Happiness: Essays on the meaning of life

by Karl Hilty

An end of all desire hath seen.”[8]

Such is the final word of their philosophy. Neither light nor hope is left for human life. He does the best who earliest recognizes the hopelessness of life and hastens to its end.

Human nature, however, is so abounding in life and so eager for life that except in those transitory and morbid conditions which we have come to describe as fin de siècle moods, it is never long content to interpret experience in terms of universal bankruptcy. On the contrary, it insists that the problem of philosophy must be in the future, as it has been in the past, the shedding of light on the meaning of life. It is a problem which philosophy has often answered with mere phrases, which have brought no meaning or comfort to the troubled heart of man, and it is not surprising that since the climax of this hollow formalism was reached in Hegel, there has been a natural distrust of philosophy.

And what is it in this speculative philosophy which creates this distrust? It is its attempt to regard the universe as self-explanatory. Here, even at the present time, is one of the fundamental propositions of most philosophizing, against which no argument may be permitted. It seems an essential assumption of philosophy; since if other ways of explanation of the universe were superadded, philosophy as an independent science would seem to be superfluous. Is it certain, however, that the subordination of philosophy thus apprehended would be, after all, a great misfortune? What the human mind is concerned about is not the perpetuation of philosophy as a science, but the discovery of some meaning in life itself, its destiny, its past and its future; and one is quite justified in losing interest in any science which does not in the end contribute to the interpretation and amelioration of human life. We have a right to demand of philosophy that she contribute to this end, and that she shall speak also with some degree of simplicity of language, dismissing the attempt to satisfy with empty and unintelligible phrases the hunger of the soul for fundamental truth.

And yet, from the time of Plato to that of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, the making of phrases has been the special business of philosophy. It has created a language of its own, which separates it as by an impenetrable hedge from the region of men’s common talk; and when one translates such language into the familiar speech of his own time, where words have a definite meaning, it is as though he withdrew from a veiled goddess the disguise which gave her all her power and dignity. The fact is that abstract philosophy has never explained to any satisfaction either the existence or the development of the world; still less has philosophy brought into unity these two conceptions, and interpreted them through a single cause. On the contrary, the history of philosophy has been a history of words, conveying no real interpretation, and it would seem as if in the thousands of years of philosophic speculation either some interpretation should have been attained or that there should at last be heard the confession that philosophy can throw no further light on these fundamental facts. Here, it would seem, we should reach the end of philosophy, and should assume that the first cause of things is unknowable.

Philosophy, however, has seldom consented to this confession of impotence. On the contrary, it has repeatedly reverted to some absolute assumption of an adequate cause which lies behind the possibility of proof. Sometimes it is the assumption of a vital Substance, one and unchangeable; sometimes it is the assumption of an infinite concourse of atoms. Yet such conceptions are in the highest degree elusive, and force us to inquire whence such substance, be it simple or infinitely divided, comes, how it becomes quickened with life, and how it imparts the life it has. The transition from such mere movements of atoms to phenomena of feeling or thought or will, makes a leap in nature which no man has in the remotest degree proposed to explain. On the contrary, instead of bridging such a chasm the most famous inquirers simply record the melancholy confession: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.”

Sometimes, again, philosophy has taught, with many and large words, that the meaning of the world resides in an opposition between Being and Not-being. This is no new doctrine and it is at least intelligent and intelligible. Yet what we really need to know concerns Being alone. It is the world that lies before our eyes that interests us. How has this world come to be, we ask, or is it perhaps a mere illusion, the mirage of our own thought, with no reality but that which our own minds assign, as people in their despair have sometimes believed it to be? As for Non-existence, what rational interest has this for us? Is it even an intelligible conception? Does it not rather set before us a contradiction which we may conceive, but can never verify, and which has for life itself no significance at all?

Still other philosophers invite us to turn from the outward world whose final cause thus eludes us, and to consider our own self-conscious nature, the Ego, concerning which no one can doubt and which no philosophy is needed to prove. Yet no sooner does this poor Ego issue from its own self-consciousness and, as it were, take a step into the outward world, as though to interpret through itself the meaning of life, than it becomes aware that some further and external cause is necessary to explain even the Ego to itself.

Finally, philosophy, in its search for the meaning of life, bows to the authority of natural science and proposes to interpret experience through some doctrine of development, or evolution, or heredity, or natural selection. All that exists, it announces, comes of some primitive protoplasm, or even of some single primitive cell. Yet still there presses the ancient question how such cells may have been made and how there has been imparted to them their infinite capacity for life and growth. It is the question which the keen and practical Napoleon asked as he stood a century ago under the mystery of the stars in Egypt. Turning to the scholar Monge, he said: “Qui a fait tout cela?” To such a question neither abstract philosophy nor natural science has as yet given and, so far as we can judge, will ever give any answer.

To interpret the world, then, by itself or through itself is impossible, for there is in the world itself no final cause. If the mind of man is the final interpreter of the world, then it becomes itself the God it seeks, and the philosophers become the object of a kind of worship. Here, indeed, is the outcome of much philosophy to-day. If, however, the philosophers have any power of observation, they soon discover one positive barrier to this excessive self-importance. It is the humbling consciousness of limitation in their own powers and in their own hold on life itself; the inevitable impression, which no human praise can remove, of their own defects; the impossibility of finding a meaning even for their own lives within those lives themselves.