Contemporary consciousness has collapsed meaning into a single sense—the utilitarian. Something "has meaning" if it is useful, serves a purpose, produces value for something else. This collapse has made genuine psychology impossible. Gigerenzer's recovery of the distinction between two radically different senses of "meaning" is the key that unlocks the entire project.
First Sense—Ontological Meaning: Meaning as what something is. The intrinsic logical character of a phenomenon. A rose has meaning not because it is useful but because it reveals something about beauty, form, interiority. A sacrifice in archaic consciousness has meaning not because it produces anything but because it is transformation, soul-making itself. The phenomenon is meaning. No external referent required.
Second Sense—Utilitarian Meaning: Meaning as what something is for. The instrumental value of a phenomenon. A hammer has meaning because it serves building. A text "has meaning" if it helps us understand something outside the text. A dream "has meaning" if it reveals something about unconscious drives, trauma, or wishes. Meaning always points beyond the phenomenon.
The distinction between these two senses has been systematically erased in modernity. When contemporary psychology asks "does this symptom have meaning?"—it is asking the second-sense question: "what is this symptom useful for? What does it tell us about something else?" The first-sense question—"what is this symptom as a soul phenomenon?"—has become nearly unthinkable.
The consequence: Psychology has become impossible. Psychology requires first-sense meaning access. But contemporary psychology operates entirely through second-sense meaning-seeking.
The historical moment where this distinction becomes visible is the Sacrifice of Isaac. This story is the pivot point of Western consciousness.
The Pre-Edited Version (Archaic): In the original sacrificial narrative, God demands the killing of the firstborn son as an offering. This is the molk sacrifice practiced across West Semitic cultures. The narrative has meaning (first sense): the killing is apotheosis, transformation, the child's elevation to divine status through sacrifice. The meaning is intrinsic to the event. The sacrifice does not point to something else; the sacrifice itself is the meaning.
For archaic consciousness, the question "does sacrifice have meaning?" would be absurd—like asking "does a rose have meaning?" Of course it does. It is meaning. The sacrifice is soul-making itself. It is the apex of human-divine relationship. It is the event through which civilization itself is founded.
The Edited Version (Modern): The editors responsible for the version we have in the Old Testament reversed the narrative. God does not want the sacrifice performed. God merely wants to test Abraham's faithfulness. The sacrifice is replaced by a ram—a substitution that explicitly rejects human sacrifice.
With this reversal, the meaning changes completely. The narrative now has meaning in the second sense: the killing would be meaningful for something (demonstrating faith, testing obedience). But the killing itself does not happen. What we have instead is a test—a phenomenon that points beyond itself to Abraham's inner state of faith.
This is the watershed. On one side: sacrifice as intrinsic meaning (first sense). On the other side: faith as utilitarian meaning (second sense). One stream flows backward into the darkness of archaic consciousness. The other flows forward into modernity's systematization of second-sense meaning.
What is crucial to see: This was not a neutral shift. It was a reversal. Modernity did not simply discover that phenomena have utilitarian meaning. It actively repudiated the first sense of meaning and elevated the second sense to sole legitimacy.
The Psalms and Prophets made this explicit: "I am full of the burnt offerings of rams...I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs...Your burnt offerings are not acceptable" (Isaiah, Jeremiah). The soul's authentic expression—sacrificial slaughter as meaning—is declared unacceptable. What matters now is not the deed but what the deed means for God's purposes (obedience, faith, moral growth).
Modernity inherited this reversal and systematized it. Modern consciousness can only recognize second-sense meaning. When archaic peoples performed sacrifice, modernity reads it as: "they believed sacrifice would appease the gods" or "they used sacrifice to manage their anxieties about mortality." The meaning is always displaced—it points to something psychological, social, economic that the sacrifice supposedly serves.
But this displacement destroys access to the phenomenon itself. Archaic consciousness did not perform sacrifice to accomplish something else. The sacrifice was the accomplishment. The sacrifice was the meaning.
This explains Gigerenzer's diagnosis of contemporary psychology. Psychology practices exclusively in second-sense meaning.
A dream "has meaning" because it reveals unconscious wishes (Freud), archetypal patterns (Jung), traumatic residues (trauma psychology), or serves adaptive functions (evolutionary psychology). The dream always means for something else. The dream itself—as self-expression, as soul phenomenon, as intrinsic event—disappears beneath layers of utilitarian interpretation.
A symptom "has meaning" because it expresses conflict, protects against overwhelming affect, or adapts to circumstances. The symptom means for something. But what the symptom is—as a soul phenomenon in its own right—remains inaccessible.
