The Meaning of Life- A Review

The Meaning of Life, Happiness and Modernity*

"The Meaning of Life"- a collection of essays edited by Asa Kasher, a philosophy scholar of Tel-Aviv University. This book includes essays, poems, and paintings by contemporary Israeli intellectuals and artists dealing with the question of the meaning of life, the meaning of death, and existentialism.

I was interested especially in the article "Why Has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last 250 Years?" by Ido Landau.

It deals with the core ideal in modern thought of "Happiness" which is identified with "fun, amusement and comfort" instead of past ideals like "devotion to God, a life of contemplation, fulfillment of duty or honor ".

"The pursuit of Happiness", says Landau, "is one of the main propelling forces of science, technology and capitalistic activity." He also asserts that because of the emphasis on the need for happiness people are more aware when they lack happiness and that makes us wonder why are we not happy. Landau says: "The lack of happiness in spite of comfort and pleasure require an explanation, and one explanation is the meaningless of life."

He recommends that people who feel that life is meaningless would try and find and develop something that will be important and comprehensible for them. "What is important?" "What is comprehensible?". He tells of a couple of ways which are possible and have been followed:

Trying to create groups in which the modern economy, modern science and etc. are less dominant, or trying to join groups like this which exist already.

Move to places where the instrumental and scientific culture has not arrived yet.

Trying to change the technological, economical and scientific reality. This way has been adopted by environmentalists and 'green party' Europeans.

Calling for a return to past ways of life and ideals. This is done by conservative circles.

Trying to develop and nurture new personal and cultural values, which fit to modern culture on one hand and include stronger elements of significance and importance. This way is suggested by Charles Taylor in " Ethics of Authenticity".

How will the future look in this regard?

One opinion is that *essentially* as humans, we need stable contents, non-relativistic contents, and that the less the culture can provide such content the more the feeling of the meaningless of life will be acute. The other opinion is that there is no essential human need for stable contents which are non-relativistic, and that we are in a transition period, after which this need will disappear. We have expectations, ideals and standards that were made in previous times, and now that science and technology shape our reality differently they will shape our expectations and understanding of the world differently.

"According to this view, the process has already began. Many people in our culture are immersed in scientific, technological and capitalistic activity, and don't feel lack of comprehension and meaninglessness (or insignificance). Many of them may also find it as a strange thing to present science and rationality, which have made so many phenomenons comprehensible, as causing a feeling of incomprehensibility.

Similarly they would think it a strange to present pragmatism and capitalism, which caused appropriation of value and importance to many things, as causing a sense of insignificance [non-importance]. For them modern science and technology provide excellent means for appropriation of value and significance to the world."

So these people would expect that the gap between standards and significance to be closed with time, and that culture would move to new standards which are more dynamic.

* [First posted on Jun. 8th, 2005]

Žižek about Children of Men

Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, wrote an essay about the film "Children of Men".


Here are several quotes out of order:

If the terrorists are ready to wreck this world for love of the other, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other.
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Today’s predominant mode of politics is a politics of fear, a defense against potential victimization or harassment: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself (with too high taxation), fear of ecological catastrophies, fear of harassment (which is why Political Correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear). Such a politics always relies on the frightening rallying of frightened men. The big event in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration politics “went mainstream”: they finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – it is “our country, love it or leave it.”
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In a typical Hollywood sci-fi, the future world may be full of unheard-of objects and inventions, but even the cyborgs interact exactly the way we do – or, rather, did in old Hollywood melodramas and action movies. In The Children of Men, there are no new gadgets, London is exactly the same as it is now, only more so – Cuaron merely brought out its latent poetic and social potentials: the greyness and decay of the littered suburbs, the omni-presence of video-surveillance… The film reminds us that, of all strange things we can imagine, the weirdest is reality itself. Hegel remarked long ago that a portrait of a person resembles it more than this person itself. The Children of Men is a science-fiction of our present itself.

It is 2027, with the human race rendered infertile - the earth’s youngest inhabitant, born 18 years ago, was just killed in Buenos Aires. The UK lives in a permanent state of emergency, anti-terrorist quads chasing illegal immigrants, the state power administering the dwindling population which vegetates in sterile hedonism. Are these two features – hedonist permissiveness plus new forms of social apartheid and control based on fear – not what our societies are about? Here comes Cuaron’s stroke of a genius – as he put it in one of his interviews: “Many of the stories of the future involve something like ‘Big Brother,’ but I think that’s a 20th-century view of tyranny. The tyranny happening now is taking new disguises — the tyranny of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’.” This is why the rulers of his world are not grey and uniformed Orwellian “totalitarian” bureaucrats, but enlightened democratic administrators, cultured, each with his or her own “life style.” When the hero visits an ex-friend, now a top government official, to gain a special permit for a refugee, we enter something like a Manhattan upper-class gay couple loft, the informally dressed official with his crippled partner at the table.

Children of Men is obviously not a film about infertility as a biological problem. The infertility Cuaron’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization is moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment: unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ - say the Last Men, and they blink.”