The Abyss Triumphant

by Clark Ashton Smith

The force of suns had waned beyond recall.
Chaos was re-established over all,
Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps
Fled unrelated, cold, immusical.

Above the tumult heaven alone endured;
Long since the bursting walls of hell had poured
Demon and damned to peace erstwhile denied,
Within the Abyss God's might had not immured.

(He could but thwart it with creative mace. . . .)
And now it rose about the heavenly Base,
Mordant at pillars rotten through and through
Of Matter's last, most firm abiding-place.

Bastion and minaret began to nod,
Till all the pile, unmindful of His rod,
Dissolved in thunder, and the void Abyss
Caught like a quicksand at the feet of God !

The End Of Meaning VIII

Modernity is characterized by the fact that man has emerged from his in-ness in a horizon, from his containment in a womb; all the facts discussed under the heading “the end of in-ness” above are evidence to this development. Of course I am here not speaking about empirical individuals. When I say “man” here, I am speaking about the general form of the logical constitution of being human, the concept or logic as the medium of the existence of a concrete empirical individual. Man has emerged from the ocean of meaning. He raised his head above the surface of the ocean and now has it out in the open. He has awakened from the One Dream or Sandplay that existence in the world had been and now is fundamentally and irrevocably extra ecclesiam, as Jung had pointed out, as well as extra naturam. He has lost his myths, his symbols. He now looks back down upon consciousness at large from outside. The flight to the moon and beyond to other planets, the observation of planet Earth from satellites, the looking back down upon the Earth from outer space: all this is the technical objectification of the psychological fact that consciousness has now taken a position outside itself and has become aware of itself and of man as consciousness. He has hatched from the Orphic world egg (End Of Meaning, by Wolfgang Geigerich).

Man has emerged from the ocean of meaning and has no idea what he has emerged from. He does not recall what he has lost. This is why we ask the question, "What is the meaning of life?" Man once swam in meaning, but now he has walked out of it and cannot remember from whence he came.

Spending one's life searching for meaning seems to have the opposite effect, i.e. the more one searches, the more life seems meaningless. It is akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that

the more precisely one variable is known, the less precisely the other is known. This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system, but rather about the nature of the system itself (Wikipedia).

I can say it no better than Geigerich himself:

What is the delusion? The search for meaning seeks something that cannot be sought, because any seeking for it destroys what is to be gained. Meaning is not an entity that could be had, not a creed, a doctrine, a worldview, also not something like the fairytale treasure hard to attain. It is not semantic, not a content. Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori. It can never be the answer to a question; it is, conversely, an unquestioned and unquestionable certainty that predates any possible questioning. It is the groundedness of existence, a sense of embeddedness in life, of containment in the world—perhaps we could even say of in-ness as the logic of existence as such. Meaning exists if the meaning of life is as self-evident as the in-ness in water is for fish (ibid.).

Meaning Of Life VII

Geigerich begins his description of Pre-Modern Man, who has no need to ask the questions of meaning because he is enveloped in a state of in-ness.

Man is fundamentally unborn. Despite his literal biological birth, he has logically never left the in-ness in a womb. In being biologically born, he only exchanged the biological womb for another, a metaphysical womb, the womb of Meaning (End Of Meaning, by Wolfgang Geigerich).

Man (I am here not speaking about the empirical individual, but, on the logical level, about Man at large, his “humanity”: the concept of man as and in which we all live) is not born directly into the environment, not “thrust into existence,” as the 20th-century existentialists thought. He is born first of all into and contained in myths, meanings, ideas, images, words, creeds, theories, traditions. They stand irrevocably between him and external reality, so that he is not naked, and it not either. Everything in the world is hopelessly enwrapped in mythical garments; nothing is just what it pragmatically is. Tools, weapons, things and events in nature, regardless of whether big or small, the activities of daily life: everything has its story about its primordial divine origin and cosmic significance, and this its mythical or metaphysical reality is its primary reality. Naked reality is fundamentally out of reach. When man came into this world, he ipso facto had entered into One ongoing, continuous, and all-comprehensive Dream, a dream from which there was no awakening since this dream was his real world and life, his “reality principle.” What we call consciousness is just as much part of this Dream as are the many particular literal dreams (which normally are thought to belong to “the unconscious”) (End Of Meaning, by Wolfgang Geigerich).

