Mattering as Resonance

In Hunting Magic Eels and The Shape of Joy I have described how existential significance and cosmic mattering are integral to mental health. I've written about this a lot. To experience our lives as meaningful we must view ourselves as significant, as mattering, as beings whose existence has value and worth. We need to feel that our lives count and that we are worthy of care and concern. Without this sense of mattering, people become vulnerable to a host of psychological difficulties, from loneliness to depression, to anxiety to despair.

I've also written a great deal about Hartmut Rosa's work on what he calls "resonance." For Rosa, resonance describes a particular way of relating to the world, a relation in which we can be addressed by something outside ourselves and respond in turn. The world speaks to us and we are capable of answering.

What I want to suggest is that mattering is an experience of resonance. Specifically, to experience ourselves as mattering is to stand in a resonant relation with our own being. Our own existence addresses us as something of value, significance, and worth. We encounter ourselves, in other words, as someone who matters. And this encounter calls for a response.

This call and response helps us see that mattering has an ethical dimension. If I experience myself as someone who matters, I am called to respond to myself with care and concern. I should treat my own being as something worthy of protection, nurture, and love. And because mattering is relational, I also expect others to recognize and respond to my value. Not in any entitled sense, but simply as a subject of human dignity, the reciprocal and relational resonance of the Golden Rule. I respond to myself as someone who matters. I extend that recognition to others. And I expect to receive that same recognition in return. Human dignity is an exchange of gifts. We become, for ourselves and for one another, objects of care and concern.

The opposite of this mattering-as-resonance is self-alienation and cosmic estrangement. When I can no longer experience my own being as something that addresses me with value and significance, I become alienated from myself. I experience myself as an object rather than a person, something to be managed, evaluated, used, or optimized. Worse, I come to experience myself as an obstacle to be overcome or jettisoned. Such self-alienation tends to occur within an alienated relation to the world itself. We experience cosmic estrangement. We no longer feel at home in the universe. We become disconnected from the larger world. And flowing from all these forms of alienation, a lost resonance with the self, are a host of mental health problems: loneliness, depression, anxiety, despair, nihilism, and a diminished sense of self.

Mental health, therefore, is more than regulating our negative emotions and correcting dysfunctional thoughts. Our flourishing demands recovering a resonance with ourselves, experiencing ourselves as mattering.