Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

The Study Of Meaning Is Incomplete Without This

The Study Of Meaning Is Incomplete Without This

The study of meaning is incomplete without relationships.

Why?

Because the meaning of life is in relationships.

Or, said different: There is no life outside of relationships.

(God to man, man to God, man to man – heck – even man to dog, maybe.)

Unfortunately, all the hand-wringing in the world will not get ethics and meaning out of physics and biology.

You need something else to guide “correct” behavior.

But of course, the rub is that correct behavior is the answer to a relational question.

Ethics makes no sense outside of you and others.

I mean, what is meaning and ethics to rock on Mars?

Understand: In the end, relationships are all there is.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

What Makes Human Life Meaningful?

What Makes Human Life Meaningful?

The question, what makes human life meaningful is not so easily brushed aside.

Ravi Zacharias wrote a great theological book on this.

And Victor Frankl wrote a great philosophical book on this.

I like this line below that: “Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values.”

Further, I would say that: “Moral values, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and theology.”

The long and short of it is that meaning is lived outside of self.

Meaning and purpose increase, as ego and self importance decrease.

The Bible calls this “dying to yourself.”

This entire question is the other side of this coin. Is it even worth it? This is not a little question.

See, we are either wildly important, or nothing at all.

I hope you believe the former with me.

A few years later, I hadn’t thought much more about a career but had nearly completed degrees in English literature and human biology. I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

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