The Meaning of Life (Or Its Meaninglessness)

                                 

Many years ago, I wrote an essay entitled The Meaning of Life, a consequence, I suppose, of being not so much a paid-up ponderer on such things - like a professional philosopher or a theologian - as being merely a thinking animal whose mind had been encroached upon by a rather cerebral matter. Without realising it, I engaged in abstruse reasoning in the piece. Since I could not - human that I was - truly define the meaning or purpose of life, I had merely skirted the boundaries of being and beingness (and, of course, those of nothing and nothingness) in the short piece. The essay was published in a newspaper I wrote for in West Africa. Much of the feedback I got harped on the essay’s indecipherability; in other words, the promise the title gave was not met by the contents; if I had proffered any meaning of life at all, it was lost in the complexity of the essay.

I was slightly surprised by this observation because I was under the impression that my ‘take’ on the meaning of life was clear and accessible. In so much as I would like to be seen as an essayist who had expressed his views as lucidly as he could, the imputation of intellectual esotericism and verbal denseness was not quite something to whoop about – although these days, I don’t give two hoots about how what I write comes across to anyone. Even then, how does one begin to write about the metaphysics of the meaning of life without running the risk of stylistic heavy-handedness or even piffling meaninglessness? One must necessarily walk a tightrope and be careful lest one fall into a dark intellectual abyss. 

But then, shouldn’t every essay or book entitled The Meaning of Life be approached with common sense, with the preknowledge that however eloquent and reader-friendly the author may be, she is never going to offer any substantive explanation of the meaning of life, even if the writing style is as clear as the retina of Gautama Buddha’s eye, the value will be opaque, at the very best. No Guru, no Teacher, no Polymath has been able to hazard a definitive and provable interpretation of the essence of life. No book either - not the Bible, Quran, or Vedas; neither Aristotle’s nor Spinoza’s Ethics, nor Collected Shakespeare or Shaw or Soyinka can offer anyone a conclusive explanation of all things. Of course, Christians might find a sort of meaning in the Bible, and Muslims might see the Quran as the book that sheds gnostic light on the shadowiness of being, but a neutral-minded reader of both books would only encounter bemusement, some poetry, contradictions, myths, antediluvian tales, reductio ad absurdum, cautionary bugaboos in the shape of hell and eternal roasting and a temperamental inadequate ‘creator’ and ‘controller’ of the world – and possibly wafts of self-induced spiritualism.          

   The question of the meaning of life came up again a few weeks ago (years now; this article was written a few years ago) when I ran into Professor Terry Eagleton’s book of the same title. Eagleton is a literary critic, not a philosopher, and maybe that is why his short introduction to this nagging, if pointless, question is not one of the most original. He goes over the same old grounds. Without explicitly declaring himself religious, hews the line of believers over against ‘unbelievers’ - he is, by the way, the arch-Anti-Dawkins. Although the book is fairly readable, Eagleton offers no meaning for life, and he actually warns against frequent posing of the question. He rounds on philosophers he considers nihilists, such as the profoundly pessimistic Schopenhauer. He touches on how modernism and its mongrel offspring, postmodernism, have been detrimental to the grand narrative of meaning. Enough of Eagleton now – he committed blasphemy with his reproof of Schopenhauer! Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, the author’s quest for meaning against the background of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, makes for better reading.

Have I just had a brainwave of what the meaning of life might consist in? You bet - not. Isn’t this a triangulation we had better leave to the three Fates to deal with, particularly Atropos, who would inevitably cut off the thread spun by Clotho and measured by Lachesis? Does religion offer any meaning as ‘believers’ would like to imagine? Well, even when I was a kind of believer, the galleon that carries Minotaur of Meaning in its underdeck was very far from the offing. Even the finest explainer or interpreter of the Bible or Quran could not crystallise their readings into an epiphany of unassailable truth or summa. Like many things in life, religion offers some consolation and acts as a placebo, a potent narcosis, which may truly help some to cope with humans’ common Oedipean blindness. Rather than being the polar light, religion is no more than a bendable cane - a ‘walking stick’ - with which some try to feel their way through the vast dark jumble-room, or even charnel house, of life.   

