A comprehensive journey through the history of "meaning," from antiquity to modern day. The word meaning appears often in our daily lives: religious leaders holding out the promise of meaning for their followers, self-help manuals seeking to demonstrate the power of meaning to enrich our lives, and most frequently people questioning the meaning of life. The word carries a multitude of connotations, from "purpose" to
"value" and "essence" to "mysterious truth", but this diversity of understanding is rarely explored. In What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy tells the story of how a word that began
by denoting "signifying" and "intending" came to acquire such a broad array of sub-definitions. The book begins with the early Christian thinkers who believed meaning could be "read" from the world as if it were holy scripture, then moves into the philosophers who adapted this notion and eventually the Romantic-era Germans that coined "the meaning of life," a phrase that later traveled to Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. The book also extends into the twentieth century, when
"meaning" acquired its greatest power in the realms of religion, psychotherapy, and self-help, all of which helped it to accumulate the fluidity and ambiguity it still displays today.
A comprehensive journey through the history of "meaning," from antiquity to modern day. The word meaning appears often in our daily lives: religious leaders holding out the promise of meaning for their followers, self-help manuals seeking to demonstrate the power of meaning to enrich our lives, and most frequently people questioning the meaning of life. The word carries a multitude of connotations, from "purpose" to
"value" and "essence" to "mysterious truth", but this diversity of understanding is rarely explored. In What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy tells the story of how a word that began
by denoting "signifying" and "intending" came to acquire such a broad array of sub-definitions. The book begins with the early Christian thinkers who believed meaning could be "read" from the world as if it were holy scripture, then moves into the philosophers who adapted this notion and eventually the Romantic-era Germans that coined "the meaning of life," a phrase that later traveled to Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. The book also extends into the twentieth century, when
"meaning" acquired its greatest power in the realms of religion, psychotherapy, and self-help, all of which helped it to accumulate the fluidity and ambiguity it still displays today.
Introduction. This Shifting, Ubiquitous Word
Chapter 1. The Ancient World Got Along without it till the Rise of
Christianity
Chapter 2. Christianity, Scripture, and "Reading" the World, from
Augustine to Bishop Berkeley
Chapter 3. Idealism and Romanticism: From the Language of Nature to
the Meaning of Life (or The World)
Chapter 4. Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson Bring the
"Mystery of Existence" and the "Sense of Life" to the
English-Speaking World
Chapter 5. Two Russian Titans Weigh in
Chapter 6. Paul Tillich: Bridge to the Twentieth Century and the
"Age of Anxiety"
Chapter 7. Meaning in the Age of Anxiety and Well Beyond
Chapter 8. Meaning Goes Clinical, Therapeutic, and Popular
Chapter 9. Meaning Bridges the Secular, the Secular Sacred, and the
Sacred
Conclusion. The Marvel of Meaning
Steven Cassedy is the author of six previous books, including To
the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to
America (Princeton, 1997), Dostoevsky's Religion (Stanford, 2005),
and Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few
Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth
Century (Stanford, 2014), which won a gold medal in US history at
the Independent Publisher Book
Awards (IPPY). He retired as a Distinguished Professor of
Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the
University of California, San Diego, in 2018 and now lives with his
wife Patrice, a playwright, in Riverdale, Bronx.
Steven Cassedy's What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning? is the
most theoretical...He goes back to basics in examining where and
when this slippery concept first emerged. The result is a truly
groundbreaking piece of scholarship (and I say that as someone who
has read a lot of books on this subject) as Cassedy locates the rot
starting wtih German romanticism and spreading under today's
self-help industry.
*Joe Humphreys, Irish Times*
Fascinating...an erudite account of the origins of the many facets
of meaning currently associated with the use of the term meaning in
such expressions as 'the meaning of life.'
*CHOICE*
Overall, Cassedy displays an extraordinary breadth of acquaintance
with numerous disciplines, from semantics to psychotherapy.
*John Saxbee, Former Bishop of Lincoln, Church Times*
Most people want to lead meaningful lives -- but what does the word
'meaning' really mean? In What Do We Mean When We Talk About
Meaning?, Steven Cassedy gives readers a fascinating history of
'meaning,' tracing how it transformed from an ordinary word in the
Middle Ages into the existentially weighty concept it is today.
This erudite book reminds us that meaning is a fluid and mysterious
concept -- but one that holds great power and promise.
*Emily Esfahani Smith, Author of The Power of Meaning*
A stimulating compound of wide-ranging intellectual history and
striking linguistic erudition providing many new insights into its
important subject.
*Jerrold Seigel, Professor Emeritus, New York University*
How did the words 'meaning' and 'life' become connected? Steven
Cassedy's remarkable intellectual history provides the first
comprehensive answer, by tracing the connection from the ancient
world, to German Romanticism, to the Catholic Church's adoption of
the language of 'meaning' in the 1960s. It's quite a story, very
irreverently told, and once you know it you might not want a
meaningful life anymore.
*James Tartaglia, Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Keele
University*
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