Arthur Schopenhauer was a pessimist. Not the kind of pessimist who looks at a dreary morning sky and assumes it's going to rain. He was the kind who'd see storm clouds and make a mental tally of how many people were likely to get caught in the downpour and die of pneumonia. He would count these people lucky.
He was a gloomy German philosopher who had the professional misfortune of living at a time, the 19th century, when gloominess seemed to be going out of style. All around him scientists were starting to solve mysteries of nature. His fellow philosophers were chirping about intellect and reason and the sunny days that lay ahead for humanity.
Bah! said Schopenhauer. No amount of scientific reasoning was going to alter his certainty that life was one miserable, frustrating, disappointing episode after another.
"As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life," Schopenhauer counseled readers, "nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony." Once you admit this, you will "no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence. . . ."
While it's unlikely Schopenhauer got invited back to many parties, give him credit. He came up with some definite ideas about the question philosophers, theologians, novelists, artists and countless other folks have been wondering about -- at least from time to time -- for as long as people have wondered about anything. Namely: What is the meaning of life?
It's been said that a person hasn't begun to think seriously until he or she starts thinking about life's meaning. If that's the case, let the record show that the human race has produced its share of serious thinkers. There are serious answers (lots). There are not-so-serious answers (almost as many).
In his series of satirical science fiction novels known as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, British author Douglas Adams describes how a species of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings constructed "Deep Thought," a computer the size of a city, to find the answer to the question of "life, the universe and everything." It takes Deep Thought 7 1/2 million years of calculating and computing, but at last it has the answer.
"You're really not going to like it," the machine forewarns two descendants of its builders.
But they insist they want to know, so it tells them.
"Forty-two."
It's no wonder the question of "What is the meaning of life?" is so often lampooned. What is it asking, anyway?
Linguistic philosopher Kai Nielsen phrased the dilemma this way: "We are asking: Is life just one damn thing after another until finally one day we die and start to rot? Or can I sum it up and find or at least give it some point after all?"
To oversimplify criminally, there are three schools of thought.
One is nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning, value or purpose. Shakespeare's Macbeth is making nihilist noises when he broods about life seeming to be "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The second outlook anchors most religions. It holds that we're here because one or more superior beings put us here and that this Creator or Creators has given us some job to do. It might be to finish creating the world. It might be to amuse the Creator. It might be to have fun. It might to believe in the Creator and be really considerate of one another. Depending on which sacred writ you read, and which interpretation of it you subscribe to, how well we perform our roles in this world may affect our status or accommodations in the next.
The third alternative, favored by many agnostics and atheists, goes like this: We can't be sure why we are here or whether any greater power is monitoring the situation, so to make our lives meaningful the thing to do is put them to use doing something we find rewarding.
About 10 years ago the editors of Life magazine asked a number of wise and/or famous people to give their thoughts on the meaning of life. The one supplied by Pulitzer Prize-winning interviewer-author Studs Terkel (Working) was the most succinct:
"To make a dent."
Fat chance.
As geologists remind us, if one were to scale down the history of the planet Earth to one year, homo sapiens would not appear until well after dinner on New Year's Eve.
One doesn't have to be a geologist to realize that neither our material selves nor anything we create has a prayer of outlasting Lake Ontario, let alone eternity. It is only a matter of time -- and not much of it, geologically speaking -- before all trace of any of us will be gone.
This morbid, here-today-gone-eventually scenario can make it tough to get one's work done. When he was 50 and at the self-professed height of his personal and professional life, Russian moralist and doorstop novelist Leo Tolstoy came to what he described as "the arrest of life." In his famous essay "My Confession," Tolstoy describes how he moped around his estate for months after realizing that "Sooner or later there would come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would be nothing left but stench and worms. All my affairs, no mater what they might be, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself should not exist. So why should I worry about all these things?"
Tolstoy would find an answer.
Christian philosopher and theologian R.C. Chalmers may have had Tolstoy in mind when he observed that, "Unless our religion has an adequate answer to give about life's meaning, we are left as very miserable creatures."
