Summary of the existentialist answer to the meaning of life

I wrote this in an email to a person who was at my PhD presentation and asked if I could elaborate on the philosophy a bit. I said I couldn’t do it in the time we had available but that I would write him something. Voila.

The starting point for this analysis is the observation that even those who are rich, successful, beautiful and popular (i.e. they should be happy) still seem challenged by existential questions and this can often derail their happiness (witness the angst of teenagers). The main ones are:

(a)    "Where am I?" (The question of world, which is mostly addressed by physics and metaphysics, so I won't go into it here) 

(b)    "Who am I?" (The question of identity or being) 

(c)    "What should I do?" (The question of purpose) 

(d)    "What is right?" (The ethical question)

Humans appear unique among animals in being confronted by these questions. Uniquely, we need 'a reason for being'. We need a reason to get up in the morning and go about our business. Animals don't, they just eat, sleep and reproduce. 

So to ask these questions is essentially the human condition. It goes hand in hand with consciousness. When philosophers have diagnosed this issue they have talked often about 'man wants being'. The problem is that (wo)man is always becoming. That is to say that at each moment we are a different person. Being would require having a fixed essence, the way gold is defined as having an atomic number of 79. Humans don't have such a fixed essence - they need to define a unique identity (Moh Widodo as opposed to just 'some guy') and this essence is constantly changing as it interacts with the world. One example that I find useful for understanding this concept is that the essence of Usain Bolt, his being, is substantially characterised by being history's fastest man. 

There are two principle approaches to accomplishing this question for being - faith and coincidence. 

Faith works by holding the individual to an external set of values. Religious doctrine furnishes an answer to the questions of being — (a) you are part of a cosmic order, (b) you are a child of God, (c) you should do God's will, (d) and what is right is what is described as good in the holy book. You live in accordance with these values and in so doing your life is meaningful because it conforms to the cosmic order and your divinely determined place in it. 

The difficulty with religion is that there is no proof. Indeed, there cannot be proof. God is not a testable hypothesis. This is why faith is necessary. Kierkegaard (who was extremely pious) even goes so far as to say that "one must have faith in the absurd". He uses the story of Abraham as a useful device for elaborating this philosophy, and contrasts Abraham with the tragic hero of Greek Myths (like Odysseus), who try to do their own thing as the gods play their game.  

What faith does is to allow the individual to accept the received doctrine and be held by it. What I mean by 'held' is that religious doctrine invariably suggests a static set of values that must be conformed to. The individual's identity, their being, comports itself to this value set, which is unchanging, and so the individual is unchanging and thus achieves being, or at least an adequate measure of being because they have a fixed core of values. 

What I call coincidence is an arguably more difficult enterprise but it is the only recourse of an atheist or militant agnostic individual (i.e. someone fundamentally committed to scientific method). The key issue here is that an atheist or militant agnostic (henceforth I will just say atheist) individual rejects the possibility of objective values. There are no moral facts. You cannot find values or moral rules 'out there' in the universe. Such things are not written into the firmament. Instead, values are created by individuals and manifested/affirmed in their choices and actions. This has remarkable parallels with the rational actor and revealed preferences approach used by economics, but I will leave that to one side for now. 

The reason why this creation of values worries most people is that such subjective values appear to lack seriousness. If there is no cosmic order, if the just do not prosper, if there is no such thing as hell and if values are not written into the firmament then what is to stop someone simply changing their values as it suits them? I can be a family man one minute and a womaniser the next. These values have no moral authority. The solution to this problem is that unless an individual takes their subjective values seriously they will never achieve the coalescence of their being. As the coalescence of being is critical to an individual's 'happiness' they have an interest in living with serious values. 

Before moving to some subsequent problems I should explain how coincidence works to address the issue of seriousness. 

The first step is to determine your authentic values. This process typically takes place in young-adulthood, say 16–25 years old. It is achieved through a combination of introspection, rational engagement with ideas and the harmonisation of who you are (in terms of what kind of person you were born - this stuff is a bit fatalistic) with who you want to be. This last thing, the harmonisation, is tricky but critical. Let's take some basic examples. You cannot be a professional basketballer if you are 5'4" no matter how much you want to. If you expend a great deal of 'spiritual' or emotional energy working towards that goal you will be miserable because you can never succeed and thus never coincide. On the other hand, if you want to be skinny yet you continue to be fat despite no inherent bias (e.g. genetic) in that direction, you will also be miserable. You must comport yourself towards your conception of your ideal self but this ideal self must be conceived with your limitations in mind. I could write a whole book on this but let's leave it at that for now. 

