The Meaning of Life

I think The 'Purpose' and 'Meaning' of Life generally comes down to the question "is someone using my life/existence for some end?" For instance, a hammer has Meaning and Purpose insofar as someone made it as a means to a specific end (to fasten bits of wood or other stuff together with nails). For some reason, people seem to find comfort in the belief that they are being used for some overarching end -- that they have a place, a role to play in The Plan. This does not necessarily have to be a Divine Plan -- the State/Polity/Community can have an overarching Plan as well, and people seem to be able to derive Meaning and Purpose from that too.

I suspect this human instinct is related to our propensity to enjoy stories and fiction. If you think about it, every character and prop in a story serves a particular end -- Chekhov's gun isn't "just there", it pops up because it is going to be used for a decisive plot point later on. Even when an author throws scene descriptions in that don't actually advance plot they usually have other purposes, such as setting the scene, creating a mood, or what have you. Stories that wander about aimlessly and don't achieve any sort of resolution may be popular with a certain segment of the Post Modernist movement, but they are not popular with the general reading/viewing public.

Perhaps we like to think of ourselves as characters (maybe even the main characters) in a great story, where events in our lives are not just one damn thing after another, but actually are plot points on the path to some momentous and interesting finale. It's depressing to think we are just blobs of matter battering about for no ultimate reason -- it's much more fun to think our lives have some sort of epic significance, and that we have a part to play in the unfolding of The Great Story.

The meaning of life. I don't think there is a necessarily objective answer to this question, at least not in this stage of my own life. But one thing I've noticed is that consciousness, or awareness gives way at first to suffering, and I think it is from suffering we as humans depart. Suffering is the fulcrum of our actions-- those that cause suffering and those that heal it, with a lot of mileage in between. My next few responses are more likely to be aesthetic or poetic, rather than scientific, but at the same time, I imagine there could be scientific reasoning behind what I'll say.

For example, when I read Genesis, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, I think of Paradise as being a place where humans are like the animals, conscious but not really aware. The ignorance is bliss cliche fits here. In Paradise, everything is provided, everything is given, so no desires readily manifest (Brahman, in Hinduism, has been given similar properties: wants nothing, needs nothing, is everything, etc). The conscious mind, when conscious of nothingness, Paradise, is at peace. Freud and the other psychos (Kristeva, Lacan) discuss the oceanic stage in child development. The child is in the womb and essentially conscious of nothingness (symbolized by the warm water of the womb); all of the child's needs are met before they're even needs. Desires in general simply do not arise. The Buddhists have a similar mythic structure: Siddhartha leaves his Father's Palace, which beforehand was a place devoid of suffering-- no old age, no sickness, no death. But Siddhartha was not fully conscious of the world, then, and what his consciousness led him to understand was that life is suffering, death is suffering, the cycle between the two is suffering. Siddhartha left the Palace, his wife and child-- in other words Paradise; in other words the womb. There is something I think called "Ajase" that represents an unconscious Japanese sensibility-- the Japanese people seek, in their life and work, to restore (recreate) the bond they had with their mother in the womb, the bond, really, of a kind of Paradise, or place where there are no desires because one has everything he or she could want.

This all leads me, I guess, to the next point. In Voltaire's Candide, we notice that El Dorado, another Paradise, becomes rather boring. The characters decide to leave Paradise.

I got the sense again that suffering is what makes life meaningful, that what we do as people is inextricably connected to our suffering. We wouldn't do anything (or, at least not very much) if we didn't suffer. We'd die, satisfied, or, perhaps worse, return to unconsciousness, return to a state of ignorance where neither the pleasure nor the beauty, neither the agony nor the cruelty can be perceived, appreciated, cherished.

AMC

I was always a fan of the quote:

The meaning of life is to live it.

Doesn't get much simpler than that.

Monkey said:

No, not the Monty Python movie, but the real meaning of life.

What's it all about? Why?

My usual, almost flip answer is, "To live."

But there's depth behind that. In my view, life experiences, good and bad, help us to know ourselves and help us to grow on a spiritual level.

In Christianity, for instance, the soul is everlasting, but it is judged on the few short years it spends on Earth. It's like Earth is a testing ground, but not for God as much as for us...an omniscient God would already know what was going to happen; we actually go through with it for our own sake. Or so it would seem to me; admittedly, I'm not Christian, though I was at one time.

Another instance...with reincarnation, the soul is reborn time and again, in some cases benefiting or suffering for what they've done in past incarnations. In some religions, you can stop reincarnating when you've learned everything you need to know.

