The quest for the meaning of life, in one form or another, has been one of the biggest obsessions of man since time immemorial. The majority of us seem to get satisfied with mere religious remedies no matter how reasonable they might be while not so few of us seek refuge in mysticism. I don’t know why, but this is what I have observed; religion somehow manages to put us in to silence by pushing the subject of many critical issues such as this one to the realm of the unknown. The saddest part is, however, that the unknown somehow evolves to become the familiar, so obvious and unquestionable that it becomes an object of worship.
I have for so long been convinced that life is purposeless, that there is no intrinsic meaning to it whatsoever. Recently and specially when I thought of discussing the subject in this site, however, things got me thinking of what it really means for life to be meaningless. I thought as hard as I could but wasn’t able to come up with a scenario, ideal or realistic, that could capture life for me in its meaningful version. Do you have any idea which, had it been true, you think could have rendered life purposeful? As for me, unless we redefine the concept of the word ‘purpose’ itself, life would still remain meaningless even if God existed.
The most appealing (not necessarily rational) approach in explaining the purpose of life, as I hinted earlier, is that which is offered by religion. Even though there are as varied answers to whether there is purpose to life as there are religions in the world they all seem to follow the same mode of reasoning. They all share the notion that life’s purpose is derivable from the very fact that it is bestowed upon us by a supreme being, a designer or whatever name you got for him/her/it. Let me elaborate this idea by drawing your attention to one of my favorite arguments offered by modern Christendom and its flaws.
There was this book (I don’t know if you have come across it) written by a well-known Christian author which was so influential to the point where it was transformed in to a movement. His name was Rick Warren. The book is titled ‘The Purpose Driven Life.’ The essence of his argument goes something like this. The purpose of life, if there is any, he argues, can only be known by inquiring the author of it, which, according to him, was the Christian God. He goes on to substantiate his view by bringing some practical real life analogies in to perspective. Rick invites us to look at some of the items that technology has brought to simplify our lives. He then goes on to ask if we could have ever gotten to know what the exact true use of these gadgetries was had it not been for the manuals that come with them, which, of course, couldn’t have been prepared by any other than the manufacturers. Then he tries to summarize his points by suggesting that the only way to understand the purpose of life is to ask of God or inquire the manual, which, obviously, is the bible.
I admit that there is some brilliance in his argument except for the fact that it is founded on some prohibitively unverifiable grounds. Let’s, just for argument’s sake, do him a giant favor, though, and see if his analogies stand against careful scrutiny. I will give His assumption of the existence of god with its entire luggage a pass. I will assume that God exists and that he has ordained a divine plan according to which we must live our lives. My contention with Rick will, then, have to do with the extent to which his analogy is genuine and relevant and to the extent to which it is pretentious or flawed. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to weigh the difference between inanimate things and humans against the point he is trying to make. Secondly he doesn’t distinguish between teleological and mechanistic senses of the term ‘purpose,’ which I think is essential to discussions of this sort. Reserving the second point for later discussions I will now deal with the first.
Let’s suppose we have just bought a calculator. For Rick the service it is intended to provide is its purpose. Computation, for instance, is one of the tasks for the sake of which it exists. Therefore, and if one is willing to think along Rick’s line of thought, computation becomes a purpose to the calculator’s life, so to say. Nothing is convoluted here. The problem, however, arises when one replaces the calculator with a fully-fledged conscious human being. The calculator’s purpose is implicit to its design. It is constructed in such a way as any use other than computation is impossible (of course, you can throw it to blow someone’s head, but that is not, at all, relevant to our discussion here). When it comes to humans the purpose of life is not that easily derivable. Or at least for the human life to have a purpose in the same sense that a calculator would is not as straightforward as it may sound. First off, in the case of the calculator we have three persons playing the drama, namely the manufacturer, the owner and the calculator itself. In the case of humans, however, there are two persons playing the game, the creator and humans. The flaw in Ricks thought is in that he unconsciously assumes that there are three parties involved in the later and not two as I suggested. I hope you have guessed who the third party is; its life itself. So, in his depiction of the situation there is god, there are humans and there is a life given to them by god, in the same sense a calculator would be given to a buyer by a manufacturer. In case you think I am being too philosophical let me assure you that I am not. The breaking down of analogies can grossly damage one’s arguments. We all know that analogies assist thinking. In as much as they are assistive, however, they are also seductively misleading. Unless the sense in which an analogy applies to one’s argument is carefully set out the risk of error (and the implications therein) is colossal. I mean really colossal! This would require a separate discussion, though, which I am not prepared to pursue any further here.
