An issue for reflection WHAT IS THE MEANING OF MY LIFE?
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- Does your life have meaning?-
- Are you asking if my life has a purpose? A mission?
- Well, not exactly.
- A direction?
- No. I am asking if your life is full of meaningful things.
-Meaningful things? Like interesting things? Or important things?
- You are confusing me. I wanted to ask if your life is meaningful.
- Meaningful in the sense of satisfying? Exciting? Happy? Important?
- I am no longer sure. Maybe I wanted to ask whether your life makes sense to you.
- Well, I understand what is happening to me.
- And whether this gives you reason to get up in the morning, to choose and plan, to look forward to the future.
- Well, I get up in the morning, I drink coffee, I go to work, I eat, watch TV, go to sleep. On Saturdays I play soccer with friends. Sometimes I am happy, sometimes annoyed or bored, sometimes too busy to know what I feel. Last summer I went with my family to the ocean. Is my life meaningful?
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March Week 1 quotation
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
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The pessimist
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher, who is known for his pessimism, both on the personal and the philosophical level. He studied with Fichte, Schleiermacher and others at the University of Göttingen. After becoming a lecturer at the University of Berlin, he scheduled his lectures at the same time as the lectures of the famous philosopher Hegel (whom he did not respect). And while Hegel’s lecture-halls were full, only five students came to hear Schopenhauer. Disappointed, he left the academic world. He lived alone, never married, and died at home from respiratory failure. Schopenhauer was not well-known during his life-time, but after his death his writings had a considerable influence on a many important thinkers, writers and artists, such as Nietzsche and Wagner.
In his main philosophy book, The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer describes our world and our life as expressions of the Will. The Will is a metaphysical power that is blind, arbitrary, always hungry for more, without purpose or law. The personal will of an individual person is a small fragment of this metaphysical Will, and it drives us and motivates us in its arbitrary ways. No wonder that life is empty, meaningless, and full of contradictions and suffering.
The following passage relates to the Will, but it is adopted from a later essay, “The vanity of existence,” which appeared in the collection of essays Parerga (1851), and is also included in a smaller selection translated to English, Studies in Pessimism.
First, a person is never happy. He spends his whole life in looking for something which he thinks will make him happy. He rarely obtains his goal, and when he does, he is disappointed. In the end he is mostly shipwrecked, and he comes into harbor without masts and rigging. And then, it doesn’t matter whether he has been happy or miserable, because his life was never anything more than a present moment that always disappeared into the past, and now it is gone. […] Furthermore, what a greedy creature a human being is! Every satisfaction he obtains is the seed of a new desire, so there is no end to the desires of each individual will. And why? Because the Will is the lord of all the worlds. Everything belongs to it, so there is no thing that can satisfy it, but only the whole, which is endless. It is pathetic to see how little is achieved by the Will – this lord of the world – when it appears in an individual person: usually only just enough to keep the body together. This is why a person is so miserable.
Life appears primarily as a task – the task of subsisting, of making a living. Once this task is accomplished, then life becomes a burden, because now a second task appears – doing something with what has been gained: avoiding boredom, which, like a bird of prey, flies above us, ready to fall on us wherever it sees a life that is free of needs. The first task is to gain something. The second task – to drive away the feeling that you have gained this something, otherwise it becomes a burden. Human life must be some kind of mistake. This is obvious if we remember that a person is a compound of needs and necessities that are hard to satisfy. And even when he satisfies them, all he gets is a state without pain, where he has nothing except for boredom. This is a direct proof that existence has no real value in itself. Because what is boredom if not the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life had any positive intrinsic value, there would no such thing as boredom. Simply existing would satisfy us, and we would need nothing more. But in fact, we do not enjoy existence except when we are struggling for something. And then, distance and difficulties make us think that our goal would satisfy us – an illusion which disappears once we reach that goal. […] If we stop looking at the world as a whole, and look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop crowded with micro-organisms; or a piece of cheese full of tiny insects. How we laugh when they run around so eagerly, and when they struggle with each other in such a tiny space! Whether here or in human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
It is only through the microscope that our life looks big. It is an indivisible point, made longer and bigger by the powerful lenses of Time and Space
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March Week 2 quotation
WILLIAM JAMES
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The pragmatist
William James (1842-1910) was a leading American philosopher and psychologist. (One of his brothers was Henry James, an important novelist.) He finished his medical studies at Harvard University after several interruptions, and later became there a professor of psychology and philosophy. He was among a group of important American philosophers (with John Dewey, Charles Pierce and others) who developed the approach called Pragmatism. In line with Pragmatism, James did not construct one big theory, but rather examined specific issues according to relevant consideration, ideas and data, and the way they functioned and fit together. The result was often a complex network of ideas and theories, without any one overall doctrine. Among his important writings are Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience.
The following is taken from James’ lecture “What makes life significant.” Since the original text is written in a literary and complex language, the text is simplified here for the benefit of those who are not native English speakers.
