THE ANSWER

REVIEW: Moorhead, Hugh S., editor. The Meaning of Life. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1988.

The most appropriate way to review Moorhead’s book is to answer the question posed in it as to the meaning and purpose of life. I will do so.

Life is short and turbulent. Death is stable and eternal. The meaning and/or purpose of life, thus, is death, as all entities tend to a stable state of existence. If you object to my conclusion, consider the following. The persons who contributed to Moorhead’s book are gentle, humane and life-affirming, as evident from their comments. If you examine the world “out there,” however, you will conclude that violence and death are everywhere apparent, --- immediately, nationally, globally. The contributors of the book comprise an insignificant and sheltered minority. Further, if you examine the foundations of the society in which such people live, you will see that violence and death, in the guise of military prowess, guarantees their existence and their ability to speculate on the metaphysics of existence. An army is institutionalized violence and death. There is no literature, including the literature of speculation on the meaning of life, that anyone pays much attention to without a dominant army as the spine of their nation or culture. There is not even history without an army. An army is the protector of literature, as the sword protecting the pen, ----a sort of iron hand inside the velvet glove of academia or belles-lettres.

Conflict, violence and death, in fact, are bred into our Western bones from the Iliad, to the Aeneid, to the books of both the Old and New Testaments. History is drowned in blood. Nor is there, was there, or ever will be a society or nation where violence and death do not prevail. The entire universe is locked into deadly conflict at every point. Nor am I separate from it. Nor have the contributors to the book been able to change the mortal equation.

I will offer other considerations, as my answer is unsatisfactory to you. There is more than one answer to the question of the meaning and purpose of life, in any case, because of different perceptivities.

As for William Humphrey on page 88: Not only do bad novels succeed in answering the question of the meaning of life, but good novels hypocritically disguise their imbedded answers and so add hypocrisy to the superficiality of supposedly good novels.

If I may take a cue from Ken Kesey on page 99: The meaning of life is found in flying over the cuckoo’s nest. I supposed he would know it. The view is better than that of Sisyphus and his continual rolling of a rock up a mountain.
For the answer of James Oakes on page 136: Yes, life is a perpetual struggle against all forms of enslavement, physical, emotional, and intellectual. We love our enslavement, though, because we make it for ourselves, ---it’s men who enslave their fellows in body and in mind.

As for May Sarton on page 169: She advises us that life means to become ourselves so that we may use our talents. Sure, and that’s what Hitler, Stalin and Mao did, too, as they used their talents for murder, massacre and genocide. (She makes my point especially well.)

And Susan Fromberg Schaeffer on page 170: The meaning of life is found inside every fortune cookie, blank or written upon.

And Philip Slater on page 178: Life is not a baggie; it’s a wedgie, an atomic one.

Absolutely, Mark Strand on page 188: Life is a dialogue with the void.
Furthermore, if I may add a personal definition in the same vein: The meaning of life is found on the inside bottom of the smallest of nested boxes that you can discover.

Since the universe and thus life is, was and always will be, as both religionists and physicists agree, it is you who are eternal and immortal. There is an aesthetic aspect to this structure, but the relevant question in this formulation is thus the meaning and purpose of death.

I propose that death is equivalent to what Zen people call “emptiness,” which is the fullness of everything. We are an integral part of the universe that is. Thus I propose that the meaning of life is “is.” (This contains an echo of a famous statement uttered by a former US President involving procreation, which is one of the meanings of life given by some of the contributors to Moorhead’s book. Or, maybe, it’s a re-awakening of that old song: “Is you is or is you ain’t ma baby? Maybe, baby, you found somebody new. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo.” This alludes to the same subject. I trust that I am sufficiently irreverent.)

If we are eternal and immortal in a never-ending “is,” it makes life and the death a single phenomenon. This, further, is the psychology of the “Now” currently bruited on TV. It is a theft from Zen without acknowledgment. If we, as individuals or as a species, did not exist in our meaning and purpose the universe would collapse in a congeries of clumps, as the Roman stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius suggested. So since we do exist in our meaning and purpose in the universe (that Marcus Aurelius called “Providence”), it is exactly what death, “emptiness,” and “is” is.

The Buddha never commented on matters metaphysical because he considered them a waste of time. Such speculations comprise an indefinitude that can never be concluded upon.

Do not, then, bother me with such fatuous questions, or you will get additional puerile answers.

Seriously, if seriousness is ontologically possible, there is a way to approach an answer to the question of the premise of the book, as to the meaning and purpose of life. Part of it involves everything you have learned up to this point (or perhaps unlearned, if you’re really smart, well-read and reflective), in reading and in interactions with people as friends, teachers, mentors, students, in conversations and in various experiences personal and impersonal. A second part involves Secular Buddhism, or Zen. A third part has to do with randomness and the science of probability invented to attempt to deal with it, though I suspect that mastering randomness is more of an art than a science. Further, you should master logic and argument, understand that everything is a scam, read poetry as if your life depended on it, love nature, have compassion for all life forms including yourself, do not commit violence even in your mind and for supposed beneficial purposes, understand the comfort and joy of not making hard and fast plans in life but let it happen one thing following another, and plan to live your life with personal excellence. If you follow these precepts, you will discover the meaning of life because the universe is rational and works in a rational manner both materially and psycho-socially.

Goodbye and good luck in your endeavor.

(TRC Final Revision 08-17-09)