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It is even conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life,
Why should one imagine that when there is a problem there is always a solution?
Human beings are perhaps the only animals who live in the perpetual shadow of death.
Other animals may be anxious about, say, escaping predators or feeding their young, but they do not give the appearance of being troubled by what has been called ‘ontological anxiety’: namely, the feeling (sometimes accompanied by a particularly intense hangover) that one is a pointless, superfluous being – a ‘useless passion’, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it.
Meaning is no longer a spiritual essence buried beneath the surface of things.
But it still needs to be dug out, since the world does not spontaneously disclose it.
In this situation, it is always possible for some to find the meaning of life, or at least a sizeable chunk of it, in the very diversity of views on the subject. People who feel this way are generally known as liberals, though nowadays some of them are also known as postmodernists.
‘I really do think with my pen’, Wittgenstein observes, ‘because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.’11
Happiness is sometimes seen as a state of mind. But this is not how Aristotle regards it. ‘Well-being’, as we usually translate his term for happiness, is what we might call a state of soul, which for him involves not just an interior condition of being, but a disposition to behave in certain ways.
For Aristotle, happiness is bound up with the practice of virtue; and though he has nothing in particular to say about rescuing people from quicksand, this would certainly count for his great Christian successor Thomas Aquinas as a sign of well-being.
Happiness or well-being for Aristotle, then, involves a creative realization of one’s typically human faculties.
the tendency of all things to realize, expand, and augment themselves; and it is reasonable to see this as an end in itself, just as Aristotle regards human flourishing as an end in itself.
We are by nature, for example, sociable animals, who must co-operate or die; but we are also individual beings who seek our own fulfilment. To be individuated is an activity of our species being, not a condition at odds with it.
Julian Baggini writes that ‘the search for meaning is essentially personal’, involving ‘the power and responsibility to discover and in part determine meaning for ourselves’.
It is the present moment which is an image of eternity, not an infinite succession of such moments.
