Meaning of life - Question Essay Example for Free

Meaning of life Question Essay Freud, like Newton and Darwin, did not consider himself to be a philosopher but had an enormous influence over philosophy, he believed that to consider the question: â€Å"what is the meaning of life? † is a waste of time. The question, he thought, is rather meaningless and has no ultimate answer, asking it is being somewhat like asking what the color of time is (Mason). There are serious arguments that can be advanced in support of this point of view, especially if we agree that meaning is not something inherent to events, things, and other processes and so on, but something we ascribe to them (Mason). To think otherwise would involve ascribing them something that is a product of our intellect and consciousness. The meaning of X, whether X is an event, a thing, or a process, is actually the connection or a set of those connections X has with other events, things, and processes and so on, which we choose to consider to be of particularly importance to us (Mason). This is why the same events have different meaning for different people. For a Chinese, be he a Communist or an anti-Communist, the meaning of the war in Korea is that it marks the end of a century of national humiliation and a permanent threat of devastation through a long series of military defeats by foreign powers; for an American, the meaning of that very same war is that it put an end to the attempts to expand by direct military invasion the influence of Chinese Communism (Adams). There are undoubtedly countless amounts of explanations to this riddle, and there are many circumstances that can change one’s perspective towards this problem, but ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer. Paragraph 2: Everything changes radically, of course, if we belong to a Church. Everything is noted under God’s eye For believers, their life long goal is to sustain God’s knowledge and go his way. Go to the right passage and obey his â€Å"laws† Their passage of life consists of saving one’s immortal soul. Duty of life makes up the meaning of life. Paragraph 3: The practical Romans grasped something that over the head of two millennia of Christianity resonates with contemporary pragmatism, and with the life philosophy resumed in the dictum â€Å"the meaning of life is life itself† Meaning of life is life itself Living the life in happiness is the meaning of life. Anything that fits you the best will become your meaning of life. Find out your goals, what you want to achieve life, and that will become your meaning of life ultimately. Limitations will apply. Paragraph 4: Living your life according to this life philosophy, which is the most commonly chosen among the life philosophies derived from the answer â€Å"the meaning of life consists in living life†, is usually not too difficult for a â€Å"normal† person living under â€Å"normal† circumstances. Meaning of life depended on the status of the person. Meaning of life is to live a good life. Do not know what exactly is a good life but a good life will be noted. Everyone has different meanings to life. Paragraph 5 (Conclusion): But be it Confucius, Aristotle or even Kant with his theory of being impossible to achieve moral perfection or any other of the great minds each of whom spent years of their lives trying to provide humanity with an answer to the fatal question, essentially, they trying to tell us what to live for and how to live. Namely, almost all the answers they offered have the same basic flaw: when they are workable at all, they work only for very few exceptional individuals and are way beyond the reach for the rest of us (Shields); us, those weak, silly and prone to sin creatures that make up the vast majority of humankind. Luckily, this vast majority do not worry too much about what great minds have in mind, but just live their lives as they best can according to their own, petty, senseless wishes and notions (Metz): work their gardens, even if they never heard of Voltaire, and whether they know that Freud existed or not, do not waste their humble intellectual potential trying to answer a question that has no answer (Metz). The rest is a senseless waste of time, â€Å"Primum vivere, deindre filosofare†, and if you spend too much time and effort philophizing, you will have no time nor energy to live, which involves earning money to pay the bills. As to the great eternal and fundamental questions, let’s leave them to professional philosophers whom society pays to do this specific job, as it pays plumbers to do the plumbing, scientists to explore nature, nurses to help the sick, the clowns to entertain us.