The Meaning of Life 1: The Hero and the Saint
My reaction to this (of course, not shared with anyone at the service) was sardonic laughter tinged with wonder. I'm not sure if a quest for "the meaning of life" would have made sense to me even at age twenty, but I long ago abandoned it as a fool's errand, a snipe hunt. In its naive sense at least, the question What does life mean? supposes that a definitive answer exists. But the question floats over the void of another question: Does life have a meaning? Maybe I underestimate the young man's sophistication, but I imagined that his search for the meaning of life made an unwarranted assumption that there is a meaning to life--more particularly, a single meaning capable of being discovered and judged to be true--and, even more particularly, capable of being put into words, evaluated, and shared. The multifaceted and subjective nature of human experience seems to make this quest ridiculous.
Of course, there's another sense to the question. There may be no universal answer, no Meaning of Life like the Holy Grail at the end of a quest for Truth. But don't we all need meaningfulness, however ad hoc? Don't we all need a reason to get up in the morning? Maybe the young man lacked one. Maybe he was lost in a limbo of purposelessness that I was spared by early marriage and the conviction that my freshman year in college was the first year of a Ph.D program. A path was always lit at my feet. It had nothing to do with with transcendence, but it was a visible path. At the tentative and ad hoc level, I had meaning--a job to work, a family to support. People expected things of me, so I never staggered about in the dangerous way that got the young man shot. I internalized family expectations, and they ordered my days and years.
Clearly, it can be painful and destructive to lack meaning at this operational level, not knowing what to do next. Missing this, life can be so many forms of masturbation, a chaos of doing the next thing that feels good. A friend of mine, a Business professor and level-headed fellow, told me he was worthless before he met his wife, a very ordinary woman in my eyes. But family gave him meaning. He didn't call it meaning of life, and it certainly wasn't about anything transcendent. He merely moved into a house where he was cared for and needed. Maybe this was all the murdered young man needed, but, in fact, he did have a girlfriend and an infant daughter, so he must have been more restless than the Business professor.
When I said earlier that my reaction at his memorial service was tinged with wonder, it has to do with recalling a magical time when I retained a whisper of hope that I might find a transcendent meaning to life--see the face of God or whatever is behind it all--not just a home to move into. I long ago gave up on that dream and can't help feeling awe at the suggestion that the young man might have died with the hope alive in him.
Any valid meaning of life must inhere in a particular life as it is lived, in its flow. In this sense, if you have to ask about the meaning of life, you're unlikely to get an answer. Asking is alienation from being. Only the lost need to read maps. This is not to deny that everybody gets lost from time to time or that maps can be helpful, but the map isn't the terrain, and, if you know the terrain, you don't need one. A map is a flat abstraction, and, as long as you're looking at it, you're still lost, still ignorant of the three-dimensional world around you.
But there remains the meta-question, Does life really mean anything? Is there an ultimate foundation, or are we just floating over a watery abyss. Are the ad hoc purposes of family and career ultimately hollow because, if we go from justifications of meaning to justifications of those justifications, and so forth, we find ourselves in infinite regress? Our fortress is a castle floating on air? Maybe the answer to this meta-question is both yes and no.
Yes, anybody who wakes up and puts on shoes in the morning is following some trace of meaning, however tentative, unconscious, and shifting. Life must have meaning in the sense of order and direction. A life devoid of meaning, with no pattern or value, isn't life, but death. Life cannot exist without some meaning. Because life is a self-replicating pattern, lack of meaning may best be understood as partial incoherence in the pattern, especially destructive incoherence. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche dismisses the search for metaphysical truth. Whatever promotes life is the truth. From this perspective, the meaning of life is simply whatever "illusion" gets us through the day (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/11/the-unicorn-in-closet.html). But Nietzsche's nihilistic stance continues to affirm as life and meaning as inseparable.
There seems to be no discernible, universal Meaning of Life. That is unless life itself, existence per se, is that meaning. If there were a universal meaning capable of being formulated and verified, then long ago and world-wide consensus would have emerged. One True Religion would be fact, not sectarian claim. But, unless we dig down deep into the bedrock of sects, fuzzing out their details, no consensus emerges (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/08/vedanta-as-fact-cloudy-kalashnikov.html). Anyway, most people ride loosely in the saddle of any religions that they profess. Orthodox creeds mask a thousand variations.