I think I don’t have to say anything more than I have already said to convince you that there really is no division between being human and life as we have come to know it. It’s simply an illusory dichotomy. The purposiveness of gadgetries is mechanistic. That is to say, what we think of as purpose is actually not a purpose but an understanding of how things work. What we are actually interested in is, however, a teleological sense of the term that is the final goal for the sake of which things happen. There is a difference. Life, of course, has a ‘purpose’ in the same sense that a calculator may have a purpose. We are survival machines in a more or less the same sense that calculators are computational devices. We can parallel humans with calculators only in as far as they are both mechanistic (and machine like). In other words a course in physiology would be enough to enlighten us on the mechanistic purpose of life as would a manufacturer’s manual on how their products work. What we really want to know, on the contrary, is the final cause, to use Aristotle’s phraseology, for the sake of which life ‘happens’. And this seems to be completely unaccounted for in Rick’s ceremonies. It should by now be clear that the analogies implications make too much claim than they really are capable of. There is still more to be said, though.
Let’s do Rick one more big favor now. Let’s assume that the creator has simply posted for us in the heavens the purpose for the sake of which he created us. I had always thought that this would bring the quest for the meaning of life to its halt. Later on however I found out that this provision would require of us to define life in a very narrow manner. Yeah, we would have known the ‘purpose’ of our human life or put more boldly the opinion of a supreme being on how we should live our lives.
Imagine a world where we can see our creator hovering in heaven above or whatever fanciful idea one might have of him. We wouldn’t be guaranteed, then, however, that no one would get curious enough to ask what the meaning of this cosmic drama could be? I definitely would be one! There is another problem well deserving of attention, here, as well. Given the fact that we humans are self-conscious beings, the existence of an approachable god would only add one more cosmic opinion to the discussion of the meaning of life. If He only tells us how to live our lives, this simply makes him a commentator and not a meaning giver to the whole existence. If he comes up, as is the case with the Christian God, with a system of punishment and reward, that would only add one more low giver with the only difference being that, then, we would have a divine, whatever that might mean, instead of just a mortal, code of conduct. And, the whole quest for meaning will culminate not in an ultimate answer to a fundamental question but in a bigger problem than that with which we started in the first place.
Life shouldn’t only signify our mere human existence but also everything that is out there at our perceptive disposal. The puzzle of life in the subject we have raised is far more profound and all-encompassing than that all religious or mystic suggestions attempt to answer. All religious speculations are so limited in that they only look in to the human problem, suggest a solution and then they project whatever solution they might have come up with in to an alien reality.
Before I sum things up for you let me relate to you one of my favorite anecdotal discussions that took between the giant world class philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein brought a closed box of match and asked Russell if he could tell whether there is an elephant inside it. Russell said there isn’t. Wittgenstein, in an attempt to make a brilliant philosophical point, which, unfortunately, is not relevant to us now, says that we cannot know for sure unless we open and see what’s inside. Russell went on to explain that an elephant is too big to fit in there. Wittgenstein went on to make his point by suggesting that we can only enumerate things that can fit in there and things that can’t, but we cannot know what exactly is inside.
The same is, at least in a sense, true concerning the subject of discussion I have raised here. All attempts to substantiate a claim that there is an intrinsic purpose to life either hold a mistaken notion of the term ‘purpose’ or simply confuse negative arguments for ultimate proofs. I liken the quest for the purpose of life to Wittgenstein’s box, the box being an allegory for life as we have come to know it and what is inside of it as the purpose of life. We can only enumerate things that would and wouldn’t fit in it but we can’t be sure of its contents (its purpose). It might contain too little or perhaps too much or might, for all I care, be dismayingly empty!
