Is Our Life Meaningless?

What does it mean to live a meaningful life?  In what sense is life ever meaningful?  Is meaning inherent in life, or is meaning something “we” give to life?  Do we give meaning to life by living in a society?  Is society a mask of the meaninglessness of life?  Is meaning a “social construct” masking the lack of any meaning?  Is meaning a soap bubble ready to burst in the context of “evolving” bundles of biochemical reactions?  Is our meaning-producing consciousness (including the one producing “us”) an ephemeral, perhaps altogether fortuitous product of meaningless mechanical processes?  Does the prospect of a relapse into “the subconscious” compel us to reify meaning, projecting it “back” into the meaning-free processes underpinning our conscious life?

Our questions suggest that the problem of “meaning”—“what is meant” or “what pertains to mind”—is bound to that of consciousness.  Is consciousness, or awareness the mere byproduct of the unconscious?  Is consciousness inherently meaningful, or is it “lost” in meaninglessness?  If meaningful life is conscious life, does conscious life arise ex nihilo (out of its absence), or is it eternal?  Does consciousness have an absolute beginning, or not?[1]  Is consciousness its own source—as Aristotle’s thought-thinking-itself?  Is consciousness as meaningful life somehow the source of meaningless life (is the latter a function of the former)?  Is meaningless life a life— ζῆν, a lingering—gone astray, life buried, life “fallen,” life dying?  Is “mortal life” the mere shadow of immortal life?

Ernest Becker once argued that modern man’s fundamental problem pertains to his “denying of death”.[2]  Yet this denial depends on a denial of immortality, insofar as the Death of God calls forth the Death of Man.  Dostoevsky had seen this: if God is dead, then Man is dead, too.  The meaning of God’s death is revealed in and signals Man’s own death.  The proclamation of God’s death is the proclamation of the death of Man, or the proclamation that Man is “spiritually dead”—that there where what is divine in him is dead, he himself is no longer Man, but a thing, an insignificant object reducible to other equally insignificant objects.  Is God a post-partum “justification” of Man, or is God that which makes Man what he is?  Could there be Man without God?  Is our desire for divine perfection the sign of a psychotic “denial of death,” or does death not presuppose immortality—as loss presupposes presence?  Is death the loss of an image, even a mask, or a masking mirror, of eternal life?  Does death entail the meltdown of mortal life and life’s “return” to itself beyond mortality?  Is mortal life anything other than a return to immortal life?  What is “denial of death” other than denial of the nature of mortality and thus of mortal life’s “regressive” orientation, of its being death?  But is death to be dismissed merely as “loss,” or does the loss not open the door to what “that which is lost” might otherwise screen?  Is mortal life a collapse into meaningless death, into mere loss, or is “the collapse” a telling melt-down somehow exposing an underlying truth?  Does death bespeak a living foundation, a life underneath death?  Does eternity show itself in “time” or the disappearing of the present into its coming renewal?

Becker’s lesson must be understood in a “broader context”: people deny death insofar as they have already denied immortality; it is not that we cannot face death because we believe in God (God as supreme distraction from death), but that we can no longer face death where it is meaningless for us.  Far from rendering death meaningless, the prospect of God invites us to discern meaning in death.  Where, on the other hand, we have decided that there is no God, we turn away from death as senseless, seeking refuge in a life centered upon the denial of death.

Nietzsche decried the condition of men who would rather believe in idols than accept the meaninglessness of life.  Is the mask of the meaninglessness of life not better than nothing?  Is a pretense not better than the presence of ethics-shattering, transhumanist truth?  Is God as Kantian “as-if” not better than no God at all?  Such questions arise in a modern context, or where masks cease to be mirrors; where the Gods we make cease to bespeak Gods unmade; where unmade Gods are replaced by idol makers converting progressively into their own idols.

Death is no longer a mystery for us; it is rather the face of the absurd, of the fundamental absence of meaning.  It is no wonder that modern man flees death, under the assumption that ancient belief in immortality, or in meaningful death, is no longer an option for us who have heard that death is meaningless, that God is dead, or that God’s fate is in our own hands; or that God needs us to will him into being.  God as mask of the meaninglessness of death and so of life.

What is our fundamental stance: does death have any meaning—any hidden, inherent meaning, meaning that is disclosed at the heart of death?  Or is all meaning a mere conscious construction essentially aimed at masking death?  This key question concerns the nature of art, of art as mask of nature.  Is the mask simply opaque, or does it serve primarily as a mirror of secrets “on the other side of death”?  With modern progressivism the mask must be opaque, closed, as Leibnitz’s monads, to the beyond.  For pre-modernity, in general, art is a mask that mirrors, that helps us see what is beyond death, beyond death as mask.[3]

The implication for politics can hardly be overstated.  Is political discourse constituted of words that are simply lies covering up truth conceived as “the pre-political,” what early moderns refer to as the “State of Nature,” a beastly subconscious or unconscious state of being?  Does civil society emerge—today we would say, evolve (with little to no concern for the classical distinction between the essential/formal and the existential, or between art and nature)—most notably through contracts that we establish as conscious animals in the context of bestiality?  Do we and our contractual societies, our own contracts, our legal constitutions, our paperwork, amount to anything more than “bubbles” in a vacuum or absence of consciousness?

