Logic, Love, Meaning of Life, and Death

It’s important, I think, that before moving on to the things that are exciting to talk about like love, meaning of life, and death, it's helpful to understand how one might rid oneself of a sense of absurdity that can at times seem intrinsic to life. Absurdity is that which has the power, as Camus suggested, to annihilate one’s sense of meaning. There can be moments for certain people, he warns, which can bring a feeling of meaninglessness and absurdity that only leads to one thing: their self-imposed end. In this sense, the person is utterly crushed.

The 'how' I’m talking about is logic. Now this may at first seem counter intuitive. But this is only because the notion of logic has been focused into a definition that encompasses or characterizes a cold, calculating, analytical view of the world or way of looking at the world where love and the rest do not and cannot seem to occupy. There is nothing romantic about logic under this heading; no song has been written about it, and no odes dedicated to it. So how can logic have anything to do with love, life, and death? What message does it have to convey to those things which are reserved for the undying questions of life? On the contrary, one might say that logic cannot even deliver the grieving man from the tragedy of his wife dying, the mother suffering from her child’s battle with cancer, or a person who is willing to commit suicide. Far from being the savior of humanity, on many occasions, it can drive a person to suicide because it is logical for that person at that moment that their life is meaningless, that life is absurd.

But this is precisely why logic should be taken seriously. Its power can both take the life of the person who has fallen into the logic of absurdity and save the life of a person who has seen the logic that is the beauty and wonder that life can come to mean for that person. In this sense, it is not logic in the abstract that has power; its power is such because it arises from life – the way we understand, the things we do, the words we speak. Saying ‘I want to live’ has logical meaning. The meaning is clear, the logic powerful, undeniable – to live. ‘I want to love’ – here, too, we find a place where logic occupies but rarely touched upon.

Here is a place, I want to propose, where one might see a divergence between contexts, from which, as a matter of course, arise 'logics'. There is the logic in the context of community (whichever community one might refer to) and the logic of the person who begins to see the world as absurdity. What the divergence shows is a deadly contradiction between what the world means for the community and what the world means for this person. The way the problem surfaces for the person, that is, from the notion of world that is meaningful to notion of world that is absurd, I would like to suggest, has a hidden skepticism, which is consequential of a bad situation. In other words, a logical doubt creeps in, somewhere along the person's line of reasoning, that life is not worth living, love is not worth having, and death, given its nihilistic, existential (or non-existential) standpoint, is not just the right response, but the best, no, the only response - it is, for all intents and purposes, what is 'Truth'. The logic of the doubt is deeply tied to the bad situation that caused it to arise. The person does not reflect on it, for who normally reflects on one's logic for doing something or believing something that seems to be plainly in one's face? It is a consequence of wanting to negate self, a rationale that is intrinsically woven into the desire like an aspect of it - 'what is the use of living?' also means 'is there any meaning to my existence?'

Someone may want to show the person who is in the grips of absurdity the beauty of love, of life, of moments yet to be had by a community that wants to share its moments with the individual, in whatever form sharing takes. But even to these, the skeptic asks his perennial questions, ‘for what reason?’, followed by ‘how do you know?’, and then the final conclusive blow, ‘we cannot know for certain’. He might apply this methodological reasoning to answers like ‘because I want to love’, ‘because I want know purpose’. Yet even these cannot satisfy the ‘cosmic skeptic’, cosmic because he questions to a cosmic degree. Everything is in question, even love, even life, and therefore, even meaning. If we cannot satisfy the skeptic, we cannot give reason to these wants, the wants of which have a connection to meaning which are not only unquantifiable, but inevitable to any human being. When meaning cannot be found, it is lost. 'Lost' seems to suggest here that we have at some point gained it. What must be remembered is that we don’t begin without a certain sense of meaning, however basic. But we can lose that sense by many different roads – cosmic skepticism is one such road. And this is a road which goes hand-in-hand with many, if not all, roads.

Thus, my suggestion here is that logic carries a much greater weight, has a much wider application, a far more inclusive definition, if you will.

More next blog...