EMPTINESS WHERE HEAVEN ONCE WAS: The Crisis of Meaning in Modern Civilization
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
Modern human beings live longer, safer, and freer lives than any of their ancestors. They can choose their profession, faith, partner, place of residence, and even their own identity. And yet it is precisely the modern era that has given rise to widespread anxiety, burnout, and a persistent sense that opportunities unimaginable to previous generations offer no answer to the simple question: “Why?” Where did this affliction of civilization — the “crisis of meaning” — come from in the first place? What actually lies behind this term, and how are we to deal with this crisis?
WE HAVE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE “WHY”?
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o you — you personally — know what the meaning of your life is? Ideally, there ought to be one, because without it, humanity as a whole, and the individual in particular, ceases to understand the direction of its development. In 1979, the report to the Club of Rome, No Limits to Learning, described this problem as the “human gap”. The point was that, having accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge about the world, humanity simultaneously began to experience great difficulty understanding why it was developing, where it was heading, and what it existed for. We produce change for the sake of change at tremendous speed, yet we are poor at managing it. But what if, having lost our civilizational meanings, we can still be fully conscious on an individual level?
After all, we have no shortage of goals in life: success, consumption, career, personal freedom, self-realization, identity, patriotism, spirituality, security, well-being. The only nuance is that most of them are presented to us as ready-made cultural products rather than as the result of our own reflection. This situation, however, can be regarded as the “default scenario”. For thousands of years, the question of the meaning of life was not posed as a personal task. Religion, community, and fate answered it for the individual. Religion explained where the world came from and where it was going. Community determined who you were, whom you owed obligations to, and what was expected of you. Fate predetermined your social estate, your father’s trade, and your place of birth. Meaning was neither sought nor chosen, because people were born, as it were, “inside” it. It was only modernity that dismantled this coherent structure into its component parts — and failed to put it back together again.
Science placed at our disposal new myths as alternatives to religious ones, the market “hacked” the community, and social mobility did the same to fate. Yet liberation from them came at a price: whereas culture had once settled the question of meaning, now each individual became responsible for answering it. And suddenly it turned out that most people were unprepared for such a “gift”. Meaning, by its very nature, proved remarkably resistant to individual manufacture. Perhaps the five thinkers discussed below made the most radical attempts to grapple with this “intractability” of meaning. Each describes the process from a different angle.
NIETZSCHE: MEANING IS DEAD, AND IT MUST BE FOUND
Nietzsche was the first to identify modernity’s catastrophe of meaning. The famous phrase “God is dead” has become so commonplace that it is easy to mistake it for an atheistic slogan. It appears in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in 1882 and means something quite different from what is usually understood by it in popular interpretation. It is uttered by a madman who wanders through the marketplace in broad daylight with a lit lantern, proclaiming that he is looking for God. When the indifferent and unbelieving crowd begins to mock the madman, he declares: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!.. Are we not continually moving? Backward, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? Are we not wandering as through an infinite Nothing?” In this context, the “death of God” is not a denial of Him at all, but a diagnosis Nietzsche makes of his age: a terrifying event of immense magnitude has taken place, and his contemporaries have yet to grasp its consequences. Faith in God was not merely one belief among many — it was the axis around which morality, truth, and the value of human life were organized.
Remove the axis, and the structure cannot remain intact: sooner or later, everything that depended on it will collapse. Nietzsche calls this process nihilism — the devaluation of the highest values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the nihilism of the “last man” is not a tragic state but a highly comfortable one: the condition of a being who wants nothing more than comfort and small pleasures. “We have invented happiness”, say the last men, and they blink. And after the death of God, this “invented happiness” leads to the degeneration of a civilization that no longer knows what it lives for and ceases to aspire to anything beyond its own comfort. Having made his diagnosis, Nietzsche also proposes a remedy: the “last man” must give way to the Übermensch, capable of creating meaning rather than receiving it ready-made. In other words, carrying out the “revaluation of values” that remains beyond the reach of most people. These ideas of Nietzsche became a kind of starting point for European philosophical thought: from now on, meaning is not given by default and must be reinvented, because living as though nothing has happened risks degeneration.
WEBER: THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD AND THE IRON CAGE
If Nietzsche speaks the language of prophecy, Max Weber speaks the language of sociology. In his lecture Science as a Vocation, published in 1919, he introduces the concept of Entzauberung der Welt (“the disenchantment of the world”). In fact, in his view, modern people know no more about the world they inhabit than their ancestors did. An ordinary tram passenger understands how a tram works less well than a Native American understood how his bow worked. The difference lies not in their understanding but in their attitude toward the world. Modern human beings are convinced that there are no mysterious, unpredictable forces in the world and that, by and large, everything in it can be mastered through rigorous scientific calculation and sound logical reasoning. The disenchanted world is devoid of intrinsic meaning, so it no longer communicates with human beings through the language of signs and purpose. Science may explain how something works, but it is entirely incapable of answering the questions “How should we live?” and “What should we do?” Weber calls the situation in which values cease to be embedded in culture and become matters of individual choice the “struggle of the gods”. Different worldviews have become locked in a desperate struggle, and there is no rational way to reconcile them.
