For a new edition of this article published on April 20, 2018 by IPC, please check the following URL. My thanks to Dr. X for the painstaking work of editing the original text
http://iranpoliticsclub.net/philosophy/meaning-life/index.htm
MEANING OF LIFE
http://ghandchi.com/29-Meaning_of_Life.htm
I was
reading an article by AAA about Agnosticism. I remembered Bertrand Russell, a
prominent agnostic, who was once asked what he would do if he died and saw
actually there exists afterlife and God. He responded that he would ask Him
(ask God), why He (God) had not provided enough evidence for Bertrand Russell
to believe in him, when he was living back on Earth? :-)
Of course,
you know that the Judeo-Christian religions and Islam have a notion of personal
God and thus the problems of agnosticism make sense. But even the esoteric
traditions in these religions do not subscribe to the notion of personal God.
For example, Islamic mystics such as Rumi were pantheists and did not follow
the notion of personal God and challenged Mutekallemun (Islamic Scholastic)'s
belief that God was not a material cause.
Even among
Muslim theologians, there is no unanimity on the notion of personal God.
Mutazilites (remember Ferdowsi's religion), followers of Hassan al-Basri
challenged Mutekallemun and introduced an Epicurean pluralistic theory to
resolve the antimonies of Mutekallemun 's rationalism. Later Ali ibn Ismail
al-Ashari (who was of Mutazilites himself d. 881), turned against them and
started a new group of Islamic theologians called Ashariya who believed in
complete teleology and God's arbitrary will. Many Eastern religions such as
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism do not subscribe to the notion of personal God
either.
For
example, the Buddhists, such as
AAA
posting prompted me to post an article that I published about 5 years ago in
Mundus Novus, a literary journal in
If you are
not in the mood for more boring philosophical discussions, you may want to
press "n" [meaning pass to next article].
MEANING OF LIFE
Mundus Novus
1989
-------------------
Meaning of Life ----------------------
Introduction:
The
following is an article about the meaning of life. One may ask why it is important to ask
"What is the Meaning of Life?"
I explain below why I think it is important to ask this question:
When a
Christian teenager feels to commit suicide, there is a lotof explanation of meaning
of life and the sanctity of life that comes to his/her mind which help him/her
to handle the situation. Whether that is
the best help for this teenager and whether there are better solutions are not
my issue now. My point is that the
schools of thought of different times had an explanation for this question that
every layman could understand and use.
Still many Catholics who work on missions to help the homeless base most
of their activities on their understanding of the meaning of life.
A similar
situation was with classical physics where the practitioners and students had
good explanation for physical events.
When there was a crisis in physics in 20s and 30s, ambiguity was all we
could hear from the main thinkers of theoretical physics. Now there is a new structure of understanding
of physics. It does not mean that people
are not questioning and thinking. I think both what Thomas Kuhn and Popper say
happen in different degrees. My point is
just that there is some explanation for
understanding physics again, which is
not just a whole line of ambiguities, contradictions, etc. This is what is used by layman, new student,
teachers, thinkers. Although all of
them may always look for better explanations.
Now back to
the question whether I need to know the meaning of life? Yes, there are times that I do feel to
have a need to know. But I cannot just
take anything, that I know I do not believe in. I am more comfortable with an answer like
Krishnamurti's style of questioning for yourself, that some people may respond
with, but I do not find it adequate. I
am also comfortable with a meditative state such as a
Coming up
with the four laws of
On the
contrary, that was the period they were the most barren, they did not have a
lot to offer and philosophers of the time were just talking to each other. We all know about the question of number of
angels on a needle, etc.... When it came
to laymen, the philosophers of the time would talk as though they were talking
to idiots. They would respond as though
saying, hey idiot, you are still asking that question which we have dropped a
long time ago even to think about , let alone to answer. They would shy away
from addressing the kind of issues that layman would normally ask a philosopher
or a priest, such as "Meaning of Life". Layman also would go to a dentist if s/he
wanted to ask the What the Meaning of Wisdom Tooth Is?
I have
tried to tackle the question. I have
quoted two modern philosophers, Morris Berman and Willis Harman, who are among
those who still ask these kinds of questions.
Most of our top-grade philosophers such as Quine do not ask questions
like this anymore. Or I may be ignorant of it. I have gone outside philosophy
and looked at a new field called NLP, which BTW I dislike most of the hype
surrounding it, and I dislike so much unethical practices by many of its
practitioners. But I like to use some of
its achievements.
Anyway, I
have tried to use some of their work to tackle this age old question of the
realm of philosophy. I have asked if
communication with universe (nature, etc) can be achieved using the same
results that NLP theorists have expressed for communication between humans with
different conceptual (actually neurolinguistic) systems. Then I am asking that if this can be done
(some attempts like this have been done by FINDHORN which I am very limitedly
aware of and again there is so much hype around it.). My next endeavor has been
to see if this approach can bring us to a solution for the Cartesian dilemma by
offering a literal way of going from subject to object..
