The relentless search for a meaningful life

Dt 28:65-68: Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.  You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.  In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.  The LORD will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.^NIV

That scripture is an eerie description of anxiety and despair.  Words like longing, suspense, dread, and lack of assurance for one’s life all describe the tensions and contradictions brewing in an anxious mind.  When you ultimately reach a point where nobody wants to buy you even as a slave then you know you are at the end of your tether.  When you are there you ask the question, “What is the meaning of my life?”  That question was made popular by Viktor Frankl (1984) after his excruciating experiences in the Nazi death camps.  There was nothing left off him except his literal naked self.

Of course, we are not all going to go through a Nazi holocaust experience but every one of us will from time to time be confronted with the question of meaning; for better or for worse; it stays with us till the end.  As I write almost all eight billion people on earth are under some form of lockdown for the fear of an invisible pandemic with many variants called COVID-19.  German cars are parked in the garages, cosy offices are empty as people work from home, conference centers are suddenly not useful as meetings go virtual, airports stand empty with no one to fly or be flown in the gigantic Boeing machines, economic systems around the world are almost brought to a screeching halt and squeezed for subsistence.  Pharmaceutical companies are stretched and competing beyond capacity and competence in the race to manufacture a vaccine or vaccines to combat the deadly virus or bring it under control at least.

Almost everyone on earth is walking around with a mask on their faces, a privilege once enjoyed by thieves.   Many people have lost one or more of their loved ones to an adversary we can identify yet cannot identify.  Practically thousands have died due to the plague and still counting…Death stands summoning at the horizon, and once more we are forced to ask, is there more to human existence than the necessary yet fleeting icons we build it on?

Frankl asked that question repeatedly as he stood underneath a shower, never too sure whether he would be sprayed with water or a poisonous gas in the Nazi death camps.  He was pushed to conclude that there must be as he finally wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.’[1]    He was a psychiatrist but that did not count for much now, he was just a number as he dug railroads with his bare fingers in the icy European winters along with millions of Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps.  But then, the story of six million Jews dying in Nazi Germany has been told in various ways and countless times even as we conveniently forget Leopold II’s killing of more than ten million Africans in the Congo Free State and the Nama and Herero in present day Namibia.  Genocides have been part of human history so much so that ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation [has become] normal behavior’ (Frankl 1984, 38).

As Reinhold Niebuhr said, ‘We are anxious below and anxious beyond.’

Our anxiety, believe it or not, is not death but the knowledge that death; even as we pour billions and trillions of money-worth into shifting the ultimate reality; cannot be done away with.  We know we will die; but what for?  Alternately, for what?  Paul Tillich, that astute theologian, participating and nurtured by observations in World Wars I and II made the acute observation:

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).

This book is about meaning; the meaning of one’s life.  It proceeds from the assumption that no one is an accident of creation.  We are all here for a reason and our earthly assignment—between birth and death—is to discover, explore and actualize that reason for being.  In the greater scheme of things, no gift is ever too big or small.  Everything is working together towards the ultimate in God’s purpose for the universe. 

The stars were created to shine, fish to swim and birds to fly; there is no competition just being what they were created to be.  The point is each one of us was created for a purpose, an exclusive and tailor-made Raison d’être.  Some people call it passion.  Paul Tillich repeatedly called it ‘ultimate concern.’  That concern in which every other concern is consumed (Aldwinckle 1966).

Nelson Mandela articulated his “ideal” for which he was willing to live or die.[2]  Martin Luther King’s dream answered deep questions he raised in the heat of racism in the deep American South.[3]  He did not live to see it realized, but in his last speech he declared, ‘I have seen the promised land, I may not get there with you…’  But deep down the ‘Not yet’ was forming in the ‘Now.’  Not too long after that speech he was assassinated. 

Purpose is not vision; it is the bigger picture in which vision is achieved.  We pursue purpose but we achieve vision.  Purpose is the spirit and vision is the action.  In purpose we are released to act and in vision we measure how far we have come.  Vision says, “I have arrived,” and purpose responds, “There’s more beyond where you now stand.” Purpose therefore is like an ocean and vision is taking a sip of the vast waters of the ocean one cup at a time; it is the creative atmosphere in which innovation continues to be born.

This tapestry called human existence is made dynamic and exciting by the contributions that each one of us can make in our uniqueness.  Thus, in the question, “What is the meaning of my life,” the individual asks and is asked, and ultimately is the only one who must give the answer.  Meaning is derived, not so much in the achievement as it is in the existential processes.  The challenge is not whether you arrive where destiny calls, it is what you become in the continuous transforming furnace of how you get there.  What makes you is the journey not the destination.

The question of purpose must ultimately be asked in the bleeding jungles of East, West and North Africa.  When you watch every single member of your family being butchered by merciless rebels or mercenaries and their skulls and headless bodies scattered like rubbish all over the streets and countryside; there you are pushed to ask, “What is the meaning of my life?”  If things can turn out to be so bad, what am I living for?

