THE SENSE OF LIFE

 

SENSE OF LIFE

If we want to give the term meaning its full scope, we must carefully distinguish it from the term meaning. In the different contexts, each word – the same as each reality and action – adds to its basic meaning a special nuance. That nuance is his meaning. Drinking a glass of wine is a fact that always has a basic meaning.

Its meaning changes if it is drunk alone or in company, routinely or in a festive spirit. Red and green have their own meaning unalterable. Put them in neighborhood and you will see how they acquire a special coloration, a peculiar sense. Experience reveals to us that meaning encompasses more than meaning.

To grasp the meaning of an action, it is sufficient to analyze this in itself. The meaning is only revealed when such an action is contemplated in a plot of related Interactions. You're hungry and you see an appetizing apple basket at the entrance to a fruit shop. It has great meaning for you to take one and eat it. You feel like it, you like it, it satisfies you. That gesture is full of meaning. It means a lot to you. But does it make sense? The apple you want to eat is not abstract, it is in a specific context: it belongs to the fruit tree and you can not appropriate it without arranging it with it. 

To make onesefiation means entering a network of interrelationships and conforming to their laws. The meaning is only illuminated when we take some distance and contemplate an action or reality in its context. The meaning has a relational condition. Because it is relational, the meaning is changing; can increase or threaten, acquire new nuances or become more elemental and rough. If I wish to master a reality, I tend to downgrade it as an object, as a means for my interested purposes, not to see it in all its complexity, as a world of relationships. 

The contemplative, respectful, collaborative gaze sees, for example, bread and wine as the fruit of a multiple confluence of elements: peasant, seeds, vines, earth, rain, wind, sun... The meaning of the terms bread and wine is enriched to the maximum thanks to this relational way of seeing. He who only sees in bread a means to satisfy hunger does not alter its basic meaning, but it threatens the bread of its meaning. The understanding of the fundamental terms of the disciplines that study the enigma of the human being, counts not only from our degree of intelligence and preparation, but also, and not ultimately, to our attitude to life: a dominant and overbearing attitude, or respectful and supportive.

• The Sense springs in the process of personal development

The question of meaning arises with the human being. The animal doesn't need to raise it. It has to develop, but its development is predetermined with relentless firmness by the species. That's why you can never be wrong to act. It is enough for him to follow his instincts to ensure his survival and that of the species. Human beings must also grow by natural law, but they have the privilege of knowing it and specifying how to carry it out. Man is an area, not a mere object, and develops as a person creating new areas through /encounter. The encounter is a source of light and meaning. 

As I meet other people and form communities, I feel that I shape my life in a way that fits the demands of my personal reality, what I already am and what I am called to be. This call is my vocation and mission. When my fundamental choices, my habits and my actions are oriented towards the fulfillment of this mission and this vocation, the march of my existence is carried out in the right direction, in the right direction. To the same extent it makes sense.

Meaning is not something that man can have statically, as an object; acquires it and possesses it dynamically, by entering into a creative relationship with other realities. Human beings, however well-endowed as it is in terms of powers, cannot be creative alone. At both the biological and spiritual levels, fertility is always dual. Any activity, even the most intense, can only make full sense if it actively assumes certain possibilities that are given to it from outside. I learn a poem by heart; I call it over and over again, phrasing differently, altering the rhythms, looking for the perfect fit of shape and background... Very soon I will feel that the poem belongs to me, even though it is different from me. He ceased to be distant, external and strange to make me intimate. Now I no longer have been dictated from outside; I proclaim it my inner voice, and I participate in it creatively. 

I set it up by letting me set up for him. This bilateral or reversible activity to be configured is only possible in the form of creative events, not in that of purely artisanal or productive processes. Human life develops at the creative level, linking itself to other areas and bringing forth new, larger areas. When one succeeds to see that his living environment consists not only of objects, but also of scopes, he discovers that the meaning of life is the result of the activity that created fruitful encounters. The idea of meaning hangs out of the conception of the human being.

• The Sense of Life and True Freedom

Our lives develop and thus become meaningful when we fulfill our duty to choose by virtue of the true ideal of our existence. This ideal is given by the creation of valuable forms of unity with the surrounding realities. In choosing in this way, we begin to be free, as we distance ourselves from our immediate appetites, fly over the situation and choose by virtue of a reality other than us and extremely valuable. If that duty we assume is regarded as imposed from the outside, our inner freedom is still incipient: we free ourselves from attachment to our appetites, but we remain submissive to an external and alien body. 

But when we come to love that ideal, we internalize it in such a way that we feel it as an inner requirement. With this, our choice in favor of the ideal gains spontaneity and inner freedom becomes perfect. One becomes transparent to the ideal. This is present in all our activity. Such a presence transfigures our being and acting and fills it with meaning. Our life has full meaning when it does not need to tend towards the ideal, because it has already become its most intimate reason for being and the impulse of its action. The ideal then plays the supreme value function, which dynamically combines all the others as a vault key.

