The Meaning Of Life

To live is to feel oneself lost — he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against reality – Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

What is the meaning of life? When that question is asked nowadays, it’s usually with a sarcastic sneer. Us sophisticated moderns don’t think any answer is possible.

I was at a meeting with the head of a successful law firm last Tuesday. When he found out I’d studied Philosophy in graduate school, he mentioned that he’d been watching a podcast in which the man said he sought to live a “noble life”. Then he shrugged.

The lawyer was good looking, personable and highly competent, probably in his mid-fifties and the head of a firm with multiple branches throughout California. His hourly rate was astronomical and he was heading to his second home in Marin county after the meeting. His shrug suggested that he’d never given the question much thought. Like most people, he’d simply accepted the answer about how to live one’s life from the culture and historical moment into which he was born. In his case – and ours – that answer is defined by a successful career and the accumulation of wealth.

But Philosophy doesn’t rest content with whatever answers a given culture and historical moment offers. It wants to go beyond them to discover the Truth. Are those answers the right ones? How might we go about answering that question?

Now is a good time to introduce the Existentialist concept of “facticity”. Facticity is all the facts and givens that you are born into and are outside of your control. Your sex, your parents, other sociological facts like race and class, your culture and historical moment, etc… You have no choice about these things.

I’d also like to make a distinction between “normies” and “neurotics”. Another term for normies is well adjusted. The lawyer was the definition of well adjusted and he made a good life for himself by succeeding according to the given cultural premises. Neurotics are those whose childhood trauma causes them to have difficulty with living. As a result, they become self conscious and introspective.

This can be a good or a bad thing. It can either increase their self consciousness and paralyze them, worsening their neurosis, or be the means of their liberation. When it’s the latter, it can lead them to Philosophical questions like the one I’m addressing in this blog. Those are questions that normies rarely ask. Because they don’t have any serious problems adjusting to life in their culture, they generally accept the cultural premises and live according to them.

There’s nothing wrong with being a normie and living a conventionally successful life. As long as the culture is somewhat rational, this can be a meaningful life. Certainly you could do a lot worse than my lawyer. But there is a deeper level of living in which, usually a neurotic, asks the Truth question: Are the answers on offer by my culture about how to live the right ones?

For two millennia, Religion offered a satisfying answer to the question of a meaningful life. There is a God. He created the universe and the laws by which it operates. And there is a book in which everything is explained, including how human beings should live. The creation of modern science, and especially Darwin’s theory of evolution, threw all of this into question. Nietzsche drew the implications for the meaning of life in his parable of the madman in The Gay Science in 1882 in which he said that “God is dead”.

My contention is that the best human beings can do is to offer a creative response to their facticity in the way that they live their lives. There are no ultimate answers and the authentic life will vary from person to person. But it must involve a serious confrontation and creative response to one’s life history and historical moment. There is no escaping Philosophy for us ship wrecked moderns for whom all easy answers have been discredited.