That means isn’t one thing we discover — it’s one thing we make, and the puzzle items are sometimes the fragments of our shattered hopes and desires. “There isn’t any love of life with out despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we name which means. It’s an energetic, looking out course of — a inventive act. Paradoxically, we make which means most readily, most urgently, in instances of confusion and despair, when life as we all know it has ceased to make sense and we should derive for ourselves not solely what makes it livable however what makes it value dwelling. These are clarifying instances, sanctifying instances, when the simulacra of which means we now have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our tradition — God and cash, the household unit and excellent enamel — fall away to disclose the bare soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.
The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with unusual rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all of the alternative ways of being and remaining human irrespective of how our minds could fray — takes up this query of life’s which means in one in all his magnificent collected Letters (public library).
In his fifty-seventh 12 months, Sacks reached out to the thinker Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the which means of life by among the twentieth century’s best writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE journal would plagiarize Moorhead’s idea in an anthology of their very own, even taking the identical title.) Sacks — a self-described “kind of atheist (curious, generally wistful, usually detached, by no means militant)” — affords his personal perspective:
I envy those that are capable of finding meanings — above all, final meanings — from cultural and spiritual constructions. And, on this sense, to “consider” and “belong.”
[…]
I don’t discover, for myself, that any regular sense of “which means” might be offered by any cultural establishment, or any faith, or any philosophy, or (what is perhaps known as) a dully “materialistic” Science. I’m excited by a distinct imaginative and prescient of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order because the “middle” of the universe.
It’s on this 1990 letter that Sacks started germinating the seeds of the private credo that will come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of dwelling and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:
I don’t (at the least consciously) have a gradual sense of life’s which means. I preserve dropping it, and having to re-achieve it, time and again. I can solely re-achieve (or “bear in mind”) it when I’m “impressed” by issues or occasions or individuals, after I get a way of the immense intricacy and thriller, but in addition the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and Historical past.
I don’t consider in, by no means have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; however there’s a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which instructions my respect and love; and it’s this, maybe most deeply, which serves to “clarify” life, give it “which means.”
9 years later, in a distinct letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take concern with the concept that there are two “magisteria” — two totally different realms of actuality, one pure and one supernatural — writing:
Speak of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “one other,” as-it-were parallel world. However after I learn poetry, or take heed to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, after all really feel a “larger” area (however one which Nature reaches as much as, not separate in nature).
A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated an identical sentiment in considering the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in considering the which means of life within the wake of a paralytic stroke — precisely the type of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such ardour and compassion for what retains despair at bay, what retains life significant, when the thoughts — that assembly place of the physique and the spirit — comes undone. On the coronary heart of his letter to Moorhead is the popularity that there’s something wider than thought, deeper than perception, that animates our lives:
When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” go to me (they don’t seem to be rare!), I discover a sense of hope and which means in my sufferers, who don’t surrender regardless of devastating illness. If they who’re so ailing, so with out the standard strengths and helps and hopes, if they are often affirmative — there should be one thing to affirm, and an inextinguishable energy of affirmation inside us.
I believe “the which means of life” is one thing we now have to formulate for ourselves, we now have to find out what has which means for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and the way one can love.
As if to remind us that the capability for love could be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which implies that we could solely be right here to discover ways to love, he provides:
I don’t suppose that love is “simply an emotion,” however that it’s constitutive in our complete psychological construction (and, subsequently, within the growth of our brains).
Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s broad and fantastic Letters with Rachel Carson on the which means of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and ultimate reality, and Mary Shelley — having misplaced her mom at start, having misplaced three of her personal kids, her solely sister, and the love of her life earlier than the top of her twenties — on what makes life value dwelling, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years earlier than ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our seek for which means and his well timed long-ago reflection on methods to save humanity from itself.