• The sense and liability 

The meaning of our lives springs when we are responsible, in the double sense that we respond to the value that polarizes all others and respond to the fruits of such a response. This active receipt of value is a creative activity. And every form of creativity is dual, it involves at least the collaboration of two realities. Therefore, it requires a selfless attitude of openness. If I pay exclusively to my interests, I block myself, I do not open myself, blind the sources of creativity and meaning. Hence, if I want to discover the meaning of my existence at a certain time, I must not ask what match I can take from life, but what life requests of me in that circumstance. 

If someone expects anything from me and I satisfy his desires, my life is burdened with meaning, for he has turned to the true ideal; it has been really put into truth, as it has moved in the plane of creativity and complied with the laws of personal growth. Conversely, the one who only cares about what beings in the environment may report to him tends to reduce them to means for his purposes, thereby reducing them on the condition of objects and making creative activity unviable. Consequently, he empties his life in meaning, because he does not base encounters or create new areas of life; comes down to manipulating objects. He places his life on a lower plane because of it, departs from his existential truth, exhausts his creative capacity.  

Thus, the one who confuses personal love with mere eroticism is at risk of reducing the other person to mere source of gratification. This relationship life of interested can have an intense meaning, even moving, but meaningless, for the decisive reason that it does not place its behavior on the plane of creativity, but in that of the arbitrary management of a rewarding reality. This lack of authenticity and adjustment to the conditions of one's being, translates into a diminishing sense. The sense of human life is enhanced by the integrative attitude of various planes of reality: for example, the sensitive-corporeal and the spiritual, the objective and the  ambiguous. It is threatened, or even completely nullified, by the reductionist attitude that moves exclusively in the most elementary levels of reality and activity. When I let myself be carried away by the lower values, which drag, and leave aside the call of the higher values, which attract respecting my freedom, I do not act in an integrative way, but one-dimensional,  under-creating. I don't carry my life in meaning; I orient it in a false direction.

• The meaning and Harmonization of Autonomy and Heteronomy 

When you adopt an inclusive attitude and it opens up. to the encounter of realities seen as scopes, creates with these a common playing field, in which spatial relationships here-there, inside, inside-outside, the own-the other... are happily overcome. In the physical-corporeal aspect, two friends are outside each other, because two bodies cannot occupy the same place. But, in the playful-creator aspect, they are in the intimacy of the same field of interaction. What comes from outside is no longer necessarily external and alien; can be intimate to them. 

And surrendering to it, or taking it as an impulse to act, does not imply a surrender to the other, therefore  an alienation or alienation, which is meaningless in a being called to be governed autonomously. When living creatively, the scheme /autonomy-heteronomy ceases to appear as a dilemma, to present itself as a contrast. I'm really self-employed to be a heteronome. I am guided by my own criteria by actively assuming fruitful criteria of action for my life and making them intimate, while still being different. As one personally lives this integration of autonomy and heteronomy, he feels  full,full, overflowing with meaning.

Something similar can be said of the mutual fertilisation of /freedom and norms. If I passively accept a rule or a precept, I do not make them intimate; they remain external, stranger and alien, and, by letting me be guided by them, I alienate and lose my personal identity, my authenticity. I do not act with proper autonomy and independence. My life loses its personal character. It doesn't make sense. She's downgraded, she's envied. It is not in truth, but in falsehood. We now understand clearly that nonsense or absurdity always comes from a lack of creativity, and it starts from a mistake of principle: from an interested will of dominance, to reduce the beings of the environment to mere objects and to limit the activity to the management of objective or reduced realities to objects. 

The Literature of absurdity was able to reflect with breathtaking verence the depaupered image offered by the man who has descended almost to the zero degree of creativity: instead of enthusiasm, he feels boredom and tedium; Instead of joy, he experiences sadness; instead of hope, he harbors despair. His life appears completely empty, and as he looks at this darkness, he feels spiritual vertigo, and with him anguish, despair, and a desolate loneliness. This distressing and desperate void is an absolute lack of meaning. Not without deep reason, today, renowned psychiatrists – such as V. Frankl and logotherapy – say that existential emptiness is the most common cause of the psychic dearchive dearchies of today's man.

•  Does Life make Sense?

Thus, in general, this question does not allow for a convincing answer. The meaning springs through creative activity, and human beings are only creative in every concrete situation. Someone's in an accident, and you reveal yourself when you see his mutilation. Your irritation leads you to think that life is meaningless. Don't waste time making general considerations about life. Get to help that needy being, and you'll see your concrete lives fill with meaning. In the encounter, the sense becomes palpable, dense, suggestive, comforting. 

To grasp meaning beyond meaning, we must broaden the vital horizon: the criteria of interpretation of life, the patterns of conduct, the perspectives from which we can contemplate our existence and its avatars. A bullfighter was paralyzed by an accident and, being unable to pursue his career, took his own life. He did not know how unfortunate to see his future life from a different perspective than he had previously cherished. He was not right to broaden his horizon of creativity, which was not limited to the exercise of the art of bullfighting, but may have taken other, no less dignified and fertile forms. If he had, his life would not have seemed absurd, unworthy of being lived, but overflowing with the possibilities of gaining meaning. 