I must admit, Geigerich has a point. Certainly, we come into this world and immediately inherit all the "myths, meanings, ideas, images, words, creeds, theories, traditions" of our ancestors (I must remind myself we are talking on a logical level here, not of the literal, biological birth). This is another sort of womb; we exchange one womb for another. In this way, Geigerich claims Man is unborn. "He merely exchanges the biological womb of the mother for a second womb, the spiritual womb, the amniotic sac of the mind, images, and meanings." In this way, the latter womb is like the spacesuit astronauts wear: Man "enters the environment only safely encapsulated in the space-suit, or should we say environment-suit, of his images, ideas, concepts, words."

We are born into this world, not directly exposed to the world in the same way as animals. Animals come into this world totally naked and live according to their survival instincts. They have no conscious knowledge of what they are doing. They are in a state of total unconsciousness.

Man is born encapsulated in a cocoon (to use Geigerich's word) of images, words, myths, and ideas. He has knowledge, he knows what he is doing, so he lives in a state of consciousness. Geigerich call him "Overanimal." What man doesn't know is how he knows. He has no conscious awareness of his consciousness.

I think we are all born into this "pre-modern" state. Some of us spend our entire lives encapsulated in a kind of spacesuit that buffers us from the harshness of an existence where we must question our own existence. A few of us, through introspection and self-questioning, break through the cocoon and begin to see reality for what it is, begin to become conscious of our own consciousness. The Apostle Paul said, "We see through a glass darkly," but then face-to-face."

The Meaning Of Life In Three Words

I don't know.

Meaning Of Life Part VI

In the case of the death of one individual symbol through consciousness's transition from an exoteric to an esoteric standpoint toward it, it may well be that this loss is compensated for by the emergence of a new symbol pregnant with a different meaning so that there is a new fascination. This is what had in fact happened in history many times; there have been numerous periods of cultural crisis when the old gods or symbols had lost their conviction and new ones had not fully taken hold of people but were slowly emerging. These times of transition were times of empirical and temporal suffering from the loss of meaning, while the fundamental, logical in-ness continued even across the period of its empirical absence. This type of change and predicament could be compared to the unrest during a removal, when one is no longer in one's old home and has not yet moved into one's new home (End Of Meaning, by Wolfgang Geigerich).

With our culture's loss of meaning, we exist in such a transitional period, a time of suffering. The old symbols we once cherished and drew sustenance from are now dead. It is a time of sorrow, of confusion. What do we do? We eat, drink, sleep, have sex, and toil at jobs we loathe. Then, there are the lucky ones, who don't realize they have lost all meaning. These go from day-to-day, mindlessly, blissfully stumbling through their moronic existence, thinking of nothing but self-aggrandizement. They have their meaning. They have no reason to suffer.

Those who suffer most, however, are the ones who realize we are in the process of passing from one evolutionary stage to another. We are in a kind of purgatory, hanging between heaven and hell, in limbo between Man and Overman.

Meaning Of Life Part V

Clearly, man's embeddedness in nature is over. But since the meaning of "meaning" is nothing else but in-ness, it is obvious why the last two centuries had a sense of alienation and nihilism. As Jung stated, to experience a loss of meaning, the "soul has become lonely; it is extra ecclesiam and in a state of no salvation." The soul is likewise extra naturam. With this insight we have returned in our discussion to, and provided an underpinning for, Jung's initial diagnosis, "No, evidently we no longer have any myth."

