is meaning necessary for life? pt. 2
In this essay I will try to show that the question "what is the meaning of life?" or "what's the point of life if there's no meaning?" is not as obvious as it seems, and contains heavy hidden implications and assumptions. After establishing this, we will discuss why these assumptions are flawed, or at the very least, rather arbitrary. My hope is that this might serve as an escape from a question that always seems to lead to a dead end.
It is a question which we have all asked ourselves at one point in our lives, although curiously, when we were children, it hardly concerned us. It is a question that most of us think about once in a while, maybe as a thought experiment or a party question, but it usually just ends in the same biological fundamentalism or a simple reaffirmation of values ("After all, I want to make the world a better place"). The fact that this question is not easily answered in a satisfactory way seems to bother some of us more than others.
If we recall, we live in a world with no objective values. Morality is subjective, at least, to people who cannot believe in God, or at least the objectivity of God anymore. The other day I watched a video of a Christian debater who was attempting to defend the existence of God, and even he admitted that there is moral grey. The Christians of the past would find even that rather blasphemous.
Of course, there is a necessary prerequisite for values and that is freedom. After all, if we were not free to choose our actions and being then it means nothing to say that it's better to do one thing over something else. And if you really believe in determinism, then you should not bother questioning the meaning of life at all, since in every moment you are already given the answer.
So it stands that most of us experience ourselves as being free, and the baggage that comes with this freedom is that we must make choices, arbitrarily. We must come up with our own reasons and principles, or lean on that of others, but ultimately any value that we uphold can just as easily be revoked. So it is no surprise that eventually we should apply this scrutiny to the act of living itself. Why live at all, if there's no ultimate meaning? If it's just about what I prefer on any given day, what's the point of my whole life?
Not many people who dread this question see suicide as the direct alternative. Camus himself points out that most who claimed that suicide was logical did not kill themselves. The more common alternative, rather, is a quiet existence. An existence of minimizing existence, if you will. An existence where we do not seek to expand ourselves, stretch ourselves beyond our limits, or to grow in any respect. A quiet existence is the bare minimum.
Since not all of us are religious, hopeless quietists, or already dead, there must be at least one more category of person. And that type of person is the one I believe constitutes the majority. It is the type of person who accepts our post-moral condition, our condition of being condemned to be free, but instead of asking "Why?" they declare, "Why not!" When they come across someone who is in despair who questions, "what's the point in living if there is no meaning?", it is this type of person who simply replies, "why ask that question in the first place? Just live!"
Either they present as relentless optimists, zealous to push their limits, or are rather simple people of habit who find daily satisfaction in small joys. Or an infinite amount of variations on an attitude that ultimately amounts to indifference to this question of meaning.
But importantly,it must be pointed out that this "Why not!" also accepts the assumptions inherent in the initial question.
So what are the assumptions that are inherent in probing the meaning of life? In summary, it is that:
- Our being is that of the human being, a biological machine.
- Our life is defined as the period between our birth and our inevitable death.
- Our world is defined by what we can discover through the natural sciences, through measureable phenomena.
In short, this is the naturalistic view which accepts all established scientific explanations for existence and the world. We all are familiar with this way of thinking. But for now, let us take a different perspective.
In a manner reminiscent of Descartes, let us focus only on our direct experience. This will sound more ridiculous the more entrenched you are in the naturalistic view. But ask yourself, did you ever experience being born? The answer is most likely, no. Have you ever experienced your own death? Again, the answer is no.
"But we all have experienced the birth and death of others!" you may protest. Yes, but that is the birth and death of their bodies. We do not know, and cannot know anything about their experience of consciousness, of raw, unfiltered being. We cannot know birth and death as a beginning and end of existence. Let's take it a step further. What I mean to point out here is that you are not first and foremost a human being. That's something we come to believe about ourselves. Remember, we are trying to discard all possible premises to arrive at the fundamental. And what we really are is something more fundamental that is constantly being experienced, and that is awareness.
We are a being that is aware of being.
Unlike the table or the chair, which has a being but is not aware of being, we are aware of the being of the table and the chair, and of our own being. We are aware of other objects that we are not, and also reflexively aware of ourselves. We are a kind of pure subjectivity, a consciousness.
But the term consciousness is a bit too familiar. We already have some sort of vague understanding of it, one that is restricted by the biological view of our being. So that is why thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre came up with their own terms of the kind of being that we are, namely Being-in-the-world (Dasein) and Being-for-itself.
We could explore this further and that is exactly what Sartre does in Being and Nothingness. But for now, let's return to the big question.
What is the meaning of life? What is the point of living if there is no meaning? Now we can see that this question assumes that we have a certain kind of biological, natural existence. But that is not something that is fundamentally true. It is convincing, but still takes a leap to arrive at. It doesn't help us understand our direct, immediate experience of Being. It is verifiable using scientific methods, but scientific methods only apply to measurable matter. It describes our bodies, and the behavior of other matter in the world. But the question of meaning when applied to just our physical body becomes as meaningless as asking "what's the meaning of an apple?" And the common claim that the meaning of life is to reproduce and survive is one that applies to the body. It is a view of our being as synonymous with the being of our bodies, and I would like to bring that into question.
This isn't to assert the existence of something like a soul, some immaterial substance housed within the body. No, that also removes us from the experience of being, and leaves us with the same problem as we did of the body: we begin to interrogate a pre-supposed substance for meaning instead of understanding Being itself.
If we our not our bodies, then the question, "what is the meaning of life?" as we understand it does not make sense to ask, since we were never born and will never die. Being is being. Being was uncreated, and cannot be destroyed.
So the response to this question might be that it is the wrong question to ask. What we should be asking is "What am I?", "What is my true nature?", or even just "What?", when confronted by Being. These are the questions where we may find the answers that we really seek.