Irving Singer (1925-2015) was a prominent philosopher at MIT. I read his book Meaning in Life: The Creation of Value, and liked it about a B+ on an A-F scale. It is rife with quotes about meaning, fulfillment, ethics, value, values, philosophy, and self-examination. In this blog, I will break down a few quotes, but provide all the quotes about meaning I found in the book. Enjoy! Oh, and p.s. this is not meant to discourage you from buying the book, and the quotes are of course not copyrighted by me.
Philosopher John G. Messerly encapsulates Singer thusly: “Singer says there are basically three positions regarding the meaning of life: a) traditional religious answers; b) nihilistic answers; and c) create our own meaning answers. Singer grants that religious answers provide many persons with meaning but he rejects them: “this pattern of belief is based on non-verifiable assumptions that exceed the limits of natural events and ordinary experience. Take away the transcendental props, which nowadays have become wobbly after centuries of criticism, and the grand edifice cannot stand. The challenge in our age is to understand how meaning can be acquired without dubious fantasying beyond the limits of our knowledge.”
“Though individuals are annihilated once they have played their tiny role, they all contribute to the ongoing development of the cosmos. They do so by searching for value and self-awareness. [Philosopher Georg] Hegel identifies this quest, which he considers fundamental in the universe, as a yearning for moral or spiritual goals.”
“The outcome of philosophy is always precarious, and often unforeseeable. At least, it ought to be.”
“Like many others, I turned at an early age to writings about life and meaning in the hope of finding a coherent world view consistent with my own sense of reality. I soon discovered that the sheer articulation of problems and answers in this area created major difficulties for anyone who aspires to intellectual honesty.”
^I think he is probably right! I am in a class about meaning, and it’s not terribly easy or reassuring. And I like his use of the phrase intellectual honesty, because, yah if one just wants to get one’s answers about life, the nature of reality, time, death, failure, right and wrong and so on from a book (a Book), all pre-packaged, no thinking necessary, I don’t really find that to be intellectually honest. It’s not proper philosophy, and in the comparison (I avoid the word contest) between religion and humanistic methods (such as philosophizing), I choose the humanistic method.
“Our purposes are directed toward the fulfillment of our desires and the acquisition of what we value… A meaningful life consists of purposive activities that are satisfying either in themselves or in their culminating consummations, which are then followed by new purposes with new consummations relevant to them, and so forth throughout one’s existence.”
“Human existence cannot be meaningful unless it is imaginative — which is to say, unless it surmounts the routine, repetitive, mechanical elements in life by using them for purposive activity that stimulates our thought with new perspectives, sharpens our sensations while also gratifying them, awakens our emotions to fresh possibilities of expression, and in general encourages the onward flow of consciousness to explore unknown capacities of our being. A life that is boring or without novelty is not meaningful for us.”
“Whatever the activities we may prefer, we can recognize that the significance of any life will always be a function of its ability to affect other lives. And not that alone, since our perfectionism involves a longing to create the greatest possible good or beauty to which our imagination gives us access.”
“Questions about the meaning of life have been dismissed or neglected by many of the greatest thinkers in the last hundred years. Even if they were right to do so, we must nevertheless wonder why it is that human beings are both attracted to such matters and constantly baffled by them.”
^Well, maybe. But it has also been taken up by some decent minds, too. I do grant him that individuals such as Bertrand Russell didn’t probably spend much time on this, but some folks such as Einstein did! He said, “The ideals that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth.” On second thought, though, Russell did say the following (I just think he spent a LOT of time messing around with what is called analytic philosophy, which is about 50% a waste of time): “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.”
“Traditional wisdom has always maintained that saintly and heroic lives are not only more desirable but also more meaningful than others.”
“Pleasures may be delusory of short-lived or even conducive to suffering, as they may also be of a sort that we would consider disgusting or vicious, but it makes no sense to doubt that what someone experiences as a pleasure really is one. The same holds for the patterns of action or experience that constitute meaningfulness. If someone has a purposeful life that he finds satisfying… then that is a meaningful life.”
“What is significant in life, and what makes us feel our own lives are significant, involves participation in creative acts that lead to greater meaning in the cosmos.”