It's safe to say that nothing improves our outlook on life -- which, to all outward appearances, is a finite enterprise -- than to discover a convincing argument that life isn't necessarily finite.
In his essay "The Transforming Power of Otherworldliness," philosopher David F. Swenson notes that the New Testament Apostle Paul shrugged off years of floggings and dungeon sentences as "a light affliction" (II Corinthians 4:17), not because he believed God was going to punch out his persecutors at any minute, but because his god was a god who promised eternal happiness to believers -- even if that meant enduring occasionally brutal treatment in this preliminary world.
Religions arguably wouldn't hold much interest if they didn't offer instructions for obtaining everlasting life, or at least a world-view suggesting that the "I" inside our bodies goes on being "us" after our bodies wear out.
The 1965 book The Meaning in Life in Five Great Religions, which Chalmers co-edited, includes a handy table on the back cover summarizing the answers Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam give to the mother of all questions. Inside, a cast of noted writers explains what each religion teaches about one's reason for being and the proper goals a believer should have for life.
Eastern religions emphasize a personal search for comprehension of what the sound and fury is all about. In both the Hindu and Buddhist constructs, our world is a place where all things are connected and interdependent. Hindus believe that a complete internalization of this notion (combined with achieving one's full, virtuous potential) takes more than one lifetime, which is why they also believe in reincarnation.
Buddhists are even more cerebral about life's meaning. They are taught first to be thankful -- or at least glad, since their creed features no god in the conventional sense -- that they were not born a raccoon or some other form of life. If they were, they would have no hope of learning Buddhism and attaining the tranquil state of Nirvana, a synonym for enlightenment.
To get to Nirvana, one must become unshakably convinced that each instant of life and everything around us is the result of infinite chains of events. It's an outlook reminiscent of a pet paradigm of modern-day chaos theorists that traces the seeds of complex weather patterns to butterfly wingbeats half a world away. The point is, one person's actions can have all sorts of rarely reflected upon effects.
Besides deep meditation and reflection, Hinduism and Buddhism also call for moral behavior. Hindus follow the familiar Christian creed of "do unto others as you would have done unto you," but not just because it sounds fair or is stated as God's law. A Hindu sees the golden rule as being in his or her own self-interest, since all others are considered to be a nothing less than a part of themselves.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which share a common root (namely, the prophet Abraham), focus less on such enlightenment and more on the nature of God and God's plan for the world.
A common thread among the three is that no matter how insignificant our lives might seem sometimes, they are worth living because they are all part of a divine production. Where the faiths differ is in their interpretation of the role in which God has cast man.
Jews see God as having definite ideas about what human beings should be doing while on earth, but they also believe that they, as a race, have been assigned an important, decision- making role in history. By worshiping God and obeying his laws and the teachings of his prophets, Jews believe they can speed the coming of the Messiah, who will then right wrongs, defeat enemies, unify the Jewish people (God's "chosen people") and lead them in God's way.
Not surprisingly the two religions built on Judaism's foundation also tout "doing God's will" as the main purpose of life. The word islam literally means "submission" or "handing over" -- as in handing over one's will (handing it back?) to God. To be a Muslim, writes the Islamic scholar M. Rasjidi, is to submit voluntarily to being a "slave of God."
Christianity holds that the first order of business in living is to establish a personal relatinsip with God, something that can be done only by believing in God Incarnate -- Jesus Christ -- and by following his teachings.
Christians are convined God invented life and created every soul and that God knows why. Only by connecting with God through Christ and by following Christ's example can one hope to understand one's place in the divine plan, one's purpose in being on this Earth in this particular time.
For Catholics reared in the United States, answering the question of Why did God make me? used to require no deeper thinking than to recite the Baltimore Catechism's answer: "God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next," notes Lawrence S. Cunningham, chair of Notre Dame's theology department. That answer still holds, he says, but since Vatican II, many Catholics have taken knowing and loving God to mandate action on some specific imperatives as well, such as working to promote justice and relieve suffering.
