From the heavens above, To the earth below, In different forms, Comes the rain and snow, In different ways, They magnify life, Like a man or a woman, Like a.
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- authentic self series
- The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness
- Endless Perspective of Life - The Writing of Eric Visconti
The individual life of the physically discrete individual is pretty meaningless, something one would rather do without. The Buddha, as Tolstoy read him, teaches that life is the greatest of evils and works as hard as he can to free himself from it. In a nutshell, Tolstoy's problem was this: It was a problem he felt deeply.
He had to have an answer to go on living.
authentic self series
Tolstoy's concern with the issue was not merely theoretical. The solution to the problem that Tolstoy eventually came to was one he thought had been known all along by the unlearned peasants. The solution lies in a kind of irrational knowledge called "faith. Meaning is found in the appropriate relationship to God, the Infinite. Tolstoy's solution bears obvious resemblances to Kierkegaard's and is very much in the same spirit.
Tolstoy spent the rest of his life working out the details of, or variations on, this solution. To the end Tolstoy held that faith in God, work, service to others, unselfishness, and love are essential parts of a meaningful life. He taught that the things ordinarily pursued by many—wealth, status, power, fame—contribute nothing to the meaningfulness of life. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy all had lives which rendered them virtual breeding grounds for problems with the meaning of life.
Nietzsche was the one that wasn't exactly wealthy, but in his case his early retirement in his late twenties provided him with a pension for life sufficient to meet his material needs and free him up for a life of thought and writing. From these four, and from our own experiences of life, we have inherited, to the extent that we have it, our preoccupation with the meaning of life.
In the early twentieth century questions about the meaning of life continued to be of interest to leading European or "Continental" philosophers. The great German philosophy professor Martin Heidegger was certainly concerned with the meaning of life. He presented two different outlooks, which we may call "early Heidegger" and "later Heidegger.
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For early Heidegger that is, the Heidegger of Being and Time, , the question of the meaning of life is the question how we can live an "authentic" life, one that is our life, not just the life for us that has been fixed by the community we live in. His answer is that to live a meaningful life is to live a life of authenticity. To live a life authenticity is to live a life that one oneself chooses, not the life that is prescribed for one by one's social situation.
To live a life of authenticity, one must have a plan , something that unifies one's life into an organic whole. This is one's own plan. So a meaningful life is one of focused authenticity. Living authentically, it turns out, is a matter of living in a way that is true to your heritage. Early Heidegger's thought seems to be a kind of pantheism, and it is possible that Heidegger subscribed to some such view all his life. Later Heidegger proposes a somewhat different view.
In this philosophy of his, we are given the task, in which our meaning lies, of being "guardians of the world. To understand and appreciate that fact is to exhibit not just a certain intellectual and practical stance toward the world, but to live with an attitude of respect and reverence toward the world, toward the natural world especially. Later Heidegger saw exploitation of the natural world, as in mining and highway-building, as deplorable, as contrary to the very meaning of life.
The meaning of life is guardianship of the world. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre changed his views over the course of his life. In his work Being and Nothingness , advocated an outlook from which life is absurd. We more or less seriously pursue goals which, from a detached standpoint, we can see don't really matter.
But we continue to act as though they do, and hence our lives are absurd. The Sartrean project is to overcome this detached standpoint, or to incorporate it into our lives. The problem is other people. They insist on their own reality. They tend to get in the way of our pursuit of our own goals. Later on, Sartre espoused a somewhat different view. On this new view, "our fundamental goal in life is to overcome our 'contingency'," to become the foundation of our own being.
The main obstacle again is other people who, on the one hand, pursue their own different goals and, on the other, propose a real military threat to one's way of life and one's homeland. In his play, No Exit, there is the famous line: The result is war, in something like Schopenhauer's sense. People are always at war, or at least at odds, with each other. In both his early and his later thought, Sartre ends up being pretty pessimistic and depressing. We can, by our free choice, give life some meaning or other. But the decision to do so is itself a matter of ungrounded free choice, which is such that it doesn't matter whether that decision or some other one is made.
Albert Camus , a Frenchman born in Algeria, was one of the leading existentialists though he himself disowned the label and one of the more influential writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He was familiar with the work of Nietzsche, and greatly influenced by it. On our theme, Camus's starting point was the perception of the absurd. Human life, he felt, was absurd, meaningless, and senseless. The way in which it is, or the reason it is, lies in an inevitable clash between the needs and aspirations of human beings and the cold, meaningless world.
This clash has at least four facets. First, we seek—demand, even—a rational understanding of things, some way of seeing the world as familiar to us. But the world does not cooperate: Second, we long for some kind of unity underlying and organizing the manifest diversity we find all around us. But again, the world is heedless of our longings. The world that presents itself to our senses is nothing but disjointed plurality. Third, we long for a higher reality a God, for example , something transcendent, some cosmic meaning of everything. But no such meaning can be discerned. Fourth, we strive for continued life, or at least to achieve something permanent in the end.