What is the scenario characterizing the premodern world?  Politics, political words, statesmen stand at once as masks and mirrors of truth: whatever we see outwardly, in a political or human context, reflects the inner truth of “the non-political”.  The non-political is not merely or purely non-political, no more than death is mere death.  Within the non-political there are tendencies towards the political, tendencies discernible in all forms of what we might call biochemical organisms.  The tendencies are traces, signs moving towards the blooming of consciousness, the constitution of an enclosure.  That enclosure, that garden—paradigmatic is that of Eden—is the human world (mundus), whose “material” elements are not cut off from the constitution of “the garden”.  Those “pre-human” or “wild” elements “breathe-in” the spirit of humanity, but they seemingly withhold from its manifestation, if only in the act of pointing to it, of anticipating man as manifestation, even incarnation of the source of the pre-human.  Much as John the Baptist anticipates in the wilderness the coming of the Christ.  The spirit is within—even within the baptismal water—even as it is not (yet) manifest.

Now, in the modern world—most notably in its Hegelian crowning— “the manifestation” turns out to be “the consummation”.  In the premodern world, however, far from constituting the consummation, the manifestation is itself a pointer: instead of pointing forward, it points backward.  The modern progressive world is a world that has rejected that pointing backward, so that everything seems to be progressive, infinitely progressive.  So instead of seeing “wild” things as pointing to man, the moderns see pre-human things as pointing, somewhat absurdly, to the result of further advance with respect to man.  Where do we further advance to?  What is progressively “beyond man”?  The modern machine, we are told, including cyborgs and their technocratic society.

“All things return to God through man, through the logos.” This is the classical position that the moderns reject: man distinguished from all that leads up to him by turning back to its source, thereby fulfilling physical impulses, freeing nature from the element of compulsion and thereby perfecting nature.  In the human return, nature is perfected insofar as natural impulses are turned back to their perfection, to be illuminated by their origin.  “Nature” can no longer serve as standard.  It is rather art that serves as standard to understand nature—not, to be sure, where art admires nature by rising symbolically above it,[4] but where art mirrors the recesses of nature as source of vision itself.  Whence the Platonic “epistrophy” (ἐπιστροφή), which involves, not a mere “subjective” posturing, but a rendering of the act of vision back to nature’s own spring: in art, nature no longer departs or “falls” from its spring, but bespeaks it; in art, the bodily is the incarnation of the spiritual, the presence of “what is ultimately the case,” or of what old Buddhists would call Tathāta (“suchness” as Socratic “what”).  The “re-orientation” evoked by Platonists invites the recognition that nature is not merely what departs from its source to become art, but what in and through art is sustained and given by its source to return to it.  More precisely, in and through art, nature emerges as its own source’s way back to itself.  Theologically speaking, art shows that nature is not abandoned by the divine and so that there is providence in nature.  But this hidden providence is visible only in and through human desire (human nature) as natural/physical desire’s “Socratic turn” to its origins.  Hence the conclusion that with human art nature is illuminated by divine art (a proposition that in old Chinese is rendered as 明明德ming ming de).  Hence the “cardinal place” that classical antiquity attributes to the human as key to understanding time itself.

The key to what we call “time,” to the orientation of things, is to be understood as human, for our classics.  Beginning from our drive to advance into the “Garden” of nature, to sacrifice ourselves for the constitution of the World (mundus) as “cultivated” part of nature—and so to sacrifice ourselves for human society in the making—“back” to the moment where nature is but “stardust,” as it were, passing through the gradual formation of myriad molecular conglomerates, the human is at work: the act of the epistrophy upheld by Platonists is embedded in all “development” away from origins, as the single factor drawing all progress providentially back to its beginning.

