My personal philosophy of the meaning of life

Considering all that I have written looking at WoW from a philosophical point of view, it's amazing how little I have used this blog to look at greater things philosophically. Oh sure, I've looked philosophically at non-WoW-related things in the past, but I'm talking about something greater, the biggest thing one can look at philosophically, the very thing philosophy was conceived of in the exploration of: life. I went through an ordeal this weekend through which I gained greater clarity into my viewpoint of the world, and after going through that, I have been inspired to share my view of life here.

For starters, I am an absurdist. I believe that our existence is inherently without meaning, though it is still the prerogative of the individual to attempt to find meaning in his life. However, that search has yielded little for me. Much of my existential musings in the past have been over what the meaning of it all is, and I could never come up with an answer that satisfied me. That was until I realized what I now see as the truth: our lives are meaningless. We are simply the result of unguided evolutionary change, and our search meaning is simply the result of an advanced mind no longer being occupied by the needs of survival.

You may be wondering, why would I be so interested in philosophy if I am an absurdist and think that our lives are without meaning? Well, the meaning of life is merely one philosophical question. Though many people think of it as the ultimate issue of philosophy, it is merely one of many. (If anything, the question of suicide is the ultimate question of philosophy, at least according to Albert Camus, but that is another topic.) To say that an absurdist cannot hold philosophical beliefs just because he doesn't believe that life has a basis meaning is like saying an atheist cannot have faith in anything just because he doesn't have faith in God. An atheist can still have faith that humans are basically good, or that hope is worth having, or that he will find love, and similarly, an absurdist can examine things philosophically even if he thinks life is without meaning.

Back on topic: for the longest time, I simply ignored the fact that my life was inherently meaningless, for it was too depressing to deal with. My lack of faith in a higher power or an afterlife certainly didn't help to allay my sorrow, but I found ways of coping. One was in recognizing that the possibility of death truly being the end should not be a frightening thought; it should be a freeing thought. If death is truly the end and there is nothing for us beyond the grave, then death truly is the great escape. It is a state without remorse, without regret. It is a liberation from the absurd, for once we are gone, we can no longer ponder our absurdity. However, this solace in the idea of death as the end did not help the issue I faced premortem. If life was meaningless, and death was an escape from the meaninglessness, why live?

I realize now that the angst I put myself through while pondering this question stemmed from the fact that I thought there was an answer. I thought that there had to be some larger meaning to my life that I was just missing, and that if I found that meaning, all of my issues would be solved. I somehow believed this while still publicly professing the belief that our lives are inherently meaningless. I suppose I was too afraid to face the absurd in my private life, even when I publicly put up the facade of having faced it, but that finally changed. The big change came when I read Albert Camus' The Stranger, in which Camus explores the idea of the absurd* and how man can react to it. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I'll say that the protagonist, Meursault, eventually comes to terms with the absurd and comes to the belief that man can face the absurd and live anyways.

This somehow brought about a great change in how I saw the world. I realized that to reject the possibility of higher meaning is to affirm the mundane, to affirm our earthly existence, and to affirm that it is enough, that we do not need a higher meaning to keep living. Two passages from the book brought about this realization in me. One takes place when a chaplain is talking to Meursault, trying to convince him to turn to God, and Meursault tells the chaplain exactly what he thinks of his philosophy: "But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me." That passage made me realize that when we hope for more than just the absurd, we negate the possibility of being happy within the absurd. However, the absurd is all we have; if we wish to be truly happy, we must embrace the absurdity of our existence. We must embrace our suffering, our joy, our life, our death, for they are all we have. When we embrace these things, we no longer need any sort of higher justification for them.

The other passage that really spoke to me takes place when the chaplain asks Meursault, "Do you really love this earth as much as all that?" In the context of the story, it made me realize that when we can affirm our earthly existence and be satisfied with only that, we don't need anything else. We don't need a greater meaning to our lives, we don't need something intangible to make our lives worth living, hell, we don't need anything to make our lives worth living. Loving life is reason enough to live.

The practical question (at least for me; if experience has shown me anything, it's that my beliefs and the subsequent questions I ask are hardly universal) is, how can someone reach that point where life is reason enough to live? Well, affirming the absurd is probably a start. By recognizing that the mundane is all we have and that nothing can come of searching for anything more, we stop seeing the physical world as something to be surpassed. This world is all we have; to try to move beyond it is to be trapped by disappointment. Still, the question remains: why? Why put forth the effort to live in this world? Why face the sorrow that will inevitably visit someone who faces the absurd? Why live a meaningless life? I suppose this article has come full circle, for those are exactly the questions that motivated my first forays into philosophy. So, I ask again: why live?

For me, I am the answer to that question; the thing that makes life worth living is me. If the mundane is all I have, then I am the only thing I can depend on. If there is no higher meaning or power that I can rely on to give my life purpose, who else can do such a thing other than myself? I am the only other option. I live so that I can live. I put forth the effort so that I can reap the rewards. I face the sorrow so that I can experience the joy. I live a meaningless life because it is the only life I have; I may as well make the best of it. These are all things I could have said and believed before discovering The Stranger, but having a reason behind them makes them all the more powerful.

I suppose my philosophy on life could be summed up by saying that the mundane, physical, absurd world is all we have. From there, the other pieces seem to fall into place rather nicely.

*For the uninitiated, the Absurd is defined as the fundamental disconnect between human interests and an indifferent world. In layman's terms, its the fact that our desires really have no meaning or value other than what meaning or value we give them.