A common thread running through Christianity's various forms is the assertion that everybody is going to live forever (after this world, either in paradise or somewhere less pleasant). However, nowhere in the Christian Bible is the "meaning of life" addressed in so many words.
In poetic Ecclesiastes, an unnamed writer (probably Solomon) assures readers "there is a time to every purpose under heaven." But no mention is made of heaven's purpose in bringing generation after generation of people into being.
At certain points in both the Old and New Testaments, man appears to have been dreamed up by God for no higher purpose than to serve as his publicist. Jacob is told by God: "I have created him (man) for my glory." (Isaiah 43:7). And Paul reminds the Romans in his letter to them, "For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee and that my name might be declared throughout the earth." (Romans 9:17).
In the Koran, the prophet Muhammad reports Allah as stating, "I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known. Therefore I created the world so that I would be known." According to the Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, what the Supreme Being is saying is, "Man is the eye through which God knows himself in his creation, through which God sees and reflects upon his own splendor."
On its meaning-of-life page on World Wide Web, the Living Stream Ministry of Anaheim, California, disseminates Bible teachings of the late Chinese Christian evangelist Watchman Nee and his Chinese-American successor Witness Lee. The writers interpret the section of Genesis that says God made man in his own image, to be fruitful and multiply, and to have dominion over animals, wild and domesticated, to mean that God created man to represent God's authority on earth.
A helpful way to visualize this, their cybertract suggests, is to consider ourselves as gloves. "Because the glove is in the image, the likeness, and the form of a hand, it is able to contain the hand. A glove is made in the form of a hand for the purpose of containing the hand. In the same way the human life was created according to the image of God so that God could dispense himself as the divine life into the human life."
This seems to explain why man, unlike animals, possesses the intellect to ponder the existence of a god, and maybe even believe in one, but it still leaves God looking like a playwright who has to manufacture an audience.
Could it be that God was just lonely?
The Christian writer C.S. Lewis believed God created the universe partly for reasons we don't know but partly to produce creatures who were like himself in that they have minds. While on earth, these creatures can choose to go in one of two directions: believe that they can make their own happiness by pursuing whatever they please, or follow what Lewis titles "Moral Law," that phenomenon which, thanks to God's handiwork, Lewis said, taps like a finger of conscience on people's shoulders, regardless upbringing or religious instruction. What we get for following God is eternal happiness. What we get for ignoring God is eternal damnation.
But what God gets for populating a planet with creatures who can choose to be with him or against him is harder to pin down.
Maybe Ecclesiastes is right after all and God's motives are not for us to discern. Paul seemed to think as much. Anticipating questions about why God did one thing rather than another, he posed a couple of questions of his own:
"Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, `Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay. . . ?'" (Romans 9:20-21)
Existentialist writer Hazel E. Barnes took a dim view of assuming that if there isn't a God our lives have no meaning.
In her essay "The Far Side of Despair," she concedes that belief in God and the perfection of God's plans provides a certain "psychic refreshment" when times are tough. But that mental Pepsi comes at too steep an intellectual price for her." Barnes and other writers can't comprehend how predestination and freedom of action could coexist. That is, if everything one does is part of God's plan and is God's will, how is it possible to do anything but God's will?
And why would God endow man with the ability to reason then demand belief in sacred accounts -- a handmade boat large enough and durable enough to float two of every species on stormy seas for 40 days? -- that defy reason?
Then there is the question of all the undeserved suffering God appears to allow, if not inflict. In his essay "The Meaning of Life," philosopher Kurt Baier dissects the dilemma he sees facing Christian fundamentalists:
"(They) have to explain not only why an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good God should create (the) universe . . . and . . . man, but also why, foreseeing every move of the feeble, weak-willed, ignorant, and covetous creature to be created, he should nevertheless have created him and, having done so, should be incensed and outraged by man's sin, and why he should deem it necessary to sacrifice his own son on the cross to atone for this sin which was, after all, only a disobedience of one of his commandments, and why this atonement and consequent redemption could not have been followed by man's return to Paradise . . ."
Having discredited religion intellectually, however, humanists might well be asked, "Do you have any better ideas how to imbue our tenuous existences with meaning?"