Einstein (2010, 3)—probably in response to the philosophers of his time—did not think that was a very clever question to ask.  He wrote:

To inquire after the meaning of life or object of one’s own existence or creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.

In fact, he thought anyone who asked that question was not fit to live.  Yet, he obviously was wrestling with the question when he wrote:

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty (Ibid.)

The question of meaning fills life with determination, focus and expectancy.  You wake up every morning filled with the spirit of pursuit.  Nothing is guaranteed in terms of achievement, but the attitude is what makes it all meaningful.  Mandela lived to see his ideal, but Martin King’s dream materialised long after he was murdered.  Purpose is ultimately determined in what Reinhold Niebuhr called the “greater scheme of things.”  Nietzsche was right, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how” (Frankl 1984, 94).

The person who has achieved all there is to achieve probably has not achieved much that is meaningful.  That is why ‘Retirement’ is such an existential misleading term beyond which most people disintegrate when they have done all they knew how to do and beyond which they can do nothing more.

God, purpose, and human anxiety

In 1952 Paul Tillich wrote an all-time blockbuster in Christian existentialism titled The Courage to Be.  He wrote vigorously and intelligently about the tensions and contradictions that exist in the challenge to become all that God has created us to be.  Of course, existentialists like Nietzsche (1967) and Schopenhauer (2004) did not think God had anything to do with it.  Erich Fromm (1941) wrote of it as an ‘Escape from Freedom.’  In existential psychology we shape our own destiny.

Tillich was a Chaplain and stretch-bearer in World War 1.  He witnessed first-hand how life can be snuffed faster than the twinkling of an eye.  He survived the bombs that destroyed everything around him.  In a letter to his father he wrote, ‘Hell rages around us. It’s unimaginable,’ and in the end, he had to ask that soul-searching question of meaning.  Many others came out of World War 1 & II asking similar a question.  In that context Viktor Frankl (1984) finally came up with his theory of Logotherapy and Jurgen Moltmann (1993) chiseled his “Theology of Hope.”

In The Courage to Be, Tillich takes a plunge into these vast and complex waters of meaning from a combination of philosophical, psycho-medical and theological perspectives.  That multi-dimensional approach must be commended because there is no single discipline in the social or theological sciences that can fully claim to understand the intricacies and complexities of human nature and its search for ‘meaning.’  Human existence is not a mathematical formula or a project but a dynamic process not an event.  In the vast waters, the more you push the wider the scope before you.  There, according to Tillich, lies the anxiety that we often seek to deny.  We must push till the end or be delivered to boredom.  According to Frankl, how we respond to these tensions and contradictions is what gives life meaning; it is the ‘Freedom’ between ‘Stimulus’ and ‘Response.’

The question of ‘meaning’ is not given to us on a silver platter; it comes with a lot of anxiety.  As we shall see later, Tillich (1952, 40-54) provides three categories in which the question of anxiety can be understood.  There is the anxiety of fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness and guilt and condemnation.  He uses biblical metaphors—or what he calls myths—as a way of understanding our relationship with God and our world.  In other writings (Tillich 1957, 66-72) he takes us back to the Garden of Eden where it all began.  For him paradise can only be regained, if at all, where paradise was lost; thus, he speaks of “Estrangement.” 

The human predicament or the problem in the human situation is our alienation from God.  Our problem is vertical before it is horizontal.  The destructiveness we see demonstrated on the landscape of human history is often a sick drama of how far we have drifted from God and that gulf is the cause of our anxiety. 

For Tillich, existentialism is the good luck of theology.  Existentialists have succeeded in showing us the dark side of life and theology—if rightly appropriated—shows us the bright side.  It is the existential analysis of the human situation that makes the theology of a “God above God,” and ‘The Right to Hope’ necessary.  The human situation demands something beyond the ‘God of theism,’ a universal rallying point of the divine around which the questions thrown at us by the uncertainties of human existence must be answered.

Thus Frankl (1984, 127) concludes, “There is no emotional homeostasis.”  This is a contradiction to humanist theories that suggest that life at some point can be free of anxiety.  ‘Homeostasis’ is not the absence of anxiety but the competence and ability to swim through the unpredictable waters.  The neurotic suffers because life for them is how they think it should be not how it really is.

Rollo May, a Tillich friend, and student spoke about religion and anxiety and how religionists ignore the neurotic dimension of anxiety and psychologists ignore the religious aspect of anxiety (May 1950).  It was Tillich who probably made the first attempt to reconcile those two extremes (1952, 64-78).

Tillich was Lutheran so he obviously wrote from a Christian perspective, but he was never trapped by the dogmatic perimeters of religion or science.  Thus, he wrote about the “God above God” (Tillich 1952, 186-190).  He embraced Socialism and criticized the possibility of its demonic eruptions.  Meaning in religion is found only when God appears where the God of traditional theism has disappeared.  If you can find God beyond doubt and despair, then you have found God.

