An in-depth exploration of the components of meaningfulness. The key role of the elusive. The relationship with self-understanding and ethics.

Starting point is that meaningfulness is essential to the life of man and that meaningfulness is desirable and possible in a meaningful world. Likewise we recognise that properties or conditions of - and intuitions concerning - meaningfulness are obscure. We intent to shed more light on them in a systematic way. More specifically, this study concerns two interrelated subjects. Firstly, we intend to provide a further demarcation of one of the key elements of the experience of meaningfulness, which we will call the 'elusive element'. Secondly, we will elaborate on the components of meaning, these being linkedness: the experience of a nexus with something or somebody; situatedness: the experience of being situated within something; c q. within the social, cultural and historical horizon and the natural horizon, and orientedness: the experience of being oriented towards something, c.q. towards an ethical horizon. Authors like Cottingham, Wolf and Audi - within their respective contexts - start from the premise that meaningfulness comes in degrees of 'more' or 'less', without working this out. We have introduced gradations to enable a more accurate approach of these categories, distinguishing six theoretical degrees of experiencing meaningfulness, starting from a limited perception and gradually increasing towards a fuller experience. We have related these gradations to ethics and self-understanding, with particular emphasis on the genesis of inter-ethics.