Of course
there is another way of looking at the question and that is dropping it. Like a dentist who says, we do not use
questions like what is wisdom teeth. We
just have teeth. Or like G.E. Moore who
would show his right hand and say RIGHT HAND.
Or one could just say meaning of life is just living it. Writing a note on the Internet at this moment
is meaning of my life. I have mentioned
all of these options in my article.
Evidently I want more than these.
You ask if it is just a curiosity.
I answer at times yes, at times it is a need and I say not just for me
but I think for every one. But I agree
that some people may be comfortable dropping it. Just like many people were comfortable to
drop the need for anything called philosophy.
I remember Wittgenstein at the time of Tractatus was like that. Then my question is meaningful for the ones
who feel the need to address it.
---------------------------------------------------------------
What is
the Meaning of Life?
---------------------------------------------------------------
The
"crisis of meaning" is the buzzword of our times. One can hear it in every corner of our
society; people feel meaningless in life!
It is like being empty and "useless." No goal, no reason for living as though one
is serving a jail term on this planet.
It is not a rare occurrence among the psychologically disturbed or
during occasional moments of one's life.
Today, surprisingly, it has become a chronic epidemic among a large
portion of the population.
In fact,
the periods of meaningful feelings have become fewer and far between, from one
love affair to the next, from one project to the next. Between jobs, between love relationships,
after retirement, etc., the problem is at its peak. Sometimes, this crisis becomes so intense for
some, that they may commit suicide or may "sell" their souls to
someone else to facilitate the suicide; as exemplified by the hard-to-forget
Jonestown and other mass suicide. This
phenomenon seems to have become more widespread ever since the dawn of the
scientific revolution three centuries ago.
Some authors such as Morris Berman in his The Re-enchantment of the
World report that prior to the scientific revolution, in the Middle Ages, the
belief in the Divine Purpose, which was shared by the society, made every
action meaningful within a cosmic picture.
Thus, the meaning of life for medieval individual supported ethics and
morality.
The
decline of religion and the abandonment of the belief in such grand designs
transformed the meaning of life to the meaning of this and that event in
life. Thus, in Berman's opinion the only
way society can regain a general meaning is to develop a participatory approach
to knowledge in contrast to the detached Cartesian dichotomous outlook. That is, to replace Descartes' separation of
the observer and the observed with a world outlook that would regard the observer
as part of the observed world or vice versa.
Berman
thinks of participation as the core principle of medieval philosophy. I agree with him as far as the mystical
tradition in that period is concerned, but in the other Medieval philosophies,
such as Scholasticism, not participation but servitude to the Divine Scheme
guaranteed the meaning. For Scholastics,
in God's mind there was a Purpose for everything and our ignorance of that
Purpose was no reason to think that it did not exist. The Purpose was believed to be in the
spiritual realm and our knowledge of it would not change its reality.
We were at
the mercy of the Divine and our search was to attain an awareness of God's
Purpose rather than to change it or to devise our own. Although this approach provided a meaningful
existence for those who were happy to live according to the Design, for others
who did not like to be a pawn in the Divine Scheme, such existence was
meaningless. This is the reason for the
endless Medieval arguments about determinism and free will in theology and
philosophy.
A similar
situation developed among the scientific philosophers. The materialists faced the same problems on
determinism and indeterminism as the Scholastics. For the modern philosophers, the material
world does not change with our attempt at understanding it. Accepting efficient causation and eliminating
final causes by the rationalist philosophers reinforced the belief that
cognition follows the reality and thus free will remains secondary to the
material determination. This is why
Spinoza, once eliminating teleology (final causes) from his philosophy,
postulated fatalistic Necessity of God and Nature as the foundation of his
philosophy.
The
problem of meaning was even harder to resolve for the materialists than the
Scholastics. The latter's appeal to
God's Design had a more powerful grip on the pious mind than the power of
fatalistic Necessity on the secular mind.
Only mystics believed in some kind of participatory pantheism. For a mystic, consciousness is everywhere
prior to time and space. Even the
material world is a form of consciousness to a mystic. Thus, for mystics, meaning was never
considered as separate from the actual existence. In their outlook, meaningfulness is implied
in our actual living, and inquiring about it is pointless. From a mystical viewpoint, once the
separation of the observer and the observed is overcome, the whole discourse on
meaning becomes superfluous.
Leading
thinkers of our time are proposing alternative paradigms of thought in the vein
of mystical traditions. For example,
Morris Berman proposes some kind of re-enchantment of the world and Willis
Harman proposes consciousness as the fundamental stuff of the universe!
