Your Existential Crisis Makes You Modern
“What we understand as ‘atheism’ would have been unintelligible to the classical mind. Certainly, there were disagreements on the nature of the gods or their activities, and sometimes even the denial of the existence of certain gods. But the notion, intrinsic to the modern understanding of atheism, of immanence—of the world existing quite free of any sort of transcendent realm—would have been almost unintelligible to them.”
—GAVIN HYMAN, A Short History of Atheism, 2010
Imagine this: You’re charging your iPhone at the airport, and a man approaches you and asks, “Do you believe in electricity?” You and I, and I’d wager every other person in the airport, know that the whole of today’s modern lifestyle revolves around electricity and, as such, there’s no reason to debate belief. The question itself is nonsensical. The man leans in for a follow-up, asking, “Do you believe in God?” This question carries a bit more weight and, no matter your answer, it’s likely something you’ve previously contemplated or even debated before in your life. Unlike the nonsensical question about electricity, you understand the question of your belief in God as being a genuine query. Your understanding of this religious questioning makes you modern.
To Europeans living five hundred years ago, the question about God would have been just as peculiar as the question about electricity is to us today. God’s presence—not electricity—was everywhere. Theirs was a world dominated by the supernatural—spirits, demons, and magic. It was commonly believed that someone of ill health was possessed by demons who could drive that person to commit malevolent acts.71 Relics of saints held healing power. Storms, droughts, plagues, and periods of fertility were seen as acts of God. People engaged in regular collective rituals, like the reading of the Gospels in cornfields to ward off wicked spirits who could harm the harvest.72 In the words of German sociologist Max Weber, the world of the premodern people was enchanted.73 The existence of God and spirits wasn’t a question of belief, but an immediate certainty. The whole cosmos was a meaningful entity in which all parts hung together in a purposeful plan. This was true not only of medieval Europe but also globally. Of course, the names and functions of the various spirits varied from culture to culture. Some cultures believed in an omnipotent creator God, others in a myriad of local spirits.74 No matter the particularities of one’s beliefs, however, the enchanted world was one in which various spirits, demons, gods, and cosmic forces constantly influenced everyday occurrences big and small.
In this world of enchantment, there was no clear distinction between natural and supernatural explanations; no scientific worldview had yet been discovered or developed to ground the former. In theory, one could deny or debate the existence of individual spiritual beings—whether a certain spirit existed or God’s exact nature and powers—but if one wanted to stop believing in the whole enchanted worldview, there simply wasn’t a Plan B. No alternative worldview existed. Disenchantment—as a possible worldview—had not yet been invented. The conceptual tools and ideas upon which to base not believing simply didn’t exist. Instead, enchantment formed the totality of one’s worldview and, as such, it was impossible to abandon the collective rituals built into one’s day-to-day life that supported and strengthened this ideology.
Because of our fundamental difference in worldviews, the manner in which modern people talk about the meaning of life wouldn’t have made sense to medieval peasants nor for that matter to great ancient thinkers like Aristotle or Epictetus. For most of human history, people didn’t question the meaning of life because there was no need to think about it. In an enchanted cosmos, it was obvious that all life existed to fulfill some larger, cosmically driven or divinely given purpose. Prior to modernity, our ancestors’ views of the cosmos and man’s place in it was positively quaint. Their world, at least cosmically speaking, was orderly in ways ours certainly is not. The ancient Greeks knew nothing about the secret lives of black holes to say nothing about postmodern art or brain scanners. Even the boldest thoughts of Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher who lived in the fourth century BCE, were colored by the enchanted worldview within which he and his contemporaries lived.
If there was a contest to decide which single individual has most influenced Western thinking, Aristotle would be in the semifinals, facing heavyweights like Jesus and Sir Isaac Newton. In one of the most celebrated and studied books on ethics ever written, The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle pondered the idea of the highest human good. More specifically, he was looking for “some end of our actions that we wish for on account of itself.”75 He aimed to unravel what makes us special as compared to animals, believing that our human nature itself holds the clues for what determines the highest human good. It’s tempting to conflate this idea of the highest human good with meaning. I would argue, however, that Aristotle wasn’t discussing the meaning of life when he investigated the concept of the human good. He surely discussed the idea of human purpose, but not in the right way. Or, rather, his investigation was limited by the era in which he lived, and it lacked an awareness of one central element: the absurd.
