Nothingness and the human umwelt: a cultural-ecological approach to meaning

In the paper I argue that the great impact of empiricism on psychology and the enclosed dualist agenda traps psychological phenomena into subjectivism. By discussing the phenomena of nothingness in biological and cultural life it is argued that meaning must be considered as a phenomenon that represents both a fit and a misfit of the individual with the environment. By stressing the overall presence of nothingness phenomena it is argued how the reduced ontology of empiricism--and its blindness to relations and transformations out of which meaning grows--should be overcome. In human cultural life, transformations are constitutive and ongoing changes are being produced to make sure that continuity as well as discontinuity will happen. The analysis of especially one case--the removal of an Amish school after a shooting episode--serves to prove how meaning grows out of cultural processes as people produce their own conditions of life. From a cultural-ecological point of view, analyzing meaning at the level of individual phenomenology, hence, means analyzing the 'total psychological situation' (legacy of Kurt Lewin). This may for instance include analyzing how people live, what they consider important and worth preserving, what must be changed, what are their core values and how do institutional arrangements contribute to keeping up that which is valued or to changing that which is not, etc. Meaning may be viewed the lived-out experience-the domain of self-generativity in human life.