Meaninglessness

Engagement is the therapeutic answer to meaninglessness regardless of the latter’s source. Wholehearted engagement in any of the infinite array of life’s activities not only disarms the galactic view but enhances the possibility of one’s completing the patterning of the events of one’s life in some coherent fashion.

Yalom argues that engagement, not the discovery of cosmic purpose, is the clinical and existential antidote to meaninglessness, invoking Wittgenstein to show that genuine involvement dissolves rather than answers the question.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se, it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one’s humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction.

Frankl distinguishes the existential feeling of meaninglessness from neurosis proper, yet identifies it as the generative condition of depression, aggression, and addiction in what logotherapy terms the ‘existential vacuum.’

Frankl, Viktor Emil, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946thesis

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The problem, then, in most rudimentary form is. How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Yalom articulates the central existential paradox: the human organism requires meaning while inhabiting a contingent universe that supplies none, making meaninglessness structurally unavoidable rather than merely symptomatic.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives…. A meaninglessness crisis which has not yet crystallized into a discrete neurotic symptomatic picture (an ‘existential crisis’) is even more common.

Drawing on Jung and Frankl, Yalom documents the epidemiological weight of meaninglessness as a primary clinical presentation rather than a secondary symptom of recognized neurotic disorders.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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today’s malady of meaninglessness does not seem to have been one of them. Meaning was supplied then in many ways… meaninglessness is intricately interwoven with leisure and with disengagement: the more one is engaged with the everyday process of living and surviving, the less does the issue arise.

Yalom situates meaninglessness historically, arguing that pre-modern religious worldviews and survival pressures suppressed the question, while post-industrial leisure and disengagement have made it a defining modern malady.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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the assumption is adventitious and culture-bound: that truth requires maintaining an ideal of meaninglessness – or to put it more positively, the avoidance at all costs of implying meaning in the world.

McGilchrist identifies the institutionalised commitment to meaninglessness as a culturally contingent assumption embedded in contemporary science, traceable to left-hemisphere dominance rather than to any necessary feature of rational inquiry.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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truth requires maintaining an ideal of meaninglessness – or to put it more positively, the avoidance at all costs of implying meaning in the world. A piece of work may still be science if it is wrong… but it will not be accepted as science if it imputes meaning to the processes of the cosmos or of life.

This parallel passage reinforces McGilchrist’s argument that the scientific prohibition on attributing meaning is a normative, culturally specific stance rather than an epistemological necessity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament… Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

Edinger, channelling Jung, presents the tension between meaning and meaninglessness as irreducibly metaphysical and temperamentally determined, refusing dogmatic resolution while staking a personal wager on meaning’s ultimate preponderance.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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If we must die, if nothing endures, then what sense does anything make? Few individuals were ever as tormented by such questions as was Leo Tolstoy, who for much of a long life grappled

Through the opening fable of the brick-carrying morons and Tolstoy’s crisis, Yalom frames meaninglessness as a question of life and death that emerges the moment self-reflection interrupts unreflective engagement.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Freud once stated, ‘The moment a man questions the meaning of life, he is sick…. By asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido.’ Accordingly, meaninglessness is considered a symptom of some more significant underlying condition.

Yalom cites Freud’s reductive dismissal of meaninglessness as evidence for why the condition has been clinically underdiagnosed, subordinated to libidinal or depressive explanations rather than treated on its own existential terms.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Nihilism is so common, Maddi suggests, that it is not even recognized as a problem; in fact, it often masquerades as a highly enlightened, sophisticated approach to life.

Yalom and Maddi identify active nihilism — the compulsive decrediting of others’ meaning-claims — as a socially normalised but clinically significant form of meaninglessness that conceals its own despair behind intellectual sophistication.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Meaninglessness is an experiential state; and though it is so consuming that it appears to render meaningless everything in the past and the future as well as in the present, it can do that only when we view our lives from the galactic perspective.

Yalom argues that meaninglessness is a perspectival rather than absolute condition, induced by adopting a cosmic or ‘galactic’ viewpoint, and that things routinely matter outside that perspective without requiring ultimate justification.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Frankl argues that the past is not only real but permanent… Such a person will think: ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities.’ We are dealing with value judgments not with statements of fact.

In dialogue with Frankl, Yalom contests the assumption that impermanence entails meaninglessness, arguing that the permanence of past experience constitutes a counter-resource against nihilistic despair.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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To create something new, something that rings with novelty or beauty and harmony is a powerful antidote to a sense of meaninglessness. The creation justifies itself, it defies the question What for?, it is ‘its own excuse for being.’

Yalom identifies creativity as a meaning-schema that is self-validating, bypassing rather than answering the question of ultimate purpose, and thereby functioning as a structural antidote to meaninglessness.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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The belief that life is incomplete without goal fulfillment is not so much a tragic existential fact of life as it is a Western myth, a cultural artifact. The Eastern world never assumes that there is a ‘point’ to life.

Yalom situates the experience of meaninglessness partly within Western teleological assumptions, contrasting it with Eastern orientations that frame existence as mystery rather than problem.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning. The influential contemporary neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has referred to the left hemisphere as ‘the interpreter’… An interpreter i

McGilchrist links the cultural phenomenon of meaning-loss to the self-referential closure of left-hemisphere ‘interpretation,’ which substitutes speech about speech for contact with a world beyond language.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that? How, to pose the question differently, can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects?

Frankl’s postscript articulates tragic optimism as a logotherapeutic response to the triad of pain, guilt, and death — a stance that preserves the possibility of meaning even under conditions that maximise the temptation toward meaninglessness.

Frankl, Viktor Emil, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946supporting

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feeling like that of the empty absurd (which we seek to distinguish from the mysterious absurd) precisely corresponds to this state of a return to nothingness in which each reactivity or recurrence is abolished by an absolute inactivity and absence of information.

Simondon introduces a structural account of the ‘empty absurd’ as a state of informational nullity distinct from existentially generative mystery, offering a cybernetic complement to depth-psychological treatments of meaninglessness.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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Discovering that we do not know who God is and what life is all about, he says, is the learning of ignorance, ignorance about the very meaning and value of our lives. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge.

Moore, via Nicholas of Cusa, reframes the confrontation with meaninglessness as a Socratic ‘learned ignorance’ — a potentially generative rather than purely destructive encounter with the limits of comprehension.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside

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The reflective ego broods on the futility of its path, the mortality which always frames our condition and the self-delusion that such hunger begets. Initially, self-reflection may occasion withdrawal and the regression of energy, which we know as depression.

Hollis situates the dawning sense of futility — a cognate of meaninglessness — within the individuation arc of the second half of life, where ego-reflectivity initially presents as depression before becoming the gateway to deeper selfhood.

Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001aside

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