Critically, for your values to be authentic they must be created by you. They cannot be received from outside; from places like social pressure, your church, your parents, your teachers, your friends etc. You can certainly engage with their arguments for why you should hold certain values, indeed you should, but for your values to be authentic you must freely and consciously choose them. Not doing so is called 'acting in bad faith'. Note that you can authentically choose religious faith. While the values of faith are found externally to the individual (in scripture and the firmament), faith itself is intrinsic to the individual.

Once you are equipped with your authentic values you must affirm them in your actions and choices. This essentially means acting with integrity (a very appropriate word for a discussion about being and morality). If you do this then you will be revealed to yourself through your action and the observations of other people to be the person you want to be and that you believe yourself to be. In so doing you will experience the coincidence of being (you will coincide with yourself). In so doing you 'become who you are' and achieve a measure of being, which, recall, was the goal. Consider a simple example. If you want to be very fit and healthy and you complete a marathon you will reflect to yourself in your actions that you are (and others will label you as) someone who is very fit. This is the coincidence of being — you are becoming who you want to be. The steady march of this process is what I refer to as the coalescence of being. It takes a lot of time and things enter and exit your 'self', but gradually the stable core of your being grows larger, denser and more detailed. 

Now if you don't affirm your values then you will never coincide with yourself. For example, say you have a strong moral value that you should not lie to people to get them into bed with you yet you continue to employ such methods because of your lusts. Such behaviour can never lead to coincidence and so you will be forever disharmonious and cut-off from being. We can see here then that you have an interest in being moral i.e. behaving in accordance with your values i.e. having integrity. This achieves something religious morality never could, which is to link self-interest and morality without the need for an external punishment mechanism like hell. 

In situations where you are failing to coincide with yourself there are three main possibilities:

1. Consider whether the failure is because you are not being honest with yourself (honesty is critical in this system) about either whom you are or who you want to be. For example, if you constantly fail at coincidence because you want to be a lawyer at the international court of justice but you can't bring yourself to study the 50 hours a week (minimum) that such an ambition requires to be realised, maybe your concept of who you want to be is too far removed from who you are. You must adjust this ambition.

2. Perhaps you are not be sufficiently rational (rationality is also critical) in your thinking about your values. We frequently have painful conflicts between our cherished values and the logical reality of the situation. In these cases, we must abandon the values and form new ones that are sound. I had this experience a hundred times over when I started learning economics. The spirit is very adept at walking under the weight of hypocrisy and dissonance but these things must be resolved to avoid neurosis and secure happiness because we cannot have identity when our personality is split depending on the situation at hand.  

3. Perhaps you are not exerting enough willpower. Willpower is the grease in the cogs of the coincidence machine and the fuel in the engine. You cannot go far in this system without exerting willpower (though perhaps those with low willpower simply need to acknowledge this and adjust their self-image appropriately). If you aren't making it to the ICJ maybe you need to exert some willpower and study harder!

This brings us to a final issue (at least in such a basic introduction), which is that while values in the atheistic coincidence framework can be serious there is still no constraint that forces them to conform to traditional notions of good and evil. One could be, for example, an authentic torturer. 

While this bothers a great many people I don't actually see it as a problem.

The first reason why is that most nasty values are very difficult to sustain if one is being rational because they will soon come into conflict with other values. For example, someone who values doing as they please will likely also value friendship, and yet these two things tend not to go well together. Someone who values freedom (as just about everyone must) will find it almost impossible to combine this value with a value for imprisoning and torturing people. 

Second, it is perfectly fitting that in a liberal, democratic society we should accept that there are no moral facts. The law can handle rules of civility that we consider critical to the functioning and development of society ('natural' law is not appropriate for a liberal society unless you define it the way Hayek did i.e. as a kind of received wisdom). But values, things like human rights, aesthetics and lifestyle choices, should be contested in the political space. We should discuss them. People should attempt to compel each other to change their values with reasoned arguments. This is inherent to the idea of affirming your values. For example, you might be a vegetarian for reasons x, y and z. If someone eats meat you must give them these reasons, you cannot simply say - that's wrong! In what sense have you authentically chosen your values if you cannot even justify them? Such moralistic admonishments can only lead to the persecution of minorities, as they did for the thousands of years before the advent of liberal values and liberal political institutions.

The final reason is that having no objective standard of right and wrong is profoundly liberating. I don't have to avoid gelatine or refrain from masturbating to be righteous or virtuous. I can contest the categorical imperative where it seems inappropriate. I can accept that some situations don't have a perfect ethical solution (like the runaway tram) and I can instead opt to reason and muddle my way through without having to stress that I am evil. We can be masters of our own destiny. Humanity should not fear its freedom.