Post #100: Man’s Search for Meaning

28 Feb. 2024

“There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

—Viktor E. Frankl, Logotherapy in a Nutshell*

     When the meaning of life gets treated as if it were a question requiring an explicit answer, it is usually a sign of trouble. Imagine someone telling you how well his life is going, at work, in love, in the family, with his friends, financially, and health-wise too—then adding that only one small problem keeps troubling him: “What is the meaning of life?” Such is the stuff of comedy, not of genuine soul-searching.

     Or to tell it in the style of a Zen story, a despairing would-be student comes to see a great master and pleads with him for help with finding the meaning of life. “Why?” the sage asks him in response: “Where did you lose it?”

     In other words, the question looks not so much like a philosophical problem (although it can certainly be turned into one, and quite intractably so) as it does a symptom of crisis. Often the precipitating causes are evident enough: a break-up, an illness, troubles with money or work, family issues, a death or like disaster, and so on. Other times, usually running in parallel with the more immediate concerns, there is an underlying crisis of faith, a frustration with having to carry on life on the terms in which it is presenting itself. Why me, why this, why go on?

     Why me is easiest to dispose of: why not you? Since you’ve seen so many bad things happening to others all around, young or old, good or bad, black or white or blue or green, why should you be exempt? Because while it is happening to others, it never feels quite real, is probably the most honest answer; or even, because I am special and the world revolves around me. Well, it seems not, or not anymore. Time to grow up.

     Why this need not detain us much longer. If it you didn’t have to face this particular misfortune, there would be another awaiting you a little further down the road, and you wouldn’t be any happier with it. But why all this misery at all, and why carry on with it? Still somewhat petulant in tone: who made you judge over all things under heaven? But this one does demand a more serious answer, if only for the practical purpose of making you take down the noose and lock your firearms safely away.

     The Buddhists do not speak of the universality of Dukkha for nothing, nor the Christians of a fallen world. We all have a sense of how dreary live can get when your enthusiasm dries up for one reason or another; when the flow turns into a heavy drag or grind, and all joy disintegrates before a sense of dullness and futility. It may be an exaggeration to say, as Thoreau did, that most of us lead lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation; but are we not all familiar enough with the feeling to recognize it with unease? The malaise can strike, it seems, even in sunny weather, at any level of wealth or accomplishment, with little regard for age or sex or any of the other distinctions of which we commonly make so much. Even the most miraculous abundance of peace, prosperity, and ample leisure does not banish it reliably, as more deprived generations may have hoped, and sometimes even aggravates it by leaving us with so much more time and mental space for troubling ourselves with life’s bigger questions.

     One of the great ironies of the battle with meaninglessness and the looming despond is that the acute fight against life’s most pressing ills and evils seems to confer, if not immunity, then a surprising degree of resistance. Where there is a mission, and be it only a desperate struggle to stay alive against the odds, there is a purpose that often suffices not for protecting us from misery altogether, but at least from tumbling headlong into the abyss of doubting the value of anything and everything. The most terrible trials and tribulations keep us busy, at least, and if they are not completely hopeless, they are often less dangerous, in terms of the loss of meaning, than arrival at a long-sought goal, and the disappointments it can leave in its wake.** Aspiring champions do not usually kill themselves on the way to that elusive star, or two, or three; but they have been known to do so when the prizes were won and there was nowhere left to go but down (or so it seemed to them). The pursuit of a worthy goal may be more frustrating than we would like, and at times may become so exhausting that it wears us down and out; but satisfaction and satiation bring their own hidden dangers—almost to the point where one might say that the only thing more fraught than arriving and not knowing what to seek out next, is never finding anything worth struggling for in the first place, or indulging the fatal fantasy that things should come to us without our having to make much of an effort for them.