In perhaps his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber sought to demonstrate how rationalized economic life emerged from a profoundly religious impulse — namely, the Puritan understanding of work as a calling. To describe the system that surrounds individuals, organizes their lives, and simultaneously restricts their freedom, Weber uses the metaphor of stahlhartes Gehäuse (“iron cage”). This cage originates in the pursuit of salvation, but its original meaning is eventually lost, while the rational mechanism created to serve that purpose continues to operate and impose its own logic on human beings. For example, the economic system demands ever-increasing efficiency, bureaucracy requires adherence to procedures, and technological systems demand constant adaptation to their requirements. Gradually, people begin to apply similar criteria not only to their work but also to education, relationships, leisure, health, and personal achievements. As a result, they increasingly answer the question “How?” and increasingly rarely ask themselves, “Why am I doing this?”
They become “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; and these nullities imagine that they have attained a level of civilization never before achieved”. Yet Weber does not oppose the rational organization of society as such; rather, he calls for it to be subordinated once again to meaningful human purposes. Subsequently, many thinkers, from Edmund Husserl to Jürgen Habermas — the recently deceased representative of the Frankfurt School — described the crisis of European culture as a loss of the connection between knowledge and the fundamental questions of human life. Habermas distinguished between two forms of rationality: one oriented toward achieving results and the other arising through mutual understanding. He linked the crisis of meaning to specific mechanisms of social organization, rather than merely to personal experiences or the loss of faith. Habermas warned of the danger of the “colonization of the lifeworld”, in which systemic mechanisms begin to displace communicative processes, encroaching upon the sphere of everyday relationships, cultural beliefs, traditions, mutual understanding, and the formation of personal identity.
TAYLOR: NOT SUBTRACTION, BUT NEW CONDITIONS OF BELIEF
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offered an intriguing interpretation of the crisis of meaning in his 2007 book A Secular Age. He drew attention to the way secularization is usually understood: science is presented as a kind of surgical instrument that has removed the veil of religious illusion from human eyes. He calls such explanations “subtraction stories.” Once the illusion was removed, the “natural” human being, who had no need for faith, was revealed beneath it. Taylor argues that this is not how it works and that the picture is actually far more complex. Modern self-consciousness did not emerge through the “subtraction” of Christianity, since it was largely formed within Christianity itself. Not so long ago, say, in 1500, it was virtually impossible not to believe in God. Today, however, faith is just one of the possibilities, and far from the most obvious one. How did such a transformation become possible?
According to Taylor, the “background” of society — everything we take for granted — has changed. The premodern self was “porous”, and the boundary between the soul and the cosmos was permeable. Human beings inhabited a world in which spirits, forces, and meanings could enter them from outside. For modern individuals, the world looks different: meaning is something that arises within consciousness, while the external world consists of neutral matter. On the one hand, this provides enormous freedom and a sense of control; on the other, it creates a buffer zone that seems to cut us off from the “sources of life”. We find ourselves enclosed within an “immanent frame” — our world can now be explained entirely in terms of its own internal order, without reference to the transcendent. Within this frame, Taylor identifies a particular experience — the “malaise of immanence”, whose symptoms include a sense of flatness, the colorlessness of everyday life, and a longing for something greater that has no name.
Taylor emphasizes that the secular age is not an age of unbelief but an age in which every position, including both belief and unbelief, becomes profoundly fragile. There are different ways to “live rationally”, and this no longer surprises anyone. Yet this explosive proliferation of spiritual and quasi-spiritual alternatives means that none of them can serve as a shared horizon anymore. In other words, the problem is not that people have been “deprived” of the meaning of life as such, but that the conditions under which meaning can be experienced as “real”, as something genuinely valid for everyone rather than merely a private opinion, have changed. The philosopher believes that this abyss runs far deeper than the simple claim that religiosity has been lost. He insists that authenticity is possible only against a background of things that matter independently of our choices. If everything is equally valuable simply because someone has chosen it, then nothing is truly valuable.