“[Philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer believes that animate existence is more often a form of suffering than of happiness or pleasure. Life on earth is a calamity whose only cure is death. But though he is pessimistic in this respect, he also thinks that knowledge of his philosophy will help us live agreeable and rewarding lives.”
“Nowadays it has become fashionable among philosophers to deny that there is a human nature. Existentialists who reject the idea that man has any definable essence do well to insist that he is always free to change his condition and thus to modify his being extensively.”
^ This is somewhat relevant to the philosophical issue of essence vs. existence. In this 10-minute summary of existentialism, a decent analysis of “existence precedes essence” is undertaken. Basically, essentialism notes that a human being has a human nature, and to some degree our path is already set the minute we are conceived. It also brings up the thorny issue of free will vs. determinism.
“The greater the benefit to the greater number of lives, the greater the significance of our own. In this respect, significance does not depend on fame, power, wealth, or social standing. It depends on the value one provides — directly or indirectly — to those who can thereby make their lives happier or more meaningful or even more significant.”
“[Philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer claimed that someone’s life is real and important only as an enlightened manifestation of the unitary life-force which is Being itself. That was why he considered the sense of individuality to be an illusion as well as the cause of human suffering. Our ordinary experience is futile, Schopenhauer thought, because this fundamental fallacy encourages us to pursue selfish goals predicated upon the belief that we are each a separate substance. He extolled the faculty of compassion because he thought that it alone enables us to perceive our oneness with all other living creatures.”
“If a person is devoted to the collecting of bottle tops or antique tobacco tins, we may agree that his quest for the biggest and best collection — worthy, perhaps, of inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records — will provide a source of meaning in his life. But do we want to say that he therefore leads a life that is really meaningful?”
“We should consider the possibility that our current difficulties often result from a sense of meaninglessness to which favored human beings are commonly prone, and more so than those who struggle for mere survival. If this is true, pursuing and attaining happiness might appear to be paradoxically self-defeating. The happier we are, the harder it becomes to find the meaning in our lives that is essential for remaining truly happy.”
^ We should, indeed. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that “Happiness is a butterfly which is always just beyond reach but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” I have loved that idea ever since I had a bookmark with that on it oh, gosh, two or three decades ago.
“The second way out he [Tolstoy] calls, Epicureanism. Assuming that life has no meaning, most cultivated people clung to their privileges and luxuries in order to preserve the gratuitous advantages that had befallen them. Though they knew it was only through good luck that they could savor whatever enjoyments were available, they merely sought further distractions in an attempt to ignore the horrifying truth.”
“We may think that creative men and women have the greatest access to beauty and joy. And yet, regardless of what has been achieved, an artist must always face the agonies of each particular art form. These present themselves anew in every work, and they inevitably curtail any momentary joyfulness.”
“The geniuses who have so clearly earned the reward of joy or ecstasy are precisely the ones who suffer most acutely from the constant struggles that creativity involves. Life is not a path of determinate length and direction such that creative individuals who have traveled furthest can feel that they are closer to some absolute and all-resolving goal. The past cannot be relived, and the future is never fully knowable until it becomes the present. The more that human beings accomplish, the more they generally realize how little they have done.”
“Having encountered difficulties in our search for a meaning of life as a whole, we may nevertheless hope to answer questions about the nature of a meaningful life. Is it something we find or something we create? How is it dependent on purposes, values, ideals? How is it related to happiness, and does it give us assurance that men and women can face up to their predicament as finite creatures? In working at these issues, we may be able to construct an outlook that reveals a life worth living even if we remain partly pessimistic about human existence.”
^ That does, indeed, feel like the heart of the matter and the nature of the questions that yield important info on meaning. Modern-day philosopher Alain de Botton cautions us: “To consider our petty status worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquilizing glimpse of our own insignificance.” Indeed, the fact that God cannot be shown to certainly exist, and there are hundreds of billions of stars out there, there is an amazingly small chance that we are each significant as a general rule. We must, like the existentialists, pound our chest and shout into the cold, quiet cosmos what we value, and what we hold to be meaningful.
