A quite popular book now, written by V. E. Frankl, bears the
title: Man’s Search for Meaning. In this book the author relates his life
in Nazi concentration camps and
summarizes his observations of men and women in those most brutal and hellish
camps ever designed by man for man’s victims. The basic message and conclusion of Frankl’s life is
that the search for
meaning, the need to have some meaning, is the most central and absolutely
first and basic need in every human being. Perhaps the best description of man
is > a searcher for meaning <. Give some meaning to human life and men
will gladly give their lives for it, but take away this assurance of meaning of
man’s existence and man must commit suicide, go insane, degenerate slowly and die anyway. This is
true for every human life. Anything we do or suffer is done or suffered because
it is somehow meaningful or seems to contain meaning for us. Without this
belief in meaning of our lives there is no real human existence. This quest for
meaning can be expressed in many ways but all of them can be reduced to the
search for worth, importance, value of life.
“Is life worth living? What is the end of it
all?” Without meaning man cannot survive and conversely, he will endure almost
anything including torture,
sufferings, humiliation and death as long as he sees some meaning in it.
“To lose one’s life is a little thing and
I shall have the courage to do so if it is necessary, but to see the meaning of
this life dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable.
One cannot live without meaning.”
Albert Camus
The absolute demand for meaning in life is so
basic and strong that those who experience an existential vacuum, that is blindness
to meaning of life, can think of only one thing: suicide. The awareness that life should be
without meaning cannot be accepted seriously.
Leo Tolstoy when he was fifty and at the top of his literary fame, experienced
a deep anguish that
life actually may have no meaning at all. This deep anxiety ruined completely his desire for
living.
“The force which drew me away from life was stronger,
fuller and more general than wishing. It was a force like the former striving
for life, only in an inverse sense. I tended with all my strength away from
life. The thought of suicide came as naturally to me as had come before the
ideas of improving life. …All that happened to me when I was on every side
surrounded by what is envisioned to be complete happiness.
…I could not ascribe any sensible meaning to a single act, or to my whole life.
… The terror of the darkness was too great, and I wanted as quickly as possible to free Leo Tolstoy, myself from it by means of a noose or a bullet…”
…I could not ascribe any sensible meaning to a single act, or to my whole life.
… The terror of the darkness was too great, and I wanted as quickly as possible to free Leo Tolstoy, myself from it by means of a noose or a bullet…”
My Confessions.
Tolstoy is only example. Each human being,
because he or she is human, has this imperative hunger for meaning in the very center of his
consciousness.
[1]Human existence,
yours and mine and everybody else’s, is problematic. For the human mind
literally everything is a problem:
everything is a question mark. All questions human beings ever asked
from the very appearance of the thinking man in the universe, are related to the question of the
meaning of existence. Without meaning we cannot live and anything that can give
meaning to my existence, to human existence is extremely worthwhile and
extremely important. Since my experience of existence is a mystery, a problem,
and since I am a human being, I must think and search for meaning. There is no
escape from this under the penalty of not being authentically human. If I do
not decipher meaning for my existence I perish, and after my mental suicide I
shall fall beneath the level of human life. But this search for meaning is
exactly philosophy.
Everyone therefore is a philosopher simply because he is human. Philosophy is
simply: man thinking. This
philosophizing is a mode of living.
[2] Philosophy is a
thing that must be done. It is as necessary as life itself. By the very fact
that I am “thrown into” existence and live this existence as a human being I
must philosophize, since, as
Socrates remarked “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Each one of
us wants necessarily to make life as meaningful as possible. This was true, is
true and will be true about every human being and mankind as a whole. Each
generation and each individual must go through this quest for meaning by himself or his life
will appear a wasted, absurd tragedy leading nowhere. William James remarked very much to the
point when he said, “Probably to almost everyone here, every one of us, the
most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be certain
that our bravery and patience with it were germinating and eventuating and
bearing fruit somewhere… (William
James: Is Life Worth Living?).”
Each one of us has one existence only. This
life which is given to me I must live myself. I myself must also make my life
meaningful. The quest for my personal meaning is therefore a lonely search,
which must be done by me, and only by me, alone. Since life without meaning I
cannot bear – I must fill it with my personal meaning. I must live my life, not
somebody else’s, and therefore the meaning of my life is unique to me, as I am
a unique person. Philosophy is a personal attitude towards life as a whole, and the universe
(all that exists) as I see it, and live it. It is a constant growth in
developing my vision of me, the world in which I exist, and the meaning, which
I try to realize and accomplish. This reflective-living-thinking is a heroic
attempt to gain the vision of the whole experience of my adventure of existence as
a human being. To live, we must think or perish, and therefore everyone is a philosopher by the very
fact that he lives.
“Philosophy is first of all,
philosophizing, and philosophizing is undoubtedly a way of living – as is
running, falling in love, playing golf, growing indignant in politics and being
a lady in society.”[3]
(Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy?)
I said that everyone is a philosopher simply
because he lives as a human being. As Ortega remarks, philosophizing is a way
of living. Everything we do in our lives has some conscious or subconscious motive, a reason why we
do it, a reason why
we believe something. A reason why we feel this way, a reason why we are what
we are. This is our philosophy. There is no life without it. Not a human life
at any rate. Our life and our thinking, feeling and believing, our ways of
behaving do not grow out of nothing. We are born into a definite – fated – environment. The childhood period is the
time when we are molded almost entirely by the immediate world, and people
closest to us. Those influences, and their name is legion, are all powerful.