If the true orientation of the workings of nature is disclosed in human work, that is insofar as human work distinguishes itself from any other work in virtue of a trait given which classical antiquity refers to men as “mortals” (viz., βροτόι/θνητόι, or mortales).  That trait is consciousness of death, which entails a “turning back” via a coming to terms with “the end” as “return to origins,” or restitution/restoration.  Glimmers, mere glimmers of this consciousness, are discernable in non-human animals that are taken aback by the vision of cessation.  The death of a monkey might shock a fellow monkey as something terrible that disrupts the surviving monkey’s “flow of self-certainty,” his habituation.  Yet, the “response to death” natural to the human being as such (man abiding in Plato’s ancestral cave) is one of looking back, of returning (through man himself as logos), of seeking out a reason behind the face of death, behind death as façade.  Thereupon, the human being recognizes that all movement forward is simply a movement backward.  Whereto?  That is a mystery, of course, one that is somehow manifest through(out) the past, as we expose ourselves to it.  Through the past: this is to say that the past does not satisfy our yearning for answers; it is not our master and guide.  In exposing ourselves to the past, we face signs pointing us “further back,” to a mystery independent of the past.  Plato highlights this point where he portrays Socrates as revering the past as such, without deeming it a standard for the recovery of origins: one must navigate through and yet transcend one’s own past, in order to gain exposure to the doors of origins, of Paradise Lost.

Christianity stresses this very point: in order to be with the Father, to return, to expose oneself one must give up all social bonds; certainties that have become a prison of sorts.  This does not mean that one must reject civil society and that truth is not compatible with ethics.  Rather, ethics is to be understood in the light of a transcendent truth.  Yet, that truth is not cut off from ethics.  It is providential truth and so it is, we might say, the core ethics, or ethics in itself, metaphysical ethics that is to be discovered: the truth about ethics, which is bound to the problem of logos, of discourse.  Ethical discourse is still not in itself, it is still an illusion, to the extent that it remains bound to death as a limit, as the end of ethics.  What the Gospels recover, certainly what they point to, what they draw our attention to, is the inherence of ethics in what is beyond death.  In this respect, they call for an immortal ethics.  Talk of punishment after death, the resurrection of the body and related Christian doctrines pertaining to the otherworld, the afterlife, do not suggest that beyond death there is something unethical, but that ethics is to be understood in the context of immortality.  That is the metaphysical world.  It would be a mistake, an error to conceive the metaphysical as abandoning the ethical, which is to be lived here and now as the metaphysical.  To be sure as long as we are bound to fear of death, we do not, cannot live fully ethically; it is only by being free from compulsion that, as the Jesus of the Gospels, we can live fully ethically.  But that is ethics in the context of immortality.

Classical “metaphysical ethics” does not entail the modern “synthesis” of ethics and metaphysics, or the modern transformation of metaphysics into a “geometrical”/mathematical system (ideology) implemented to “perfect” ethics, progressively—to solve ethical problems, to overcome ethics.  Premodern man knows nothing of the “historical-progressive” consummation of ethical life.  Or, to be more precise, premodern man mocks the very notion that is the staple of modern progressivism.  The vulgar life that Zhuangzi dismisses in his “dream of a butterfly,” does not because it cannot entail progressive accumulation of experiences leading to the rise of a Great Society.  In his tale, the author awakens to realize that he is not a butterfly, or that the carefree life of the butterfly—the life free of care for metaphysical questions—is an unrealizable dream.  What is realizable, here, is merely alienation from metaphysical questions, alienation producing anxiety, anguish, dread, not happiness.

The teaching that happiness, the good life, requires openness to metaphysical questions, is one for which the problem of life (βίος) entails the bond between “lingering” and mind, thereby involving the challenge of seeking out the good life (εὖ ζῆν), which classical antiquity evokes as the life of the mind, or life for—oriented back to—mind.  Life would then be “lingering” in consciousness, “lingering” gathered in, or back to mind: lingering as a problem of and for thought, of clarification and ordering; lingering as emerging into the light, into clarity, into clear reflection; lingering as meaningful telos, as “way” and “return to” mind, through which the contents of mind are ordered, clarified; as in a mirror in which lingering itself is exposed, or in which the testimony of all lingering is given.  Turn away from that mirror, and your life appears meaningless; turn back to it, and meaning comes back to life—our life.

NOTES:

[1] “Absolute beginning” is distinguished from “beginning in time,” or “relative beginning” as a re-emerging out of latency.

[2] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.

[3] See the “Ignota Latebat” (“Unknown it Hid”) image of Metaphysics that G.B. Vico had placed on the title page of his Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744).  Metaphysics is the human mind seeking itself in the dark mirror of its own doings (Vico’s “Civil World”).

[4] “Mankind, which once, with Homer, was an exhibit object for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself.  Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own annihilation as an aesthetic enjoyment of the first order” (“Die Menschheit, die einst bei Homer ein Schauobjekt für die Olympischen Götter war, ist es nun für sich selbst geworden.  Ihre Selbstentfremdung hat jenen Grad erreicht, der sie ihre eigene Vernichtung als ästhetischen Genuß ersten Ranges erleben läßt”; transl. M.A. Andreacchio): concluding paragraph of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), third version (1939).  In Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Band I, Teil 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980; pp. 471–50).

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