So one of the "common strands" that I see in a lot of religions is this idea that we live so that our spiritual selves can be tested, grow, experience, and so that we can know ourselves more fully.

Which, to me, can be summed up as, "The meaning of life is to live."

I hope that I'm not starting this thread off wrong. I usually hang out in PC&E--this room's polar opposite on AW, I admit--and there, when we broach a topic, it's generally considered good form to give our own opinion. I think that it's at least partially so that the thread starter puts it all on the table first, so that everyone else feels free to do the same.

So anyway, there it is, a question and my opinion all on the table. I haven't had a serious question regarding the meaning of life with anyone but my husband, so I'm interested in other views.

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The meaning of life is likely to be something like what Wordsworth was trying to explain about himself in the Prelude. So here he is at Cambridge:


The Evangelist St. John my patron was:
Three Gothic courts are his, and in the first
Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure;
Right underneath, the College kitchens made
A humming sound, less tuneable than bees,
But hardly less industrious; with shrill notes
Of sharp command and scolding intermixed.
Near me hung Trinity's loquacious clock,
Who never let the quarters, night or day,
Slip by him unproclaimed, and told the hours
Twice over with a male and female voice.
Her pealing organ was my neighbour too;
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.


http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/William_Wordsworth/william_wordsworth_289.htm

I suspect this human instinct is related to our propensity to enjoy stories and fiction.

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To write them, to think of ourselves as actors on a stage, characters in a book, to write our own stories, our own histories. It's my own opinion that our own speculative-selves too often point to an end or conclusion, when no end or conclusion is ever really in sight. Does history have to lead somewhere final? Much fiction tells us it does, especially romances and myths, but I'm not so sure.

This is perhaps why I think mimesis will never fall out of favor. We see things in the universe as being props-- when we perceive them, question them, try to figure out how they fit, they're given meaning, given a place and function and purpose. Our fiction tries to tell the truth of things, reveal things about the human condition, so that elements we find in fiction are interesting because they have some shred of reality within them, some slightly off-center yet dead-on detail or feeling or echo or citation.

The narrative self, which I imagine has existed since Man and Woman could tell stories, see itself as another part of the story, with another function and purpose. The character isn't just a character...

But maybe it is. Maybe the narrative self we hold to our chests so dearly is fiction, by default of our interests, agenda, and obsession with the grand narrative, our part in it. But if our narrative self is a fiction, what shreds of truth have we been relentlessly pointing to?


AMC

AMCrenshaw said:

To write them, to think of ourselves as actors on a stage, characters in a book, to write our own stories, our own histories.

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But each person has innumerable stories about themselves. Some people seem to resign themselves to what is in marketting terms the "elevator sentence" version of themselves and everything else. The elevator sentence is the line that you're supposed to give if somebody at a conference wants a quick answer to "So what do you do?"
I think it is important not to confuse any personal meanings with whatever can be quickly recounted in an elevator to strangers. And yet there alwas seems to be some anxiety to have a marketable meaningful story about yourself. A funny side-effect is the identity without a story...which one might suppose is even more desireable: the fat, brash, drunk, belching man in a nice suit who is some kind of successful bon-vivant (have I enjoyed that meaningful role on occasion and yet it has no narrative at all and perhaps that's its attraction).

AMCrenshaw said:

But maybe it is. Maybe the narrative self we hold to our chests so dearly is fiction, by default of our interests, agenda, and obsession with the grand narrative, our part in it. But if our narrative self is a fiction, what shreds of truth have we been relentlessly pointing to?

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Narratives are ways of slicing the cake of reality. The cake, in and of itself, does not naturally come in slices (or as Plato might have put it, the Carcass of Reality may be properly severable at the natural joints, but unless someone carves at it with a knife it doesn't start out as pieces) -- it all comes in one big whole. But we can't eat the whole shebang all in one go; we need to cut it into easier-to-ingest slices. If the Narrative Self is just a fiction, then it is our way to try to understand the 'cake' of our own reality. The truth it is pointing to is that we exist and have an impact on the world around us.

Monkey said:

That narrative, is IMO, more of the point than where it takes us.

I do see this as a story we're telling or a game that we're playing, but I don't think that it has to be for some Higher Purpose or The Great Story. It's the tough decisions and the moments of bliss that tell us who we are and what we're made of, and that keep our lives fascinating. The "Paradise" mentioned by AMCrenshaw holds no allure for me. Without some needs, and some restraints, how can we really grow?

So in my world view, we leave that "Paradise" and come here to play this beautiful, terrible, fascinating game and in the process experience things (pain, love) that we wouldn't have, had we never had the opportunity to live.

