Meaning of Life

Meaning of Life The Statesman Dec 08-09, 2019 (I) What is the meaning of life? What purpose, if any, do we serve here on the Earth? Why are we here? These are some of the oldest questions of humanity. While science explains the ‘how-s’ of life, it is happy to leave its ‘why-s’ to other disciplines to address. The other branches of human knowledge – metaphysics, theology, psychology, history, sociology, etc. attempt to answer these questions from their own perspectives, answers which are remarkable not only for their divergence and also for the infinity of paradoxes and contradictions that they create. For some people, life may be all about having a family and to go on living till death, while for some others, it is all about accumulating wealth. Some live this life for an eternal afterlife without having any idea about the purpose of such an afterlife. Meaning of life may be diverse for different people it could be the pursuit of either knowledge or religion, or art or love. To Aristotle, "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence"; to Camus, it is the absurdity of the human condition that we search for meaning in a world which has none. Nietzsche believed that the question itself was meaningless, while Plato defined man as ‘A being in search of meaning.’ The sixth-century Chinese sage Lao Tzu—author of Tao te Ching or the Book of Change - believed that neither goals nor accomplishments impart any meaning unto our lives - that the value and meaning of our existence come from the universe itself of which we are a part, and it requires no effort on our part to derive a meaning for life. Mystery is the essence of our existence, and we, the wayfarers, are also part of Tao - the way, which is unknowable; even though life may not be comprehensible, it is certainly not meaningless. Many people believe that even though life may be devoid of meaning, it is nevertheless valuable because it makes us happy and brings moral good, while others feel that we only impart meaning unto our own lives by choosing how to live. “The day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life”, as the philosopher Richard Taylor said in his 1970 book Good and Evil. The question of the meaning of our life is also closely associated with the existence of life elsewhere in the Universe. Indeed, if life exists elsewhere, then our life may not be just happenstance as it is believed; we then become part of a larger whole. It is very much likely that life exists in the millions of planets in the goldilocks zones within galaxies scattered across the Universe where water can remain in the liquid form, a condition believed to be essential for the existence of life as we know it. However, so far the Earth is home to the only life known to us. Countless species on earth had found their way into extinction through geological times, and no star is going blink in sorrow if humanity also meets the same fate. There is no deeper meaning encoded in our DNA. Whether life has meaning or not, one thing is certain, life is full of pain and suffering, and those who have passed through a great deal of suffering may have a different, and perhaps more realistic, perspective on life. In that context, the 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning by the Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl is interesting. Talking about his experiences in Auschwitz, Frankl observed 1 that a prisoner passed through three stages: shock after arrival, followed by apathy and emotional death and then disillusionment with life, even if he manages to survive and see freedom. Frankl says that a man can survive anything only if he has found a meaning for living, which is his deepest desire. Apathy towards life arises from the feeling of being doomed, from being unable to control the circumstances in any way. Frankl says that a man can still choose his attitude even in the worst of suffering, and thereby derive a meaning for his life. He survived three years at Auschwitz by thinking about what he would do after the camp – to inform the world about the survival strategies and help others to live in the face of crises. He says a man can find meaning either through work, love or suffering - the image of his wife indeed helped him in his most difficult times. The question about the meaning of life is something that had bothered each one of us at some point in time. I had my doubts during the college days while studying physics. I surmised that since physics played a larger role in the Universe than biology - gravity and electromagnetic forces and all that stuff without which the Universe would not have existed or created the conditions for life to evolve – and because the Universe was also created ex nihilo – out of nothing, through an incomprehensible quantum fluctuation, life has intrinsically no meaning. It turned me towards atheism which allowed me to evade the question, at least till the time I got so preoccupied with the more pressing businesses of an otherwise meaningless life that the question of meaning rarely occurred in my mind. I had the opportunity of re-examining the question while reading Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, a collection of 21 themed essays, one of which discussed the meaning of life. Harari says that man, being a storytelling animal, weaves the meaning of life around several stories that ultimately carry no meaning. One such story, propagated by religion, is that we are all parts of an “eternal