Life & its purpose
A dialogue between philosophies
Life and Lemons
- What is life ?
- What is the purpose of life ?
- How should I spend my life ?
Fear not, all these questions will be answered today.
There are some questions in life that keep coming back to us. Whose answers no one really knows. We only have approximates and theories at best, to choose from. With some work, I think we can get sub-optimal answers, good enough to settle with and live by (atleast for a while).
Until one day, they come back. Usually during desperate times. When we begin to question the answers we gave before, ready to re-write the answers with our new found will.
Below I have tried to make sense of different ideas from philosophy to arrive at the meaningful answers.
What is life ?
What is life ? There is a straight answer to this from nihilism i.e Life is meaningless.
But we can’t settle with this answer, as it takes us nowhere. So we look further to find existentialism, which says “Life is meaningless inherently, but individuals can create their own purpose.” So, life is [ insert your purpose ].
What is the purpose of life ?
Hedonism suggests life should be a pursuit of pleasure and work to avoid pain. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea does it ? But how realistic is it ? We all are born with certain variables (demographic, family education, income etc) tied to us that determine what pursuits are viable for us. And there is always a trade off, hence we need to choose the pleasures we intend to pursue carefully. While also ensuring it is viable so we can pursue it for entirety of our lives.
A fraction of our lives should be driven by skepticism so we question assumed knowledge, and empiricism to continually interpret our experiences and observations. As we continually explore and experince the world, we will often stumble on things we like, things we don’t like, and things we really really like.
The next step is to find someone who can pay us for doing this thing we really really like. This will happen when we are solving a certain problem with the work we are doing, and unknowingly subscribing to the pragmatism philosophy.
What would add to the joy then is,if you are able to do what you really really like with others, perhaps a community and the consequences of your work and thus thinking from a utilitarian viewpoint.
The next question is how do you conduct yourself then ? Having achieved what you wanted ? Virtue ethics says, “The purpose of life should be cultivation of virtues such as honesty, courage and integrity to lead a morally virtuous life.”
And thus, the purpose of life should be …