On Meaning-Adjacence

Meaning is a vexed subject. Why? I suppose that even talking about it suggests that it is something we can simply invoke and then apply like gauze on our skin. But as many commentators have suggested, including Heidegger and Wittgenstein, we are thrown into a world that is always-already meaningful. We do not choose how or where we are thrown, but that we are thrown is incontestable, and that we are thrown into a kind of matrix of meaning - our parents, our family, history, our culture, our background, our race, our class, our gender, etc. - is also incontestable. All of this suggests, then, that talk about meaning is slightly armchair philosophy-ish - helpful when we feel angst, or something similar, but mostly turbulence on the top of the water that, at the deeper levels, is quite quiet, dark, and secure.

And yet. I wonder about meaning, which we can define as a sense of significance, because for three years, from 2020-2023, I was psychotic, and so the meaning that I felt from the first-person perspective - a meaning that felt abundant, obvious, and overwhelming - was also a meaning that had a different standing in the shared common world of the second and third person. This then begs the question, what was the status of the meaning I experienced when psychotic? How is it possible to experience a meaning that is unshared?

When I was psychotic, I should say, I experienced what we could call a form of ontological blindness, or word-blindness. I'm not totally happy with the usage of "blindness" here - it seems potentially appropriative from the visually impaired community - but it can do for now. What I mean by ontological blindness is that I was living not only with psychosis, but also with anosognosia, so I did not have insight that I was psychotic. If one is psychotic, but knows they are psychotic, they still have at least one anchor in the shared common world. But when one has both psychosis and anosognosia, the shared world drops away in a major phenomenological sense. I want to get inside the experience of that, and I'll try to do that in this blogpost with the concept of "meaning-adjacence."

So what is meaning-adjacence? Meaning-adjacence is the experience of significance, when that significance is not publicly communicable. That does not mean the meaning is indeterminate; it can be very fully fleshed out in the mind of the person experiencing psychosis. It does mean that it is a significance experienced from the first-person perspective that is adjacent to meaning in the public shared world.

We do have a term already for a kind of aspect of meaning-adjacence, and that is "aberrant salience." Yet I think aberrant salience is more ontic, and more empirical, than meaning-adjacence, which I consider more structural, ontological, and phenomenological. Meaning-adjacence is related to Matthew Ratfcliffe's "existential feelings," in that the experience of it might also be connected to one's sense of reality and belonging.

Let me try to describe meaning-adjacence from a personal perspective: I was psychotic for three years, convinced that I was telepathic, that I was in touch with a cosmic shaman, and that the world as we see it was a false world, behind which was the telepathic world, which represented a more advanced way of communicating. (In reality I was hearing voices, and interpreting those voices as instantiations of telepathy.)

This is how I lived my life. These are the beliefs I held, which produced a world that was not the shared world. If you were to ask me then what I believed, I probably would not have told you, for I was paranoid as well, and believed that my autonomy was constantly threatened by people who did not like how powerful my consciousness was. (Notice the weid paradox of being powerful in my consciousness and yet being constantly threatened.) But what if I had told you? "I am an ancient being, manifesting through Andrew Field, and I am also the reincarnation of Aristotle. I am in touch with a cosmic shaman who lives outside the world."

Hearing this, most people would hopefully adduce that this person is mad. And they would be right. But this interests me less than the way in which, from the first-person perspective, these beliefs were corroborated by my hallucinations and delusions. There was a coherence to my experience when I was psychotic, but the coherence did not mesh in any way, shape or form with the common shared world. From the shared world, I was intensely incoherent. But from my world, I was coherent. How do we capture the friction inherent in this situation?

I think we need to talk about meaning, about significance. My world was meaningful to me, but not to others. It was a solipsistic world, a world I projected onto others. But it was also deeply meaningful, though this meaning was not able to be shared. Meaning-adjacence can do some work here. But it also presents a quandary - which is, how do we stretch "meaning" to include both the psychotic world and the shared common world? Because I believe the significance I felt when psychotic was ontologically different than the significance I feel now, in recovery. How is it different?

I suppose I want to invoke the notion of world-blindness here, though we could also call it "other-blindness." When I was psychotic, I was solipsistic, and so there was no room for the world as a shared place. Everything I thought, or saw, everything another person said, or expressed, tied into my delusions and hallucinations. Thus the significance I felt was meaning-adjacent. Meaning ultimately has to derive from the shared common world to make any sense. It's similar to Wittgenstein's argument about a private language, in that I suppose when I was psychotic, I really did think the meaning of words derived from their connection to a kind of private place in my mind. I suppose this serves as an argument for Wittgenstein's argument, in that believing this leads to a form of lunacy. But then I wonder, can I call what I was experiencing meaning?

I think, if we define meaning as an experience of significance in the shared world, then we can then use "meaning-adjacence" with some assuredness. But this then becomes problematic, because it seems as if we are saying that psychosis is not meaningful, when it feels profoundly meaningful. Maybe it would help to differentiate between private experience and private meaning. For it is of course possible to have a private experience of pain, or a delusion, or hallucination. But as soon as this is taken up in language - "I'm in pain"; "I'm hallucinating"; "I am paranoid" - then we are talking not about experiences exclusively, but meaning.

Am I then saying that the notion of psychotic meaning or significance doesn't make sense? No: the experience of meaning or significance while psychotic is undeniable. But perhaps I am trying to draw attention to certain differences in our understanding of meaning. For example, we talk about

1. Meaninglessness

2. Meaningfulness

Yet meaninglessness cannot apply to the experience of psychosis, because it is so meaningful to the person experiencing it. Yet meaningfulness in the Wittgensteinian sense also does not make sense, because meaning derives from a shared set of practices, a shared set of rules. So where do we locate psychosis in this spectrum of meaning? Let's do this again:

1. Meaningfulness

2. Meaning-adjacence

3. Meaninglessness

Meaning-adjacence can then call attention to the fact that psychosis is not shared, but it is experienced as meaningful. By meaning-adjacence I do not mean a feeling of meaning that is private, as in aberrant salience. I mean the very conditions of psychosis that make aberrant salience possible. Those conditions involve experiences of significance that are not publicly communicable, even if they are shared in recovery through words or langauge or whatever. I suppose this is what Karl Jaspers meant when he considered delusions "ununderstandable."