The Searching Self: Beyond the Cycle of Worms.

In his essay The Meaning of Life Richard Taylor defines meaninglessness as

essentially endless pointlessness. A meaningless life is one that is caught up in an idiotic
cycle. Death can be seen as a welcome event because it brings this cycle to an end.
Meaninglessness involves a repetitious cyclic activity that never comes to anything Can
meaning simply be found if we embrace this type of activity and reconcile ourselves to the tasks?
Taylor has Sisyphus want precisely what the gods inflict on him. It is his desire to roll the stone
and his desire is therefore fulfilled for all eternity. This twist does not bring mercy to the
perversion; it in fact multiplies the perversion like a Stalinist show trial.
Taylor argues that our lives share certain patterns with all life. Taylor describes caves in
New Zealand inhabited by worms that lure insects to their death. Taylor asks, What great thing
awaits all this long and repetitious effort and makes it worthwhile? His answer is really
nothing. Taylor offers the insight that the point of any living things life is evidently nothing
but life itself Life is defined as a vast machine feeding on itself, running on and on forever to
nothing. Taylor believes that since we are part of this life the differences are not as great as we
like to think. What makes us different from the cannibalistic worms? Are we not the same? Do
we not create our own cave- bubbles that break as soon as something sharp touches them?
The old house in the village where I was born is now in decay. My grandfather built it
after he returned from the United States to fight in the Great War. Here sixteen people lived,
loved, rejoiced and mourned. I remember sitting on the wooden floor in 1989 looking through
old photographs and letters that my father wrote to his parents and brothers. My tears mixed with
the ash of my cigarette. This once beautiful village house is no more. The rocks rolled only to
crumble. The Buddhists believe that we can end our suffering by embracing impermanence. I
have never liked this answer even if I know it is true. I am left with what Taylor calls an
unspeakable sadness. It is not enough for me to embrace the notion that the day is sufficient
to itself. Taylor argues the point to living is simply to be living in the manner that it is in our
nature to be living. It is not that we stand on the shoulders of giants; rather we stand on
fragments and remains. The landscape is already a deathscape that no amount of grass trimming
can mask. If the result of all our activity is ruin, what is the point?
The Sumerian quest story of Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk was first told in 1500 BCE.
Fearful after the death of his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh sets out on quest to find the secret of
immortality. After many adventures and struggles, he fails to find the elixir that will rescue him
from death. We are told that the search itself remains the most important thing even when the
quest ends in failure. I am not willing to accept this position. The stories that we tell reveal that
the quest never gives us what we intended to get. The quest attempts to bring back the lost
object. Isis searches for the remains of her husband Osiris. Orpheus descends to the underworld
to bring back his wife Eurydice. Demeter attempts to rescue her daughter Persephone from the
dead. If Lacan is correct, the lost object is never to be found. The lesson of Moby Dick would be
that the pursuit of the object only leads to death. Captain Ahab found the white whale but it is
death that surfs the waves that doom Ahab and his crew.
One can say yes, the archaeologist can unearth this piece of ceramic tile, but her PhD
thesis will never record what was important unless it is recorded by the person who lived there.
These tiles were laid together with memories whose meaning will always remain secret. It is not
the doing that counts, but what can be achieved by the doing. I agree with Taylor, the meaning of
life is within us. It is not something given and readymade.

1
 Leo Tolstoy in his My Confession writes that there are five basic attitudes towards life
and meaning. We can live in ignorance of the problem of the meaning of life. We can ignore the
question and seek pleasure. We can admit that life has no meaning and commit suicide. We can
admit that life has no meaning and continue to live. The attitude chosen by Tolstoy is that
without faith one cannot live. Faith for Tolstoy allows one to be satisfied with life. Tolstoy
writes, In contradistinction to the people of our circle who struggled and murmured against fate
because of their privation and suffering, these people accepted diseases and sorrows without any
perplexity or opposition but with the calm and firm conviction that it was all for good. Tolstoy
is convinced that the more intelligent we are, the less we will understand the meaning of life
Tolstoys wise peasants live, suffer and approach death and suffer in peace and more often in
joy I cannot accept Tolstoys easy answer. A people drugged on faith can be easily brought to
the Gulag to be told it was all for good.
David Swenson argues that happiness is lifes vital fluid and the very breath of its
nostrils. Though I would like to believe in such optimistic remarks, I do not think, happiness
and life are so much one and the same thing Life itself brings forth the evidence that happiness
is a fleeing thing. We have a need for happiness but happiness is not something that life provides.
Given this, I am not in agreement with Louis Pojman who argues that we should live as though
the theistic worldview were true. It is the as thought\ and the as if that I find problematic.
Pojman provides us with the same answer presented by Tolstoy. Pojman is correct when he
argues that secularism fails to produce moral saints like Jesus, Maimonides, Father Kolbe and
Mother Teresa but neglects to ad that these saints became exemplars because of secularism.
Secularism and theism are tied more closely than either group wishes to acknowledge.
I am not satisfied by Schopenhauers answer that on the whole life is a disappointment,
nay a cheat. I do not find the blessed calm of non-existence preferable. Schopenhauer argues,
The happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent
to which it has been free from suffering Schopenhauer condemns life in advance. Much of life
is about suffering and un-ease, so that any joy however large does not seem to put suffering into
a corner. Given the accounts of Schopenhauers own life and his legendary sexual appetite, one
wonders why he so full of complaint? Was the orgasm after-glow not enough to melt his
pessimism or did he see pleasure as a cheating lure cast by an optimism that no longer believed
in itself?
I agree with Schopenhauer that this world cannot be the successful work of an all-wise,
all-good and at the same time all-powerful Being. The Nietzschean answer would be to find joy
within the suffering. Here the words of Bertrand Russell are important: Be it ours to shed
sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows with the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure-
joy of a never tiring affection, to strengthen their failing courage, to instill faith in hours of
despair. The insights that Russell gives us comes from the strength of the free mind that has
overcome the mediocrity that spreads itself as the ground of culture.
Moritz Schlick in his remarkable essay, On the Meaning of Life argues that we shall
never find an ultimate meaning in existence, if we view it only under the aspect of purpose.
Schlick sees purpose as a burden. Empty work is a burden. This work is not performed for its
own sake. Schlick affirms that: the core and ultimate value of life can lie only in such states that
exist for their own sake. He calls such activities play because they contain free purposeless
action. In this joyous play all working days become holidays This creative play produces
values that can transform this war-racked globe Schlick names the poet, the artist and the