The tone of this lecture is very personal. James describes how he went on retreat to Chautauqua Lake, where everything seemed too comfortable, rich, respectable, perfect. This gave him a sense of boredom and insignificance – he longed for struggle and hardship. Going back by train, he saw a manual worker high up on a metal structure. This made him understand that struggle is a crucial aspect of the meaningful life. But struggle is not enough, James tells us. A second element is needed too: an ideal. In order to be meaningful, life has to struggle in the name of an ideal.
A person might live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of an unskilled laborer, and yet count as a most noble creature of God. […] If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? The answer must be that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner ideal, while their comrades were not motivated by anything worthy of the name “ideal.” […] The ordinary life of laborers is sterile and not respectable because it is moved by no such ideal inner motivation. They patiently endure the back-ache, the long hours, the danger – for what? To buy a pound of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and avoid as much as they can. This, really, is why we build no monument to the laborers in the subway […] And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose external conditions were even more brutal. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.
[…] But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite account of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something which we conceive intellectually, not something unconscious. And it must carry with it that sort of outlook, inspiration, and brightness that go with all intellectual matters.
Second, there must be novelty in an ideal – novelty at least for the person who is grabbed by the ideal. Routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the people who entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us, here, not something we think about, but for many of our brothers and sisters it is a most legitimate captivating ideal.
Now, if you think about it, you will see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, reasonable or mistaken, low or high. […]
But these conclusions, you instinctively feel, are mistaken. The more ideals a person has, the more you disrespect him, if that’s all he does – if he shows no courage, accepts no hardships, collects no dirt or scars in the attempt to realize the ideals. It is quite obvious that something more than simply having ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that can be admired.
[…] Ideal aspirations are not enough, when not combined with courage and will. But it is also not enough to have only courage and will, only persistent endurance and insensibility to danger. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, in order to result in a life which is objectively and completely significant. […] I am speaking broadly, I know, and am ignoring certain qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one point in one lecture, and I shall be content if I have explained to you my point this evening even slightly.
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March Week 3 quotation
LEV TOLSTOY
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The religious
The Russian writer Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for his great novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and others, but he also wrote many philosophical essays about topics such as society, justice and morality, religion, work, pacifism and non-violence. He was born to an aristocratic family south of Moscow. In his youth he lived a careless life, left university without finishing it, gambled, and served in the army, until he started writing at around the age of 30. This transition was influenced by two trips to Europe, a traumatic experience of public execution in Paris, and meetings with writers and anarchists. Later in his late forties, he experienced a mid-life crisis – a sense of meaninglessness recorded in “A confession” – which led him to religion. However, he did not join any institutional religion, and his approach can be described as pacifist religious anarchism.
The following passages are taken from Tolstoy’s autobiographical-philosophical text “A Confession,” written in 1879-1880. In this short book, Tolstoy describes a meaning crisis which he had experienced five years earlier. Through this personal story, he discusses the issue of the meaning of life, or more precisely how life can possibly have a meaning, given that it is finite, and will soon end with death. According to this book, Tolstoy searched for an answer in science and philosophy (“I had studied life,” as he says below), but found none. Eventually, after reflecting on the attitudes of religious believers, he reached the conclusion that a finite life can have meaning only in relation to an infinite reality, in other words to God.
(From Section III)
So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and the stopping of life, as if I did not know what to do, or how to live, and I felt lost and miserable. But this passed, and I continued living as before. Then these moments started to return more or more often, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the question: “What is life for? What does it lead to?” […] I said to myself: “Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or all the writers of the world – so what?” And I could find no answer at all. These questions would not wait, they had to be answered immediately. And if I did not answer them, it was impossible for me to live. But there was no answer. I felt that the ground on which I had been standing had collapsed, and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left to live on.
(From section V) My question, which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide, was the simplest question. It was in the soul of every person, from the foolish child to the wisest elder. It was a question which one cannot live without answering it, as I had found by personal experience. It was: “What will happen to what I am doing today, or to what I will do tomorrow?” Differently expressed, it was: “Why should I live, why should I do anything or want anything?” It can also be expressed as: “Is there any meaning in my life that would not be destroyed by the inevitable death that awaits me?”
(From section IX) The question was: “Why should I live? In other words, what real, permanent result will come out of my life – my life which is illusory and temporary? What meaning does my finite existence have in this infinite world?’ And in order to reply to this question, I had studied life. The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, because my question, as simple as it first appeared, included a demand: to explain the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa. […] When I understood this, I understood that rational knowledge could not answer my question. The answer given by rational knowledge showed that in order to get an answer, the question must be asked in a different way, which includes the relation of the finite to the infinite. And I understood that the answers which are given by religious faith, even if they are irrational and distorted, have this advantage: they include a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution.
