is meaning necessary for life?

We have, for the most part, abandoned the possibility of a prescribed meaning for existence. As a side effect of that, we have found that we are uncreated. No one has experienced their birth, and moreover, non-being cannot give rise to being. Therefore, being has always been, although being itself does not conform to any linear sense of time.

When most people question the meaning of life, they are entering into this question with many assumptions. Usually, the concept of our being is that we are an animal, a sort of biological entity composed of matter which abides by the laws of physics. Being this organism, we are born, age, and die in a specific fashion, and the period between birth and death we call "life". Our being is linked to the being of our bodies.

While our conception of being surely includes our bodies, it is not evident that the being of our bodies is our being. But out of curiousity, let's continue down this line of questioning.

The human being did not ask to exist. None of us chose to exist. We simply find that we do exist, that there is something rather than nothing. Our existence is not a matter of biology. It is rather an ontological truth. The condition of our existence may be described as the human condition, but being itself is not human nor anything else. It simply is.

But for the human being, is it necessary to have a meaning to live? It appears that the answer is, for the vast majority of us, no. We do not get up every morning on the brink of suicide, grab a gun from our nightstand and point it at ourselves, only to reaffirm our meaning for living so that we can go about our day. I don't doubt that there exist people for whom this is a reality, but we will discuss them later.

For now, I think it's appropriate to point out that when people claim that for them the meaning of life is love, or learning, or any one of the infinite possible responses to that question, they do not mean that this is the purpose that keeps them from suicide. It is not even entirely clear if we can generalize what people mean by a "meaning of life." But typically we mean it in the sense of a purpose for our existence.

Since we were not created, we do not have a prescribed purpose. So what then? We could end here and just say that "being has no meaning and does not need one." Buddhism is with us until this point but then says that we all have the seed of Buddhahood within us. And of course, the Abrahamic faiths would be apalled that we have accepted these premises at all.

But we have found that suicide is not a valid response, since it does not return you to a nothingness, or "end" your existence. There is no such thing as a nothing, because nothing always exists relative to something. There can be no nothing had there not already been a something.

I cannot tell you what you would experience should you commit suicide today, but it would not be the cessation of being, or "life," if you will. This is what many eastern religions have already known. Whether we truly reincarnate in the manner described in Buddhism is not of the greatest importance. What matters is that there is no end to being.

So at least, we have managed to move past the naturalistic understanding of the human life as a period of time between the birth and death of the organism. We have in fact moved past humanity, although we acknowledge a human condition.

This may have been what Sartre meant when he said being is de trop. And while this is certainly fascinating, it still leaves us short of an ethics.