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I'm rather fond of the strategy of avoiding pain as much as possible. There is a lot to be said for accumulating some meaningful experience in detached or self-referential narrative spaces such as vacations, journeys, pilgrimages, minor flirtations, games and watching TV. Not quite living, but not quite suffering a lot either.

I do see this as a story we're telling or a game that we're playing, but I don't think that it has to be for some Higher Purpose or The Great Story.

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Agreed. And yet a great part of me says that we have to recognize our lives in terms of the other stories and how each play their parts on a bigger scale, in the bigger story. I think there are ethical and spiritual reasons for thinking that way. But suffice it to say that a "people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments".

It's the tough decisions and the moments of bliss that tell us who we are and what we're made of, and that keep our lives fascinating. The "Paradise" mentioned by AMCrenshaw holds no allure for me.

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Neither for Candide, nor for me. For no other reason than it would be quite boring. I don't think that I personally could appreciate Paradise for very long and I suspect that neither could Adam, Eve, or Siddhartha. But I am fascinated by the fact that this very drive I quietly abhor is the same drive found within religions. I'll use Buddhism as an example, since I'm in that mood. The end goal of all Buddhist practice (we can play semantic games all day, but let's get to it) is to experience satori, attain enlightenment, and then extinguish (nirvana). What's interesting to me is that the rhetoric of these experiences or non-experiences is ultimately rooted in never seeing things (reality, gods, etc.) as wholly other, and when 'wholly other' ceases to exist so does 'wholly different'. Many, many, many Buddhists speak of the 'bliss' and the 'joy' of realizing emptiness, nothingness, a state in which the mind is totally silent and, one might say, unconscious. By unconscious I don't mean unaware, I mean the lack of a will, lack of desires, lack-- in short-- of suffering. Can't we say that same of Christianity? That the ultimate goal might be to experience what we've somehow lost or given up or surrendered for a time? Isn't the meaning of life, from that point of view, in changing one's consciousness, mindset, actions so as to ascend the ladder to heaven's gates, where God will be sure to embrace us and all our desires and needs will be swept away like footprints along the sea?

AMC

A funny side-effect is the identity without a story...which one might suppose is even more desireable: the fat, brash, drunk, belching man in a nice suit who is some kind of successful bon-vivant (have I enjoyed that meaningful role on occasion and yet it has no narrative at all and perhaps that's its attraction).

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What's interesting, though, is how easily these tropes are narrativized. I could read your example and interpret it, with historical and sociological context and probably ballpark a semi-accurate depiction of the man's life, or, heh, the genre of his life...

AMC

AMCrenshaw said:

Neither for Candide, nor for me. For no other reason than it would be quite boring. I don't think that I personally could appreciate Paradise for very long and I suspect that neither could Adam, Eve, or Siddhartha. But I am fascinated by the fact that this very drive I quietly abhor is the same drive found within religions. I'll use Buddhism as an example, since I'm in that mood. The end goal of all Buddhist practice (we can play semantic games all day, but let's get to it) is to experience satori, attain enlightenment, and then extinguish (nirvana). What's interesting to me is that the rhetoric of these experiences or non-experiences is ultimately rooted in never seeing things (reality, gods, etc.) as wholly other, and when 'wholly other' ceases to exist so does 'wholly different'. Many, many, many Buddhists speak of the 'bliss' and the 'joy' of realizing emptiness, nothingness, a state in which the mind is totally silent and, one might say, unconscious. By unconscious I don't mean unaware, I mean the lack of a will, lack of desires, lack-- in short-- of suffering. Can't we say that same of Christianity? That the ultimate goal might be to experience what we've somehow lost or given up or surrendered for a time? Isn't the meaning of life, from that point of view, in changing one's consciousness, mindset, actions so as to ascend the ladder to heaven's gates, where God will be sure to embrace us and all our desires and needs will be swept away like footprints along the sea?

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Nietzsche had some rather nasty things to say about this goal of eliminating suffering by eliminating the Self and the will. He advocated quite the opposite path, if I recall...

AMCrenshaw said:

What's interesting, though, is how easily these tropes are narrativized. I could read your example and interpret it, with historical and sociological context and probably ballpark a semi-accurate depiction of the man's life, or, heh, the genre of his life...