I think
that we need to understand the core principles of the rationalist thought in
its Greek Platonic form and in its European Cartesian version, in order to
address the relevant issues properly in the current turmoil of paradigms. In Greek times, an ontological
differentiation between the spiritual and the material world was formulated
(e.g., the Plato's Theory of Forms). For
Greeks, the spiritual and physical realms of existence were two separate
worlds. The ontological distinction
justified the separation of "priests" and "philosophers" in
their pursuits. In the modern Cartesian
system, a further split happened within the material world. The epistemic distinction between the subject
and the object was thus formulated. This
new development allowed the independence of the "scientists" from the
Church "philosophers."
For Descartes,
the dichotomy was epistemological _ meaning that as far as our act of knowing
is concerned, the distinction between our thoughts (subject) and things
(object) was valid. This epistemological
division between mind and matter, subject and object, is responsible for the
methodologies of verification in the sciences.
In other words, the truth can be verified independent of the individual
observers. Not only all our developments
in science can be traced to this dichotomy, but the disassociation between our
actions and their outcome is a heritage of this split which has caused a host
of ethical problems. Recognizing these
foundations, it is evident that the detachment of individual actions from the
holistic result is not something to be overcome by general moralistic appeals.
In the
last two decades many forefront scientists and philosophers have recognized the
ethical dilemma of the scientific paradigm stated above. As noted previously, many of them are
renouncing this paradigm and are embracing mysticism. For example, the latest work of Willis Harman
proposes consciousness as the fundamental stuff of the universe as prior to
time and space. Harman thinks that his
metaphysical scheme will put an end to the lack of meaning in the contemporary
world and will support the formation of a planetary interconnectedness. Thus, participation will end the arrogance of
the observer who sees himself detached from the "external" world. In short, in view of this group of new
scientists, the distinction between the observer and the external world is a
matter of perspective just like the pre-Copernican picture of the universe.
Yet, down
in our hearts, we do not feel that the scientific split of mind and matter is
just a matter of perspective. Even when
we recognize the impact of paradigms on our thinking, we cannot drop the
dichotomy whole-heartedly. It is like
Pandora's Box, it is hard to disbelieve the dichotomy and deeply feel an
immediacy between our individual actions and their holistic result after having
learned the "autonomy." In
fact, the participatory vision as a guarantee for meaning and ethics has mostly
worked for mystics who voluntarily accept an immediacy between their individual
action and the holistic result. Some
people's semi-religious belief in Karma also has had similar effects. For most others, such dictums have hardly
been effective because they neither want to exercise them voluntarily nor are
they forced to adhere to them due to any material imperative.
I think
that people whole-heartedly believed in the Divine Purpose in the Medieval
times and also believed whole-heartedly in the object/subject dichotomy in the
era of science. The mystical paradigm of
participation was believed by the Stoics after the fall of the Greek
civilization and also was believed by the sufis of the
In fact,
overcoming the dichotomy of human existence and the external world is not
desirable. It would reduce the
possibility of trustworthy knowledge and an uninformed mind would be happy to
think of her/his subjective feelings as truth without seeing the need for
verification. In the modern
industrialized world, the destructive power of such confusions about knowledge
have been constrained by the grip of the scientific paradigm on our rational
thinking. Treating knowledge as a
private enterprise and dropping verification from our common sense may replace
knowledge by ignorance.
We need to
remember that the dichotomy of the scientific paradigm, by emphasizing
verification, has created an unprecedented depth in our understanding of the
universe. Nonetheless, if we retain the
epistemic dichotomy, the question remains how we can overcome the dilemma of
meaning! In my opinion, what our
scientific institutions are doing, i.e., adding more knowledge of the external
world to our repertoire does not solve this dilemma. The heart of the dilemma is to find new ways
to communicate with the external world!
To
communicate with other human beings and the external world is the fundamental
problem of our time. The dichotomy of
subject and object, observer and the external world, has brought us a
tremendous wealth of knowledge. To
communicate between subject and object can bring us a tremendous wealth of
meaning unprecedented in Scholasticism, materialism, or mysticism. It will be like making love to the whole
universe and what could be more meaningful than such a symbiotic relationship.
Symbiosis is like the kind of resonance that one witnesses in the whirling of
two expert dancers (i.e., autonomous synchronicity). If one can produce such an experience in
nature, then life will take on a different meaning. I will elaborate more on this issue
later. Science of the last three
centuries sought essentially to understand the utilizable truth of the external
world when analyzing from object to subject.
On the other hand, when going from subject to object control and
predictability were primarily intended.
It is time
to go from subject to object and witness the vibration of the "giver"
and "receiver." The more we can develop our communication with the
world, the more we can find meaning in life.
What I am proposing is not just a wish.
