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Purpose, Freedom, and the Search for Meaning

Sisyphus, by Titian. The ancient image of a meaningless life—and, perhaps, of a meaningful one.

The question of the meaning of life is perhaps one that we would rather not ask, for fear of the answer or lack thereof.

Still today, many people believe that humankind is the creation of a supernatural entity named God, that God had an intelligent purpose in creating us, and that this intelligent purpose is ‘the meaning of life’.

I do not propose to rehearse the well-worn arguments for and against the existence of God, and still less to take a side. But even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us, no one really knows what this purpose might be, or whether it is especially meaningful.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system—including the universe itself—increases up to the point at which equilibrium is reached, and God’s purpose in creating us, and indeed all of nature, might have been no loftier than to catalyse this process much as soil organisms catalyse the decomposition of organic matter. In a word, we may be no more than complex fungi or enzymes.

If our God-given purpose is to act as super-efficient heat dissipators, then having no purpose at all is better than having this sort of purpose—because it frees us to be the authors of our purpose or purposes and so to lead truly dignified and meaningful lives.

In fact, following this logic, having no purpose at all is better than having any kind of pre-determined purpose, even more traditional, uplifting ones such as serving God or improving our karma.

In short, even if God exists, and even if He had an intelligent purpose in creating us (and why should He have had?), we do not know what this purpose might be, and, whatever it might be, we would rather be able to do without it—or at least to ignore or discount it.

For unless we can be free to become the authors of our own purpose or purposes, our lives may have, at worst, no purpose at all, and, at best, only some unfathomable and potentially trivial purpose that is not of our own choosing.

Can We Really Create Our Own Purpose?

You might object that not to have a pre-determined purpose is, really, not to have any purpose at all.

But this is to assume that for something to have a purpose, it must have been created with that particular purpose in mind, and, moreover, must still be serving that same original purpose.

Many things acquire purposes that were never intended for them.

Many Junes ago, I visited the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the South of France. One evening, I picked up a rounded stone called a galet which I took back to Oxford and put to good use as a bookend.

In the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, these stones serve to capture the heat of the sun and release it back into the cool of the night, helping the grapes to ripen. Of course, these stones were not created with this or any other purpose in mind. Even if they had been created for a purpose, it would almost certainly not have been to make great wine or serve as bookends.

That same evening over a rabbit stew, I invited my friends to blind taste a bottle of Bordeaux—an evil trick, given that we were in the Southern Rhône. To disguise the bottle, I slipped it into one of a pair of socks.

Unlike the galet, the sock had been created with a definite purpose in mind, albeit one very different from (although not strictly incompatible with) the one that it came to assume on that idyllic evening.

The point I’m driving at is that purpose need not be fixed at the moment of creation: it can also emerge afterwards.

What If the Meaning of Life Lies Beyond This Life?

But this raises a related question. Can meaning come from us at all? Or must it come from somewhere beyond us—whether from the intention of a creator or from a life beyond this one?

Many would argue that the meaning of life lies beyond this life, which is merely a prelude to some eternal afterlife.

However, I can marshal at least four arguments against this position:

  • It is not at all clear that there is, or even can be, some form of eternal afterlife that entails the survival of the personal ego.
  • Even if there were such an afterlife, living forever is not in itself a purpose. The concept of the afterlife merely displaces the problem to one remove, begging the question: what then is the purpose of the afterlife?
  • Reliance on an eternal afterlife not only postpones the question of life’s purpose but also dissuades or at least discourages us from determining a purpose or purposes for what may be the only life that we do have.
  • If it is the brevity or finiteness of human life that gives it shape and purpose (an argument associated with the philosopher Bernard Williams), then an eternal afterlife cannot, in and of itself, have any purpose.

So, whether or not God exists, whether or not He gave us a purpose, and whether or not there is an eternal afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

Existence Before Essence

To translate this into Sartrean (or existentialist) terms, whereas for the galet it is true only that existence precedes essence, for the sock it is true both that essence precedes existence (when the sock is used on a human foot) and that existence precedes essence (when the sock is used for an unintended purpose, for example, as a bottle sleeve).

