THE MEANING
AND PURPOSE OF LIFE: The meaning and purpose of life cannot reside in anything
which is subject to antithetical evaluation.
In other words it cannot reside in happiness, truth, love, goodness,
work, beauty, wisdom, knowledge, reasonableness, pleasure, virtue, etc., because
of the inevitability and even necessity of sadness, illusion, hate, evil, play,
ugliness, folly, ignorance, unreasonableness, pain, vice, etc., which, by their
regular (negative) intrusions, effectively guarantee the intermittent
prevalence of the former (positive) aspects of life, and are therefore of
crucial importance in the overall scheme of things.
No, the meaning and purpose of life has to
do with what Dr. Jolande Jacobi,
the Hungarian psychologist and disciple of Jung, terms 'the Way of Individuation'
- a development of the personality through the various stages of life, with the
invariable consequence of greater knowledge of the self both in its relation to
the individual and to the world generally.
One doesn't foolishly strive to combat the inherent dualism of life by
taking an apparently one-sided though ultimately self-deceptive stance in
it. One experiences this dualism as an
eternal fact which, through its comprehensiveness, inevitably redeems itself. One could sum-up by saying that the meaning
of life lies in life itself, whereas the purpose of life is simply to live.