Philosophy gives its own consolations, too, although less pompously than religion. As a matter of fact, philosophy offers no consolations – despite the flavoursome proffering of such by writers/philosophers from Boethius to Alain de Botton – what it does is to turn anyone who embraces it (or her, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy) into the ballast in the very boat of his/her life - you sink or float by your own devices. Philosophy does not attempt the concentring of life’s rather spiky spokes onto any hub – in other words, philosophy is only a cog and not the hub. Philosophy does not offer saccharine julep that kills the bitter taste of life. Philosophy offers counterpoison; it offers hemlock, which destroys the candied sweetness and light in your mouth and guts, which will not kill you and will not make you stronger, but probably savvier. Philosophy removes your milk teeth and especial sweet tooth and replaces them with nicotine-coloured wisdom teeth. Backgrounding any philosophical study of life’s meaning is the Socratic axiom that he knew nothing. Socrates would not have been able to offer any definitive meaning of life if you asked him. At best, he would ask you to tell him what meaning you thought life, or your life, had - loading the question so lightly that you would certainly be shown up.                

So how does one get a purchase on the meaning of life? One might as well shin up a slippery Babel-tall thread to Christian heaven to arrive at it. So far as I am concerned, there is no definable meaning at all to life; it only behoves every person to seek and define the meaning of his or her life (a very anti-Eagleton subjectivism). I see nihility in many things we give undue weight to, but I am not a nihilist in the sense of being completely enamoured of nothing and nothingness. I have a family and kin; I have friends. Even if I fancy myself a great understander of nihilism, I am a poor nihilist just like I failed to be a true antinatalist (a practiser of the Silenian ideal of better-never-to-have-been-born). I only try to give meaning to things within reason. For instance, I reject the possibility or existence of any god because even if there is any conclusive evidence of a ‘god’ being there, it will add zilch meaning to my own existence – as a matter of fact, the thought of any entity called ‘god,’ or worse, ‘God,’ detracts from any meaning I may want to give to life. In a way, the monotheist God reminds me of the story of Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, God being the latter: a distraction, a kibitzer who interferes in the treacherous card game of life – except, of course, that Alexander the Great was real and God is a figment of our imagination. Before the Distinguished Thing - the name Henry James gave to death - arrives to do the not-so-distinguished thing, humans do their best to shamble and blunder, Oedipus-like, for any kind of meaning for their lives. We quest for meaning in religion. In spiritualism. In food. In various forms of antifoodism. In friendship. In freemasonry and kindred organisations. In family. In love. In books. In art. In music. In bullshit and bullshitting. In drugs. In gambling and every kind of addiction, including the Internet. In procreation. In philoprogenitiveness. In childlessness. In many ruts and rituals of everyday life. In masturbation. In sex and its manifold kinks. Oh yes, in sex. Or why would the late English poet laureate, John Betjeman, say in his last days that the only regret he had was that he did not have enough sex? And the latest pop-psych weasel word, ‘sex addiction,’ is indeed nonsense. In my opinion, consenting adults can have as much sex as they can. Now, the once ragingly goatish Bill Clinton seems to have ‘mortified the flesh’ and zenned out, but in a rampant Freudian alter-world, the ageing man would not say 'no' if he were gifted an Abishag to warm the cockles of his heart – or some other cockled organ. However, whether these things offer any ‘real’ meaning is another matter. Again, take the primal sop we offer ourselves: sex. For good reasons, the French describe the act’s orgasmic finale as ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death,’ but then for many who recover from ‘the little death,’ post-coital tristesse, or after-sex sadness, melancholy, sometimes overtakes the momentary spasms of ecstasy.   

I like reading books, and I have immensely enjoyed reading some of them, even experiencing Barthes’ version of ‘le petit mort’ while perusing certain books, for instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what is the sum of meaning that I have found in the sum of every book that I have read? It is incalculable, and this is not because I have found in them a googol (or google?) of meaning that has led me to resolve and ratiocinate the surds of life, but incalculable because even now I cannot begin to unravel how the reading of George Eliot’s magnificent Middlemarch has contributed to the sum of my intellect. Or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – or Critique of Practical Reason, or even his Critique of Judgement. Or Achebe’s Arrow of God. Or American Psycho. When you throw the latter novel into the mix and yet another offbeat beast like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a character gets his kick from eating shit, then I think it becomes clear that one tittle of meaning you take from life is the bilge in its underbelly, the utter shittiness (notwithstanding that the books are fiction, I would imagine that murderous psychopathy and pathological coprophilia are humanly probable).  This is what depth psychology tries to help us to crystallise, sometimes with goodish results. Even though I am a keen reader of Freud, Freudianism and its offshoots, Jungian psychology is my guilty pleasure, guilt because, even with the best will in the world, I can’t embrace Jung’s God/paranormal placebo...

Now, why stop abruptly? Or isn’t that how the lives of many of us are cut off, suddenly, unwarned, even painfully. To conclude, I will quote Flaubert. ‘Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread and want to know the whole design.’ We simply can’t.