In Tillichian terms, “Before sin is an act it is a state.”  That condition is the state of individuals and nations; indeed, it is the state of all creation.  In our finite freedom we have been excluded from the infinite destiny to which we belong.  That exclusion is the “tragic element” of the human situation (Taylor 1987, 191).  We belong to that from which we have been excluded and the tensions and contradictions of that paradox is the source of our anxiety.

If one asks, “What is the meaning of my life” in a real sense one, consciously or otherwise, seeks to reconnect with one’s spiritual deep.  In the final analysis that question is spiritual, and it is precisely at this point where Tillich states, “The human spirit presents itself to us as religious.”  We are a religious species and that is the difference between us and the rest of the animal world.  It is Teilhard de Chardin who said (Egan 2004), ‘We are not human beings on a spiritual journey but spiritual beings on a human journey.’

The question of purpose or meaning is not as innocent as it is asked because it brings with it a whole baggage of anxiety.  Ironically, it does not only come with a collapsing world around us; some ask it at the summit of ground-breaking achievements, what Maslow later called “Peak Experiences” (1999).  What do you do when you have become the richest person on earth; or you have done what you best know how to do? 

The search for meaning is anxious and permanent and sometimes we feel as if we are racing against time.  There are more questions than answers.  When we cease to ask the question, we are immediately delivered to boredom.  As Schopenhauer observed (2004, 42):

Not the least of the torments that plaque our existence is the pressure of time, which never lets us, so much as draw breath, but pursues us all like the taskmaster with a whip.  It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered to boredom.

The question is both creative and frustrating.  It can prompt us in the direction of innovation or lethargy.  That explains the human rat race of economic high speeds and the extremes of sensual indulgence.  Frankl said, ‘When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.’  We are overdriven by what Martin Luther King called the “Drum Major Instinct.”  The best among us wants to be the “winner takes all.”  Having done all to achieve, or not, we find the question still stands before us.  “What is the meaning of my life?”

The irony of the human situation.

As mentioned earlier, the irony of the human situation is that we are anxious below and curious beyond.  Looking into the abyss of nothingness, as Nietzsche said, the abyss looks back on us (Rodden 2000).  Looking beyond the horizon we are invited towards life’s’ endless possibilities as we fear we could fall into the abyss.  Ours is the perilous position to be pretend otherwise painted so vividly by Reinhold Niebuhr:

We are like the sailor climbing the mast…with the abyss of the waves beneath him, and the crow’s nest above him.  He is anxious about both the end toward which he strives, and the abyss of nothingness into which he may fall” (Niebuhr 1988, 18).

That “perilous position” is the source of our anxiety.  The possibility to become is threatened by the possibility not to become.  Tillich calls it the tension between “Being” and “Nonbeing” (1952, 32).  In religious terms, ‘to be’ is to achieve the divine and ‘not to be’ is to be thrown into the depth of the demonic.  To achieve the divine, we must forever push through the demonic.  The anxiety of being is the awareness of the perennial presence of the demonic where the divine must be achieved.  African philosophy has always been aware of the principle at least, of the tensions between the divine and the demonic. The Batswana say, “Though an eagle may catch its prey high in the sky, it must land to consume it on the ground.  There it will meet its demise.”[4]

In the unfolding processes of life, we discover that in strange and precarious ways, so richly portrayed in the centres of human history, evil is always good’s weird bedfellow.  Every victory is harassed by the possibility of failure.  Being on every turn is threatened by nonbeing.

How then should we understand the problem of anxiety?  Tillich makes the submission,

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing cannot be eliminated.  It belongs to human existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).

He repeats what philosophers and religionists have said in different ways.  Life is anxious.  There is a lot of empirical evidence around us even with casual observation.  The challenge therefore is not to change the situation but to embrace it.  If we deny the sickness it makes it impossible to find a reprieve.

We need to embrace the possibility of losing where we win and winning where we lose.  If I know I can win where I lose it prompts me to try again.  If I can lose where I win it gives me the courage to confront the situation and to push for higher and better.  That recognition is a call for courage and innovation.

Sin is what introduces the pessimistic; yet we are not sacrificed at the altar of that hazardous moment because we have a choice.  Choice is that space between stimulus and response.  As Frankl (1984) argues, we may not always choose the conditions around us, but we can choose our attitude and response towards those conditions.

Each one of us in different ways must respond to Hamlet’s soliloquy (Shakespeare 1992), “To be or not to be, that is the question.”  So, what do we do?  Do we reach out into the inviting heights and seeming endless possibilities of human existence, or do we plunge into the doldrums of its exigencies?  That unrelenting and ever-present juncture of courage and choice is not only anxious, but also frightening.

As Marianne Williamson wrote (1992, 190-191):[5]

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

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[1] (Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning 1984).

[2] See article, http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/mandela.htm.

[3] See article, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/11/mlk-recording-speech-found/31470821/.

[4] My own paraphrase of the Setswana proverb, “O se bone nong go ralala godimo, go tla fatshe ke ga yone.”

[5] That quote is usually wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela.