Who Is Spengler

Why you won't find the meaning of life

Why you won't find the meaning of life
By Spengler

Much as I admire the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who turned his horrific experience at Auschwitz into clinical insights, the notion of "man's search for meaning" seems inadequate. Just what about man qualifies him to search for meaning, whatever that might be?

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht warned us against the practice in The Threepenny Opera :
Ja, renne nach dem Gluck
Doch renne nicht zu sehr
Denn alle rennen nach dem Gluck
Das Gluck lauft hinterher.

(Sure, run after happiness, but don't run too hard, because while


everybody's running after happiness, it moseys along somewhere behind them).

Brecht (1898-1956) was the kind of character who gave Nihilism a bad name, to be sure, but he had a point. There is something perverse in searching for the meaning of life. It implies that we don't like our lives and want to discover something different. If we don't like living to begin with, we are in deep trouble.

Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author Soren Kierkegaard portrayed his Knight of Faith as the sort of fellow who enjoyed a pot roast on Sunday afternoon. If that sort of thing doesn't satisfy us (feel free to substitute something else than eating), just what is it that we had in mind?

People have a good reason to look at life cross-eyed, because it contains a glaring flaw - that we are going to die, and we probably will become old and sick and frail before we do so.

Spengler » The Elusive Meaning of Life

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‘For those of you who still are searching for the meaning of life, the sooner you figure out that the search itself is the problem, the better off you will be.’

I find it quite revealing that in your preaching on the futility of searching for the meaning to life that you never once mentioned the God of Abraham,Issac and Jacob once,not once.

at some point in my transition from student to worker, I settled on “being useful, and helpful” to the extent that I could. Having lost formal participation in the workforce more than ten years ago, and having since been rejected for even formal volunteer activities, I took a break from The Weather Channel when the rain finally stopped yesterday. My sole goal was to collect the fallen branches and check my downspouts before the winds came.

Then I discovered a big chunk of a big sugar maple had been partially sheared and was blocking my one-block street so that the four neighbors to my south could not drive out. I reverted to my Scout-like “be helpful” persona. Asked the neighbor if she had reported the damage. Yes, she had, and some day the village would come to remove the twelve inch tree limb. I offered any help, something this neighbor has never considered while watching me shovel snow from my driveway.

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