The end of meaning

The question carries two senses simultaneously, and both are worth holding. There is the end as terminus — the collapse of meaning, its exhaustion or disappearance. And there is the end as telos — what meaning is ultimately for, what it serves. The two senses are not as separate as they first appear. The collapse of meaning is often the moment when its deeper purpose becomes visible.

Neumann names the historical situation with characteristic directness:

The disintegration of the old system of values is in full swing. God, King, Fatherland, have become problematical quantities, and so have Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, love and fair play, human progress, and the meaning of existence. This is not to say that they will not continue to influence our lives as transpersonal quantities of an archetypal nature; but their validity, or at least their position, has become precarious, their relation to one another questionable, and their old hierarchical order has been destroyed.

What Neumann describes is not merely a cultural shift but a structural event: the archetypal canon — the inherited system by which transpersonal energies were organized and transmitted — has lost its binding force. When that happens, the energy does not disappear. It goes underground, and what surfaces in its place are the single dominants: power, money, ideology, the "isms" that consume the individual because they carry the charge of the whole without any of its integration.

This is the condition Jung diagnosed from a different angle. The numinous symbols that once held the psyche in relation to something larger than the ego have been stripped of their mystery. "We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity," he writes in The Symbolic Life; "nothing is holy any longer." The consequence is not peace but a specific kind of restlessness — the soul that cannot find its symbolic life is not liberated but haunted. Jung describes it with unusual plainness: "That thing in you which should live is alone; nobody touches it, nobody knows it, you yourself don't know it; but it keeps on stirring, it disturbs you, it makes you restless, and it gives you no peace."

The soul's response to this condition is not passive. It improvises. It reaches for whatever promises to restore the sense of participation — the feeling that one's life is part of something that matters. The pneumatic ratio runs especially hot here: if I am spiritual enough, elevated enough, conscious enough, I will not have to live in this meaninglessness. The appeal is genuine because spirit is real and its relief is real. But the relief is temporary, and the soul knows it, which is why the search intensifies rather than resolves.

Edinger identifies the structural problem with precision: symptoms are what meaning looks like when it has been degraded. "Symptoms are disturbing states of mind which we are unable to control and which are essentially meaningless — that is, contain no value or significance. Symptoms, in fact, are degraded symbols, de-graded by the reductive fallacy of the ego." The symptom is not the absence of meaning but meaning in a form the ego cannot metabolize. The question is not how to eliminate the symptom but how to hear what it is saying — which requires a different orientation entirely, one that moves toward the disturbance rather than away from it.

Hillman's contribution here is to refuse the upward solution. Depression, he insists in Re-Visioning Psychology, is not the enemy of meaning but its via regia — the royal road into soul. "Through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness." The Christian model — Friday always already containing Sunday, suffering always already redeemed — is precisely what he refuses. The counterpart of every crucifixion fantasy is a resurrection fantasy, and that prior commitment to resurrection is what prevents the descent from doing its actual work.

What Hillman is pointing toward, and what Neumann's historical analysis supports, is that the end of meaning in the terminal sense — the collapse of the inherited canon — is not a catastrophe to be reversed but a disclosure to be inhabited. The soul speaks most clearly in the failure of its strategies. The logics of not-suffering — spiritual ascent, the acquisition of the longed-for thing, the vigilance that keeps danger at bay, the love that promises safety — all eventually fail. In their failure, something else becomes audible: not a new system of meaning, not a recovered wholeness, but the particular texture of this soul's actual life, which was always there beneath the strategies.

Jung put it to a correspondent with characteristic bluntness: almost any difficulty can be borne if its meaning can be discerned. It is meaninglessness that is the greatest threat. But the meaning he is pointing toward is not the meaning of a system — it is the meaning that emerges when the ego stops trying to dismiss the soul's contents with a "nothing but" and begins instead to sit with what is actually present.

The end of meaning, then, is the beginning of a different kind of attention.

thumos — the Homeric organ of feeling and value, whose loss tracks the Western crisis of meaning
Edward Edinger — portrait of the analyst who mapped the ego-Self axis and the symbolic life
James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and its refusal of redemption arcs
Erich Neumann — portrait of the depth psychologist who traced the collapse of the archetypal canon

Sources Cited

Neumann, Erich, 2019, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
Edinger, Edward F., 1972, Ego and Archetype
Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman