The Meaning of Life:

This is meant as a summary of our work so far and then a sketch of an alternative not in the readings. It goes by at a high rate of speed, and so there is little in the way of abbreviated arguments.

Summary

Just what is the question? Our first move to clarify the question about the meaning of life is to consider how it might arise. Tolstoy provides one way to ask, and Camus and Sartre seem to take something like the same approach for granted. That way, briefly, is to look at one's life and to find in it some futility or hollowness, usually an emptiness or vacancy which is felt rather than reasoned, often in the face of death, and to wonder then whether not just your own life is empty but whether all life is meaningless. For Tolstoy as for the existentialists, this is no slight thing, not to be shrugged off.

What are the possible answers? That is, can we make this multiple choice?

A. Faith, simplicity, work. This is Tolstoy's answer. It has its plausibility because of the force of his own attempts to find some other answer and being driven back to this one by failure to find rational answers and by his wonderment at the strength, satisfaction, peace, and ability to face death and suffering on the part of the peasants.

B. Faith is impossible and the resulting absurd situation human beings are in must be faced rather than evaded, with the result that our lived lives and the choices we make will make up all the meaning that can be given to our lives. This is Sartre's and Camus' answer. Though they do not say so, it is an answer clearly directed at Tolstoy's question, raised in basically the same way Tolstoy raises it. That is, they too are confronting death and emptiness when they work on this problem.

C. A meaningful life is a good life, a life in which we strive to be true to what we know and to be aware of what we do not know, a life in accordance with how we understand we should live. I suggested this view which Socrates gives us in Plato's Apology is a view that our moral worth is central to whether we have a significant life, whether our life is meaningful or not.

D. Nothing. There is no meaning to our lives, no more than if our lives were the lives of slugs or bees who live a month and then croak--pond scum, that's what we are. "Life's a bitch and then you die." This is the nihilist position, and it has some of its appeal based on its relentless facing up to Tolstoy's question and relentless rejection of giving in on some question just because we hope the answer is true. This is how I suggested we might read the selection from Tom McGuane's Nobody's Angel.

E. Living is the meaning of life. This is the answer I mean to elaborate here, drawing on some things I have been told about Zen approaches to living. The mood of this answer is different from those above, in that it seems to reject the idea which prompts the question in the way we have raised it above. That is, this answer is based on finding, when we look at our lives, that our lives are full rather than empty, satisfying rather than hollow, profound rather than superficial.

Zen: Zen is a variant of Buddhism, the philosophical religion originating in India about 2500 years ago, resulting from Buddhism's combination with Lao Tsu's Taoism in China 1500 years ago and then in Japan in the twelfth century.

Zen is a form of meditation, and the study of Zen is in part a study of methods for preparing oneself for enlightenment. But it can also be summarized as a series of beliefs, though the experience of the discipline and the experience of enlightenment are as central to Zen as are the beliefs. That is, an intellectual study of the beliefs or tenets of Zen without satori or enlightenment is thought to be a sterile way to encounter Zen, especially since enlightenment is not something which can be achieved by rationality.

Here is a version of tenets of Zen, from Zen Art For Meditation, by Stewart W. Holmes and Chimyo Horioka (Chas. Tuttle Co., Tokyo: 1973):

1. The realities of life are most truly seen in everyday things and actions.

2. Everything exists according to its own nature. Our individual perceptions of worth, correctness, beauty, size and value exist inside our heads, not outside them.

3. Everything exists in relation to other things.

4. The self and the rest of the universe are not separate entities but one functioning whole.

5. Man arises from nature and gets along most effectively by collaborating with nature, rather than trying to master it.

6. There is no ego in the sense of an endlessly enduring, unchanging private soul or personality that inhabits the body.

7. True insight does not issue from specialized knowledge, from membership in coteries, from doctrines or dogmas. It comes from the preconscious intuitions of one's whole being.

8. In emptiness forms are born. When one becomes empty of the assumptions, inferences, and judgments he has acquired over the years, he comes close to his original nature and is capable of conceiving original ideas and reacting freshly.

9. Being a spectator while one is also a participant spoils one's performance.

10. Security and changelessness are fabricated by the ego-dominated mind and do not exist in nature. To accept insecurity and commit oneself to the unknown creates a relaxing faith in the universe.

11. One can live only in the present moment.

12. Living process and words about it are not the same and should not be treated as equal in worth.

13. When we perceive the incongruity between theories about life and what we feel intuitively to be true on the nonverbal, nonjudging plane, there is nothing to do but laugh.

14. Zen art has this characteristic quality, that it can fuse delight in a work of visual art, knowledge of life, and personal experiences and intuitions into one creative event.

15. Each of us develops into a unique individual who enters into unique transactions with the world as it exists for him.

You can see in these some themes about existence, a rejection of a certain view of appearance versus reality, and nonjudgmentalness, and get some hint of Zen taking stands on philosophical issues in opposition to other schools of thought. For our purposes, though, the important parts of Zen have to do with claims about the meaning of life being found in everyday living, about the attitude of trust and relaxation in the face of uncertainty, in meaning not being reserved for some special group or successful investigators, in going along without a need for agendas or goals, and in the value of laughter at our own temptations toward intellectual theory.