Meaning as Resonance: Significance, Coherence, and Purpose in an Architecture of Mattering

Two questions travel under the single word "meaning." One concerns reference: what a word, sign, or representation is about. The other concerns existence: the felt sense in which a life, a project, or a relationship has meaning or fails to. This paper concerns the second. It argues that existential meaning is the for-itself opened: a self-maintaining system whose own continuation is at stake for it, become aware of itself as such, reaches past its boundary to bind to another stake-bearer. Resonance is the felt signature of that binding. On the reading defended here the anchor of meaning is always a for-itself, whether bound to directly, as a living other, or through the sedimented practice of for-itselfs, as a craft or tradition, and these two modes mix rather than divide into kinds. The three components the literature on meaning in life has converged upon, significance, coherence, and purpose, are not three independent ingredients but one architecture seen from three angles: significance, felt mattering reinforced by connection, is the felt core; coherence is the narrative organization of resonant connection; purpose is its forward projection. The literature describes these components without deriving them. The account supplies the mechanism, and with it a distinction the literature lacks, between the resonant coupling that meaning is and the self-narrative that reports it, which can register the coupling or counterfeit it. Asked at its widest, of the totality rather than of a life, the question dissolves: the totality is not a for-itself and cannot be a partner to the relation, and what remains in facing it is not meaning but awe.