The problem with the meaning of life

The problem of the meaning of life has hardly succeeded in overcoming the protection of the pre-modern man's family and family duty. Among the wealth of traditional obligations, the poverty of life is a little popular idea. Debt may require suicide, but in a broader perspective, it denotes unconditional care for the life of the community. Traditional debt to family and community is incompatible with the nihilism of the question, "Is it worth the effort?" In this sense, existential anxieties are not yet the prime concern of the pre-modern man, who experiences a variety of reasons to be seen at home in this world, in a place where his efforts are desirable, binding and demanded by authority, taller and more categorical than his own conscience and choice. The life before the birth of the Self does not belong to the individual, and therefore its devaluation is not in the power of the pre-modern "orderly" person. He is rarely alone even when he dies and seems to be more intimate with the authority of the community and its normative system than with himself. It seems impossible for a person, conscious of himself primarily as the owner of his household and his inheritance, to be able to live as a foreigner in a casual and meaningless world lacking in wealth, purpose and dignity. (Tolstoy seems to coincide with this profile, but his case does not even reflect the situation of the temporary worker of the divine, social and generic enterprise). Shakespeare as one of the beginners of the modern phraseology of the absurd signals the approaching invasion of individuality but is still far from the stubbornness of his follower Schopenhauer, for whom life is a tale created and told by a malicious cosmic idiot (will), infirm in his blindness and creativity

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Before Nietzsche was killed by a god, Schopenhauer cripples him by taking away his mind and his goodness, making him an intellectual disinter who, in all ways, makes senseless and dishonorable human existence. Assuming that McIntyre is right about the failure of the Enlightenment project to justify morality in terms of theology, Schopenhauer is the philosopher who marks the death of this project, breaking with the good, justifiable tone of ethics. From the perspective of his vision of life there is nothing to justify and to save: neither knowledge nor freedom or good have any necessary and true character worth the argumentation and defense. In fact, this is generally not worth the effort, stemming from Schopenhauer's logic, perhaps the demarcation line that separates all previous pessimism from the late-modern melancholy and its adjoining efforts, harnessed in constructing the question of meaning primary care. As a spokesman for the "most honest" of all ages, Nietzsche expounded the problem of nihilism, creating a noteworthy newsletter about the intellectual climate of his time. This is a time when Schopenhauer's writings have already become popular and have begun to influence the minds of the intellectual elite. In his announcement of the phenomenon of radical nihilism, Nietzsche cogently cites his poem from the near past, his belief in the absolute insolvency of existence, turning it into a definitive one of the nihilistic handicap of the age, which, as we understand it, is curable but is at an advanced stage of development. If the significance of being Nietzsche is the triumph of not letting yourself be misguided, this also applies to Nietzsche's sense of reorganizing the attitudes of his contemporaries on life issues.

The question of meaning, as found in nihilism, has close ties to moral and theological issues, and is the product of exposing not to the bankruptcy of life, but to the insolvency of moral and Christian optics that for millennia has trained the eye to sees the whole, the order, the purpose and the reasons, and is now suddenly stopped by proceedings. The psychology of nihilism should be sought precisely in this rearrangement of visions and perspectives; the ease with which the meaning has been established everywhere has caused human sensitivity to become accustomed to the euphoria of the hypothesis of the supreme purpose, and since the psychological effectiveness of this hypothesis is progressively decreasing, only the frustration and disappointment of the bare life remain. To ask impatiently about the meaning of life, it is the vanishing of the confused organism, which, without its usual stimuli and diet, is suffering deeply. The hysteria around the meaning is not only an ontological aspect of man, but it is a very particular case of a temporary episode of nervous system disorder that encompasses the whole philosophy of life and the various forms of existentialism. Of course, Nietzsche could not have known how much time the healing adaptation of the body to the new conditions would have continued, but even though at the beginning of the day, Nietzsche anticipated the dawn of nihilism, on the subject of meaning. Nihilism is a pathological intermediate state (pathologically, the vast summary, the conclusion of the almost complete lack of meaning): either because the productive forces do not have the power yet, either because decadence is still delaying and its aids are not yet invented. It remains to ask how and how the forces have recovered to the point where the joyous dweller of our time has ceased to conform to the old label of gravity and has convinced that the question of the meaning of life fits equally to the repertoire of the madman and of comics.