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The Meaning of Life

What’s the meaning of all this?

Brenda Almond on the pursuit of wisdom.

Often, when people look for meaning in life, they turn first of all to religion and then, if that fails to convince, to philosophy. Sometimes they try to suppress the questioning by engaging in frenetic activity, whether quasi-martial or quasi-marital. But thinking tends to intrude even on these activities and – contrary to received opinion in the academic world – philosophy is a ‘people’s activity’. That is to say, philosophy in the sense of a quest for meaning in life – some way of understanding the odd but undeniable fact of our individual and self-aware existence – is part of the human mind set. This is especially so when a person is confronted by any of the biological rites of passage of the human animal – birth, sex, reproduction and death.

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