“If Hegel is right, life may well be called a tragedy for everything that participates in it. It is tragic for each entity perceived as a being whose organic drives and cherished values will be defeated sooner or later… Their tragic existence contains an inherent creativity that reveals the progressive attainment of ever-increasing meaningfulness, goodness, and beauty.”
“It is nevertheless a tragedy for the participants, since they survive their brief appearance only in having a meager effect upon the ineluctable flow that quickly engulfs them. One might therefore say that Hegel sees life as a tragi-comedy: tragic for those who perform in it but inherently rewarding for the evolving and impersonal spirituality that marches toward fulfillment throughout this process.”
“[Philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer thinks that all life must be tragic, since every event is governed by laws of nature that have nothing in them that could be considered ideal. The fundamental principle existing in the universe is dynamic, material, brutal, non-purposive, and more or less without direction. Schopenhauer calls this principle “the will” since we feel it most directly in our volitional impulses.”
“[Philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche is convinced that this totality must be meaningless, devoid of spirit, as Schopenhauer had said. And yet he thinks participants in life might create — through amor fati — a heroic comedy by courageously accepting it all despite the fact that everything is ultimately tragic and even vile. In this way, Nietzsche feels, one might see life realistically without undermining the pursuit of noble ideals that Hegel considered paramount.”
John G. Messerly also tells us this about Irving Singer: “While Singer’s thoughts on the topic are vast and complex, the secret to understanding it is found in the title of his first major book on the subject, Meaning in Life: The Creation of Value (Volume 1). Meaning is something we create. Yet he is sensitive to the rejoinder that regardless of what matters to us subjectively, nothing matters objectively. Here he notes two responses: 1) if something matters to an individual then it matters, period; and 2) if nothing matters then it doesn’t matter that nothing matters. However, neither response reassure. That things matter only to us is not enough, and that things do not matter at all provides no comfort.”
“[Philosopher Georg] Hegel’s optimism may seem ridiculous to us in view of its unswerving certitude about the goodness of the universe, but it alerts us to the importance of ideals and to the human capacity for self-fulfillment in the act of pursuing them. Hegel’s greatest strength consists in his recognition that human beings can and do enjoy life by striving for spiritual goals.”
“But what exactly is involved in the problems we are exploring? What is one saying when one asks for the meaning of life? People who raise this question usually want to know about more than life alone. They want to know where existence “comes from.” They want to know the why of it: why we are “here,” and why anything — or rather everything — should be as it is.”
“We know what it is to pursue ideals that express human values and elicit relevant emotional responses. The crucial question for most people is whether anything of the sort is justified by objective conditions in the universe.”
“In earlier generations some philosophers believed that the purpose of life is the progressive advancement of the most highly organized species. Others claimed it is just the continuance of life itself. Nowadays one might be tempted to argue that the purpose of life is the replication of DNA. But to each of these replies, we can ask: What is the purpose of that?”
^ That regress makes finding meaning a bit tricky. Even God can be analyzed thusly: What gives God’s life meaning? If we believe that God gives our life meaning, then it stands to reason that God would have to have a God to give his life meaning. It gets confusing fast. But Singer is asking, So perpetuating our species and evolutionary fitness is, according to science and nature, our ultimate goal, but why is that “a thing” instead of, say, nothing? What it really means, I think, is that we must stop our analysis with ourselves, lest we fall down a rabbit hole. Indeed, Messerly points out that: “In his 1967 article entitled “Why,” Paul Edwards discusses whether or not the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningful.[i] He begins by pondering two issues regarding the use of the word why: 1) the contrast between how and why questions, and the prevalent view that science only deals with how questions; and 2) ultimate or cosmic why questions like “Why does anything at all exist?” or “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“According to Plato, painters, poets, composers, etc., contemplate a realm of possible forms to which they have access through their powers of abstract reason within the confines of their individual talent. They then impose these forms upon the materials of their art in the hope of achieving a predeterminate good. This good serves as a goal that guides the aesthetic process from its beginnings. Only by recognizing that his initial intuition shows forth reality and the meaning of life, can the artist — or anyone else— pursue the purposes ingredient in human creativity.”