But our efforts are pointless, everything will come to nothing, and all that lies ahead is death and oblivion. Our situation is like that of the mythical Greek of old, Sisyphus. We are condemned, as it were, to pushing a rock up a hill, over and over only to see it roll back down again, every time, when it reaches the top.
Pointless labor is Sisyphus' lot, and ours too. The pointlessness and absurdity of life raise the question of suicide. Should we kill ourselves? Camus's answer is that, no, we should not. To kill yourself is to give in, to lose. If we were prisoners of war—which is something like what we are—our captor and tormentor would want us to do exactly that—confess that things are too much for us and kill ourselves. That would be his ultimate victory, which would bring him a chuckle, or perhaps even a hearty guffaw.
How then should we live? The first thing to do is to insist that life is better if there is no meaning. That would really irritate our tormentor. Second, we should cultivate a mindset of honesty and lucidity. We should not indulge in denial, or evasion, or imaginings of an eventual escape into an afterlife where everything will be put right. We should acknowledge that life is awful—but then, perhaps, add "and I love it" or "all is well. Camus observes, "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Fourth, we should live for now, stop worrying about the future, stop striving to achieve future goals.
Nothing is going to come of anything we do in the long run anyway. Fifth, we should "use everything up": This amounts to a kind of perverse "Yes! Finally, we may ask why anyone would want to live like this? Is it something that would appeal only to the French? What are the advantages of such an attitude toward life? Camus has answers to these queries, three in fact. First, living as he recommends is a way of salvaging our dignity, and it is a way to which a certain majesty adheres. Second, surprisingly perhaps, such a way of living brings with it a "curious joy.
Camus's scornful existentialism is the best conception we have of a truly free human being, one who does not allow himself to be shaped and determined by the mindless, meaningless world that surrounds him.
The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness
Anglo-American philosophers in the very late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to be interested in problems of the meaning of life as well. The American pragmatist philosopher William James , a Harvard professor, wrote a couple of interesting essays on our theme in the late s. Both essays were written as addresses to be delivered to live audiences.
They demand some discussion and consideration. In "Is Life Worth Living? He calls it the "profounder bass-note of life" and suggests that it is to be found, or heard, somewhere in all of us: Some people are so naturally optimistic and in love with life that they are constitutionally incapable of being much bothered by the bass-note and pay it little attention.
James's example of such a person is Walt Whitman; and one thinks of the English.
Endless Perspective of Life - The Writing of Eric Visconti
James finds no fault—intellectual, moral, or otherwise—with such people. It is rare good fortune to be blessed with such a temperament. If everyone were, the question of the worthwhileness of life would never arise. But for every Whitman, there is a suicide, and a thinker of the dreary constitution of the poet James Thomson, author of "The City of Dreadful Night.
In his address, James imagines himself in discussion with a would-be suicide whom he tries to persuade to take up his burden and see life through to its natural end. James acknowledges that some of these suicides—perhaps the majority of them—are too far gone to have anything said to them, for instance, those whose suicidal impulses are due to insanity or sudden fits of frenzy. It is to the class of reflective would-be suicides—those disposed to kill themselves because of their thinking, reading, and brooding on the darker side of life—that James directs his remarks.
It is these he wants to cheer up or comfort and keep alive. James speaks of two stages of recovery from suicidal illness. The first stage includes three elements, three palliatives, for the suicidal condition. First, there is the thought, "You can end it whenever you will. But James thinks the thought can be a comfort. It means there's no particular guilt or stigma attached to suicide.
It means one won't have to put up with this miserable world forever; one can opt out whenever one wants. It may delay the act by encouraging the thought, "Why kill myself today when I can always do it tomorrow? It is worth hanging around a while longer in order to see the headlines of tomorrow's newspaper. Third, there is a certain fighting instinct in human beings. James thinks the normal man has a reason to go on, even if the whole thing is worthless and meaningless, as long as there is some injustice to be put right, some villain to be put down, or some evil to overcome in the little corner of the universe he inhabits.
The three things just mentioned all lie in the first stage of recovery, one that is partial and inferior to what lies in the second stage. The second stage is one of full recovery. It is the religious stage. It gives one assurance of a fully worthwhile and meaningful life. James's injunction is to believe—to believe in a supernatural, spiritual order of things which overcomes and makes right the deficiencies of the natural order as we know it.
We do not have rational or evidential proof that such a supernatural order exists. But Kant proved that natural science cannot prove that such an order does not exist. To make one's life worthwhile and meaningful, all one has to do is to posit faith in such an order, to believe that there is a spiritual realm in which all the wrongs of the natural order are righted. In that case, one will view the natural order as an inadequate representation of the spiritual, or as a veil through which the true and wonderful nature of the spiritual is hidden or obscured.