Examined in detail, there may be almost as many meanings to life there are lives. I'd be bereaved to lose what you consider a nuisance; my heaven is your hell. Imagine Donald Trump in a Trappist monastery or a Trappist monk managing a casino hotel. Meaning always comes at a cost.
This recalls two paradigms suggested by Francis J. Ambrosio in his Great Courses lecture series, "Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life." He groups solutions to the question of life's meaning broadly under two types: the way of the hero and of the saint.
The hero achieves meaning by self-realization, by being different from other people and accumulating personal accomplishments, typically defeating enemies or overcoming obstacles. A culture hero may serve his community--he may kill a dragon, for instance, that threatens a town--but his self-worth derives, not from his service, but from his exceptionalism, his disconnect from ordinary people. A hero may find meaning with acts that are destructive or that do little to benefit the community, such as climbing a mountain or running a faster mile.
The saint, on the other hand, finds meaning through community participation, within a compact with God (or the gods) and fellow human beings. The saint serves and belongs, drawing meaning from the whole, not from separate personhood. The hero acts out. The saint behaves. The hero is enlarged by separation, the saint by connection. The hero violates norms, the saint realizes and adheres to higher norms.
Of course, a figure like Francis of Assisi may be so exceptional as to fold the saintly paradigm back on itself and be a hero-saint. Ambrosio's two types are, after all, abstractions, tools of analysis. In most real-life cases, the types are mixed and blended. Most of us neither are not purebred heroes nor saints, but hybrids.
Last year, I remembered my friend's son, his search for meaning interrupted by a bullet to the heart. Suddenly, I recognized him. In monastic isolation with the 2020 pandemic, wasn't I filling notebooks with words? Though I didn't dare name it (until now), wasn't the quarry I was circling the meaning of life in my seventy-ninth year? And hadn't I, through the process of months of recollection and thought, arrived at a few insights, if not answers, into what might answer the absurd question of absurdity? With some trepidation, I share a few thoughts.
Without believing in the way of the hero, I still pursue it in a lower-case sense, creating bursts of meaning by dispatching myself to slay miniature dragons. As a retired teacher earning as much by breathing as I did by working, I could laze about all day, but a crowd of self-assigned quests pushes me along. Reading for entertainment seems alien. Reading is "research," whether it comes to fruition or not, and even watching movies or (seldom) television has a film-studies edge. Meanwhile, I'm directing a play, having just finished acting in one, teaching myself piano, and working up songs on guitar to perform in public. See my fifty-plus videos on the Banjo Bill Green YouTube channel, and, on the private side, there are daily walks, yoga stretches, and gym workouts. Still, all of this, though it fights depression better than St. John's Wort, is dust in the wind. Most of what I did fifty years ago is forgotten, even by me, and in fifty years all of my existence--much less the dragon pups I joust with today--will equally forgotten.
It doesn't take much imagination to see all personal accomplishment as vanity. The way of the hero only works if you wear blinders. Shakespeare may be "immortal," but he understood what heroism was good for:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. (Hamlet 5:1)
This may lead, and in many cases does lead, to the way of the saint, the submerging of personal vanity into something larger, devotion to a good cause. But, as Thomas Nagel points out in his incisive essay, "The Absurd" (Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979), serving a larger cause cannot not confer ultimate significance unless that cause is itself significant even, say, after the sun goes supernova. Like Hamlet, we are plagued with dreams of infinity. The saint, religious or secular, who is selflessly devoted to a church, a nation--or even to a cause as grand as saving the planet--is no more significant on a cosmic scale than an gnat on a ball of dung.
But there's another way (Isn't there always?). Another sort of saint subsumes the self even in a supernova sun crisping the earth and leaving it cold, even in a cosmos subsiding into entropy. This sort of saint identifies with existence itself, relaxing in a timeless moment of absolute participation with all now. Last night, the movie Soul reminded me of the old story of the fish wondering, "What is this thing they call the ocean?" Ocean is part of the fish and she is part of it, united as part and whole. All that she has ever known is ocean. To sense ocean, she need only breathe. It flows through every pulse of her gills, but she can never comprehend its boundaries. Shores are voids in it, but it wraps continuously around the earth and flows edgelessly into itself.
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