In any way which I formulated the question, this relation appeared in the answer. How should I live? – According to the law of God. What real result will come out of my life? – Eternal suffering or eternal joy. What meaning does life have, which death does not destroy? – Union with the eternal God; heaven. […] Looking again at people of other lands, at people who live now and lived in the past, I saw the same thing: Since the beginning of humanity, wherever there is life, faith has made life possible for the person. And the main outline of faith is the same everywhere and always. Whatever one’s faith might be, and whatever answers it might give, and to whomever it gives them, every such answer gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of the human being, a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, or death. Therefore, only in faith can we find a meaning and a possibility for life. What, then, is this faith? […] It is not just agreement with what you have been told (as faith is usually supposed to be). Faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life, so that the person does not destroy himself but rather lives. Faith is the strength of life.
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March Week 4 quotation
MORITZ SCHLICK
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The player
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) was a German philosopher, and the founder of the famous Vienna Circle. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin, and then turned to philosophy, and started publishing articles and books on topics such as philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. In 1922, after becoming the head of a philosophy department at the University of Vienna, he started to organize and lead a group of important scientists and philosophers, which came to be known as the Vienna Circle. In his publications he made significant contributions to the approach called Logical Positivism. In the 1930s, most of the members of the Circle left Vienna because of the rise of Nazism, but Schlick decided to remain there. He was murdered in 1936 by an ex-student who shot him with a pistol, in part for political reasons and in part because of mental imbalance. Schlick’s murder was celebrated by many in the general public, since he was thought to be Jewish (mistakenly, since in fact his family came from Prussian nobility).
The following passages are slightly adopted from Schlick’s essay “On the meaning of life” (1927). In this essay, Schlick acknowledges Schopenhauer’s argument that simply existing doesn’t make life meaningful. It is not worth working just in order to be able to continue to exist in the future. Schlick therefore searches for an activity that is valuable in itself, not simply because it leads to some future results, and he finds it in what he calls “play.” Notice, however, that for him “play” means much more than simply playing games. Later in this essay, Schlick makes an additional step: that playfulness means youth, in the broad sense of “youth.” The meaning of life is, therefore, youth. The text below does not include this additional step.
For a living person, pure existence in itself is certainly without value. Existence must also have a content, and this content is the only place where the meaning of life can reside. But in fact, our days are filled almost entirely with activities that serve only to maintain life. In other words, the content of existence is mostly the work that is needed in order to exist. We are therefore moving in a circle, and in this way we fail to arrive at a meaning for life. […] Life means movement and action, and if we wish to find a meaning in life, we must find activities which carry their own purpose and value within themselves, independently of any external goals. These are, therefore, activities which are not work, in the philosophical sense of the word “work.” […] There are, in fact, such activities. We must call them “play” since this is the name for an action that is free and is without a purpose – in other words, an action which carries its purpose within itself. However, we must understand the word “play” in its broad, true, philosophical sense – in a sense that is deeper than is usually given to this word in daily life. […]
Play, as I see it, is any activity which is done entirely for its own sake, independently of its effects and consequences. Nothing prevents these effects from being useful and valuable. If they are useful, so much the better – the action still remains a play, since it already carries its own value within itself. Valuable results may come out of it, just as they might come out of activities that are not pleasurable and that are intended to achieve a purpose. In other words, play, too, can be creative. Its results can be the same as the results of work. The idea of creative play will have a major place in the life-philosophy of the future. In order for humankind to continue existing and progressing through playful activities, these activities will have to be creative: necessities must somehow be obtained through such activities. And this is possible, since play is not a form of doing nothing. The more activities become play (in the philosophical sense), the more work would be accomplished (in the economic sense), and the more valuable things would be created in human society. Human work becomes work not when it bears fruit, but only when it is governed by the thought of its future fruit. Let us look around us: Where do we find creative play? The brightest example can be seen in the creation of the artist. His activity, and the shaping of his work by inspiration, is itself pleasure. And it is almost by accident that valuable products come out of it. While working, the artist may have no thought about the benefit of these products, or even about his rewards – otherwise, the act of creation would be interrupted. […] This is also true for those actions which produce neither science nor art, but rather the necessities of the day, which may seem completely without spirit. The tilling of the fields, the weaving of fabric, the repairing of shoes – all these can become play, and they may receive the character of artistic acts. […] It is the joy in pure creation, the dedication to the activity, the absorption in the movement, which transforms work into play. […] Admittedly, goals are needed in order to produce the tension that is required for life. Even playful activity always gives itself tasks, most concretely in sport and competition, but it still remains play as long as it does not degenerate into real fighting. But such goals are harmless. They impose no burden on life and do not dominate it. They are left aside, and it does not matter if they are not achieved, since at any moment they can be replaced by others. […] The final liberation of human beings would be reached if, in everything they do, they could give themselves completely to the act itself, and always be inspired by the love of the activity itself. The end would never justify the means. The highest rule of action would be the principle: “What is not worth doing for its own sake, don’t do for anything else’s sake!” All life would then be truly meaningful, down to its ultimate details. To live would mean: to celebrate the festival of existence.
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