AMC

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Yet this narrativization is far more misleading than merely being fictional. As Mr. Chuckletrousers has been careful to point out, the narratives are only stabs at the cake. The cake is still out there and mostly untouched by narrative.
For example, you see before you (or not as in this case) a man, nay, a fat man in a nice suit, who has avoided a number of excessively meaningful recent adventures (such as bioprospecting under the arctic) in the name of less meaningful but much more pleasant minor diversions. Less whacking at the cake and more enjoyment of the cake.
One also realizes how fantantasicaally wrong people tend to be about such elementry things as what airplane they are on and where they are going...at times like that it is all too often the ballpark stereotype (as played by me) who can set the more meaningful people straight about what they ought to be doing if they want to avoid say, being lost thousands of miles from their steakhhouse homes in Dallas. I, unlike most of mankind, feel obligated to have a clear idea about where I am going since it is impossible to play the part of a bon-vivant when one is lost.

Mrs Draba has what she calls the Seven Dwarf theory of Idealism. You'll notice that the Seven Dwarves of Snow White fame each share the same physical trait (they're short), and each has only one psychological/sociological trait (at least in the Disney version). A real person wouldn't wander around all day acting Bashful. Sometimes he'd out and speak his mind. Sometimes he'd be tired and turf Sleepy out of the hammock. The Seven Dwarfs are idealised versions of real people.

The point though, is that the idealisation works better because they're Dwarfs and therefore Different. The physical difference (they're shorties) makes the psychosocial idealisation not just palatable but desireable. In short (scuse pun), we tend to idealise when confronted with the strange and the new.

What has that to do with the 'Meaning of Life' question? Why, everything.

Our lives are constantly changing, newly challenging, full of uncertainty. How do we cope with that?

We idealise it.

There must be some meaning, we cry! It couldn't possibly be this complicated and scary without purpose!

Which is another way of saying that our fear tries to oversimplify the complexity of our existence, prompting our imaginations to turn our lives into a Seven Dwarf narrative, reducing our roles from Real Person with contradictions and paradoxes to flat caricature.

Which I think makes us Dopey, if nothing else.

Why does there have to be a meaning of life? Life doesn't have to have any meaning, and I'm okay with that.

In that sense, one's "purpose in life" can be to find one's own meaning in life.

Ruv Draba said:

Mrs Draba has what she calls the Seven Dwarf theory of Idealism. You'll notice that the Seven Dwarves of Snow White fame each share the same physical trait (they're short), and each has only one psychological/sociological trait (at least in the Disney version). A real person wouldn't wander around all day acting Bashful. Sometimes he'd out and speak his mind. Sometimes he'd be tired and turf Sleepy out of the hammock. The Seven Dwarfs are idealised versions of real people.

The point though, is that the idealisation works better because they're Dwarfs and therefore Different. The physical difference (they're shorties) makes the psychosocial idealisation not just palatable but desireable. In short (scuse pun), we tend to idealise when confronted with the strange and the new.

What has that to do with the 'Meaning of Life' question? Why, everything.

Our lives are constantly changing, newly challenging, full of uncertainty. How do we cope with that?

We idealise it.

There must be some meaning, we cry! It couldn't possibly be this complicated and scary without purpose!

Which is another way of saying that our fear tries to oversimplify the complexity of our existing, prompting our imaginations to turn our lives into a Seven Dwarf narrative, reducing our roles from Real Person with contradictions and paradoxes to flat caricature.

Which I think makes us Dopey, if nothing else.

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I have my doubts about the dwarves. I've always thought they suggested the failure of the supernatural to function when we are in its liminal grasp. It's all well and good to expect to escape to the forest, but it is another thing to expect to stay there forever. The darves are small (ie supernatural, liminal beings) but inept (poor SW gets the poisoned apple after all). There's a lesson there for everyone: have an escape plan that does not depend on supernatural beings.

Higgins said:

There's a lesson there for everyone: have an escape plan that does not depend on supernatural beings.

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Well, many supernatural beings do seem to suffer from Sevendwarfism.

Ghosts, for instance, are always carefully attired in Spookwear. They don't just show up nekkid yelling 'Crap! I'm dead!' They're always clad in evocative garments calculated to achieve thematic, emotional effects. And they're more careful of their entrances and exits than ham thespians at The Globe.

Deities too, wear their personalities like Sevendwarf badges. 'Hi! I'm the Goddess of Fertility and I'm Shy and Giggly. Hee hee!' If she turned up for a job interview in any mundane employ, you'd wonder what she'd been smoking. I don't know why I'd entrust my harvest to her when I wouldn't trust her to cook a burger unsupervised.

As for escape plans, I'm not sure that we get one, with or without sevendwarf assistance.

Life: you're stuck with it, until something rips it away.

