It Is Not the Individual but Humanity That Is a Story
The human being is born, grows, lives, and dies. Is the whole story as simple as this? Or does it truly mean something — into what world we were born, under what conditions we grew, how we lived, and at last what memories we left behind us in dying?
Whichever of the two positions a person stands nearer to, I cannot say that they are in error. For it is possible to produce sound arguments for both. Especially when one turns to look upon the past of humanity: setting aside persons few enough to be counted on a handful, even the story of the one who lived most meaningfully has been effaced in this turning of the world. When, regarded thus, we have before us a picture rather shattering, what is to be said to the one who asks: who then can speak of the meaning of anything? Since I hold this to be the tightest argument against meaning, I have chosen this one alone from among them. (You may of course think otherwise.) To vanish… surely the most terrible end that can befall a person. Naturally, of the person who thinks and comprehends… Let us say it in an Aristotelian manner: the human being by nature desires to exist and to be remembered.
I should like to open two parentheses. The first: the matter that the one whose story is effaced and the one whose story is not both arrive at the same place. The second: the power of faith to resolve this dispute at the root. I shall not touch upon the former here, since it is an altogether different choice, nor upon the latter, since it leaves no matter to discuss.
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To return to our proper subject… I am among those who stand nearer to the second view, that is, to the genuine existence of a meaning. I am among those who believe that a person's life does not consist merely in the performance of the verbs to be born, to grow, to live, and to die, but that behind it there dwells a meaning, whether manifest or veiled. Naturally, I have strong grounds that impel me to this reasoning.
First of all: it is not the human but humanity that is a story, and this thought of mine runs diametrically counter to today's world, which fans individualism to the utmost. That effort at existence displayed by occupying little spaces and laying claim to those tiny squares is both futile and contrary to human nature. The human being, a social creature, wrote history by a togetherness that was the exact opposite of this. The most important output of our so highly developed mind was not a set of inventions; it was the enlarging of the population that holds together, by bringing us to perceive the necessity of acting in common. Thus we were able to stand up to nature, to the other living beings, and thereby to the world and to life. In the end the human attained — though for some it is disputable — the position of the ruling species. Without doubt this necessity of togetherness did not remain a consequence of reason alone; it worked itself into the human soul as well. Where is it that you look for the cause of your postmodern depressions?
Just like science… Science is a heap of pieces of knowledge, great and small, and at the same time the effort to enlarge that heap. It is the raising of a building in which tons of trial and error yield one correct brick, and in which these bricks, coming together, touch upon life. Which labourer of science could raise this building alone? We may adapt this logic to life; indeed, it is this logic in life that was adapted to science. We live all together. Every one of us is trying to produce a brick — perhaps to be a brick — and in the end, by that brick, to contribute to the forming of a safe harbour that encircles us all. This building sometimes bears the identity of science: it brings forth the technical elements of life, or mends your health. Sometimes it is a social web: it nourishes your soul, or affords you pleasure. And sometimes it is a body of rules: it orders your life, or protects you, and even forms systems that think in your stead. Put at its simplest: not one of us is capable of meeting, across a whole life, the entirety of what we need. Our knowledge, our experience, our skill, and most fundamentally our time do not suffice to furnish such power. Life is a whole of efforts in which every person takes hold of one end of the work. Every one of us is a brick in this building, and if bricks enough are broken, the building collapses. And so life comes to an end. There is that matter of our all being in the same boat — look at that reckoning from this side as well.
Very well — and what if only "I" break off from that building?.. There is no need to analyse this at length. You are I; and he, and the other… Since one of us has felt so, there must stand somewhere millions who share the same feelings. Those millions may well amount to bricks enough.
The other face of the medallion is more interesting still. We have come into this world once, and we have a lifetime in hand. Moreover, we have a cast of mind fed, through a mechanism of positive feedback, by certain emotions — I shall not go into what they are; in today's flood of content one may meet with them easily and again and again. To pass the time in hand with pleasure, we have no road to tarry upon other than to busy ourselves with occupations suited to our nature, and to arrive at a favourable result in at least some of them. Call it what you will; for the pursuits you might wish to fit into a lifetime there is no definition beyond this. You have certain occupations; after all your striving, some of them come to their end as your heart would have it, and leave you contented within the frame of your own value judgments. The form of this tarrying that best befits human nature is, for the reasons we touched upon a moment ago, that which bears the theme of humanity. For the evolution of our mind proceeded along the axis of remaining together and of keeping our species alive. And every effort in that direction turns into a meaning that nourishes our well-being.
In sum, we have positioned ourselves far from certain popular readings of meaning that promise pleasure and make one feel precious. To my mind this is what the matter deserves, and what is true of it. Yet we have not sold the dream of a life free of meaning; on the contrary, we have touched upon this: that without constructing meaning in this direction, we could not speak of life at all. Every quality of a person, every story of a person, has a meaning. This meaning appears only as we run all together after the common aims of which we are a part. And it vanishes only when humanity vanishes. In truth, at that hour there would remain no person either to go in pursuit of meaning.