A new field of knowledge has already uncovered a way to approach this
new paradigm in a very small domain. The
field is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and there are many
misconceptions about this field that I need to elaborate on my fascination! To
elaborate on my sense of communication and meaning, I would like to provide a
brief review on the basic tenets of this new development of psychology, i.e.,
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP
recognizes three major categories of mental representation: Visual, Auditory,
and Kinesthetic. If you want to relate
to a visual person, you need to use visual mode of communication. For example, use visual words or phrases such
as "see," or "look."
Also note that visual people tend to look up to remember things, and
also breath with the upper portion of their chest. Similarly, there are clues for auditory and
kinesthetic people that can be used to recognize them. Now if you use the correct mode of
communication, the respondent will start resonating with you. There are a wide range of applications for
this discovery. Unfortunately, this
discovery is being used mostly for controlling situations and people. The
attempts to control other human beings and nature are not new and are as old as
human history. Management of human
beings and an expedient treatment of nature are central to manipulation and
prediction in "communication."
My interest in NLP and communication is NOT from this traditional focus.
The
discovery of what causes resonance in human communication is the most
paradigmatic aspect of NLP for me. The
resonance of two lovers, in the ideal case, when there is no overwhelming power
struggle from either side, is the most meaningful. It is the highest form of being one yet being
many (two)! This kind of dichotomy in
relationships not only does not strip us of meaning but makes us feel our
deepest sensations. Such a dichotomy
makes a higher level of vibration possible than when identities are dissolved
in participation. I think to arrive at
such relationships with other human beings and nature, we need to learn the
elements of resonance. FINDING THE MODES
OF RESONANCE IS FINDING THE MEANING OF LIFE!
Just
looking at two individuals engaged in a conversation with resonating signals,
one can see the depth inherent in their relationship. They actually convey their meanings to the
"inside" of the other person and they take the other person's meaning
"within" themselves. It is not
just a mirror-like reflection. It is a
wholehearted give and take. An
appropriate mental representation is the start of a resonating
communication. Thus, the value of a
trustworthy mental representation can be realized. This first step of communication has been
highly achieved by the results of the scientific knowledge. But total communication happens when this
mental representation is pointed at the potentially resonating recipient. If this side of communication is ignored, as
it has been in the last three centuries, the frustration results and the best
mental representations of reality seem worthless and meaningless. Meaning of
life is thus neither from outside nor from inside, nor lost in mystic
participation. The meaning is inherent
in the communication process when our mental representation is focused on the potential
recipients in nature or at other humans.
After all, the challenge of our time is to find ways to "talk"
to the stones! If what NLP has developed about the communication between human
beings is extended to the communication between the human beings and nature,
probably we can put an end to the crisis of meaning in the 21st century. Finding out the modes of communication, can
help us to resonate with plants, birds, the sea, etc. In my opinion, this is the way to overcome
the crisis of meaning. MAYBE
COMMUNICATING WITH NATURE IS THE FINAL FRONTIER OF THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
One may
argue about the relationships of the other life-forms in nature. Is not their cruelty and destruction inherent
in nature even without the humans? True
that no species destroys its own kind but they destroy others! What about the control relationship between
the domineering animals and their prey?
For example, lions attacking donkeys!
Are we supposed to accept these relationships as inevitable? Are such relationships the only way animals
can survive in the world?
I think if
it is true that humans may keep on eating milk or fruits without destroying the
animal or plant, why cannot the same relationship be possible for animals or
plants. The new habits may even change
their genetic heritage, i.e., change their "nature!" For example, everyone knows of domestic cats
who have learned to live peacefully with birds; or dogs who live peacefully
with cats.
Such cases
show that animals also have the potential of different kinds of relationships.
In my opinion, changes in the relationship of human beings with each other and
with nature may cause changes in the relationships of the other species as
well. I think the Life Era as elaborated
by Eric Chaisson [Life Era, 1988] may eventually replace destructive
development with harmonic development in nature. If life is going to overcome other forms of
existence (i.e., energy or material forms) in the universe, it needs to develop
to a maturity of not destroying itself.
In other words, the meaning of life is defined within such a harmonic
cosmic picture.
A LIVING
COSMOS WITH RESONATING RELATIONSHIPS OF VARIOUS LIFE FORMS IS WHAT OUR SPECIES
DESERVES TO HAVE IN THE FUTURE. OUR ROLE
IN ITS DEVELOPMENT AND OUR PLACE IN SUCH A COSMOS DETERMINES THE MEANING OF OUR
LIVES. THE MORE we can evolve personally
and the more we can contribute to the evolution of our species and other
life-forms to such a cosmic excellence, the more meaning we will find in our
own individual lives.
Sam
Ghandchi
1989
Related Articles:
Secularism & Pluralism-Essays
http://www.ghandchi.com/600-SecularismPluralismEng.htm
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* The above article was first
published in Mundus Novus in 1989.
** The introduction was
written in 1994 and was first posted on
SCI (soc.culture.iranian) Usenet newsgroup on