cycle that encompasses and connects all beings” where each has a distinct function to fulfil, to understand which imparts the meaning unto our life. Citing the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita, he says that each has a unique Dharma, following which each fulfils his role in the Cosmic drama, which is eternal and inescapable. One must fulfil one’s predestined role in this drama, so as to uphold the laws of Nature. This is a circular story which gives a fixed identity to each individual. In contrast, there is a linear story followed in Islam or Christianity which says that God created the universe and expects all humans to conducts themselves in a certain manner, as decreed by religion. Following God’s commands is the only meaning of an individual’s life so that on the great Judgment Day, each is punished or rewarded according to their deeds on earth. A similar story is also provided by Nationalism which commands that one’s life gets meaning by contributing to fulfilling the destiny of one’s nation and by advancing its interests in all situations, even when it harms the people of other nations. Communism ordains that the mission of one’s life is to advance the cause of revolution and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, while Fascism directs every citizen to believe that his nation is superior to every other nation and its interests are supreme to every other consideration including the wellbeing of the individual himself. These are all stories and they derive their power by giving the individual a role to play and hence imparting an identity; and also by embedding the individual into a timeless cosmic eternity, something bigger than himself which he cannot fathom. All these stories have serious shortcomings. Nation, God or religion are all artificial constructs invented by humans; the world was not created with any of these entities. The circular theory does not convincingly explain why one has to be reborn endlessly and pass through the same lifecycles in order to fulfil an amorphous cosmic drama whose features remain unknown. Eternity also is a vague 2 concept, since we are discussing the meaning of life, eternity cannot logically extend beyond the life of humans on earth which is only 250000 years (leaving aside the animals who had evolved earlier than humans and the question of meaning of their lives). Humans are not destined to live for eternity either, we do not even know if humanity will survive another 50000 years. Linear theory does not explain either why people have to strive in life for some reward in afterlife whose features are equally unknown. (II) Some believe the meaning of life consists in leaving something behind as a legacy for posterity – may be an offspring, a work of art or literature. How that begets meaning unto someone’s life in retrospect while he was alive, however, is unclear. Some find meaning in spreading kindness and happiness, while some may find it in seeking and finding a soulmate, who is no different from millions of other humans. As regards kindness, history is replete with examples that kindness, piety and compassion which underpin every religion can comfortably coexist with the worst kind of cruelty inflicted upon humans - the Spanish Inquisition run by pious Christians, persecution of Rohingiyas by compassionate Buddhists, or exploitation of lower caste people by devout Hindus are glaring examples. As regards love of a soulmate in which eyes reside the entire Universe, well, science tells us that love is nothing but organic chemistry, the interplay of the neurotransmitters in our brain. Psychologists use the socalled Lövheim Cube of Emotions to explain how all our emotions arise from neurochemicals – for example, the emotion of joy is a result of high serotonin, high dopamine and low noradrenaline in the brain. There is nothing pure or divine in love. Thus there is a portfolio of stories for us to choose from. We rarely put all our faith in a single story and conveniently choose the story that supports our need at any given time, displaying our remarkable ability for cognitive dissonance. Some seek other means, like Harari, who finds solace in Buddhist meditation which he practices for two hours daily, which he claims gives him clarity and focus which probably it does, but it is doubtful whether meditation can also endow life with meaning. Of course, being a non-practitioner, I am not the best judge. All these stories are nevertheless fake just by being stories; these are the products of human imagination. As Harari says, “For many people in 2018, two wooden sticks nailed together are God, a colourful poster in the wall is revolution, and a piece of cloth flapping in the wind is the Nation.” By waiving the cloth we transform an abstract concept of a nation into a ‘tangible reality’. To impart reality to the stories, human imagination has again invented rituals, which are celebrated with all solemnity and sombreness to establish their authenticity by converting the fictional into the real. To render the process of this conversion even more genuine, rituals are often accompanied by prayers or chanting of mantras and hymns by priests and shamans in languages that their followers can hardly understand – this lack of understanding itself imparts even more authenticity to the rituals by enveloping them in an aura of mystery. A ritual is a magic complete with all its hocus pocus. Thus with a Latin “Hoc est corpus”, the priest converts an ordinary piece of