Purpose Before Meaning: A Process Theory of Meaning Formation

Debates about meaning in life are commonly framed in terms of subjective, objective, or hybrid accounts. While these approaches illuminate important aspects of the problem, they typically treat meaning as a relatively static property grounded either in personal attitudes or in objective values, and they focus on where meaning resides rather than how it emerges. This paper proposes a process theory of meaning. The analysis begins with lived experience: human beings encounter conditions such as suffering, curiosity, or limitation that generate tensions requiring orientation. When these experiences are accepted rather than resisted, the psychological energy previously absorbed by resistance — understood here as attentional and motivational capacity freed from avoidant processing — becomes available for engagement with reality. From this process emerges an intuited purpose: a pre-reflective direction of action, understood through Gendlin's felt sense and Husserl's pre-predicative consciousness, that is distinguished from both explicit goal-setting and the deliberately chosen purposes discussed in logotherapy and existentialist accounts. Meaning then arises as a form of conscious engagement associated with pursuing this purpose while remaining grounded in reality, involving three analytically distinct dimensions: experiential, cognitive, and existential. Satisfaction is a necessary but not sufficient component of meaning; coherence and significance are equally required. The six stages of the model are logically ordered but may overlap or operate recursively in lived experience. The paper advances a Principle of Purpose-Precedence: purpose precedes meaning, and purpose itself arises from accepted experience.