The days of man's in-ness, his total containment in Nature, have come to an end. The loss of meaning has resulted in mankind's constant questioning after it. It is futile because the situation has changed.

Giegerich contends there are two opposing positions we can take. One can either defend the past mythological age, standing against all who attack it, or one can accept the new situation we find ourselves in and learn from it.

By longing for "meaning," the first option defends, to be sure, the old sense of in-ness, i.e., the in-ness in the former situation, but therefore has to renounce what it actually most desires, in-ness as an actual reality, which, however, today would be the in-ness in the utterly new psychological situation of being extra ecclesiam et naturam and not the in-ness of old. Either way, a loss is unavoidable.

One can easily see the quandary we moderns are in.

This first option reminds me of a group like the fundamentalist Christians, who fight tooth and nail to preserve what they believe is the original truth of Christ. It is interesting to note that they do this while rejecting all symbolism and metaphor found in the scriptures in lieu of a literal interpretation.

Giegerich claims the second option is today's reality. History is

the soul's alchemical retort, and we collectively are the prime matter in this hermetically sealed retort and are transported through one phase of history's alchemical opus after the other, each time finding ourselves in an entirely new world situation.

The first option, a negative interpretation of the fundamental change from myth and metaphysics to modernity, does not work. So much has become clear. We have to turn to the second option, that is to say, to let ourselves be placed by the soul's process into the situation that is. It must teach us how to interpret our situation.

Meaning Of Life Part IV

The search for meaning, according to Giegerich, is self-contradictory:

The search for meaning is in truth, but secretly, the longing for a state of in-ness, but since the question about the worth and meaning of life has existence as a whole in its field of vision, it inevitably positions us outside and vis-a-vis life. The search for meaning unwittingly has to construe that which it desires to be the logic or syntax of life as a semantic content, as a kind of doctrine of wisdom or a creed or ideology, ultimately as a commodity. This is why today meaning exists in the plural of numerous competing meanings put up for sale on a large "meaning market" by a whole "meaning industry", and why we are in the position of customers who have to make their decisions and choices about these "meanings." Even if we "buy" a certain meaning and immure ourselves in it, nothing can undo the fact that it is a secondary acquisition and that our in-ness in it, if it comes to exist at all, is like that in a house that we ourselves built or rented, not that kind of a priori and irrevocable in-ness that was actually sought.

Let's examine Giegerich's term, "in-ness," a little closer. As was previously stated, Giegerich compares in-ness to that state in which a fish has its existence in water. It is totally contained in its world and this is its meaning for existence. It doesn't need to question it; it just is.

Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori. It can never be the answer to a question; it is, conversely, an unquestioned and unquestionable certainty that predates any possible questioning. It is the groundedness of existence, a sense of embeddedness in life, of containment in the world--perhaps we could even say of in-ness as the logic of existence as such. Meaning exists if the meaning of life is as self-evident as the in-ness in water is for fish.

Humans, prior to the end of the mythological age, were totally immersed in their world. Their myths, legends, and religions were not offered as answers to questions concerning the meaning of life. Rather, they were emanations of human thought that factually expressed human experience as totally contained, totally immersed in Nature.

There were different ways of expressing in-ness. One was expressed imaginally through the creation of myths; another was through metaphysics, utilizing human reason. These modes of thought

were the self-expression in consciousness of the meaning
that was.

The end of in-ness, as we have discussed, came sometime in the nineteenth century, according to Giegerich. I can't help but think this was somehow meant to be. It is as if our evolution on this planet demanded that we shift our mode of existence for some unknown reason. Admitedlly, the shift has resulted in much pain and suffering for mankind. Just the psychological toll alone has been tremendous, not to mention the death and mayhem caused by various totalitarian ideologues who claimed to have solved the riddle of life.

I am reminded of how reality's pendulum swings from side to side, continuously. Do we strive to return to in-ness? I say, Live life as it is and do not strive at all. Live life to the fullest! Forget about meaning. The question is moot. Carpe diem!