In much the same way that we take electricity for granted, Aristotle didn’t doubt the existence of a cosmic order, so much so, in fact, that it never occurred to him that such an order may not exist. The enchanted world was a meaningful whole and, like every other creature, human beings had some inherent purpose or virtue, the fulfillment of which defined the human good: the virtue of a horse is to run and carry the rider; the virtue of an eye is to give us sight; and thus for Aristotle, there must exist “the virtue of a human being,” some form of excellence unique to being human.76 Observing that our capacity for rational thinking sets us apart from other animals, he concluded that the human good must be about living in accordance with this rational soul, which requires certain virtues. For him it was never a question of whether there is or isn’t a purpose to human existence. In the enchanted cosmos Aristotle lived in, it was self-evident that humans had a purpose since everything had some inherent purpose; it was only a matter of us discovering it.
The grand question about life for Aristotle and for the next few millennia of Western thinking was about the end of man. This question, called telos by the ancient Greeks and summum bonum by the medieval Christian thinkers, was the focus of Western thinkers until modernity, and sought to address the ultimate end of humankind, the essential why of our existence. It was a question about what human beings are for, in the same sense we might ask what bicycles or knives are for; riding and cutting, respectively. What united both Greek and Christian thinkers from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas was the fact that they never questioned the possibility that humanity had an end. Theirs was a worldview where the cosmos was intelligible and human beings were created for a purpose. So the task of the thinker was only to unveil and discover the human good or the human end already present. As Professor Joshua Hochschild argues, the end of man was “the question about human life asked for most of Western history.”77
Starting somewhere in the seventeenth century, however, a more scientifically driven worldview started to slowly gain prominence in Western societies. This new worldview first carved out a separation between the natural and the supernatural and then started to push the latter into the margins. In the span of a few centuries, science killed the enchantment of the Universe. There were other culprits as well—the rise of humanism and individualism, urbanization, increased mobility, industrialization, democracy, and more bureaucratic governments—but the scientific worldview was most influential in turning the Enchanted Cosmos of premodern times into a seemingly disenchanted, meaningless, and Mechanical Universe. In the Enchanted Cosmos, the question about the end of man made sense, but it didn’t fit into the Mechanical Universe where humanity no longer had a self-evident place in the grand order of things. This led to the need to ask a new kind of grand question about life. In 1834, a man named Thomas Carlyle hinted at the seemingly simple question “What is the meaning of life?” and we, as a society, have been grappling with the existential fallout ever since.
A MEANINGFUL INVENTION: CARLYLE’S BIG QUESTION
“Rightly viewed, no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself.”
—THOMAS CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus, 1834
While it can’t be said that Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian-era Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian was the only man to ponder the meaning of life, he was the first to write about it in the English-speaking world. Published between 1833 and 1834, Carlyle’s book Sartor Resartus was notable for several reasons: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote its preface, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman cited it as a key influence on Moby-Dick and Song of Myself, respectively, and today it’s often cited as the book to mark the transition in English-speaking literature from the Romantic to the Victorian period.78 It also contains the earliest known writing in the English language of the phrase “meaning of life.”79
Sartor Resartus was written at a particularly tumultuous time in world history when nearly every aspect of daily life was affected by any one of several revolutions happening worldwide: the French Revolution altered the political world and its aftershocks were still being felt across Europe; the Romantic revolution fostered emotions, self-inspection, and introspection; nearly every aspect of daily life was transformed by the Industrial Revolution; and the scientific revolution threatened the religious worldview. Carlyle’s text opens with the following lines: “Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch of Science has now been brandished and borne about . . . ; how, in these times especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely than ever, but innumerable Rush-lights and Sulphur-matches, kindled thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated.”80
The “Torch of Science” burning so fiercely that no “cranny or doghole” can remain unilluminated—one could not better describe the sheer intellectual power with which scientific thinking forced itself into people’s lives and reshaped their dearly held truths and worldview. What was previously taken as self-evident and beyond question—that the world is a meaningful whole and humanity has a special part to play in the unfolding of that world—suddenly lost its foundation. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t shocking that readers should find the book’s protagonist, middle-aged Professor Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo, overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of his trivial life. His is a depression that often accompanies a major life transition but one that’s made especially acute by the uprootedness many people felt in this era of the nonstop march of industrialism and other transformations. Unlike in previous times, religion and tradition no longer seemed to hold all the answers.