“We assume that a sentence such as “What is the purpose of life?” makes sense because it has the same grammatical form as sentences like “What is the purpose of pre-heating the oven?” This question is intelligible and has relevance to an observable purpose in life. But though the first utterance has a similar grammatical structure, there is no assurance that it has any meaning whatsoever.”
“For the most part, our language is a function of what we can experience or imagine on the basis of experience. We participate in life; we experience it directly; and that can give us knowledge of the purposes within it. But if these purposes must be grounded in a larger purpose that underlies the entire universe, nothing that we try to say or ask about the meaning of it all may really make sense.”
“The belief that human purposiveness has no real significance belongs to the philosophical view called “nihilism.” This, in turn, is related to the idea that our existence is inherently “absurd.” The beginnings of absurdist thought may be traced to David Hume. He argues that there is no knowable true statement from which one can deduce the existence of anything (except in a tautologous fashion). In other words, as far as we can tell, everything that is exists for no necessary reason.”
“One’s motives for seeking a meaning of life is quite evident. The problems of living would be greatly simplified if everything could be shown to make sense in terms of a goal toward which it was or ought to be tending.”
^ On the other hand, the very important existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus, said that “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.” Further: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
“The cosmos does not care about human welfare. Camus remarks that ‘the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.’ It is as if the life of every human being, from beginning to end, was simply a ridiculous rearranging of the chairs in the dining room of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.”
“Man is portrayed as inherently divided between his purposive desire to pursue whatever goals he values and his being as a self-transcending spectator who recognizes that the world is wholly unresponsive either to him or to his values. The world does not seem to mind destroying, sooner or later, everything man cares about.”
“Rather than searching for a prior meaning of life, we would be asking what is needed for someone to have a meaningful life. This is a different kind of question: it orients us toward possibilities that emanate from man’s estate regardless of any external meaning that may or may not surround it.”
“The absurdist philosophers observe, or assume, that the universe has no overarching purpose and, apparently, no concern for human welfare. Since people nevertheless continue to pursue cherished goals, the philosophers see a contradiction between the purposefulness in man’s struggle for life and the general purposelessness of the cosmos. This is what they consider the source of human absurdity.”
^ Two interesting quotations about meaning in this vein are by the well-known little philosopher, Anne Frank: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” As well, scholar Daniel N. Robinson on absurdity: “We will suffer, knowing there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but are suffering confers a certain kind of dignity that makes us worthy of ourselves.” Let’s throw in another for good measure: ““Meaningless is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite. Activity, and even long, drawn out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and the purpose of the activity.” (philosopher Richard Taylor)
“[Philosopher] Thomas Nagel is obviously advocating, or at least favoring, irony as a suitable and meaningful reaction, just as Camus had proposed heroic defiance as the means by which human beings can overcome the absurdity in life. To say anything of this sort, however, is to admit that human existence is not wholly absurd. It then behooves us to determine the nature of meaningfulness and how it may be attained.”
“Men and women have the goals and purposes that are meaningful to them because a biological structure in their needs and satisfactions underlies, either directly or indirectly, their creation of meaning. It is not at all absurd that human beings have the values that they do. These belong to us as just the natural entities that we happen to be.”
“Nor is it absurd that we have values that are distinct from those of a fish or a bird or any other species significantly different from our own. Each set of values arises out of material and social circumstances that make an organism to be as it is, which is to say, as it has evolved in nature. When natural preconditions are satisfied, the organism is rewarded by consummations that reinforce a viable mode of living. That is how our values come into being. That is the soil in which a meaningful life originates.”
“If we function as healthy beings, we act with assurance that people like ourselves are capable of creating sense and value in their lives. To the extent that they do so they augment the meaning of life in ways that would not have existed otherwise. Without meaning of this sort, human existence degenerates into misery and general chaos.”
Two quotes from two interesting individuals: “Sometimes when you have everything, you can’t tell what really matters.” [Our life] doesn’t need an external source of meaning for it to have meaning, to have significance for us. So then we need to ask the question, What is it about our life that gives it meaning? …To answer that, we need to identify values. When people ask about the meaning of life, they mean: “What values give life meaning or significance; what makes life pointful; what values should we promote or seek or try to develop; what are the values of life; the values that make life worth living?”
