What is the Abyss?

The word “abyss” comes from the Greek for “without bottom”. Taken literally, it means “bottomless pit”. Thus, it literally means something that cannot exist. There are no bottomless pits. The word seems designed to be confusing. It is a concept that can only be used as a metaphor for something else.

The deep-sea floor is called “the abyssal plain”, but that makes no sense, as it is the bottom of the ocean. “The abyssal plain” literally means something like “the bottom of the bottomless pit”.

I suppose that the concept of a bottomless pit made more sense before people knew that the Earth is a ball in space. You could imagine a hole in the Earth that goes down, down, down, and never comes to an end. But even then, can you really imagine a bottomless pit? Can you imagine infinity?

A bottomless pit is a metaphor for infinity. You can only conceive of infinity in terms of what it is not. Infinity can only be defined and understood as the absence of something finite.

The word “abyss” can be used for anything deep and mysterious, such as the deep sea, the depths of despair, the depths of space, the deepest problems of philosophy, or death. It is a metaphor for the unknown, the unknowable, the incomprehensible, the unfathomable.

Nietzsche famously said that if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you. (I am paraphrasing.) What did he mean by that? That aphorism evokes a primal fear of the unknown, of eyes gazing out of the darkness at you. We are creatures of the daytime. Darkness turns the human hunter into the hunted, the known into the unknown. Nietzsche’s aphorism also conveys the notion of the abyss as a mirror. When you stare into the abyss, you stare into yourself.

I’m not sure what Nietzsche meant, if anything. Maybe he intended to create confusion in the reader, and by doing so, make him gaze into the abyss.

To me, the ocean and the blue sky are abysses.

Of course, the ocean has a bottom, but we can’t see it, except in very shallow water. Looking into deep water is like looking into an abyss. There is nothing to see, and you see it. You see only blue and green light from the sky scattered by water molecules. For me, that visual experience exemplifies the metaphor of gazing into the abyss. You can look into the ocean, but you cannot see it. You might see a fish in the ocean, waves on the surface, or a boat floating on the surface, but you cannot see the ocean itself.

The same is true of the sky. You can see a cloud in the sky, or a bird, or a plane, but you cannot see the sky itself. It is just a background of blue: an illusion of sorts created by the scattering of blue light in the atmosphere. The sky isn’t a thing that you can see. It is a space that you can gaze into.

The blackness between the stars is an abyss. I often lie on my back at night, gazing into the night sky. I look at the stars, of course, but sometimes I look away from them, into the spaces between them. That isn’t a natural thing to do. Our eyes naturally focus on objects, not on the space in which they exist. Stars are finite. Although they are incredibly big and incredibly far away, we can sort of understand what they are. The blackness between the stars is harder to fathom.

Gazing into that abyss is gazing into space and time. Whether space and time are infinite or finite, they are unfathomable. If they are finite in some sense, then what is beyond them? To think of space and time as finite, you must imagine space-time as an object of some kind, such as a fabric or a surface. And you can only imagine that object as existing within a larger frame of space and time.

Chaos is another type of abyss. Chaos is disorder. Chaos is the unknown. The word “chaos” comes from the same root as “chasm”, which means a deep crack in the ground, something that you don’t want to fall into, something that you might leap across with fear in your heart.

Chaos can be surprising, disturbing, confusing or just plain scary. Imagine that you walk into a room that you think is empty, and then someone jumps out from behind a curtain and screams at you. You would feel surprise and confusion, because you didn’t expect that to happen. Surprise and confusion are the emotional responses to a failure of one’s mental models to predict one’s experiences. They make us aware of the distinction between our models of reality and reality itself.

We can emotionally experience chaos, but we cannot grasp it except as the absence of order. Chaos is the absence of order. The unknown is the absence of knowledge.

Death is an abyss. We can contemplate it, but we can never fully grasp the reality of it.

Imagine falling from a high place to your death. You would experience the fall, but not the impact. Your brain takes time to process information. In the moment of impact, your brain would be destroyed before it could process the experience of the impact. You can imagine your death from a third-person perspective, as someone else observing your death, but you can’t imagine it from your perspective. Your subjectivity ends at death, and so you cannot die within your subjectivity.

As an object, you will die. As a subject, you cannot die.

At the moment of death, your subjectivity will cease to exist. What makes you you will be destroyed. Your memories will be erased. The knowledge that was carefully stored in your brain over many years will be gone forever. A relative might be able to identify your body, but you will not be in it. Your identity will be gone.

It is sad to contemplate the inevitable destruction of the identity that you spent so many years creating and maintaining. It is like a sand-castle that will be washed away by the incoming tide.

Looking into someone else’s eyes can be like gazing into an abyss.

When you look at someone’s face, you get a sense of what they are feeling, but there is an impassable barrier between minds. Faces convey emotion, and words convey ideas, but never perfectly. You can never know what it is like to be someone else.

What do you see when you gaze into someone’s eyes? Nothing. In a loving gaze the pupils dilate, as if they were windows opening up, but there is nothing to see.

We know each other as objects. We extrapolate the existence of other minds, but we only imagine that their feelings and thoughts are similar to our own. You cannot reach out across the abyss of psychic isolation and touch another mind.

There is one more abyss that we can gaze into: the lack of a foundation for meaning, truth and value.

That abyss is hidden from most people by their unexamined assumptions. You discover it by bringing those assumptions into awareness and thinking about them. This reveals them to be assumptions, not an objective foundation. If you tear up the floorboards of your worldview, you won’t find some ultimate bedrock beneath them. Instead, you will find yourself staring into an abyss.

As a subject, you are floating in the abyss. There is no firm, objective ground on which to stand. There is no external standard by which things can be measured. Existence is transient, chaotic, and full of uncertainty. You have no objective basis for your beliefs and actions, but you must believe and act anyway. There is nothing else that you can do.

That is what the abyss means to me. It is a metaphor for infinity, time and space, chaos, death, isolation, and the lack of a foundation for existence.