In the novel, which also serves as an allegory of Carlyle’s own search for meaning, we’re shown how “Rational University,” that is, an increasingly secular world that is “in the highest degree hostile to Mysticism,” infected Teufelsdröckh with religious doubt, causing him to question his faith and the very existence of God.81 Doubt darkens into what he calls “the nightmare, Unbelief,” and the professor soon finds himself seemingly alone in a cold and silent world, writing: “To me, the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Violation, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” Bereft of belief and left to his own philosophical devices, he declares—using the phrase the “meaning of life” for the first time—“Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.” The essential human battle for him is thus between Necessity and Freedom: a man either bound by appetites, bodily desires, and other earthly matters or a man dedicated to transcending such things in order to follow a higher moral duty in his work. For Carlyle, this is the meaning of life: by engaging in purposeful work, we can transform our personal ideals into reality and attain a real sense of fulfillment. He writes, “Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.”
It’s comforting to know that the meaning of life, far from being a burning question that’s teased humans since the dawn of time, was a phrase coined less than two hundred years ago by an author whose semiautobiographical protagonist is himself the author of a book entitled Clothes: Their Origin and Influence. Considered a professor of “things in general,” Teufelsdröckh expounds on exactly that in his sartorial-inspired tome, including the importance of the “Clothes-wearing man,” the Dandy, and the proper German way to wear a collar: low behind and slightly rolled.82 While Clothes is seemingly innocuous, it’s also a poioumenon, a type of metafiction that gave Carlyle ample room to voice more weighty, philosophical concerns. Yet, despite doubting the existence of any value in the modern world, Carlyle clearly didn’t think it was all gloom and doom, and he imbued the text with words of hope and the conviction that man could, indeed, traverse the existential wilderness and emerge from it triumphant. Still, the whole book was in a sense a symptom of the fact that Carlyle had lost touch with the stern Calvinist religious faith that his parents had enjoyed. Sartor Resartus can be read as his struggle to grapple with this loss of faith while living in what he calls “an Atheistic Century”; it’s his attempt to come up with a way of understanding life that’s compatible with a loss of faith in traditional Christianity.
Often named as one of the most influential public intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Carlyle inspired a host of thinkers; everyone writing or thinking about meaning and existential crisis in the English-speaking world was, in one way or another, reacting to his work. At the same time in continental Europe, philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer picked up where Carlyle dropped the first stitch, with Kierkegaard writing, “What, if anything, is the meaning of this life?” in Either/Or, a seminal early work from 1843.83 An existential fever seemed to take hold in learned circles, sweeping up everyone from philosophers and novelists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Beckett, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, composers like Richard Wagner, and biologists like Thomas Huxley (known by his nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog”), with Schopenhauer helping to lead the charge. In his essay “Human Nature,” he asks point-blank: “What is the meaning of life at all? To what purpose is it played, this farce in which everything that is essential is irrevocably fixed and determined?”84 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published in 1878, popularized the idea of existential malaise to the general public—previously it had mainly been the purview of a select circle of intellectuals. Even before the publication of his masterpiece, Tolstoy had grappled with a disenchantment similar to Carlyle: like the Scottish philosopher, Tolstoy struggled to come to terms with the scientific worldview. It seems no accident that a few months before writing in his diary that “life on Earth has nothing to give,” he had been reading about physics and pondering the concepts of gravity, heat, and how a “column of air exerts pressures.”85 In understanding more about the mechanistic laws of nature, he lost his faith in the transcendent, writing, “Far from finding what I wanted, I became convinced that all who like myself had sought in knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing.”86
Tolstoy, along with Carlyle and Schopenhauer and other contemporaries, was among the first to realize the full implications of the new scientific worldview: it reduces humanity into a biological organism that has no inherent purpose, good, or value. As Tolstoy put it: “You are a temporal, accidental conglomeration of particles. The interrelation, the change of these particles, produces in you that which you call life. This congeries will last for some time; then the interaction of these particles will cease, and that which you call life and all your questions will come to an end. You are an accidentally cohering globule of something. The globule is fermenting.”87
Of course, knowing something and liking its discovery are two different things. Many didn’t like the inconvenient truth that lay at the heart of the scientific worldview, but that didn’t prevent the worldview from spreading. By the end of the twentieth century, the general public had withstood generations of existential malaise, so much so, in fact, that the seemingly unanswerable Big Question—What is the meaning of life?—felt less like a man-made invention and more like man’s eternal struggle. It undoubtedly made some long for simpler, more enchanted times or, barring that, at least some prudent advice on how best to style one’s collar.