With a little creative imagination, he could have outlined other lines of action, based on his current abilities, and given rise to a multitude of encounters of different order. When he felt despondent to death by the tragedy of deafness, Beethoven recommended to his brother Charles, in his will in Heiligenstadt,that he would not stop practicing virtue, for thanks to her he had overcome the temptation to resort to suicide. By virtue Beethoven understood the defense of the freedom of others, the surrender to the service of the needy (Fidelio), fidelity to the ultimate roots of being, which lie in "the loving Father who is above the tent of the clouds"2; in short: human solidarity in all aspects of life. This welcoming attitude raises the deep joy that elevates us to unequaled peaks in the last time of the Ninth Symphony. According to Bergson, joy "always announces that life has triumphed, that it has gained ground, that it has reported a victory; all great joy has a triumphant accent."

•      The sense is illuminated through the risk of creativity  

The creation of very valuable forms of unity requires effort and risk, for to meet we must open ourselves to others in a generous, confident and sincere way, and this attitude may not be reciprocated, and even betrayed. Hence the temptation to seek inner protection and peace in infrapersonal, under-creating,  infra-responsible lifestyles, which are not capable of encounter, but also of scheduled struggle.  

Since World War I, a sense of nostalgia has been felt in Europe for the strata of being inhumane. The solitude of the tree (Caligula, of A. Camus), the veracity of the animal and the vegetable (Franz Marc), the primitive times when man was mainly beast and had safe instincts such as the animal (Ortega) is longed for. fears of intelligence and seeks the necessary unity with the environment through methods of  empastant intuition (H. Hesse); the spirit of being contradictory of the soul (L. is accused. Klages). 

These attempts to live life fully, but without risk, carry in themselves the guarantee of failure, because the human being is configured for encounter with the realities of the environment, not for fusion or estrangement. If I merge headed, I get lost as a person. It is the season of vertigo's vertigo of the ambition to enjoy. If I stand by to dominate, I block my personal development. It is the last phase of the vertigo of the ambition to possess. In both cases, my situation of spiritual helplessness becomes extreme. If we go down to the level of the animal, we do not achieve the peculiar form of peace of those who do not need to program their existence because their instincts ensure their adjustment to the environment and their  survival. 

Man is not a being that has the characteristics of the animal and specific ones, so that, abandoned these, it acquires the status of a mere being of instincts and conditioned reflexes. Man can never give up his intelligent status, even if his creative activity is bordering the zero degree. By not exercising the ability to choose by virtue of an ideal and assume high values, man does not acquire safe instincts, instincts that ensure his existence. His instincts or tendencies are not in itself oriented towards the goal that marks the full achievement of man. They are undetermined, so they can lead to the full development of the person or to their total suffocation. 

In apparent paradox, the only way for man to obtain protection is to beware of dominating the situation and adopting an attitude of confident dedication. Through the risk involved, it can, in some cases, achieve genuine encounter; and, in it, the fullness of meaning. This is achieved only by the integration of all the energies that the human being harbors, not by the renunciation of the highest and most demanding4. When man overcomes the inner excision and integrates the different planes of reality that converge in his being, he lives a very joyful experience: he discovers clearly the eminent possibilities that unity opens up for him, and feels that his life takes on an unprecedented dimension, an unheard-of depth. This profound way of seeing and feeling life entails a fullness of meaning.

•        The achievements of the Supreme form of Meaning 

If a person expands his human horizon in the direction of Infinity, he confers a new and greater rank on the meaning of his life. This exceptional experience of meaning is made when we actively respond to the word that brings us a message of superhuman wealth and we found a meeting relationship with the /Absolute. Whoever has lived this experience at least once in his life will see his existence enriched with that horizon of meaning, which will constantly invite him to overcome all precarious realization of himself and bring to full development his vocation and his mission. This supreme horizon is given by religious faith, radically understood not only as a cold intellectual nod to certain dogmas, but as personal adherence to the Supreme Being. The encounter with the absolutely perfect form of reality elevates man to the best of himself, to the maximum display of his noblest aspirations, and brings him feelings of enthusiasm and full happiness. 

S. Kierkegaard rightly states, in his programmatic work The Mortal Disease, that "the antidote to despair is faith." This implies surrender, bonding, love. That implies a selfish encapsulation in itself and the breakdown of every love bond. Faith, linked to trust and fidelity, is at the basis of the process of creating encounters that I often call ecstasy. Despair is the phase of the vertigo process that precedes the destruction of one's personality. Actively responding to any invitation to /meeting is an inescapable condition for giving full meaning to life, one's own and even that of others, who are called to stop being strangers and become intimate. That step is taken in the experience of participation. By participating, man transcends himself and discovers that "the deepest thing in me does not come from me" 

(G. Marcel). Man reaches its full meaning (plenification)when he directs his life in the sense (direction) that mark the conditions of participatory activity. Learning to participate, in the full sense of the word, is the goal of all authentic human formation. Man is not given in advance the meaning of his own existence, as an object that can be possessed and retained. The meaning thus constitutes for man a goal and an always renewed task, a challenge that urges him to transcend at all times the milestones already achieved.

                             By  Robert., NSINGA