The existential problem

In the 1960s and 1970s, an endearing actor, Peter Falk, played a detective named “Columbo” on a television show of the same name. The drama was unique in its genre because it revealed the identity of the murderer in the opening segment. The mystery was how Columbo was going to amass enough evidence to arrest the murderers, who were uncommonly clever and calculating. Happily, Columbo always nailed his target.

If you have read the first parts of this book attentively, you already know that I conclude that human life has meaning. The mystery is how I am going to argue for that conclusion. Although I am not as imaginative a scriptwriter as those who orchestrated Peter Falk‘s television triumphs, I will begin at the logical point: a historical example of a psychological crisis that triggered the quest for meaning.

Enter Leo Tolstoy, the embodiment of existential crisis. The great Russian novelist, the master wordsmith of War and Peace, Anna Kareriirta, and much more, was seemingly blessed. He had a good family, uncommon intelligence, stunning professional success, material well-being, good health, and most of any reasonable catalog of meaningfulness. Yet he was, around the age of fifty, tormented by the thought and psychological experience that life was meaningless. Tolstoy was plagued by the four horsemen of self-doubt: awareness of human mortality, lack of control of the things he most valued, absence of ultimate justifications for his actions, and an acute sense that his life might in the end add up to nothing. Tolstoy was threatened by his inevitable death, the fragility of the things and people he valued, and the apparent lack of foundational justification for his actions. Finitude, contingency, and arbitrariness haunted him.

Sooner or later there would come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would he nothing left hut stench and worms. All my affairs . . . would sooner or later he forgotten, and I myself should not exist. . . . How could a man fail to see that and live. . . . A person could live only so long as he was drunk; but the moment he sobered up, he could not help seeing that all that was only a deception, and a stupid deception at that!‘

Tolstoy saw no way out of this human predicament. He entertained four possibilities. First, if we remain ignorant of the Facts, then the meaninglessness of human life would not affect our enjoyment of our existence. But ignorance was not an option for Tolstoy or any other educated or intelligent person.

Once we are aware of the facts we cannot retreat to the safety of ignorance no matter how hard we try. Second, we might find consolation in enhancing our power and privilege. By focusing narrowly on personal and professional successes, through immersion in material pleasure, and by reveling in our relative advantages over others, we might avoid the pain of meaninglessness. 

But the road of invidious social comparison is only a diversion from the inevitable truth. We are all born to suffer, die, and be forgotten. Power and privi- lege do not alter the facts; they only divert our gaze. Third, suicide is always an option. Although Tolstoy sometimes called this the choice of “strength and energy,” it is difficult to see this as a solution. Suicide evades the problem of a life by ending it. It does not, typically, create meaning as much as it capitulates to the felt absence of meaning. Fourth, the choice of endurance or “weakness”: continuing to push on, hoping against hope that the meaning of life would make a surprise appearance in the future.

Tolstoy solved his distress by appreciating the lives of simple, uneducated people. Peasants, wanderers, monks, and social dissenters were his models. They had dificult, beast-of-burden lives, yet their religious faith gave them a “consciousness of life” that connected them to meaning. Only religious faith, not reason, can make life meaningful. Tolstoy vowed to link his being with spiritual conviction and action. He espoused humility, vegetarianism, and the value of manual labor, while rejecting luxuries, violence, coercion, and material accumulation. He also advanced the ideal of chastity, while recognizing that the nature and circumstances of people would not permit widespread compliance. Love of fellow humaii beings was a more important value than the ambition, vanity, and lust for individual success or the insulating consolations of an honorable family life. Sentimentalizing the life of peasants and glorifying faith in God permitted Tolstoy to celebrate personal immortality and a grand design, and to reinstate foundational justification for human action.

Critics see Tolstoy as evading the tragedy of life through flight to an imaginary: transcendental afterlife. Putting that issue aside, Tolstoy’s crisis is significant. First, his life illustrates vividly that a meaningful life does not automatically result from the fulfillment of typical human desires. More is required. Second, his solution to the problem of the meaning of life demands a “consciousness of life” or a “faith” that cannot be rationally supported all the way down. Third, his life denionstrates a trinity of the deepest human aspirations: the yearning for a final culmination, a connection to enduring value, and a rational and just universe (“Tolstoy’s trinity”). Fourth, Tolstoy accepts the theistic assumption: Either God exists as the creator of meaning embedded in the universe or there is only chaos and meaninglessness.

Tolstoy concluded that the meaning of life is to discover a way to live such that the question of life’s meaning no longer arises. Find a hetter way to live and the ultimate questions wither away. Tolstoy was incorrect. He did not take his own counsel about ignorance seriously enough: Once we are conscious of the questions, we cannot suppress them, we cannot forget forever. The only solution is to find a way that permits us to ask the ultimate questions, struggle with tentative solutions, yet continue to live energetically. The path of denial through continually distracting engagement dehumanizes us.

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” is about the cosmos and about ourselves. To find out about the cosmos we must distinguish the world from ourselves. The answer to the question deeply influences how we should live. Therefore, the question itself arises from the human condition, from psychological curiosity, often from crisis. The question is riot merely an abstraction fueling intellectual reflection.

One answer, The Religious Solution, is that a Supreme Being or Nature builds a human teleology, or overriding purpose, into the cosmos. If so, the further question is whether an external purpose that supposedly applies to everyone should issue any persuasive existential imperatives for me. Is the individual submerged by universal demands?

Another answer somberly resigns us to Cosmic Meaninglessness: The cos- mos is inherently meaningless and, thus, human life is meaningless regardless of our best efforts to delude ourselves with frantic activity arid joyful amusements.

A third answer advises The Creation of Contingent Meaning: The cosmos is inherently meaningless, but the meaning of human life is the search for and construction of meaning itself. If so, the further question is whether all meaning is equal or, if riot equal, how does meaning relate to value.

From: Belliotti, Raymond A., Happiness is overrated