The Axis of Being, part I —Is Life Worth Living?

            

The Black Virgin, Rocamadour, France

I recently made the comment to a friend that having words and insects around me was part of what made life “worth living.”

Their reply was that life isn’t “worth” living—it just is.

This didn’t sound quite right to me, and so I thought I’d examine the question.

The statement is one of those statements that purports to be communicating something profound and important, as though it had an inherent authority greater than the idea that life has a value that makes it worth participating in. 

Let us presume it’s meant to indicate that life has an authority of its own that exceeds and transcends valuation.

Is that in fact true?

This question goes to the heart of what I’ve been attempting to investigate in my essays on Metaphysical Humanism. What is meaning? How does it relate to value? If everything just “is,” and meaning and value are completely arbitrary (or even non-existent) entities, should we then conclude that all things are both relative and, in the end, entirely pointless?

The essays on Metaphysical Humanism examine much of this in detail, but a particular point perhaps a bit outside of that scope comes to mind here.

Anyone who has had an episode of depression knows the difference between what it means when life is felt to be worth living and when it isn’t. To pretend anything else is sophistry; our emotions are a very real and integral part of our lives and of life itself. Life wouldn’t even be life as we understand the word unless emotions were in play; they are real forces which have a real impact, and they can’t be so loftily discounted with a philosophical wave of the hand as though they were insignificant or unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

This kind of thinking— that there’s no inherent value to life, and no way to meaningfully sense it—is all too common among those who think too much, at the expense of the other parts. It marks a mindset which feels that hard data triumphs all other functions of perception. 

Emotions are notoriously difficult to boil down to data points; why not just edit them out of the picture by discounting them as insignificant? This is exactly what one does when one makes statements like the opening one. It’s actually a way of devaluing life itself, by removing it from a field of meaningful discourse. It doesn’t look like that, of course; it’s cleverly disguised as an objective philosophical premise. 

This examination of the emotional part of life deserves more scrutiny in regard to who we are and how we are; it connects to our inner world and helps form it. 

So the next set of essays will relate to those questions... in my usual, perhaps rambling, way.

May life be worth living for you,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.