bread and a glass of wine into the flesh and blood of Christ, and Christians sincerely believe so. With a Sanskrit hymn, “Gange cha Yamune chaiva Godavari Saraswati/ Narmade Sindhu Kaveri jalesmin sannidhim kuru”, a Hindu priest converts tap water into the confluence of all these rivers in a moment, and Hindus drink that water in that belief. By slicing the throat of a poor goat on a particular day, Muslims believe that they 3 have performed the holiest of deeds and that their piety has reached the merciful Allah, and they celebrate this fact. There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise, that any of these deeds have achieved the end they profess. The Universe does not run by stories, but sometimes the story demands a real sacrifice, whether of an animal or a martyr sacrificed for his flag, religion or God. Through such sacrifices, the story’s legitimacy is established beyond all doubt and it enters the collective consciousness to reinforce, for all generations, the ultimate truth of a fake story. As Harari cautions, whenever we hear the words sacrifice, eternity, purity or redemption, we need to be alarmed. In reality, the Universe is nothing but an aggregation of molecules and atoms only, without any intrinsic beauty, bliss, purity or meaning; it gets meaning only through us, not vice versa. So is life. In the twentieth century, liberalism rejected the stories of cosmic dramas or Judgment Day, it instead taught us that faith is nothing but ‘mental slavery’ and doubt is a ‘precondition for freedom’. It advocated freedom – the exercise of an individual’s freewill - as the meaning of life through which we can explore, invent and create. The supreme ideal is therefore to free the mind from all limitations and assert the liberty of choice in order to realise the ‘Self’ and express oneself. The New Age Gurus immediately latched onto the concept and carried it to unprecedented heights, inventing weird but charming theories about the mind which attracted millions of followers. Alas, like all other stories, this story also falls through. As science tells us, our freewill, desire or craving for liberty are all but the interplay of biochemical algorithms produced by the brain, about the working of which we have only rudimentary knowledge. To seek meaning out of emptiness is futile. The concept of ‘Self’- the bread and butter of New Age Gurus, is actually nothing but a fictional story – we manufacture these stories in order to derive a false meaning where none exists, though it makes our living easier. There is also no such thing as ‘freewill’, as an experiment in psychology – Libet’s experiment – conducted in 1985 at the University of California seems to suggest. In his book “The Illusion of Conscious Will”, psychologist Daniel Wegner examines various evidences to argue that the notion of conscious will is nothing but a deeply-entrenched illusion. Freewill implies that our thoughts cause our actions. We thus infer that our conscious thoughts caused the action, ignoring the fact that planning for the action may have been triggered by unconscious processes, maybe past experiences or external stimuli. That we act by our conscious freewill is thus just an illusion, even though it is a powerful illusion. Volition – the mental power to make a conscious choice or decision – is indeed problematic. As Marx said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Indeed, if human behaviour is entirely controlled by electrochemical processes within the brain, then the existence of soul or freewill can be described as pure myth. If human beings - and all life for that matter as well as all cognition - are entirely the products of biology and chemistry, then, as Stephen Pinker said in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, life will cease to have any higher meaning and purpose, freewill will be a myth and people cannot be held responsible for their actions any longer, because the concept of moral responsibility for one’s action will cease to have any meaning. Thus we may be “predestined to move in a circumscribed groove” determined by the automated movement of atoms and molecules, and our brain, the incredible learning machine and a wonder of evolution, will serve no other purpose except making robots of us, blindly following the commands of a “blind watchmaker”, or rather, a ‘blind programmer”. It is impossible to get reconciled to this idea, and this 4 is where seeking a meaning, false or otherwise, assumes importance. We need to have one, whatever that is. Early in my life, I had read Somerset Maugham’s 1944 book The Razor's Edge, which tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot who, traumatized by his experiences in World War I and the death of his comrade, set off on a journey in search of meaning of life that ultimately brought him to India, where he had found realisation and happiness in Ramana Maharshi’s Ashram at Arunachalam, Tiruvannamalai. I had followed my wife there to practise monastic life for two days. No, I did not find any meaning of life there, in fact I am not sure if I was searching for one. But I remembered Maugham, “Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.” Life is a long journey, boring for most of the way. Meaning perhaps lies in learning to enjoy the humdrumness of life, in pursuing simple things rather than meditating on profound ideas. In the ultimate analysis, each one therefore chooses his own meaning. I am doing so right now, dear reader, by talking to you. 5