Cathy sent me a copy of Giegerich’s paper “End of Meaning” which I hadn’t read, nor even heard of. (Thanks Cathy!) It’s long and I’m still on the road so I’m reading it a few pages at a time when I stop and have a walk-break.

Here’s the abstract:

“Meaning” as in “the meaning of life” is not (“semantically”) a belief system, but (“syntactically”) the sense of “in-ness.” A comparison of the logic of animal existence with that of human existence reveals that man, despite having been biologically born, remained psychologically unborn, language, myth, metaphysics having served as a secondary psychological “uterus” for him. With the dramatic changes in the human situation since around 1800 (the closure of Western metaphysics, the industrial revolution), the previous in-ness was no more. This fundamental change can be seen as the eventual birth of man, astrologically expressed as the emergence of consciousness from the status of “fish in the water” to that of “Aquarius,” the lord of the waters. In this sense, the “loss” of meaning must not be interpreted negatively as a loss.

C. G. Jung’s personal need to nevertheless regain a new sense of meaning necessitated his becoming a psychologist. Only through the logical interiorization of former contents of myth and metaphysics, only through the displacement of the arena of essential questions from the public world to the so-called unconscious “inside” the private individual, was it possible to simulate a situation where the former sense of meaning could become true once more. This interiorization is comparable to Kronos’ swallowing of his just-born children.

This idea that man has lost the exterior meaning function, that is, we have lost the capacity to live inside myth because we have become individuals, seems a little sideways to me. Nevertheless there are some brilliant moments in just the small amount I have read so far. For example, the idea that meaning is not semantic is frakking brilliant. Of course it can’t be because otherwise any non-linguistic human being is incapable of meaningful moments, relationships etc, and what little is known of normal adults with no language shows that this is not the case. So meaning is pre-linguistic.

What gets me is that Giegerich then goes on to say as his “therefore”

Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori.

and this is a problem because it shoots us right back into Kant’s lap and that simply will not do. Now, perhaps that’s not what he intended so I’ll keep reading and see what happens.

So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to do one of those post-as-you-read/react things.

The next installment will be titled: a fish swimming, part 2