We human beings are either like the rock or the sock, but whichever we are like, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

In fact, let me correct myself. We human beings are neither like the rock nor the sock—because capable of discovering and creating meanings.

This echoes Kant’s insistence that human beings are not merely means to some external end, but self-determining ends in themselves. It is this capacity for autonomy—for rationally determining our own ends—that gives us our special dignity.

Human life may not have been created with any pre-determined purpose, but this need not mean that it cannot have a purpose, or that this purpose cannot be just as good as, if not much better than, any pre-determined one.

And so the meaning of life, of our life, is that which we choose to give it.

But how to choose?

Camus and Nietzsche

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. 

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

The tragedy of Sisyphus became the very source of his freedom. The universe may not provide us with a ready-made meaning, but this need not prevent us from creating one, and living with dignity, courage, and even joy.

Nietzsche, too, challenged us to embrace our fate, even to love it. In Ecce Homo, he wrote, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

How to Find Meaning

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (d. 1997) wrote about his experiences during the Second World War.

Tellingly, Frankl found that those who survived longest in the concentration camp were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of inner freedom and purpose.

He observed:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope: even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can still be given a meaning, and so too can suffering.

Life in the concentration camp taught Frankl that our deepest drive is neither pleasure, as Freud had argued, nor power, as Adler had maintained, but meaning.

After his release, Frankl founded the school of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘reason’ or ‘principle’), which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. The aim of logotherapy is to carry out an existential analysis of the person, and, in so doing, to help them uncover or discover meaning for their life.

According to Frankl, meaning can be found through:

  1. Experiencing reality by interacting authentically with the environment and with others.
  2. Giving something back to the world through creativity and self-expression, and,
  3. Changing our attitude when faced with a situation or circumstance that we cannot change.

‘The point,’ said Frankl, ‘’is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.’

The Final Freedom

Whether or not God exists, whether or not He created us for a purpose, and whether or not there is an afterlife, we are better off creating our own purpose or purposes.

We began with a fear: that if life has no pre-determined purpose, it must be meaningless. But it now seems, the opposite is true. A purpose imposed upon us from outside may give us a goal, but not necessarily meaning—for meaning requires that we recognise and embrace it as our own.

The meaning of life is not hidden in the stars, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure. Nor is it handed to us at birth. Instead, it emerges from our attitudes and choices. 

Thus, it is more of an activity than a state—something that we create, discover, and renew throughout our lives.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my books The Gang of Three, an overview of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and their enduring answers to the question of how to live, and The Art of Failure, on how adversity, loss, and failure can become sources of meaning, growth, and fulfilment.

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Is Kant’s Categorical Imperative too rigid?

When obeying those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws, we are following the so-called Categorical Imperative, which might be re-stated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

This is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible and Indian Mahabharata, according to which we should treat others as we would wish to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate some mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical vs Categorical Imperatives

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.” If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. In contrast, Categorical Imperatives are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie,” “Do not steal,” “Do not commit suicide.” 

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings.

For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based [Greek, deon, “duty”], and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Some Examples of the Categorical Imperative

Kant furnishes some examples to flesh out the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, knowing full well that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the practice of lending would end. 

When we help someone, our action must be motivated by duty if it is to have moral worth. If I help someone from inclination, for example, from sympathy or because it makes me feel good, I am still doing a praiseworthy thing, but my action, being circumstantial rather than principled and reliable, lacks moral worth. Imagine a grocer who always gives the correct change, but only to avoid being caught and losing his reputation. His behaviour, though not blameworthy, is lacking in moral worth. If he knew that he could not possibly get caught, he may start behaving dishonestly. Because his behaviour is prudential and circumstantial rather than born out of duty, it is not categorical. 

For Kant, a paradigm of moral worth is the person who hates life and longs to commit suicide, but stays alive purely out of duty. Because this person has no self-serving inclinations, he is acting purely from duty, rather than mere “conformity to duty.” Similarly, and counterintuitively, a hard-hearted person who has no other motivation than duty has a moral worth “beyond all comparison the highest.”

The Humanity Formulation of the Categorical Imperative

The universalizability formulation is the first formulation the Categorical Imperative. The second formulation is the humanity formulation, or end-in-itself formulation: “Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means.”

