The End of Meaning

More thoughts spawned by the mass shooter episode I'm working on

Years back, I came across an essay by the German depth psychologist and philosopher, Wolfgang Geigerich, called The End of Meaning. Geigerich was a trained acolyte of Carl Jung, but in this essay he leveled a criticism of Jung’s happy assumption that modern people could find the missing meaning in their lives by identifying the archetypal and mythic narratives at play in them. Jung once remarked that on his many travels, he had encountered people who were on their third trip around the world - uniterruptedly. “Just travelling, travelling; seeking, seeking.” Geigerich quotes Jung:

One such woman (Jung) asked: “‘What for?… What are you trying to do that for?’ And I was amazed when I looked into her eyes - the eyes of a hunted, cornered animal… She is nearly possessed…” But then he continues: “And why is she possessed? Because she does not live the life that makes sense. Hers is a life utterly, grotesquely banal, utterly poor, meaningless, with no point in it at all. If she is killed today, nothing has happened, nothing has vanished - because she is nothing. But if she could say, ‘I am the daughter of the Moon. Every night I must help the Moon, my Mother, over the horizon’ - ah, that is something else! Then she lives, then her life makes sense, and makes sense in all continuity, and for the whole of humanity.”

Geigerich points out, accurately, I think, that the ‘cure’ proposed by Jung is actually only a repetition of the illness itself:

“Daughter of the Moon”—this is absolutely out of reach for a modern woman; it is precisely an idea that could only be sought in an endless, futile search (italics mine). Thus Jung conjures up the very transcendence the longing for which is the cause of such seeking. Jung’s suggestion feeds her neurotic craving, her “addiction.”… It is her very problem that while as a modern woman she cannot possibly say anything like what Jung suggested, she nevertheless thinks she ought to be able to (italics mine); it is her problem that on principle there are no mythological garments that would fit her, but that she nevertheless is unconsciously convinced that it is indispensable to have one. This is the neurotic trap that turns her into the pointless seeker, the hunted, cornered animal which Jung saw in her eyes.

In the essay, Geigerich fleshes out his thesis that ‘meaning’ - if by that term we mean a sense of embeddedness in a fixed symbolic system which relates the parts of one’s life to the whole, the whole to the parts, and both to the world at large - is simply no longer accessible to modern people. Indeed, the way Geigerich and many other thinkers would put it, the inaccessibility of fixed meaning systems is precisely what makes us modern. To the woman whom Jung suggests might learn to follow the Pueblo Indian example by thinking of herself as a Daughter of the Moon (or some appropriately contextual alternative), Geigerich insists her only path out of the corner is to recognize the longing for meaning, accept that it is not available to her, and see that her desperate search for it is the very source of suffering and insufficiency that chases her like prey. This is the basic mechanism of most addictions: the object of addiction eventually creates and exerbates the problems only it can solve, and the addict ends up in a recursive loop that can only be escaped by radical intervention.

After addressing Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’, Geigerich extends his thesis on the impossibility of meaning to the practice of religion. He says that, as any clinical psychologist knows, it is common for patients brought up in a religious tradition to complain that they cannot truly feel their faith, not the way they read about in books, or the way that the preacher says they’re supposed to feel if they’re doing it right, with their whole heart. These are people deeply committed to the idea of their religion, and who long for an experience of the divine, and who suffer deeply for not being able to find that experience. Geigerich says that this malady is another example of the traveling woman encountered by Jung. His patients believe they ought to be able to access a kind of unitive experience no longer available to us without a total abandonment of all personal and social considerations (and even then, one is likely to simply go mad before becoming a mystic, see: George Price), and it is this very longing for the impossible that causes the sense of lack they interpret as a need for religious experience.

By the end of the paper (it’s about 50 pages), the reader is in the heady state one is in after laboring through a dense meditation on the question of meaning. And then Geigerich smacks you in the face with a passage I’ve never been able to fully put out of my mind.

There is one, and only one, way… religion can today still be a present reality and not just a commodity and hobby. Under the conditions of modernity, the price for giving religion the status of present reality is, however, that it has to be reduced to the zero grade of itself, religion without any dignity, any substantial content and any conscious awareness. Where does religion as present reality show today? Only in the momentary acts of certain irrational, meaningless crimes: in the action directe of the bombings and shootings, e.g., of the Unabomber and the Columbine and Erfurt high school shootings, in certain cases of sexual abuse and murder of children, etc. Here, the numinous is an immediate reality, as a tremendum breaking through the indifference and “banality” of everyday life, and as an overwhelming power “religiously observed” by the individuals committing these crimes, who usually give up for their passion any hope for a future happiness. But the numinous is here a reality for only one short moment, without substantial dignified content, totally abstract and absolutely blind, bringing not the least spiritual reward (blessing, illumination, experience of meaning) for anybody. It is just the empty shell of religion, the abstract naked form of the sacred, and as such the legitimate form of religion as a living reality today.

Before you object to the association of such monstrous acts with ‘religious’ experience, I would just remind you that monstrous acts - including torture, human sacrifice (including of children), cannibalism, and acts we would interpret as sexual abuse - have been associated with the sacred for much of human history. It may be worth noting how many of the first civilizations that emerged out of the neolithic - Mesoamerican civilization, the Phoenician, Etruscan, and Levantine civilizations - had come, by the time they were conquered by warriors from the steppe, sea, and desert, to associate an orgy of bloodletting with their central religious rituals.

I recalled that disturbing passage from Geigerich the other day after being interviewed by my friend Astral Flight (coming up soon on his Astral Flight Simulation podcast). We discussed the phenomenon of school shooters and other spree killers, and I found myself thinking about something that often comes to mind after one of these incidents, namely: What is going through the mind of one of these people as he walks through the doors of the school or movie theater. Probably up until the very moment he pulls the trigger for the first time, he is still wondering if he’ll actually go through with it. Even after he pulls the trigger, I wonder, do these killers ever get partway through their massacre before suddenly awaking in shock and horror at what they’re doing? The Columbine massacre didn’t stop because the boys ran out of targets or ammunition. They had plenty of ammo left, and there were still hundreds of kids trapped in the school. After a while, the attack simply fizzled out, and they sort of wandered aimlessly, as if not sure what to do with themselves - like Jaoquin Phoenix’s Joker in the moments after his climactic murder of a talk show host. Witnesses testified that, near the end, the two boys walked past individual students and groups without firing at them. What were they thinking about? What did they talk about? At least one student heard one of the killers say, “Today is the day we die,” but we know little else.

I’ve had dreams like this. The dream starts and I’m already engaged in some kind of killing spree - often a fantastical one, like flying a video game-style fighter plane gunning people down and blowing things up - only to ‘wake up’ partway through the dream in horror at the crimes I’ve committed. Sometimes the dream is more basic: I will be running through a town or public place killing people, some people I even know and love, and the entire thing feels like a video game, or else there will be some justifying narrative, e.g., my victims have all become zombie-like or have been body-snatched. But then I snap out of it and realize that they were just people all along, that all of this was real, that none of this could be taken back, and all at once the full emotional weight of what I’ve done, and the permanence of it, comes down on me. The emotions I experience in the dream are so visceral and genuine that when I actually wake up, I am overwhelmed with relief and gratitude that I had not actually done these things.

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I once read an interview with an ISIS fighter who left the group to surrender. He admitted to taking part in massacres of several villages, in executions and other atrocities. And then, one day, he said, he was in the middle of an assault on some Yazidi village… and he awoke as if from a dream and it all became real to him. The first chance he got, he fled and surrendered.