Throughout my philosophy courses in undergrad, I often wondered about how (or whether) studying philosophy directly affects the way you lead your life. None of the students in my philosophy courses seemed to live or act differently than anyone else; no one seemed to know what they were doing with their lives better than the rest of us (even the professors), all concerned with the same day-to-day trivialities.
And yet we spent a few hours every week discussing, in all its depth, the nature of being and existence – themes that otherwise might only come up after a few bottles of wine with friends. It seemed inevitable that these discussions should affect our lives (if only our inner lives) in some way.
This is why my favourite philosophy to study at university was Existentialism – the one I’ve found to have the most direct impact on my life. All of the others (Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology, whatever is it) were interesting, sure, but nothing seemed so important as to study the nature of my lived experience.
After all, what weighs more heavily on each of our lives than thoughts about life, death and meaning (the Existentialists’ key themes)? For whatever reason, I’m predisposed to thinking about these things way more often than I should, so I always enjoyed class discussions. They were just a chance to talk out loud about things I wondered most of the time anyway, and it was through these courses that I learned the tangible value of philosophy in my life – the real direct impacts that it has had on my every day.
First off, philosophy teaches that there is profound value simply in raising questions. And sometimes it actually even provides answers – if only to conclusively say that there are no answers. But even by highlighting questions of existence, philosophy adds profundity to our daily life. By engaging with it we become aware and conscious beings. It makes us thinking, reflective subjects of existence instead of passive outcomes drifting through it.
Philosophy also fundamentally encourages a sense of wonder and amazement at the mystery of existence, and in this way it adds meaning to our lives by making us more acutely present and engaged in what we’re experiencing.
Thinking about things like our mortality and our relationship with death also serves to make us understand our very need to live meaningfully. Why are so consumed with the idea of meaning? Only because mortality makes us question our own: we seem to have this innate urge to ‘make the most’ of our limited time.
Philosophy can also affect the meaning that we’re looking for because it helps us to understand the reality in which we search for it. And, as the saying goes, it’s a search as old as time.
Terms like “existential dread” and “existential Angst” have often been used by philosophers to describe our instinctive reaction to this reality. These expressions only started coming up in the 19th century, but the existentialists who popularized them – ones like Søren Kierkegaard – came up with them in an attempt to ‘put their finger’ on something already long-existing.
It’s the same 'something' that drove ancient thinker Epicurus to devote most of his writings to analyzing our fear of death, which he claimed to be the source of all our existential anxiety. Philosophies like his give us a framework through which to make sense of our experience and all of the angsty dread that comes with it.
So what’s the use of a framework? As most people experience firsthand, existential anxiety can be insanely paralyzing, preventing us from going on with our lives in any way at all. Philosophy helps to work through the anxiety, understanding where it comes from and what we can do about it. Spoiler: not much – but it still offers some respite.
In the same way that existential anxiety is rooted in our search for meaning, existential despair is rooted in a sense of meaninglessness. And thanks to philosophy, we have a term with which to talk about the cause of that despair: the “Absurdity” of existence.
Philosophers have come up with a whole bunch of different explanations for the origin of Absurdity. Albert Camus believed that it came from the gap between our need for meaning and the universe’s lack thereof. Taking a different approach, Thomas Nagel thought that it was a result of our capacity for self-reflection: he claimed that the Absurd comes from the clash between our “internal perspective”, which causes us to take our lives very seriously, and our “external perspective”, which forces us to step back and see the triviality of our concerns.
The differing conclusions don’t matter much – philosophy’s contribution instead is that it gives us the tools with which we can communicate about our experience. Imagine having to deal with all of that existential doom without being able to talk about or understand it!! Dear god no.
In our age of individuality, the beauty of philosophy is that it’s a bit of a buffet: you pick whatever ideas resonate most and go from there. Another perk is that the availability of all these different philosophical views on meaning allows us to expand the horizon of our own personal philosophy.
In this way, it’s a profoundly unifying discipline. As Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning, “If hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.” To sum: feelings of existential uncertainty are naturally human, and the platform of philosophy allows us to make sense of them collectively.
Alright, now we’ve praised philosophy enough. What about its limits? What is it missing?
Well, we’ve already forgiven its most obvious inadequacy: its inability to give us clear-cut answers. Sadly, philosophy will never on its own be able to decide whether or not life has objective meaning, and most 'useful' philosophies of meaning are based on assumptions that can never be proven. E.g. Susan Wolf wrote plenty about how to live meaningful a life, but all-the-while was assuming that meaning can be ‘achieved’ (so to speak) and that experiences of meaning are within reach. Other philosophers – Camus and most of the existentialists included – tend to base their philosophy on the assumption that the universe has no meaning.
But at the end of the debate, the limits of our human condition screw us over. We can never have certainty about meaning in an objective way. But that's completely fine! As said, philosophy only tries to ask the right questions.
There’s a more fundamental limit to the study of meaning, though: it doesn’t actually capture our lived experience of it. What does it feel like to live day by day? What does it feel like to live with meaning? These questions – ultimately the most important to us – simply can’t be answered by analytic philosophy.
Most philosophers seem to realize this in one way or another. It’s why Susan Wolf uses the “Endoxic” method in her research – i.e. she looks to “ordinary” people for insight, believing there to be something of value and truth in the day-to-day experience of meaning.
Leo Tolstoy realized it too: when confronted with his own feeling of meaninglessness, he turned first to the sciences and then to philosophy for comfort, finding that neither offered any. Finally, when he looked to the poorer groups of his Russian society – the peasants and farmers, who were uneducated in formal philosophy – he found that they seemed to be doing something right. By just living and experiencing the life in each day, they seemed to be more in touch with meaning than any philosopher around him.
Tolstoy writes: “It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life […] Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question."
When I first read his writings on the topic, it bothered me that he never really addresses the fact that when your basic needs are met and you finally have time to sit and reflect, you naturally succumb to feelings of meaninglessness. I mean, isn’t that still a problem worth addressing? But I now think that that actually is Tolstoy’s thesis: you’ll never find meaning just by sitting and analyzing the world. Your best chance is simply to get on and devote yourself fully to the life at hand.
We could list more and more philosophers who come to the same sort of conclusion, but the point here is that real knowledge of meaning can’t come just from thinking about it. Sure, we turn to philosophy for some logical explanations of meaning, but to see a reflection of of our own experience, we turn to art instead. Music, painting, poetry and prose – these are really the most powerful sources of existential comfort.
In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer talks about this idea in relation to science, but I think that it applies just the same to philosophy. He writes:
“Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artists reminds us that our science is incomplete.”
Thanks to philosophy, I can read all about the nature of this crazy existence that I’m experiencing. Thanks to art, I can have that lived experience reflected back to me. A perfect mix, isn’t it? Both hugely enrich our lives and nourish a sort of childlike wonder in us.
And thank god for them: they make this experience a whole lot more interesting.
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