They make us what we are in the most true meaning of the word. As children, we
imitate, and we believe, what the people in our immediate environment tell us.
We do not have enough power of though and reflection
to make the choice yet. Without criticism we accept the ways of living and acting in the small and
narrow little world of our childhood. Our psyche, our behavior, our reactions, our beliefs are all taken
in good faith from this small world of our birth and early upbringing. It must be this way.
There is no other possibility open to us at this stage of our life.
But gradually we grow up: little by little. Our
horizon of
experience widens. We see more of the world, we meet different and new people. We learn
that people live and think in very many different ways, and that our own way is
not the only one possible. We start to compare, criticize, evaluate and very
often we have to go through disillusionment, pains and doubts.
We realize that truth is not something that is
ready made, waiting for us.
We realize that people differ profoundly
|
in ways of living
in ways of understanding the meaning of life in their beliefs about themselves, the world, meaning of their lives. |
It seems that there is hardly one truth to
which everybody could agree. Examples are
many:
1. Knowledge
– Human knowledge is open to infinite progress.
|
1. Human
knowledge is an illusion. A person really cannot have any certain knowledge
at all.
|
2. Man
– Man is the crown of all reality. He is destined to eternal bliss.
|
2. Man
is an accidental byproduct of the blind forces of matter.
|
3. Meaning –
All life is meaningful.
|
3. The appearance of
humans is ultimately meaningless. Life
is absurd.
|
4. God – There is
an Infinite Divine
Creator.
|
4. There is no God.
|
5. Immortality – Death is only a transition to a fuller and better
existence.
|
5. Death is the
ultimate end of human existence, the inevitable absurd ending of an absurd
life. There is no afterlife.
|
Views, beliefs, visions of reality change in
history and along individual lifetimes… It seems that truly everything is
flowing, as Heraclitus
taught.
Different traditions, customs, powers and institutions claim
our allegiance and try to win us for their own causes. Our childhood’s naïve
safety-feeling vanishes. We are awakening to reality , to ourselves. We cannot live someone
else’s lives or take someone else’s beliefs and values uncritically. But we
also realize that amid this confusion many people do not even truly try to
examine their lives. They live sometimes their lives through without truly
evaluating, examining themselves. They never grow up to authentic, reflective maturity. They lack the
courage to think for themselves. We are tempted to join them. It is risky and
frightful and painful to decide to be fully oneself, to truly start searching for one’s own
personal meaning, one’s own personal philosophy. Why is this so? Because every
growth is painful. The basic conditions here are:
(a) Determination for disciplined reflection
(b) Passion for
truth
(c) Courage; the capacity to face the unknown and to risk yourself, your
so-called “security” of the “now”.
There is no way out. The very fact of our being
alive in the world forces us to find our place in it, to decide what we shall
believe, and what we will do with our lives. We said before that everyone is a
philosopher simply because he is human and he lives. Each one of us however, is
exposed to the temptation
of an un-authentic living.
This un-authentic life happens whenever we do
not decide at some point of our life to start truly the search, the personal
search for our own meaning for own philosophy of life. It is extremely easy to
fall into the trap
of un-authentic existence. It happens
automatically, unconsciously to us. Although we know that an unexamined
life is not worth living, we may for irrational motives evade the facing of the
basic problems of our existence. False concepts of security, emotional ties to unexamined values, and beliefs,
ingrained prejudices, sloth of mind, lack of courage,
to be fully oneself – all those factors are tremendous obstacles in our development towards our
own philosophical life. Thus many people drift along as slaves of customs, fads and prejudices of
their times, and are carried by time to their graves. The “common man” or the “faceless man”
sells his time, his labor, his soul to powers and institutions and ideologies or mythologies which he
really does not know. Nor does he care to know. This selling of himself
provides him with false feelings of security, with false meaning of life. It is
false because it has never been examined in depth. It has never been faced in
an honest effort towards a true vision of the totality of the human experience
of existence. Ultimately, it is something alien, imposed from outside.
An unexamined life is not worth living because
it is a living in quasi-authenticity.
Such a life ultimately leads to disillusionment, meaninglessness and tragic frustration. It cannot lead anywhere
else.
To exist in the world as a human being means
constant risking of oneself, constant deciding what we are, what we believe,
what we do. There’s no escape since even if we evade making a decision we make
a decision. We decide not to decide and that is a decision. Everyone is
responsible at least to himself for his existence.
Since philosophy is essentially thinking and
searching for the meaning of our lives, it must be done by everyone for
himself, for the way we think determines the way we act and live and die.
To philosophize
is to explore life.
It means breaking free
to ask questions.
It means resisting easy answers.
To philosophize
is to seek in oneself
the courage to ask
painful questions.
is to explore life.
It means breaking free
to ask questions.
It means resisting easy answers.
To philosophize
is to seek in oneself
the courage to ask
painful questions.
J. Christian
“The end of philosophy is not that we may
know what men have thought, but what the TRUTH of things is.”
Thomas Aquinas
Philosophy is the love of wisdom.Its object is search for truth.
Wisdom is the art of happiness
and
TRUTH is the way to it.
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