One need have little conception of what the spiritual realm is like. The content of the belief in it can be quite minimal. All one needs to affirm is that there is such a realm and that its reality makes life worthwhile. James draws on two of the tenets of his pragmatism to support such an approach to the meaning and worthwhileness of life. One is the right to believe what we need to believe, even though it goes beyond belief warranted by empirical and rational evidence. His classic case for the right of such belief is in his essay, "The Will to Believe. Another tenet of pragmatism on which James draws is the idea that belief is a matter of action.
To believe something is not so much to have a certain mental state as to act in a certain way. Whatever is in one's mind, to act as though life is worthwhile and has meaning is to believe that it does. In "What Makes a Life Significant" , James expressly addressed the question of the significance or meaning of life. What he said in this essay was rather different from what he had said in the previous one.
The essay was in part a response to the deification of the uneducated, hard-working peasants in Tolstoy's Confession. James admired Tolstoy a great deal but felt he went a bit overboard in his praise of peasant life and in his tendency to identify it as the very locus of meaning. James held that the lives of Tolstoy's peasants were full of one ingredient necessary for a meaningful life—toil, struggle, pluck, will, suffering, manly virtues—but that they lacked the other necessary ingredient for a fully meaningful life, namely, what James called "ideals.
Toward the end of the essay, James gives his own view. He states it in two or three different ways, the sense of which seems to be the same. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result. The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's pains. James is rather vague about what the "ideals" are, or even what they are like.
In at least some cases they have something to do with culture and refinement, but it seems that they can and will vary from person to person, and may reside in some form in the uncultured and unrefined. In any event, it is noteworthy that James does not bring up the subject of religion. There is no suggestion that belief in God or a spiritual world is necessary for a fully meaningful life.
An ideal wedded to manly virtue is enough. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell is often portrayed as one of those early twentieth century analytic philosophers who had no patience for big questions, such as that of the meaning of life. The portrayal is often reinforced by the famous story of Russell and the cab-driver, to whom Russell had nothing to say about the meaning of life.
It is true that Russell sometimes expressed a dismissive attitude toward the question: But elsewhere he seems to have taken the question very seriously. In "A Free Man's Worship," he begins with a fairly gloomy, despairing picture of the world science reveals to us, the only world there is, really. It is purposeless, void of meaning. The causes that produced us had no prevision of the end they were achieving.
We ourselves, and everything precious to us, are the outcome of the accidental collocations of atoms. There is no life for the individual beyond the grave. The existence of our very species, along with all its achievements, will eventually be extinguished in the death of the solar system and "buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. But the thing for us to do is to maintain our ideals against the hostile universe. That universe knows the value of raw power, and not much else. Let us not worship it, as did Nietzsche. In exalting the will to power, Nietzsche was failing to maintain the highest human ideals in the face of the cruel world; he was, in a sense, giving in, capitulating, prostrately submitting to evil, sacrificing his best to Moloch.
Let us be clear-sighted and honest. Let us recognize that the facts are often bad, that in the world we know there are many things that would have been better otherwise, that our ideals are not in fact realized in the world. But, again, in our minds and hearts, even though the whole business may be futile, let us tenaciously cling to our ideals, loving truth and beauty.
Let us renounce power. Let us worship only the God created by our own love of the good. Let us live constantly in the vision of the good. One trap we must guard against falling into is that which Russell would think Camus fell into some decades later. We should not cultivate and live in a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the senseless universe. Because indignation is still a kind of bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with the evil world. Give up the indignation so that your thoughts can be free. From freedom of thought comes art, philosophy, and the vision of beauty.
To achieve this we must develop a kind of detachment from our own personal happiness, must learn to free ourselves from the burden of concern for petty things and personal goods.
To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. In The Conquest of Happiness Russell makes a couple of remarks about the meaning of life that are worthy of note. The first is this:.
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. Life is not to be conceived on the analogy of a melodrama in which the hero and heroine go through incredible misfortunes for which they are compensated by a happy ending.
The second is odd but interesting, perhaps not the kind of thought that would occur to most people:. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deeply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man's enjoyment.
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I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct of usefulness. When I talk about this concept with friends, family, and colleagues, I always find it difficult to put this into words. Most things we do in life are just activities and experiences. Those things should make you happy, right? But they are not useful. I love to go on holiday, or go shopping sometimes.
When I create something that others can use. Or even when I create something I can use. For the longest time I found it difficult to explain the concept of usefulness and happiness. But when I recently ran into a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dots finally connected. And that always sounds heavy and all.
Did you do useful things in your lifetime? Just make it a little bit better than before you were born. You can make up your own useful activities. But when you do little useful things every day, it adds up to a life that is well lived. A life that mattered. In the book, he writes about how he lived his life and how he found his calling.
He also went to business school, and this is what he thought of his fellow MBA candidates:. You can say that about all of us. And after he realized that in his thirties, he founded a company that turned him into a multi-millionaire.