Like Aristotle, Kant argued that everything that has instrumental value derives this value from the end that it serves. Thus, for anything to have value, there must be some end that has intrinsic worth, that is, some end that is an end-in-itself. For Aristotle, this “supreme good” was happiness, or eudaimonia. For Kant, it was a rational being who could freely determine his or her own ends. In all of nature, man alone is an end-in-itself, and must therefore be treated as such. 

We can only use others (like waiters and cab drivers) as means if we respect their own ends and agency, treating them as rational beings with purposes of their own rather than mere tools for achieving ours. You can employ a servant if you pay and treat them fairly, and the servant wills it because working for you furthers their own ends. Although Kant never applied the humanity formulation to specifically and explicitly condemn the transatlantic slave trade, his moral philosophy provided the framework for later abolitionists.

Benjamin Constant’s Challenge to Kant

In the aftermath of the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), a period during the French Revolution marked by mass executions of perceived enemies, the Swiss writer Benjamin Constant conceived of a thought experiment to undermine Kantian ethics.

Imagine an axe-wielding murderer at your door, asking where your friend, who has taken refuge in your house, is hiding. Although, according to Kant, lying is always wrong, it would be absurd to speak the truth and reveal your friend’s location to the murderer. In this scenario, surely, the duty to protect your friend overrides any duty to tell the truth. What’s more, by intending to commit a grave injustice, the murderer has forfeited any right to the truth.

Kant responded to Constant in his 1797 essay, On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives, and dug in his heels. Even in those circumstances, it would be wrong to lie. The morality of an action is determined by its principles, not its consequences. One could not know whether lying would do more good than harm to one’s friend in hiding. Whereas one would be responsible for the consequences of telling a lie, the consequences of telling the truth would be on the murderer. Moreover, to lie to the murderer would be to treat him as a mere means to an end, denying him the status of a rational being capable of free, reasoned action.

The One Problem with Kantian Ethics—and a Solution

Kant’s rigid application of the Categorical Imperative led him to condemn many actions and behaviours that are no longer generally condemned, such as masturbation and suicide out of world-weariness. He referred to masturbation as an “unnatural vice” on the basis that the natural purpose of sex is procreation. 

The Categorical Imperative is, no doubt, a good rule of thumb, but must admit of exceptions. Exceptions, too, are a matter of judgement and reason—more so even than the rules themselves.

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Getting to the real Immanuel Kant

A young Immanuel Kant (the Becker portrait)
Without communication, love does not exist; without respect, it does not endure. —Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant is often remembered as the driest of philosophers: austere, methodical, and so punctual that the people of Königsberg supposedly set their clocks by his daily walk. Yet beneath the formidable reputation lay a surprisingly warm and personable man. His greatest transformation came not through philosophy, but through friendship.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as ‘the most urbane fellow in the world.’

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed as much to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, as to the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock.

Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired soldier, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion and broader health.

After lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He walked alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: ‘The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.’ A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire ‘could have added laughter’.

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who thereafter became much more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine (another of God’s comforts), Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself in the belief that his special mix protected against senescence.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green inspired Kant’s routine and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just as, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of ‘perfect friendship’, which, he thought, is only possible between people of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as ‘another self’—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

Kant deemed ‘perfect friendship’ an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at ‘moral friendship’, in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a ‘rebirth’. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

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Kant’s philosophy cannot be fully understood in isolation. The German Greeks places him within the great tradition of German philosophy, from Leibniz through Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, revealing how these thinkers transformed the legacy of ancient Greece.

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Immanuel Kant on the Perception of Space and Time.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, which is regarded as one of the most difficult books ever written, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argues that space and time are not features of the world-in-itself but forms of intuition inherent in our faculty of sense.

In short, space and time are mind-dependent matrices for organising sense experience. Space is the pure form of “outer sense” by which we perceive objects as external and spatially arranged. Time is the pure form of “inner sense” by which we order our mental states. Because space is a form of intuition and not a property of the world-in-itself, we are able to identify its structures à priori, independently of sense experience, as when geometrising.

