help recover a sense of purpose, by revealing the organising structures in nature, society and the mind that can make human purposes meaningful.

The Meaning of Life

I’ve tried to show how the cognitive science of Vervaeke’s agent-arena framing maps on nicely onto what really matters to us about the meaning of life from a philosophical angle.

We can indeed hope to understand the meaning of life - in a way that improves on the shallow advice that we must each find our own - with a rigorous and scientific approach.

The agent-arena framing clarifies why we pose our deepest questions in terms of the meaning of something beyond ourselves: life, the universe and everything. Meaning in life is the meaning of an arena for an agent.

Agent-Arena relationship:
I’d say that meaning arises from the relationship between agent and arena that is dialectically forming through interaction. Defining the meaning as something that exists within structural boundaries of the pitch would exclude any interaction that’s outside of those rules.

Meaning of life:
Can a collection of Incidence-Meaning (Situational meaning or moment’s meanings) form an opus titled Life’s meaning?

How “meaningful” does meaning need to be?

Falling in love, for example, can be seen as an existential act that involves the creation of meaning. Love defines the existence and purpose.

Is the amount of meaning needed defined by your hunger for meaning?

How is the presence of meaning validated? Joy? Neurotic obsessiveness? This should point at the essence of meaning.

One way of looking at this is that there are multiple layers of meaning. The football player wants to win the game (arena=stadium) but also to progress his career (arena = society) but may find his/her experience of meaning is lacking something if not grounded in a larger vision (arena=world). The first two levels are genuinely meaningful, but not optimally so if the wider layer is absent.

Thanks Jonas. Meaning question is really interesting. I wonder whether the meaning is contained within the fulfilment of one’s (sacred?) purpose (self-actualisation) independent of the measurable positive/negative impact on oneself or the world or is the meaning something that can be evaluated objectively. This is not to say that one shouldn’t strive to impact positively the world, but more for people not to torture themselves seeking the meaningful meaning, but to follow the divine’s direction for meaning (I used - falling in love, can be enjoying the nature or contemplation). BTW - I’m not using “divine” out of some deep religiousness - just figuratively.

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Yes, I think this is a fundamental question here, and will depend on one’s overall epistemology. The extent to which one thinks something like objective knowledge is possible will also be the extent to which objective meaning is possible, in the agent-arena framing, since meaning is linked to knowledge of the arena.