HOW SCIENCE GREW OUT OF RELIGION
“This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”
—SIR ISAAC NEWTON, General Scholium, 1713
Although nowadays it’s commonplace to pit science and religion against each other, this wasn’t originally the case. For several centuries, the scientific revolution progressed within the context of Christianity and a firm belief in God, rather than opposed to it. Indeed, the rational and logical analysis that science relied on was first developed within the context of theological studies as a way to better understand God and the world he created.88 Initially, scientific investigations were a way of celebrating and getting closer to God. Given a rational cosmos designed by divine will, scientists like Newton were simply deciphering the language of God. The goal was to better understand the intelligent heavenly plan behind the Universe. Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century German mathematician and astronomer whose laws of planetary motion were a major force in the scientific revolution, was motivated by a wish to demonstrate that God had created his Universe on the basis of geometry. Kepler transformed from being a theologian to an astronomer when he realized that “God is also glorified in astronomy, through my efforts.”89
The scientific worldview thus started as a spin-off of the Christian worldview but it soon suffocated its parent. More and more thinkers began to understand how the various elements of this new worldview were increasingly not dependent on God but were instead able to stand on their own. While the word atheism first appears in the English language in 1540,90 it took some time before its definition was narrowed down from denoting general heresy to meaning an outright denial of theism. Like anything that poses an affront to the status quo, the word was first used accusatorily; most people saw atheism as being on par with witchcraft and sorcery. It wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century that Frenchman Denis Diderot became the first self-confessed, public atheist philosopher.91 As a philosophical trend, atheism moved like wildfire . . . at least in certain circles. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, Tolstoy observed that, among the learned circles of the Russian and European elites, “hardly one in a thousand professed to be a believer.”92 By the late-nineteenth century, many universities had dismissed the previously accepted thinking of religious dogma, relegating religious argumentation to a marginal role. Religious thinkers and believers, of course, didn’t disappear, but the practice of belief and faith began to turn inward. Belief was becoming more of a private matter. In the public sphere, certainly in politics and in the workplace, religious believers were expected to participate in rational discussions wherein the supernatural could no longer be enlisted as part of one’s argument. When making decisions on when to harvest one’s crops or whether to build a dam, one relied on scientifically tested knowledge, not divine revelation, and consulted experts, not spirits.
To be sure, enchantment, religion, and the supernatural still impact many people’s lives today—not as the self-evident background tapestry of our worldview, however, but as something that coexists with the scientific worldview in more or less tension. Religious believers today must navigate the space between their private, more enchanted beliefs and the disenchanted, rational, and modern way of seeing the world. And while this disenchanted worldview has led to many gains in technology and how to run a society, it’s also revealed a terrible possibility: What if the Universe didn’t create human beings to fulfill a grand purpose in life? What if the meaning of life is that there is no meaning?
Thus, the question “What is the meaning of life?” is first and foremost reactionary. It was invented as a consequence of the spreading of the scientific worldview and the consequent disenchantment of the world. The old self-evident purposefulness of the whole cosmos, including human beings within it, was challenged. In this context, it became acutely important to ask for what was lost. And a phrase was invented to describe what we used to have: meaning of life. But let’s not lay all the blame on science for our existential crisis. After the scientific worldview entered human consciousness, someone needed to invent the idea that we ought to experience our lives as meaningful. Enter the Romantics.