Kant’s Amazing Insight

There is such a thing in nature as handedness, or chirality. For instance, in most people, the hair whorl on the crown spirals clockwise, from left to right. Hops wind clockwise, beans anticlockwise. Most snails coil clockwise, though a few species are predominantly or exclusively sinistral. Many molecules exist in both right- and left-handed variants. With thalidomide, it is only the S-enantiomer that leads to birth defects.

Kant had the amazing insight that no amount of verbal description can capture the difference between “incongruent counterparts” such as your right and left hand. What distinguishes the two can only be grasped through sensible intuition, which is tied to a conscious, embodied being’s subjective frame of reference.

Kant used this analysis of incongruent counterparts to bolster his argument that “space in general does not belong to the properties or relations of things in themselves.” 

The Mysterious World-in-Itself

Space and time are like the irremovable spectacles through which the human mind sees the world, and without which it would not be able to see it. Thus, as far as humans are concerned, space and time are not subjective but objective, insofar as they are “built-in” and common to all. If you are human, there is simply no other way of seeing the world.

This notion that objectivity is based on inter-subjectivity is one of Kant’s most important principles, underlying not only his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, but also his ethics and aesthetics. For instance, when making ethical decisions, we ought to abstract from our contingent circumstances and reason like any and every rational mind. When making ethical decisions, we seek to become everybody—to become pure mind or pure reason, like God.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, if space and time are not features of the world-in-itself, what remains of an object, say, a tree or a table, outside of space and time? For Kant, the nature of the “thing-in-itself” [German, das Ding an sich, or noumenon] is entirely beyond the bounds of human knowledge. All we can say—contra Bishop Berkeley, who held that things are nothing more than perceptions in the mind—is that it exists in some form or other.

Could Kant Be Right?

A criticism of Kant’s position is that we ourselves are objects in the world: our very existence and make-up presuppose space and time—which are therefore not “of the mind.”

Kant’s response is that human beings have a dual status. The phenomenal self is indeed a part of the phenomenal world. But the “I think” that makes experience and self-consciousness possible is not. This so-called noumenal self is the source of rationality and morality, and, because it stands outside of nature and contingency, of freedom as well. Our dual status is how we can still be morally free and responsible in an otherwise determined universe.

Kant thought of space as Euclidean. The later development of general relativity and non-Euclidean geometries, with their implication that space is not uniform, undermined Kant’s notion of space as an intuition—even though the human intuition of space might still be Euclidean.

Kant arrived at his radical position in seeking to bridge rationalism and empiricism and explain how synthetic à priori knowledge might be possible, that is, explain how we might possess universal, necessary knowledge about the world (or, at least, the phenomenal world) that is more than just definitionally true. By showing that the mind actively shapes how we experience reality, Kant synthesised rationalism and empiricism into a completely new framework called transcendental idealism.

Philosophy tends to answer one conundrum with an even bigger one—which happens, however, to be partially or accidentally insightful. “Conundrum” is a humorous mock-Latin word coined by 17th-century Oxford students seeking to lighten their load.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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The German Greeks was announced for end of June, because I didn’t want to rush it. But it was so inspiring to write that I finished earlier.

So I’m releasing the ebook early, on the quiet, at the special price of 2.99. When the paperback comes out at the end of June, the ebook will go up to the regular 9.99.

The work has already received a couple of editorial reviews, including from Prof Robert Wicks, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, who called it: ‘A fine, enjoyably readable and historically accurate book that informatively and excitingly portrays the lives of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.’

The lightning book cover (which I designed myself) is inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who preaches:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

For Schopenhauer, our character is inborn and immutable, and apparent, at every stage of life, in the face and, especially, the eyes, which are the ‘mirror of the mind’. For this reason, when someone surprises or disappoints us, we never say, ‘Oh, his character has changed’ but, ‘Oh, I must have been wrong about him.’

Under the changeable shell of his years, his relationships, even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeable and always the same.

Schopenhauer took this idea very seriously, and when sitting for painters, obsessed over the depiction of his eyes.

That’s why, now, his eyes are still so full of lightning.

You can order the ebook here in the US and here in the UK.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be very receptive to any comments and feedback.

PS. I appreciate that many will prefer to await the paperback or hardback.