     The idea of a determinate goal, a holy grail, a promised land, can be a vital spur to motivation in life, but it too comes with inbuilt hazards. When we think of a path, we automatically connect it to the impressive destination we imagine it leading to. Indeed it might look obvious that we walk for no other reason than to get to the desired end. Why else? Yet this seemingly innocent and natural assumption disregards how little we truly know of ultimate destinations, which must remain mere figments of the imagination until we have witnessed them ourselves, however much we may credit the reports of other travelers who claim to have seen the soaring peaks and majestic summits with their own eyes. There is a more practical way to approach the issue, however: I may yet discover, one may say to oneself, all the splendors of the spiritual Himalayas; but until that fine day, what I need far more urgently than such epiphanies is an accessible path that gives my life a surer sense of direction, clearer markers and pointers along the way, and a frame that helps me to keep putting one foot stubbornly before the other, and rolling my chosen boulder up the hill again and again, day after day.

     This choice of general orientation in life should be neither a matter of blind belief, nor of complete arbitrariness, as if anything were as good as any other; surely that is not the case, and there are better courses in life and worse, however reluctant or incompetent we may feel to arbitrate between the alternatives. It is up to every one of us to make our choice from the wide range of options before us, and to put our faith in one of them, because in the absence of such a practical commitment to something, whatever it may be, you may soon lose not only your sense of direction, but the very feeling of supporting ground under your feet. Not that there is any need for endorsing one of the many grand creedal architectures on such prominent display in the spiritual marketplace, or for mustering an unwavering faith in some other scheme of salvation that promises to hold everything together, as if in its absence the heavens would fall. They don’t; healthy doubt is no more to be spurned than honest faith.*** What is needed is not necessarily Faith in the religious or confessional sense, but a robust enough conviction that what you are doing matters and makes a difference, however big or small it may be.

     Put your faith, then, in something, anything, even if it is uncertain? But is the Dhamma not supposed to be about letting go of mere beliefs and wishful thinking, facing things as they are, and abandoning our attached ways—leading us to recognize at last the “emptiness” of all things, including our very selves? Maybe so, but who said anything about making the Path a fixed thing? I am merely pointing out that it looks more like a signpost to me than a compulsory obstacle course. The Teaching has been likened, in the traditional texts, to a raft, used for crossing over to the other shore, complete with highly detailed instructions on how best to put it together (see #5). Yet it’s not the conveyance that is important here, but the crossing over; as long as what you construct floats and carries you in the right direction, it does not matter all that much whether it is the best, or the truest, or the most beautiful of its kind. It needs to serve its purpose; whatever does so is good enough. To hold out for the perfect vehicle is tempting but perilous because of how easily the best can become the enemy of the good, as an old Italian folk-saying had it that was popularized by Montesquieu and Voltaire.

     To think that you can reach the other shore by swimming alone is to presume upon your own unbounded strength in a manner that the gods are said to dislike intensely (and chastise accordingly). It would be an equally hazardous conceit to imagine that you can safely dispense with your raft while you are still on your way. When you have completed your journey and you stand firmly upon the other shore, your raft has outlived its usefulness and will no longer be needed. Then, and only then, can you leave it behind without loss, or dismantle it at your pleasure; then too, you will finally understand what was truly real about it, and what “empty” or only conventionally true. Until then, however, nobody builds a raft, or places his trust in it on choppy waters, with wooly ideas about its emptiness in his head. The fleeting nature of things may indeed reveal itself eventually in all its ephemeral transience and lack of substance; but as a starting point, such dismissals of solidity look singularly unavailing and unhelpful to me. A wall of bricks is still something that can crack your head easily, whether you think of it in terms of subatomic particles or wavelets or Buddhist emptiness. Adequate provisions for a lengthy voyage need to be more hearty and robust, it seems to me; but if your engine differs from mine in running best on emptiness, then go right ahead and “fill up” in your own manner! Have safe trip!

