How Meaning of Life Was Invented? (Philosophy)

Thomas Carlyle on how to overcome an existential crisis.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the Scottish author celebrating his 225th birthday on the 4th of December, was a towering figure in 19th-century literature, praised by everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Charles Dickens dedicated his Hard Times to Carlyle, a portrait of Carlyle hung over Emily Dickinson’s writing desk, and James Hutchison Stirling noted that in the 1840s Carlyle “was every literary young man’s idol, almost the God he prayed to.”

Thomas Carlyle ©wikipedia

What he usually doesn’t get credit for is that he was the man who coined the phrase “meaning of life” in the English language.

In Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, published in 1833-34, the protagonist loses his faith in God, plunging into an existential crisis that Carlyle called the Centre of Indifference, where nothing really mattered. From a stellar point of view, “What is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? … thou art wholly as a dissevered limb.”

In what Carlyle described as an atheistic century, where the Torch of Science burns so fiercely that “not the smallest cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,” the comforting religious worldview is “parched away, under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief.” Repeated disappointment gave rise to doubt, “and Doubt gradually settled into Denial!”

In the midst of this crisis, where “to die or to live is alike to me,” we hear for the first time the modern cry for meaningfulness: “Yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.”

Carlyle, like many of us today, felt that he lived in an era during which the voice of God had been silenced, suffocated by the triumph of the scientific worldview. This is the context where the phrase meaning of life was first needed. In using the phrase, Carlyle was directly inspired by German Romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel using the German equivalent to the phrase, der Sinn des Lebens, a few decades earlier in their similar revolt against the rational and mechanistic modern worldview.

Meaning of life thus emerged to describe something that no longer could be taken for granted. It became the symbol of a riddle at the heart of our existence: If human life is an arbitrary and impermanent occurrence leaving no trace on a cosmic scale, then what could make this life worth living?

Carlyle, fortunately, had an answer. His protagonist emerged from The Centre of Indifference with a new foundation for meaning. This is what electrified the young generation in the 19th century. As historian R.L. Brett notes: “It was Carlyle who held out the promise of a vitalistic philosophy which could replace the materialist and mechanistic thought of the preceding century.”

The Ideal is in thyself” Carlyle proclaimed, “the thing thou seekest is already with thee.” Whether or not there is God out there, there is something God-like within us: Our freedom to not succumb to our animal desires but instead be guided by the better angels of our nature. Carlyle’s days of indifference were over when he realized that there is a mandate which “lies mysteriously written, in Promethean, Prophetic Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of Freedom.”

What we find in our heart, according to Carlyle, is a call of duty to work. “Work thou in Welldoing” is our mandate. By engaging in purposeful work, we fulfill our role, and make our existence meaningful.

What you ought to do in life is not found in some abstract ideal but by carefully examining the situation you are currently in: “In this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal.”

Carlyle’s recipe for a meaningful existence is thus simple. Assess your current situation: What are your capabilities and resources? What could be better in your life and in the lives of those around you? What could you realistically do to make these good things happen? By this kind of realistic assessment of your current situation, you already know what ought to be done:

“To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward Capability specially is.”

If you have much capacity, do much. Tackle some grand challenge of our time like malaria, climate change, or poverty. If you have little capacity, do what little you can in your immediate social surroundings. Don’t wait for some commands carved in stone to drop from the sky to provide absolute clarity and direction. Instead, start from where you are right now. Examine your current situation, your interests, your capabilities, and the ailments around you that you could realistically address. Then go out and ”Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.” Meaningful existence is that simple. It is a call to action, using what is within you to bring forth a slightly better world. And you’d better start today. For as Carlyle notes:

 “’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.”

This article is originally written by Frank Martela, who is a philosopher and researcher at Aalto University in Helsinki. This article is republished here from psychology today under common creative licenses.

Must We Always Be Striving For a Better Life? (Psychology)

The workshop started with a simple question: What do you want? That question was followed shortly with What is your deepest intention? And then, What do you want to create in your life? Out then came the magic markers, poster boards, glue sticks, glitter, and all sorts of other art supplies. We were to start drawing, mapping, and fleshing out a future life and future self, complete with the action steps that would lead us to our deepest wants and intentions.

From the time we’re very young, we are conditioned to be strivers. We are trained to want and keep wanting for more and better. Better versions of ourselves and better experiences for ourselves… this is where we are supposed to aim our attention.

