Man's Search for Meaninglessness

Nice title.

Thank you. It just popped into my head, although I don't know what it... means. But could there be meaninglessness in the absence of meaning? Isn't it like having chaos with no order, falsehood with no truth, appearances with no reality, or shadows with no light? In each case, the former term is parasitic on the latter. 

Nevertheless, some people not only insist that life has no intrinsic meaning, but derive meaning from being that kind of person -- the kind of person who can courageously stare into the abyss staring back at them, a mutual reflection of nobody to nothing.

The possibility of meaning must entail the possibility of meaninglessness. But is meaning discovered or invented? I have a neighbor down the street whose meaning in life is rescuing unwanted or abused animals that are blind, crippled, missing a limb, etc., or just plain old. His house is a Land of Misfit Pets.

However, one of the peculiar things about meaning is that it is neither universal nor transferable -- my neighbor's meaning means nothing to me, but even if it did, I need to experience it on a first hand basis. Meaning can't be transferred from head to head, like a mathematical equation.

Does this make it arbitrary? In which case it isn't meaning at all, just the illusion thereof? 

Certainly one of the problems with finding meaning is affluence. After all, if you're hungry, the meaning of life is food. Prior to modernity, the principal occupation of the great majority of mankind was the production of food. So, life essentially meant agriculture. I'm only one generation away from that, in that my father grew up on a small farm in the south of England. 

It's only been a hundred years since the majority of Americans became city dwellers. According to Kennedy, "Forty-four percent of the population was still counted as rural in 1930," and "well over half the states of the Union remained rural," with a way of life that "moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season." 

And for these people, dark meant dark, for few rural dwellers had electricity. One of them described the "horrible choice" of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling her, or lighting a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, and other insects. 

And of course, city life was no bargain either. Although industrial workers earned more than farmers, "Not until 1923 did United States Steel Corporation grudgingly abandon the twelve-hour day," nor had the two-day weekend yet been discovered by the early explorers of Slack. 

Perhaps Marx was right about one thing, about how mechanized factory work robs labor of any intrinsic meaning. 

There is also the question of meaning existing in the collective for most of man's history. It took a long time to invent the individual, which brought with it a new locus of meaning. Combine this with affluence, and we are all called upon to discover life's meaning. Or not. 

Frankl wrote a famous book on Man's Search for Meaning, which I've never read because it seems too obvious -- that a primary motivational force in human beings is the search for meaning. Having been a concentration camp survivor, he believed that the worst forms of suffering could be endured if the individual could preserve some sense of meaning. It seems that nihilists were less equipped to endure the unendurable. 

It seems to me that Slack both giveth and taketh away. In other words, while it opens a space for potential meaning, it cannot provide that meaning. Rather, it's always a kind of bespoke do-it-yoursoph innerprize.

Now, a big box religion provides a kind of ready-made, prefabricated, off-the-shelf meaning. But what if this meaning doesn't speak to me? For example, the meaning of Islam is to slavishly obey the Koran. Even if this were the meaning of life, it just doesn't do it for me. But nor does any other religion, at least not completely. I've been a Catholic for a few years now, and I wish it furnished all the ready-to-hand answers, but it doesn't.

Or maybe I'm just resistant -- another one of God's problem children, as discussed in yesterday's post. But what's a fellow to do? Just pray, pay, and obey? Maybe. But what's so special about you, Bob? What makes you think you're exempted from God's own instruction manual?

I wouldn't put it that way. For Schuon, the general purpose of religion as such is to facilitate

discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or to the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality. 

This goes back to the boat and the shore, the purpose of the former being to reach the latter. It can be a magnificent yacht or a humble dinghy, so long as it gets you to the other side. The perennial religion "is fundamentally this," that

the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real. It is this mystery, together with the metaphysical discernment and contemplative concentration that are its complement, which alone is important in an absolute sense from the point of view of gnosis. 

So, to the extent that a religion "works," this is why it works. Put another way, this is its meaning and purpose, to disclose reality:

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God, the Great Spirit. Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union.

With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let's get back to Berdyaev, because I like the way he struggles with the meaning of Christianity. For example,

The eternal man, oriented toward eternity and infinity, is at once the eternally new man and an eternal and limitless purpose. The eternal man is not something given once for all: he is not to be comprehended statically. The truly new man is a realization of the eternal man, bearing in himself the image and likeness of God. 

So, it's a process. In Orthodoxy they say that the image is given, while attaining the likeness is on us: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus,

The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God. 

God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so,

Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle. 

I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle -- that man and riddle co-arise in the primordial WTF?! It's just that the philosopher, the Raccoon, the true man of gnosis, never stop asking WTF?! 

Which must mean that man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer. But he can in no way be the answer to the riddle that he is. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of religion. For Berdyaev,

Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element in him, and he may know himself from his darkness..., from the demonic element within himself. 

And he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism. 

We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of bullshit.

But how did we get into this existential pickle? And what does it all mean?

Let's say there is a no man's land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man's land -- not to mention a knowing man's land -- in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know. 

Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both. 

One person and two natures? That reminds me of someone... But in any event, "the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God," and "If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless." 

In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given per se -- for again, meaning isn't transferable, i.e., my neighbor's meaning isn't my meaning. Rather, meaning must be what the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, or something.

Which raises a host of potential problems, me being just one of them. To be continued...

God does not ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

Everything is trivial if the universe is not engaged in a metaphysical adventure.