Is it a meaningless mission and beating about the bush to get to the depth of the meaning of life? Is the meaning too vast to fathom? Whatever it is, it seems to be so. It seems so because, on the one hand, life is situated in the physical world as every possible and perceptible things in the world and, on the other hand, life as like any normative idea is a conceptual idea, partly intuitive and partly logical – a thingummy of Cartesian duality of mind and matter, theory and praxis which makes it a unique entity in terms of paradigmatic consideration.
Yes, life is a ‘bisectile hybrid’, a half material and half mental caged in a single whole in consequence of circle of reason. Does the material world existing almost for itself have any meaning of its own? Does existing for itself (thing-for-itself) bear any resemblance to the meaning of the value attributed to itself (thing-in-itself)? Sometimes it seems it means something proportionately embedded in the vastness of things that carry values in continuum of logic and reason to sustain the very credibility of the greater design of the whole universe and again sometimes it seems to mean nothing so far as very constitution of the ideoverse lapsing into the purpose and objectives of things is concerned.
Whatever way we decide to categorise and conceptualise life as a whole, life comes a full circle epicentering the mind-matter duality into an organic whole and as such when we look for material aspects and prospects of life, the mental ideoverse associated with life lurking around the organic whole is essentially poised to be overlapping and absorbing the diverging mind-matter duality as because the material world is very much recreated in our meta-physical world as a part of the whole and this duality remains elusive so far as we see reality as such in both subjective and objective considerations.
So, holistically speaking, life is symbiotically positioned as an integral part of nature and life, particularly human life, being a sensitive being, can assert itself at will to be free from circumstantial contingency with a clear and loud message of always not being subdued and submerged by the silliness and freakishness of circumstantial-cum-situational adversaries. But in no way it is positionally over and above nature and natural consequences. Life is so designed that it is destined and committed to abide by the pros and cons of natural consequences and it remains firmly rooted to the natural courses of existence from being to becoming.
The process from being to becoming to becoming is integrally related and interactive with the ecology of the natural world. According to Gaia hypothesis, the living and non-living entities of the earth are intrinsically related in a complex interactive system that can be viewed as a single compact system or a single organism – that single organism is the earth itself or for that matter the natural world in which and with the support of which the life’s being becomes gradually full and blooming to its potential. And thus life’s prime importance of asserting itself in a wider perspective is attained in no uncertain terms, this ‘throughness’ of life is what gets the prerogative as the prime mover of life’s essence articulated by its existence.
As a living being, the life of human is something extraordinarily unique in essence in the sense that human life is potentially superior to enforce its assertiveness at will and that is why it is at liberty to project its supremacy within the framework of natural course and consequences. But assertiveness should not mean supremacy over other beings or the natural world, rather it is ‘will to freedom’ that sustains one’s being to becoming in full glory through the full course of life without hindrance from the physical and metaphysical world and in this context both the physical and metaphysical world should be all the pleasurable to life.
As to life’s motive force, pleasure is the sine qua non of human life and existence and that is what ‘will to freedom’ is all about. Pleasure is truly defined when Epicurus said, "When we say… pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of the sensuality…By pleasure we mean absence of pain in the body or trouble in the soul…" That is, when we are in equanimity with our body and soul, we are pleased for the pleasure we get out of this and this is this pleasure for which we strive to live for life. But when any of them is diseased, we feel like dying for death as the absence of the summum bonum of life makes way for the deformation of life both functionally and existentially.
That is why without partaking of a feel of pleasure human life cannot survive for long. When pleasure is put paid to existential course of life, life tends to be on a terminal course of existence, that is, life gradually terminates in submerging death. And it is the fear of death that is examined time and again to prod life pleasurably on the natural course of death. Without facing the fear of death, life cannot be tasted fully and a tasted and satiated life cannot be examined without forcing it to go through the travails of pains and pleasure pleasurably and with equanimity. That is why Socrates said, "A life unexamined is not worth living."