On the Meaning of Life
1
To look back to the circumstances under which a question arises helps us in understanding a question better thus making it easier to answer it. Moreover, it can even point to the dissolution of the question altogether and make the answer unecessary or generate different, perhaps more interesting questions. The question regarding the meaning (or purpose, which is not exactly the same[1]) of existence has a complicated origin, where many factors play a role and contribute to its emergence.
I will start with the simplest, and one that has been experienced by all. When we were children, we asked questions about everything. When children ask the question “What is that?” they do not merely want to know the name of something which captures their curiosity. They want to know what it does and what it is for. We categorize external objects not only by what they look like but also by what they do and what they are for. This mode of questioning is then transposed on whatever the child needs to know. When parents shout or beat their children, most of them make sure the child knows why this happens so the child won’t do it again. The child feels it was responsible for the parents reaction. So children associate certain behaviors and the subsequent pain or reward (be it physical or emotional) with a reason, and it doesn’t take much time to generalize (the tendency for children to generalize is well documented[2]) this to most internal states: anger, envy, jealousy, fear. Their experience with their parents being the most intimate and most frequent, their initial model for explaining their internal states is that an external agent causes internal states (e.g. Parent causing pain to the child or child making the parent angry). Thus, they mostly seek external causes for what happens within them.
Let us summarize the above insights in order to connect them with later ones. Children are heavily assisted in learning the meaning and purpose of things from an external authority figure. He/She symbolizes their source of knowledge. They are made to feel responsible for their parents reactions. They are punished and rewarded by the same persons and during those processes they associate external causes with internal states.
Having said the above, it is now not difficult to be in the position to understand the Freudian point[3] regarding Christianity. God, as the benevolent father with supreme authority, is the agent who teaches us the meaning and purpose of things. The Father who can answer what our father couldn’t because he’s omniscient. The Father who punishes and rewards and make us feel responsible for our sins. Where our sins explain the pain and evil in the world, like our bad behavior explained the punishment our parents inflicted on us.
Thus, unwanted internal states, are moralized from the beginning. Even if the child is not brought up in a Christian environment the punishment he receives is given a moral justification: “You did something wrong.” Thus, the moral interpretation of natural phenomena has haunted mankind for thousands of years. Earthquakes and floods were seen as punishments and good harvests and fertile wives as rewards.
Children, as well as adults, can withstand meaningful suffering because they can change it by their future behavior. The child can ‘behave’ and the adult can be a good Christian or a good citizen. But pointless suffering seems unendurable exactly because we cannot do something to change it.
Thus, the usual emergence of the question regarding the meaning of life comes from the experience of pointless suffering. “Why?” is the incessant question of a suffering mankind. If only we knew why we suffered, we could do something about it, and hence avoid suffering. It is this quest that has given birth to all religions. The Buddhists answered it by claiming that the root of suffering is desire. Hence if I eliminate desire, I eliminate suffering. The Christians thought mankind was suffering because it had a sinful nature, inherited from its parents Adam and Eve. If you’re a Christian or a Muslim there is a meaning in suffering but there is no escape - at least not in this life. Virtually every philosophy addresses the issue of suffering and why it is present. The Stoics claimed that we suffer because we don’t live according to nature. The Epicureans because we do not prudently choose which pleasures to indulge in and which to avoid. Epictetus claimed we suffer because we care about things which are not in our power to change. Were we to concentrate on the ones that are truly within our power, then suffering would largely diminish and a happy, peaceful life would be possible. The list is endless but the point remains the same. We want to know why we suffer - in order to do something about it.
2
What is the meaning of life? Most people unwittingly subscribe to what in philosophy is called an “Augustinian” picture of language. That is, they take the meaning of words to be the objects for which they stand. Thus, for those persons (let’s call them Augustinians), the meaning of the word “apple” is the apple itself, and if someone were to ask them what they mean by apple, they would fetch or point an apple. The problem with this picture, famously diagnosed by Wittgenstein, is that you cannot point to an object for the meaning of some words. What object would you point, for example, for words like “No” or “Now”? There simply isn’t any object for such words, and this just reveals that the Augustinian picture of language is, if not mistaken, then at least limited, because it fails to explain how we understand words in which there is no object that we can point to.
Thus, when people ask, what is the meaning of life? They sometimes mistakenly search for an object, which simply confuses them and leads them nowhere.
Wittgenstein eventually came to the conclusion that the meaning of words and symbols comes from the way they are used. In short: Meaning is use. Think for example of the word “gay”. In the 19th century it meant: happy, cheerful. In the 20th century it means a homosexual man. The usage of the word has changed, and thus its meaning. This explains why it is so much easier to learn a foreign language while living in that foreign country, where the words and their uses are so vividly interconnected, instead of learning it from a book. Language is something you understand by practice, and practice is nothing other than use.
Thus, if we were to follow the developments in the philosophy of language and linguistics, we would say that the meaning of life, is not to be found in some object external to itself, like the apple in the case of “apple”. If you spend your life searching for it in the Augustinian way, you’re never going to find it, for the presuppositions of the question you are asking are leading you astray. Neither is it to be found in some value turned into a noun (so as to make it look like an object) like “the Good”, “the True”, “the Beautiful”, or even a conjunction of them. The meaning of life is found within the practice of life itself. It is is discovered in living it.
[1] See Appendix (not written yet)
[2] See A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, Cambridge University Press.
[3] In, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion.
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