“Though their answers to these questions are diametrically opposed, both approaches look for a unitary, all-embracing set of answers that somehow might be there, waiting to be revealed. The traditionalists would seem to see the world as a quasi-mathematical problem for which there must be a definite solution. If we can only refine our reasoning powers or cleanse our hearts, they say, we are sure to discover what we seek. Against this optimistic view, the absurdists despair of ever succeeding in such a quest.”
“To ask about a meaningful life that we might discover is not nonsensical. We may understand how the human imagination is operating when it poses such questions. To answer them in the manner of the traditionalists or the absurdists is fruitless, however, for they offer no way of verifying that a universe such as ours does or does not have an independent meaning capable of being found. How could we justify or defeat either assumption? What would count as evidence for or against it?”
“Since we depend extensively on other people, our sympathetic awareness of them readily turns into concern about their welfare. When this element in our nature combines with our faculty of idealization, there results the kind of behavior that seeks to preserve and to improve life beyond ourselves.”
“…a long line of thinkers — from Plato to [philosopher] Alfred North Whitehead, [theologian] Paul Tillich, and others in our century — have developed concepts of “eternal objects” that are different from the content of temporal experience… But beautiful as this vision may be, it is, I believe, simply untrue to reality.”
It has been posited or decreed ever since Plato (and definitely right on through the Thomas Aquinases and the Popes of the world) that values and ethics are “out there,” special, sacrosanct, ethereal, timeless, immutable, universal, God-given Forms (in Platonic parlance). However, as Edward O. Wilson notes in the following quotation, it is likelier that values, virtues, and ethical admonitions are not given from upon high, or sacred, but merely evolutionarily-defined, culturally-transmitted adaptive mechanisms that function to keep society moving ever-forward. This takes some of the gleam off special concepts such as truth and honor, but so be it. What’s true is true. Just because something is evolutionarily adaptive and naturally selected through hundreds of thousands or millions of years of humanity’s progress does not cheapen it. It may, in a way, ennoble it. In this way, culture (and, the genes that act as counterpart in this humanistic and atheistic enterprise) are jointly and significantly responsible for the values and ethics that are some of humanity’s most prized possessions. As Wilson wrote in his compelling book about the integration of all science and art, Consilience: “To translate is [the factual] into ought [the normative, prescribed behavior] makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts. They are very unlikely to be ethereal messages outside humanity awaiting revelation, or independent truths vibrating in a nonmaterial dimension of the mind. They are more likely to be physical products of the brain and culture.”
“What brings tears to her [Emily in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town] eyes, and to ours, is her sudden awareness that we never really savor or consummate our being in time. It is as if time, as we live it, is something we cannot fully experience. It is always escaping us. We always seem to be out of phase, unable to synchronize our feelings and our needs with time’s uncontrollable movement.”
“Insofar as man experiences himself as a separate individual, what matters to him is anything that brings about his own happiness and sustains the meaningful life he has chosen. Insofar as he is one among other manifestations of life, however, and perceives himself as such, he becomes aware that what matters to other creatures matters equally and really does matter.”
“Anyone who has ever watched a bird building its nest will agree that it usually goes about its business with a kind of confidence, security, and single-mindedness that is rare in men and women. Doing what comes naturally, animals often appear contented, sometimes even serene.”
“We must therefore rephrase the usual questions. Instead of seeking the meaning of life as if it were something preexisting, we must study the natural history of mental acts and bodily responses that enable organisms such as ours to fabricate meaning for themselves. We speak of “finding” a life that is meaningful, but the meaning is something we create.”
“The Nazi philosophy was able to beguile as much of humanity as it did precisely because it promised a significant life to those who were willing to sacrifice everything to it. Evil as it was behind its idealistic veneer, it satisfied the heroic imagination of many people who saw no other possibility of achieving a meaningful life. It pacified their doubts about whether life is worth living by providing a cause for which they were even willing to die.”