They have ideas.
A useful first step, many argue, is to stop thinking of ourselves as objects in a tool box.
"We must resist the temptation," writes the British philosopher Ronald W. Hepburn, "to translate `What is the purpose of life? into `What are people for?'" So far as we can tell, we are more autonomous and versatile than, say, a Dustbuster.
Day to day we may not be able to glean the eternal purpose behind putting in earrings that match, eating food rich in B vitamins or recycoling aluminum, but do we need to?
In his essay, "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel writes, "No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove."
Hazel Barnes' advice for finding meaning is to imagine life to be like a Chinese checkerboard, except without the logically arranged, regularly shaped holes or uniformly sized marbles.
Traditionally, she argues, people have assumed that to play Chinese checkers, or to live life correctly, some pattern must exist which, if discovered, would show us how to arrange our marbles (or priorities). Some have argued, she says, that if no such pattern exists, there is no reason to play.
"Existentialism holds that there is no pre-existing pattern. . . . Nor is it sensible to hope for some nonmaterial force which might magnetically draw the marbles into their correct position if we put ourselves in touch with such a power by prayer or drugs or any other device which man might think of."
She admits this approach "deprives man of guide and certain goal" but it leaves us free to create our own patterns for our marbles.
It's unclear whether it would necessarily also keep us from losing them.
In his essay "`Nothing Matters,'" moral philosopher R.M. Hare tells the story of an teenage boy who came to stay with Hare and his wife for a time in England. To make their French-speaking guest feel more at home, the Hares set some French books on a table beside his bed.
Hare describes his guest as being cheerful, lively and friendly when he first arrived, in addition to being sincerely religious. But after he'd been with them a week, he began acting strangely. He hardly spoke at meals, surprised them by asking for cigarettes, and one night disappeared for hours, explaining when he returned that he had been wandering in a field.
Hare learned that his guest had been reading the only work of fiction set out for him, L'Etrenger (The Stranger) by the existentialist writer Albert Camus. The book had convinced him that nothing in life mattered.
Hare reread The Stranger hoping to find a clue to the mysterious effect it had had on his guest. Instead he found himself amused by the novel's climactic scene.
In it, an Algerian prisoner about to be executed for murder confronts a priest who is trying to get him to confess to the crime so he might receive absolution. The prisoner seizes the cleric by the collar and begins screaming at him in an attempt to make the priest see that nothing in life matters. Hare, and ultimately to his despondent friend, were able to see the irony in getting so excited over anything if nothingtruly matters.
This seems an important lesson for anyone perspiring with worry over the elusiveness of life's meaning.
It may be true that nothing the vast majority of us does will be remembered, much less matter, to anyone a few generations from now. What's worse, as physicists remind us, there's a good chance that all the matter in the universe will at some point be sucked back into its pre-Big Bang configuration, a super dense chunk smaller than a Tic Tac.
But should we let these probabilities spoil our plans for the weekend?
Even pessimists like Schopenhauer, who would have us believe that this is the worst of all possible worlds, have found it in their intellects to get out of bed and brush their teeth. As the philosopher Paul Edwards observes, "[M]ost pessimists do not commit suicide." Does that make them hypocrites? Maybe not.
One of the many frustrating aspects of searching for life's meaning is recognizing that our reasoning is restricted to what we can sense and conceive. If we had a sixth or seventh sense, or five entirely different senses, might we not grasp that we aren't really human beings treading a planet in a vast solar system within a much larger universe, but dust motes adhering to a smear of neptunium on the inside edge of the third tine on a salad fork in the 11th dimension?
Or maybe we are like ants crawling over books in the New York Public Library. Our antenna give us some idea of the size and texture of the books, but even if we manage to force open a cover now and then, we can't hope to read word one.
Plenty of people would say this is nonsense, that our existence is easy to explain. These are people like paleontologist, essayist, and humanist Stephen Jay Gould. When the editors of Life asked Gould for his thoughts on the meaning of life, he didn't beat around the fossil record. He said: "We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available (so thank your lucky starts in a literal sense); because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a `higher' answer -- but none exists."