2
scientist as exemplars insofar as their activity is shaped by this inspiration. For Schlick, the
pursuit of knowing is a pure play of the spirit
Schlick contrasts the work of the artist, poet and scientist with the mechanical,
brutalizing, degrading form of work (that) serves ultimately to produce only trash and empty
luxury. Schlick continues, So long as our economy is focused on mere increase of production,
instead of the true enrichment of life, these activities cannot diminish. What kind of culture can
give rise to the work that can become vocation and play? Schlicks warning is clear, a
civilization which maintains artificial breeding grounds for idle trumpery by means of forced
slave labor, must eventually comes to grief through its own absurdity.
For those of us who are unwilling to wait for this apocalypse, what can be done now to
emerge out of the feedback loop that diminishes our spirit by making us slaves to mortgages,
credit card interest and payment plans? Schlick argues that to live means to celebrate the
festival of existence. This festival is not one of weary pleasure but of joy that refreshes, enriches
and exalts. Schlick allows us to see that youth is not a preparation for some training in adulthood.
Such a view is contained in the majority of religions that shift lifes center of gravity forwards
into the future. This perfect state never arrives. What arrives is a state of continued servitude
posing as the freedom to choose between McDonalds or BurgerKing.
Schlick argues, if life has meaning it must lie in the present, for only the present is real.
The spirit of youth is an attitude that one can have always regardless of numerical age. This
attitude takes root when action become play. Schlick concludes, the more youth is realized in
a life, the more valuable it is. Schlick wants the spirit of youth without its other attributes. As
such, this spirit of youth becomes an abstract concept.
Schlick provides a better alternative to the absurdity embraced by Nagel and Feinberg.
Nagel argues, we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair. The
absurd occurs for Nagel when there is a discrepancy between our aspirations and reality. There is
a clash and collision between what we want to achieve and what is achieved. Viewed from the
filter of a million years the everyday things we do can be viewed as insignificant. However, it
will always remain significant that Noah is my son and Holly is my daughter even if time
devours everything. A secret cannot be devoured. As Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus,
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Philosophy is a small
insignificant thing that we take seriously. It may entrench us within the absurd when we forget
that the sun beckons us to escape from the interior fluorescent burn.
Feinbergs example of the absurd is taken from a World War One documentary. A group
of British reinforcements marches towards the front singing, Were here because were here.
Feinberg writes, the soldiers were in an inescapably absurd predicament, without hope and only
by their unflinching acceptance of the absurdity of their situation are they save from absurdity
themselves. The soldiers are not saved from absurdity. There is no inspiration in their example.
They could have changed the co-ordinates of their situation but choose to do otherwise. The
marching off into slaughter is not a cosmic incongruity that we meet with an ironic smile.
There is no sad pleasure in observing this situation. There is nothing noble in such a sacrifice
especially when youth were murdered for the hegemonic dreams of dying generals and unjust
monarchs. The spirit of youth can resist this call to kill and instead send the architects of war to
fight for themselves.
John Kekes argues that the question, does life have a meaning, originates in a disruption
of everyday life. The problem happens when we find ourselves, unsuccessful, bored, tired,

3
unlucky, grief stricken, victims of injustice. The question arises when we start reflecting on
the point of the routine activities we endlessly perform.
It seems pointless to argue with someone whether priming the drywall is actually
painting the drywall even as your brush is coated with paint. You stand in front of the drywall
thinking there are better things to do with my time, but then reflecting further you realize there is
no need to turn to religion or morality or join a new club. There is no need to ask if there is a
cosmic order, nor is it necessary to remain in unreflective innocence or willfully embrace
ignorance.
If the everyday is problematic then a shift in how the everyday is seen is required. Kekes
writes, everyday life is what life mostly is. Keeping it going requires constant struggle. From a
birth we did not choose to a death we rarely desire, we have to cope with endless problems. If we
fail, we suffer and what do we gain from success? No more than some pleasure, a brief sense of
triumph, perhaps a little piece of mind. But these are only interludes of well being because our
difficulties do not cease.
Kekes ignores many other solutions available to the so called difficult business of
living. In these well-argued accounts of meaning, reason and logic are not saviors. It is as if
theorists believe that by providing necessary and sufficient conditions that difficulties will cease.
The difficulties do not cease. How we deal with them is the challenge. Herein we can locate
whatever meaning may exist.