^ The difference between being a moral pillar versus a moral sheep is a matter of keeping a vigilant watch on oneself and purposely shaping one’s behavior — rather than being bumped around by consequences, the opinions of others, fear of punishment, or social convention. It is a damned shame the Germans were so destitute — of both income that was not being absolutely obliterated by runaway inflation and morally/spiritually — because it gave Hitler and his fallacious sense of meaning a way in. Indeed, philosopher Lou Marinoff writes: “In its most unfortunate manifestations, the belief that salvation lies outside oneself leads people to embrace fatalism or apathy, in which case they assume no responsibility whatsoever for improving their lot in life. And you know what happens then? Exactly nothing. Your life doesn’t get any better all by itself. You have to make it so.”
“Thinkers have offered their own guides to a meaningful existence: the cultivation of creativity itself, aesthetic contemplation, the pursuit of spiritual or humanitarian ideals, the full employment of one’s energies, the realization of individual talents, the search for truth, the experience of love in one or another of its modalities. However we finally analyze these alternatives, they all belong to a spectrum of life attaining meaning it does not have until we bestow that meaning upon it.”
“[Philosopher Martin] Heidegger failed to emphasize that meaningful acts are devices for surmounting death even though we recognize its inevitability. They enable us to overcome death by creating and expressing values that not only manifest life but also further its ongoing existence in ourselves.”
“Civilization is always conservative inasmuch as the future determines itself by means of responses — many of them habitual — that preserve what was meaningful in the past. But it is also progressive, since it gives the imagination material for extending earlier attitudes through sophisticated reactions that make possible vastly unforeseen and often unforeseeable variations.”
“Physical decay and many types of disease, including mental illness, are often unable to diminish it. Indeed, some of the most meaningful lives are lived by persons who undergo severe pathologies of either mind or body. A meaningful life can and often does result from efforts to overcome such impediments.”
“I think instead that we must treat death as the great destroyer of meaning since it is the termination of each life in nature. But human beings know that they will die, and this awareness may itself provide a source of meaning for them. Moreover, the death of one person is an occurrence in the lives of those who survive. For them, too, it can take on creative meaning.”
^ My fomer friend Laurent Grenier, a quadripalegic, notes two interesting things in this vein: “I use the specter of death, which is looming over my life, as an incentive to make the most of my current situation. I am resolved to live fully, at once. There is no time for delay. Besides, if a resolution to live fully is not effective immediately, it cannot be taken seriously,” and “From childhood until death, the human condition is a succession of challenges that entail a continuous test of will against laziness, ignorance, suffering, egocentricity, malevolence, and wastefulness – among other evils. This test is a thrilling (sometimes overwhelming) opportunity in dignity.”
“[Philosopher Jean-Paul] Sartre gives the example of a man who courageously prepares to die on the scaffold and determines to make a brave appearance at the end in order to round out his life with dignity. This would be comparable to viewing death as the resolving chord. But before the man can be hanged, he dies of influenza. That is what life is like, Sartre states, and it shows why death is not a culmination but only an absurd termination. Death is not a part of life: it only supervenes upon it. Death occurs as a foreign agency, and for no reason that reveals the fundamental nature of the life it dispatches.”
“When we live with an awareness of the limits death entails and also symbolizes, we begin to feel the wonder in our ability to do anything at all. In view of the littleness of our lives, even our minor achievements may seem grandiose. Accompanied by a realistic sense of mortality, our decision about how to live take on a meaning they would not otherwise have.”
“People fear death, [philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer says, because they think of themselves as separate substances, each unique and ontologically independent. This is erroneous, he insists, since we — and everything else that lives — are but manifestations of an ultimate metaphysical force that courses through all of nature. This force, which follows deterministic laws and in itself has no purpose, is ‘the will.'”
“If you find your existence meaningless, he says to the young man or woman in his audience, you need only recognize how abysmal life would be unless well-intentioned people like yourself accepted their responsibilities. Faced with an urgent crisis that demands moral commitment, [philosopher] William James asserts, the ordinary person will respond.”
“Great necessities call out great virtues.”
“Stoic heroism – that we must confront the most difficult and unpalatable truths about ourselves without flinching, go on looking them clean in the eye, and live in the light of this knowledge without any reward other than the living of such a life for its own sake.”
