The inescapable meaning of life

By Jug Suraiya

Does life have meaning? This, the most fundamental of all questions, indeed the basis of asking any questions at all, has been posed from ageless time, not just by philosophers and sages, but also by so-called common folk.

Most often this question arises in the face of crisis, acute distress, or sorrow caused by the loss of a loved one or the failure to fulfil a cherished desire.

Does life, my life, have any meaning? Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, who survived the demonic horrors of a Nazi death camp, in which his father, mother, and brother perished, took the question, ‘Does life have meaning?’ and turned it around to ‘Do we have meaning in life?’

In Auschwitz having faced, daily and from hour to hour, not just the possibility but the likelihood of death, Frankl came to realise what he called “the responsibility of being”. “It is the uniqueness of our existence…the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it – or leave unfulfilled – that gives our existence significance.”

In 1946 Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning,based on his Auschwitz experience, which laid the foundation of the branch of psychiatry called logotherapy, the core of which is the existential premise: find a Why for which to live, and the How to do so will follow.

As a preview of this work, Frankl composed a series of lectures just 11 months after his emergence from Auschwitz, called Yes to Life: In spite of Everything. In consonance with his contemporary, Erich Fromm, who cautioned against “the shared laziness” of both nihilistic pessimism and rose-tinted optimism, Frankl quoted a verse from Tagore: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy./Iawoke and saw that life was duty./I worked – and behold, duty was joy.”

Life as a duty that must be borne? That sounds terribly dull and boring, a tedious chore that has to be performed. How can there be any joy in this ‘duty-full’ life? Frankl answers that by inverting the question ‘What can I expect from life?’ to ‘What does life expect from me?’, “It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life – it is life that asks the questions…we are the ones who must answer…living itself means nothing other than being questioned.”

In Indic philosophy, this “moral obligation”, this “duty to life”, is called dharma. It is the ‘Why’, the meaning we invest in life: I live to raise and protect my family. I live to pursue a fulfilling career. I live to follow a path of scientific or spiritual discovery.

“The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realise its meaning…changes from person to person…To ask about ‘the meaning of life’ (is like)…asking a world chess champion, ‘And now, Master, please tell me: which move do you think is best?’”

On the ever-changing chessboard of life no one, no guru, no god person, can tell us what our move, best or otherwise, should be. If I elect to let someone else choose my ‘Why’, that choice itself remains mine to answer. Life is an inescapable interrogator.

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