Truth be told, when confronted with these kinds of broad, future-oriented questions, author Nancy Colier often find herself blank, unable to identify what she want for her future in any real detail. She usually use the magic markers and glitter to make a picture for her daughter. It’s not to say there aren’t things she want to do and create: she want to spend more time in the desert, she want to build her speaking business and she want to do more silent retreats. But mostly what she feel in the face of these five-year-plan questions is a big fat “should” with a sprinkle of confusion and a splash of fogginess. The strong sense is that she should have a clear plan and an overarching vision of the future. And, that there’s something wrong if she don’t or don’t even want to participate in the exercise.

But then she remember: We take our progress-oriented, more and better, capitalistic mindset and apply it to ourselves and our time on the planet. We relate to ourselves as an object in our model of unending progress. We focus on the future, where we want to get to, what else there could be, and what we are aiming for. At the end of the day, we assume that wanting means wanting for something, and specifically, something else, something external, and something new and different.

After years of asking myself these sorts of well-intentioned questions, she discovered that they’re not the right questions for her or for many of her clients. The question, What do you want?, while wonderfully helpful in some ways, can become another demand on us, another thing we’re supposed to accomplish, another bar to reach. We are supposed to have a to-do list for our future and a plan to get there, and if we don’t, we are certain to miss out on that future of our dreams.

After thousands of workshops and too many hours spent journaling, talking, meditating, singing, and every other ing, she realized that what she really want is to get to be here. That is, to experience this moment, this dare she say ordinary moment, and to experience it as enough. The intention she hold is to stop trying to get to somewhere else, stop becoming someone else, and stop figuring out a better reality. While there’s nothing wrong with any of that, for her, the work is in diving deeper into this present moment, and finding the wonder and awe in this. Her five-year plan is to show up for all of the individual moments on the way to that moment in five years, which itself will then be just another now.

We are trained to think of time and our life as something that’s moving forward on a horizontal line, hurtling into the future. Progress is our north star. It gives us a place to move towards, and with it, a sense of purpose and meaning. At a deeper level, the idea of progress protects us from our existential fear of meaninglessness, from the vastness that comes with just being here, one now at a time. If we are not heading somewhere else, somewhere better, then we are left simply with this moment, heading nowhere in particular. If now is all we have, then what? Can we bear that existence?

But what’s remarkable is that when we enter this present moment fully, dive completely into now, with no next, and nowhere else to get to, we discover that time feels more like a vertical experience than a horizontal one. With each now, we drop into a kind of vertical infinity that is its own destination.

After diligently searching for an impressive “want” that would warrant a giant poster board and bright green sparkles, she discovered that what her want is far simpler than what she thought she should want. What she want is to be completely where she is, and to stop having to want something else all the time. She want for this moment to be everything, whatever it is. Furthermore, she want to feel a more consistent sense of awe for the fact that she get to be here at all.

She offer her own experience here so that you may know of an alternative to the habitual striving and wanting that we are encouraged to participate in. But please, if these sorts of intentional inquiries are useful; if they help you gain clarity and move the dial forward in your life, then use them without hesitation. But, if you find yourself feeling blank or lacking when asked about what you want and want to make happen, about where you are headed, then perhaps you can give yourself permission to stop striving to get somewhere better, and instead, strive to just be here.

Getting off the five-year-plan highway can feel like getting off the “normal” grid, opting out of the way we do life in this society. But that’s okay. Getting off the striving highway and turning your attention to where you are can lead you to a far better and richer life, which paradoxically, is exactly the kind of life you are supposed to be striving towards.

It is the ultimate challenge to just be in this moment, with no agenda and no need to improve it. To arrive here and stop trying to get somewhere else may be the most difficult and remarkable achievement of our lifetime. When we’re able to truly show up for this moment, whatever we create and wherever we find ourselves in five minutes or five years will be just that. That “there” will be our new “here” and that “then” will be our new “now.” In a society that values striving above all else, we can add “striving to be in our life (as it’s happening)” to our want list. We can add “here” to our list of sought-after destinations. At the end of the day (and the beginning and middle too), the journey to where we are is the most important journey we will ever embark on. What do I want? Truth be told, I want to be here.

Writer of this article is Nancy Colier, LCSW, Rev. is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister and the author of the book The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World. This article is republished here from psychology today under common creative licenses.