     It is a disturbing thought, but a salutary recognition nonetheless, that even the worthiest labors, if you lose sight of why you are undertaking them or why it matters, may cease to sustain you. “It’s well-paid and gains me the respect of my peers” is all very well for everyday purposes. It may be enough for you, full stop, and it sure beats “It earns me nothing but trouble, and nobody deigns to notice my efforts at all.” That said, there are whys that can make up even for abject poverty and utter obscurity, while all the money in the world has been known to leave a gaping void where it counts. Not that you should drop everything in search of an all-purpose meaning of life that you can find in some hallowed place, complete and in one piece, only waiting for you to pick it up and dash with it to the finishing line—ideally after a flash of revelation that answers all your remaining questions at once, or some other moment of blazing enlightenment and permanent awakening that chases all darknesses and spiritual slumbers away forevermore. Instead, the meaning of life is probably best considered not something that you are given, but rather something that you are asked to give yourself, by the steps you keep taking, and the faith and love you are able and willing to put into every one of them.****

     But that very faith is what has become unreliable, uncertain, or even altogether unattainable in a serious crisis, you may object. I hear you: then try acting for the time being as if you still had the faith you have temporarily mislaid—as if there were still a point to what you are doing even when you can no longer see it clearly. This might look like a mere confidence trick writ large if there were not so much to be said about how faith, or the lack thereof, tends to verify itself in life. There are countless situations, as William James argues so convincingly (in the same lecture I mention in my notes below, “Is Life Worth Living?”) when it is up to you (recall Marcus Aurelius’s personal mantra in #93) to make one or the other of two possible moral universes true by your trust, or mistrust, in the world and its possibilities. Only surrender fully enough to the nightmare view, and you will yourself help to make the picture as bleak as you painted it; your own sneer at life will remove the worth that your existence might otherwise have given to it, and your dark prophecies will fulfill themselves in all their horror. But cling instead to the conviction that there is meaning to it all, no matter how badly your confidence may be shaken at times; keep taking up the burden simply because it is there to be shouldered; fight the good fight and see your part of the battle out, even against seemingly hopeless odds, and you may thereby tip the balance and redeem the whole war. Consider too how many innocent creatures have been sacrificed, as food or to make room for our dwellings and amenities, to make your life possible and comfortable; think of all that such a long line of ancestors had to do to give you a chance to live: “Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built?”

     Perhaps such reflections will help with making your confidence grow back. Perhaps not. Miracles of the spectacular kind are not to be expected; but any fresh green shoot, however small and fragile, is a wonder in the desert. All else failing, you will need to change tack completely and find something new to live by, which is probably the deeper reason why we all have to go through these crises at one stage or another of our lives. Such is the price of our growth, even if it has the power to destroy us.

*Included with Man’s Search for Meaning since 1962 (Beacon Press, 2006, p. 104). Frankl’s version doesn’t replicate Nietzsche word for word, but it is close enough. The original (Twilight of the Gods, Maxims and Arrows, §12) might be more literally translated as, “When one has a why in life, one can reconcile oneself to almost any how.”

**William James made this point unforgettably in his 1895 Harvard talk on whether life is worth living: “Sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the Captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French milliards were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in the shape in which we see it there today. The history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills.”

***See my reflections on “Pyrrho’s Path and the Equanimous Life” in Humanitas (published by the University of Coimbra), no. 82 (Nov. 2023), pp. 31–61, available from the journal’s website and my page on Academia.edu.

****Thus back to the passage that I quoted from Frankl as my epigraph to #86: “What is really needed is a reversal in how we ask for the meaning of life: what we must learn ourselves and teach despairing mankind is that it is really never a question of what we expect of life, but rather what life expects from us, and nothing else! To put it more philosophically, we might speak of a kind of Copernican revolution, such that we shall no longer simply ask for the meaning of life, but understand experientially that we ourselves are the ones being presented with questions by life, every day and hour anew—questions that we must answer not by pondering or talking about them, but by our actions, our right conduct. For to live means nothing other, in the end, than to take responsibility for giving good answers to the questions of life, that is, for meeting the challenges that life poses to each of us—the demands of the hour. Since these demands differ from one person to the next, and from moment to moment, it is impossible to say what the meaning of life might be in general.” (Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, Kösel Verlag/Penguin, 2009, pp. 177–78; compare p. 77 in the Beacon Press edition of Man’s Search for Meaning, 2006).