A patient's narrative "has meaning" because it reveals their unconscious dynamics, repeating patterns, defensive operations. The narrative means for something. But the narrative as the patient's expression of their own interiority—as a first-sense meaning phenomenon—is treated as mere surface, symptom, sign pointing elsewhere.
Psychology has become so thoroughly committed to second-sense meaning that first-sense meaning has become literally invisible. Practitioners cannot even conceive of it. When Gigerenzer speaks of sacrifice as intrinsic soul-making, contemporary psychology hears this as "advocating for sacrifice"—because in contemporary consciousness, all meaning must serve something outside itself, and if sacrifice doesn't serve a recognizable purpose, it is meaningless.
What is lost by this collapse into second-sense meaning?
Access to the soul itself.
The soul—as Gigerenzer understands it—is intrinsic meaning. Soul phenomena are events of meaning in the first sense. They are self-expressions, self-speakings, phenomena that show themselves to themselves through themselves. To encounter the soul requires dwelling in first-sense meaning.
But contemporary consciousness cannot dwell there. Every time it approaches a phenomenon, it immediately asks "what is this for? what does it mean for something else?" The utilitarian question arises before the phenomenon can reveal itself.
This is why psychology has become anti-psychological. The discipline that claims to study the soul has made soul-access methodologically impossible through its systematic commitment to second-sense meaning.
How can consciousness recover access to first-sense meaning?
The answer is almost impossibly difficult: By recognizing that the first-sense question is not a "type" of meaning-question at all. It is not a question about meaning. It is an encounter with meaning.
When you stand before a great artwork in immanent reflection, you do not ask "what is this painting for?" You allow the painting to show you what it is. The meaning is not something you extract; the meaning encounters you. You are altered by contact with it.
Similarly, when archaic consciousness performed sacrifice, it was not asking "what will this accomplish?" The sacrifice was transformation. The meaning was the event. No external purpose required.
Contemporary consciousness must learn to ask differently. Not "what does this phenomenon mean for?" but "what is this phenomenon as itself?" This requires abandoning the utilitarian impulse entirely. It requires trusting that phenomena can be complete in themselves, expressive in themselves, meaningful in themselves.
For psychology, this means returning to the phenomena themselves—dreams, symptoms, narratives—without immediately translating them into external meanings. Allowing the soul's expression to be heard as expression, not as symptom of something else.
This is radical. It reverses modernity's entire orientation. But it is the only way psychology becomes possible again.
Philosophy: Ontology and Appearance — The distinction between meaning-as-being and meaning-as-utility maps onto the philosophical distinction between ontology (what is) and epistemology (what is for our knowing). Gigerenzer's recovery of first-sense meaning is a recovery of ontological thinking—allowing phenomena to show themselves in their own being rather than only in their utility for knowing.
Behavioral-Mechanics: Instrumental vs. Intrinsic Value — Behavioral mechanics operates entirely through second-sense meaning (what behavior serves, what purpose it accomplishes). The contrast reveals why behavioral analysis succeeds in prediction/control but fails in understanding. Intrinsic meaning—what a behavior is in itself—lies outside the behavioral-mechanics domain entirely.
If this distinction is correct, then the question "does sacrifice have meaning?" is fundamentally malformed. It presupposes the second-sense meaning framework. From within that framework, sacrifice has no meaning (it serves no purpose, accomplishes nothing for the tribe except loss). But from the first-sense perspective, sacrifice is meaning—it is the soul's own self-making.
This means modernity's entire moral condemnation of sacrifice rests on the wrong meaning-sense. Modernity asks "is sacrifice useful?" and answers "no, it is senseless slaughter." But archaic consciousness was not asking the utilitarian question. It was expressing first-sense meaning. The condemnation is not refutation; it is talking past the phenomenon.
This has profound implications: If modernity systematically uses second-sense meaning to evaluate first-sense phenomena, then modernity's judgments about archaic consciousness are structurally invalid. Modernity cannot see what archaic consciousness saw because modernity has made that seeing-mode invisible.
Can consciousness hold both senses of meaning simultaneously, or does commitment to second-sense inevitably erase first-sense? Is there a way to recognize a phenomenon's intrinsic meaning while also analyzing its instrumental value, or are the modes mutually exclusive?
What other first-sense phenomena has modernity rendered invisible through second-sense meaning collapse? Poetry, ritual, art—what else shows itself in first-sense meaning but is systematically misread through utilitarian frameworks?
Is the recovery of first-sense meaning even possible for modernity, or is it permanently locked into second-sense? What would it take for contemporary consciousness to ask "what is this?" instead of "what is this for?"