Topics Existence

Question So a really old question would be "what's the meaning of life?". I wanna switch it up and ask "why do we even exist?". We've done so many negative things throughout history. The importance of knowing what we're made of and how we work means nothing to me, if I don't know why we exist on this planet we call earth.

Accepted:
January 17, 2017

Comments

I am not sure how old the

I am not sure how old the question is, in exactly the form you give it. I suspect it is quite new. In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle asks whether 'there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this) . . .' (W.D. Ross trans.). But this is a very different question. There is no mention of meaning, and there is no mention of life. So I think it makes matters worse to think that 'Why do we even exist?' is the same question. (I wonder about the implication of the word "even". What is it suggesting? (Cf. 'Why does he even bother to come to the meeting, since he never utters a word, and sleeps through them?')) Another bit of phrasing bothers me. You say that what we are made of means nothing to you, 'if I don't know why we exist on this planet we call earth.' Are you thinking that it's not really called earth, but we, we ignorant fools, we call it that? So what is it's real name? We need to get the main question very clearly in mind, without the noise, before we can hope to begin to answer it. I suspect it has as much to do with the dislocation produced by the destruction by science of the mediaeval world picture, which gives a picture of life ending up in Heaven in the eternal life of God. Once science had destroyed the cosy Judeo-Christian metaphysics, there was a vacuum in which one could ask, 'What - what then - is going on? What does life amount to? What does it mean?' The question is an essentially secular one. It is important to note that here by life is meant life in a quasi-biographical sense, not in a biological sense. John Wisdom asks us to imagine that 'we come into a theatre after a play has started and are obliged to leave before it ends.' We may then be puzzled by some action in the part of the play that we have seen. 'What does it mean?' we can ask. "Why did the heroine raise her left arm three times without any explanation as the clock struck one?' (This is my example, not Wisdom's.) The important point about this question is that the narrative is taken to be incomplete. Is that assumption satisfied in the case of a human life and biography? Not necessarily, it seems to me, since much in life is explicable and much may be complete. Many obituaries point to a kind of completeness and fulness of a life well lived, and novels can too. If a beloved father dies, one need not conclude that life is meaningless, whatever that is supposed to mean. One will mourn, and yet one may not be troubled by the onset of meaninglessness. One might of course think that death implies incompleteness, but that is far from obvious. Suppose we think that the question, 'What is this nice log fire for can be expressed (which I doubt) as, 'What is the meaning of this fire?' The fire is to provide heat for those around it. That does not mean that when it ends (provided it does not end too early) and dies down, we can infer that it has or had no end or that it was meaningless. The reverse is true. If the end comes at the right time, that simply underscores the "point" of having the fire. I should add finally that I do not believe that the "negative things" that we have done in history have any connection with "why we exist on this planet" or with "What is the meaning of life?" or at least one would want to see an argument making the connection.