One might then counter, "So what if we, along with along with everything else on Earth, evolved from something else? Who's to say what or who set the forces of evolution into motion?" Pope John Paul II announced in 1996 that Darwin's ideas are worth taking seriously and don't necessarily contradict Christianity.
As for the paradox of our having freedom of action while God knows every action we'll take, C.S. Lewis conceived this tonic: God is not shadowing us along our time line at our pace, he is outside of time, above it. "He does not `foresee' you doing things tomorrow; he simply sees you doing them."
Lewis was great at devising reasonable answers like that to vexing questions about Christianity. But as almost any evangelist will attest, belief in the religious meaning of life requires something more than reason. It takes faith.
"From the Christian standpoint," Chalmers writes, "it is utter nonsense to think that a secularist or an agnostic can come to know what the meaning and purpose of life is according to Christianity." And the Hindu Upanishads declare, "The self cannot be realized by scriptures nor by intellectual probity, nor by the astuteness of the intellect. It can only be realized by him who chooses it."
It's always tempting to dismiss faith as wishful thinking, but not all great thinkers have. Philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that the existence of God can't be explained by reason, but he also believed faith was necessary to explain mankind's apparently hard-wired morality or sense of right and wrong.
Albert Einstein was no atheist or nihilist, either. Undeserved suffering notwithstanding, he couldn't shake his belief that the universe had not only an intelligence behind it, but compassion.
"God may be sophisticated," he said, "but he's not malicious."
If the price for peace of mind about life's meaning is belief in a supreme being, it is a bargain for many.
After his painful struggle to find a reason to live, Tolstoy opted to join the uneducated peasants down in the village and believe that God exists and put him on Earth for a reason. This lifted his spirits so much that he became downright philosophical about his mortality. It's said that when he was a old Tolstoy was spotted planting apple tree seedlings. His neighbor laughed at him and called him a silly old man because when the apples finally grew to fruition he wouldn't be around to eat them.
"Yes," the author replied, "but other people will eat them and they will think of me."
Tolstoy had essentially taken the suggestion of the 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (since repeated by countless evangelists) to: "Bet on the toss of a coin that God is. If we win, we win eternity. If we lose, we lose nothing."
But does eternity equal meaning? As more than one philosopher has pointed out, even if we assume that our lives have meaning because God has endowed them with meaning, that still leaves open the question: What is the meaning of God's life?
If there's one philosophy that can accommodate both the God-given and man-made perspectives on meaning in life, it might be the one visualized by the American philosopher Richard Taylor.
In his essay "Does Life Have a Meaning?" Taylor ponders the myth of Sisyfus, a mortal in Greek mythology who was punished by the gods for revealing divine secrets to man. His fate was to roll a rock up a hill for eternity, the kicker being that every time he neared the top of the hill the rock would roll back down. This labor, Taylor observes, is supposed to represent the ultimate in frustrating futility.
Taylor then asks us to suppose that the gods, in a moment of mercy, decided to instill in Sisyfus an irrational compulsion to roll rocks. Suddenly nothing makes him happier than to be pushing his rock up the hill. He's now in heaven -- and he can partake of this pleasure forever because the gods have sentenced him to remain at his rock-rolling station for eternity.
Viewed objectively, Taylor says, Sisyfus's activity is still purposeless. He never accomplishes anything. But he is happy. In fact, if his task were ever finished, if he ever did get his rock to the top of the hill, he'd be unhappy and he would probably die of boredom.
It doesn't take a Socrates to grasp the similarities between Sisyphus' irrational rock- rolling and our wills, our deep-seated interest in what we do each day, whether that's getting a flu shot, or taking your children to a house of worship, or keeping an eye out for a sale on pine bark mulch.
"(T)he strange meaningfulness (our lives) possess," Taylor concludes, "is that of the inner compulsion to be doing just what we were put here to do, and to go on doing it forever. This the nearest we may hope to get to heaven, but the redeeming side of that fact is that we do thereby avoid a genuine hell."