FRANKL: THE EXISTENTIAL VACUUM
Of course, any discussion of the meaning of life would be incomplete without mentioning Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and Dachau. He approached the subject from an unexpected angle — a clinical one. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he describes his experience of surviving the Nazi concentration camps. According to his observations, those who had someone or something to live for were more likely to survive. Frankl repeatedly refers to Nietzsche’s idea that those who know their “why” can endure almost any “how”. Yet upon returning to peaceful postwar life, the psychiatrist discovered another “peculiarity” among his patients. Many suffered from what he called the existential vacuum. This was not a neurosis in the classical sense, nor the result of childhood trauma or repressed drives. It was a feeling of inner emptiness, meaninglessness, and boredom. Frankl explains it through a double loss: unlike animals, human beings are not told by their instincts what to do; unlike their premodern ancestors, they are no longer told what to do by traditions. Often, they no longer even know what they themselves want.
For example, Frankl describes “Sunday neurosis”: when the working week ends, a person is left alone with their own emptiness and falls into depression. They try to escape it either through conformism (doing what others do) or through submission (doing what others tell them to do). Ultimately, the emptiness is filled with substitutes for meaning — power, money, pleasure, and addictions. But how can modern individuals free themselves from “noogenic neurosis” — suffering that originates not in the psyche but in the “spiritual dimension”? Unlike Nietzsche, Frankl does not believe that meaning can be invented. It can, however, be “discovered”, because it is always present in a specific situation and addressed to a particular person. It is discovered either through creativity, through love, or through one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. For Frankl, the last of these paths is connected with freedom and responsibility: even when nothing can be changed, a person remains free to choose their attitude toward it. According to Frankl, it is not we who question life about its meaning. On the contrary, life asks us questions, and we answer through our actions.
HAN: THE EXHAUSTION OF FREEDOM
Following Frankl, the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han also identified the emptiness that disguises itself as activity. In his essay The Burnout Society, he describes it as the most contemporary form of the crisis. Han contrasts two types of society. The first is the disciplinary society of prisons, barracks, and factories described by Michel Foucault, which was built on prohibitions and the imperative “You must!” According to Han, modern society represents the second type — the achievement society, guided by the motto “You can!” Here, no one coerces individuals from outside; each person becomes their own project. Surely this must be complete freedom? Yet Han considers it a more sophisticated form of coercion. The achievement subject exploits themselves while feeling free. They are simultaneously the perpetrator and the victim. One can rebel against an external oppressor, but not against oneself.
That is why the characteristic illnesses of our age are not neuroses caused by repression but depression, burnout, and attention deficit disorder. According to Han, depression is an illness of a society suffering from an excess of positivity: modern individuals are exhausted not by prohibitions but by the endless obligation to want more, fulfill their potential, and “be themselves”. Multitasking, commonly regarded as an achievement, actually leads to the loss of contemplative capacity, which distinguishes human beings from wild animals. This is because animals in the wild are forced to behave in precisely this way — constantly dividing their attention. What, after all, is contemplation? It is unhurried thinking and the ability to concentrate on something for an extended period, from which culture itself emerges. It stands in sharp contrast to the hyperactivity of animals. To be able to ask the question “Why?”, we need a contemplative pause. Without it, the question of meaning not only remains unanswered but ceases to arise at all.
HOW NOT TO “BLINK AWAY” FREEDOM AND MEANING
In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm once distinguished between freedom “from” and freedom “to”. Modernity has brilliantly accomplished the first task, liberating us from traditions, social estates, ecclesiastical authority, and communal coercion. But what do we need freedom from all these things for? The question remains open. Neither new laws, revolutionary scientific discoveries, nor advanced technologies can provide an answer. Neither authoritarianism, conformism, nor hyperactivity can fill this void. A career promises a calling but turns into Weber’s cage. Consumption promises satisfaction but produces only new desires. Politics offers dogmas, heresies, and formulas for salvation stripped of any transcendent dimension. “Ready-made meaning” becomes a form of unfreedom, while longing for lost wholeness can easily turn into the romanticization of a world in which most people have no voice.
Freedom and meaning do not necessarily have to be sought and found in the distant past. For example, the ideal of universal dignity or the right of individuals to seek their own answers to life’s fundamental questions can be regarded as new, distinctly modern forms that were impossible in distant historical eras. At the same time, just as they did thousands of years ago, many people today find meaning in creativity, love, family, work, faith, and service. If we judge by the Book of Ecclesiastes alone, the crisis of meaning is not a unique feature of modernity. And meaning has not disappeared — the conditions of its discovery have changed; it has simply ceased to be shared and self-evident. Today, finding it often requires precisely what the entire structure of modern life works against. Therefore, perhaps the principal task of civilization today is not to discover new technologies and markets, but to restore the practices and environments that allow people to ask “Why?” rather than blink like Nietzsche’s “last man”, assuring one another that they have invented happiness.
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