Ruv Draba said:

Well, many supernatural beings do seem to suffer from Sevendwarfism.

Ghosts, for instance, are always carefully attired in Spookwear. They don't just show up nekkid yelling 'Crap! I'm dead!' They're always clad in evocative garments calculated to achieve thematic, emotional effects. And they're more careful of their entrances and exits than ham thespians at The Globe.

Deities too, wear their personalities like Sevendwarf badges. 'Hi! I'm the Goddess of Fertility and I'm Shy and Giggly. Hee hee!' If she turned up for a job interview in any mundane employ, you'd wonder what she'd been smoking. I don't know why I'd entrust my harvest to her when I wouldn't trust her to cook a burger unsupervised.

As for escape plans, I'm not sure that we get one, with or without sevendwarf assistance.

Life: you're stuck with it, until something rips it away.

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HA! Don't confuse life with the meaning of life. You can always escape the meanings. Upon reflection, revelling in a certain amount of meaninglessness seems like a perfectly good escape to me.
And it's much the same with SW's tricky voyage to the Underworld...at least in the Disney version, where she starts her journey of self-discovery by singing down a well and ends up poorly protected by dwarves whose business is in the underworld.
You'd think (and here Woody Allen's thing about the Evil Queen might be helpful) that a sensible Evil Queen (perhaps a contradiction?) would have let nature take its course with SW who seems to be something of a romantic...but it may be that the EQ is somewhat misled by SW's seemingly healthy demeanor and that cranky mirror. How objective is that magic mirror anyway? Why tear away the EQ's illusions? Who else is in the Kingdom exactly anyway?
SW and the 7ds is an inexhaustible mystery.

Good note, Higgins: "Don't confuse life with the meaning of life."

The initial post, saying that the meaning of life is to live, is just an "if X then X" argument. It's also oddly self-defeating. If living is the point of living, then clearly life has no other purpose.

The people who see meaning everywhere can't imagine a lack of meaning. That doesn't mean there is a meaning, in any absolute sense. And the people who don't need meaning wonder what all the fuss is about.

Life is just a side effect of a lot of solar radiation hitting a chemically active planetary surface. ;-)

Higgins said:

How objective is that magic mirror anyway? Why tear away the EQ's illusions? Who else is in the Kingdom exactly anyway?
SW and the 7ds is an inexhaustible mystery.

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The Magic Mirror has perhaps the most existential angst of all those characters. What is the purpose of its existence? To answer questions about beauty? And who says that life is a job anyway? And should it lie? Should it make constructive suggestions (e.g. "Why not try hair-dye?") How does it know when its done a good job -- and given its fragility, should it ever tell the truth? A utilitarian argument would indicate that it will always have more future ahead of it than past -- as long as it keeps people happy. Moreover, telling people the truth will make n-1 people unhappy. How does it cope with this ethical dilemma?

Perhaps, for the magic mirror, there is no escape into a meaningless existence. What a chore! Maybe that's a lesson for us too.

In the games that I play, I lean to games where there is no winning or losing, or even any real competition.

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Maybe you like Mancala? Have you played it? It is a quiet, intuitive, and sometimes meditative game.

AMC

I'm jumping track on ya'll.

The meaning of life, for me, is to be in a love relationship with God-in Trinity. As a Christian, the opportunity for being in that particular love relationship is by accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and recongnizing his duel nature of being both God and man, the son of God, and by accepting the fact that his death, burial, resurrection and ascention procurred my place with Him, in relationship.

The scriptures say that God is Love. Love, by nature, cannot be expressed without the object of love's affection. Love, by nature, is action. God created humanity to love and for that love to be reciprocated. The will, created by God as the essence of man's being, is sovereign and only a man can be responsible for the willful choices that he makes. Love can not be love unless it is freely chosen. To enter into a love relationship with God, man must freely choose to love God or it is not a love relationship.

When I entered into that love relationship with God, that I was created for, I found the meaning and purpose of my life: to be loved by God and to love Him. That love is expressed by my obedience to Him and by my care and concern for others.

Biologically speaking my purpose is to procreate and pass on my genetic material. It's the same goal as any other living thing that's been roaming around the earth for the past billion years.

As far as how I personally see my "meaning" in life, is simply to get what I what I want out of it. Basically I want to get the best for myself, both at a personal level(self improvement/education/relationships), and at a material level(place to live/food/money/etc.). I don't really view it as that difficult of a question to answer, as it's really definable by the individual, but I think most answers kind of fall a long these lines, at least if they're speaking about the human experience as opposed to the biological purpose.