“We are the will, [philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer claims: our life is only an expression of it. When we die, our personal energies are merely reprocessed by the cosmic force that briefly appeared in us and will now appear in something else. From this point of view, death does not destroy our individuality, since we never really had it in the first place.”
“Though we no longer have authorities whose certitudes can direct us, we acquire the freedom to mold our own destiny. Santayana’s approach requires greater courage perhaps, and so it may be harder to attain. But this alone would make it more outstanding as a personal achievement. Nevertheless, [philosopher George] Santayana does not explain how this attitude can be distinguished from bravado or mere defiance.”
“What happens throughout the ages is that human intelligence, having doubtless evolved as a device that enables our species to master its physical environment, creates infinitely varied systems of extended purposiveness. These systems become important to mankind; they acquire special value and often stimulate a further search for values.”
“Aesthetic creativity, like creativity in general, usually involves an endless quest toward new and ever-changing values. The artist may say that he is pursuing “the ideal,” but rarely will he define it as a particular culmination that would be the absolute fulfillment of his labors if only he could attain it. Whatever he does accomplish becomes a springboard for further acts of creativity.”
^ “A musician must make his music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to ultimately be at peace with himself,” said noted psychologist and humanist Abraham Maslow. As well: “We have so many amazing examples of human creativity from human prehistory and history, such as the pyramids of Egypt and the Mayan ruins at Chichin Itza, the statues of Nemrut Dag in western Turkey, the Acropolis in Athens with its Parthenon, the Roman roads and aqueducts that crisscross Europe—an ongoing progression of varied and enduring human creative achievements.” Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is “to fit together” and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating – whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.”
“It [the Platonic outlook regarding ideals] instills an alluring vision of goods that lie beyond each present experience, and it encourages us to take purposive action in the attempt to snare them. But then it systematically dashes every hope by asserting that nothing in the actual world, nothing in nature or the environment, is really valuable since none of it can possibly satisfy our craving for the absolute.”
“Each experience of goodness serves to justify our ability to idealize. The organism is recompensed by what it has gained while also being spurred to continued action by the knowledge that ideally much more can always be imagined. A meaningful life results from this intermeshing of gratifications that matter not only in themselves but also in their ability to awaken new desires and new pursuits.”
“When [philosopher Georg] Hegel said that nothing great was ever achieved without passion, he was referring to our passionate need to serve one or another ideal. Not all men and women feel this love with the fervor and the desperate craving that belong to passion. But love occurs at various temperatures, sometimes hot and sometimes tepid.”
“Loving another person means experiencing him or her as more than just the embodiment or representation of an ideal. It means accepting this person as he is, bestowing value upon him….”
“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”
Existentialist psychologist and former loved professor of psychology at The University of Southern California, Leo Buscaglia, notes the following: “The hardest battle you’re ever going to fight is the battle to be you. You’re going to have to fight it for the rest of your life in a world where people feel more comfortable if you can be there for their convenience. But if you give ‘you’ up, there’s nothing left. But if we can get our stuff together we can become all that we are. And then you can say, ‘ I am. I am becoming.'”
“We may say that happiness requires a harmonious adjustment between oneself and one’s surroundings; but an individual who finds himself out of harmony, his experience largely consisting in a struggle against a hostile environment, might nevertheless have a meaningful life.”
“The hero, and to some extent, the saint are people who often feel the need to make this kind of choice. They may experience happiness, but they are prepared to sacrifice it for the sake of some goal that has greater importance for them. Though their lives are not the only ones that are meaningful, they reveal that meaning and happiness are not identical.”
“When these afford satisfaction, either in themselves or in their consequences, human beings are happy to some degree; and unless they have at least a modicum of happiness, it may be impossible for them to pursue most of the projects they care about. The concepts of meaning and happiness are thus interwoven. They are nevertheless distinct.”
“If our vocabulary did not contain the words trouble, adversity, calamity and grief, it could not contain the words bravery, patience and self sacrifice. Those who know no hardships will know no hardihood. Those who face no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the human characteristics we admire most grow in a soil with a strong mixture of trouble.”
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