The Seba library treats Meaning Giver in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Yalom, Irvin D., Neimeyer, Robert A, Kerényi, Karl).
Nothing in the world has significance e… Both to constitute (to be responsible for) oneself and one’s world and to be aware of one’s responsibility is a deeply frightening insight.
Yalom, drawing on Sartre, argues that the human being is its own Meaning Giver—a position carrying existential terror, since no external source guarantees significance.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
the need for meaning has been so frequently observed and so urgently pursued by individuals coping with such events that a number of theorists have suggested that finding meaning is critical for successful adjustment.
Davis, surveying the bereavement literature, identifies meaning-finding as a near-universal adaptive imperative, implying that the self must assume the function of Meaning Giver when catastrophe dissolves prior frameworks.
Kleio, ‘the giver of fame’; Euterpe, ‘the giver of joy’; Thaleia, ‘the festive’
Kerenyi’s enumeration of the Muses by their epithets situates the divine feminine as archetypal Meaning Givers whose bestowal of fame, joy, and song constitutes the original endowment of significance.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
we are not enquiring about them… but we are enquiring about the meaning of men in giving them these names,—in this there can be small blame.
Plato’s Socrates relocates the question of meaning-giving from divine prescription to human intentionality, probing what the original name-imposers—figured as philosophers—understood themselves to be doing.
, Cratylus, -388supporting
only the ancient form shows the intention of the giver of the name; of which the reason is, that men long for (imeirousi) and love the light which comes after the darkness
Socrates identifies the ‘giver of the name’ as the primordial Meaning Giver whose intentional act encodes desire and cosmological orientation into language, a process obscured by later linguistic drift.
, Cratylus, -388supporting
‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are not primarily objective; they belong to the speaker, whatever the speaker’s status; before being a social, political, scientific, etc. instance, the speaker is an enunciating instance.
Benveniste shifts meaning-giving from a metaphysical agent to the enunciating subject, making the act of utterance—not prior intention or external authority—the locus at which significance is produced.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
‘The language contains the society… Only what the language denotes is social… The language is thus always the interpretant.’
Benveniste’s claim that language is ‘always the interpretant’ positions it as a structural Meaning Giver that precedes and conditions any individual act of signification.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
A story told by Viktor Frankl is illustrat[ive]
Yalom’s citation of Frankl in the context of existential methodology gestures toward the tradition that identifies the individual’s will-to-meaning as the operative Meaning Giver in therapeutic practice.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
As soon as they are mana, the most heterogeneous things are the same, all parts of the divine process.
Jung’s account of mana illustrates how archetypal projection operates as an involuntary Meaning Giver, investing otherwise neutral objects with numinous significance outside rational control.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside