What Does It All Mean?: A Humanistic Account of Human Experience

By William A. Adams

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he’d not found them - not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves - in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Sep 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781845406042

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Title page

What Does It All Mean?

A Humanistic Account of Human Experience

William A. Adams

Copyright page

Copyright © William A. Adams, 2005

The moral rights of the author has been asserted

No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic

PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic

Philosophy Documentation Center

PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA

www.imprint-academic.com

Acknowledgments

I began in earnest to write this book eight years before its publication date. A lot of people have suffered through inchoate drafts of it and have generously provided their criticisms and comments. I sincerely thank all the students, colleagues, and anonymous readers of my web site who gave their thoughtful consideration.

After of years of being immersed in the writing, I was no longer able to tell if I was making any sense, so I turned to the professionals at New Leaf Editing in Seattle. My thanks to Marti Kanna and Gary Anderson for knowing how English works.

Finally, thanks to Anthony Freeman at Imprint Academic for having the confidence to go ahead with the project.

Preface

I love those old photographs from the 1800s showing nameless people staring blankly into the camera. The men have large moustaches. Nearly everyone wears a hat. In studio shots, women are dressed in their finery, soldiers in neat uniforms. Sometimes they’re taking a break from work, standing in front of a store. The ones I like best show two men pausing in the midst of cutting down an enormous tree with a two-man bucksaw. But no matter where those people may have been at the time, they peer out from a sepia-toned world - and the most interesting part is that all of those people are now dead.

Looking at the photos, I can see that those people were engaged in their world, and it’s easy to suppose that they believed their lives were meaningful, just as I suppose mine to be. But now they, and their era, are long forgotten. They’ve vanished, leaving hardly a mark, except for a few grains of silver on a photograph. Would it have mattered if they had never lived?

Each person in those photos strove to be or to do something; they cried, laughed, worried, argued, prayed, and hoped. They had toothaches, backaches, insights, loves, failures, and moments of contentment, but there’s nothing left of all that now. Their life experiences were absolutely compelling while they were taking place, but all of it has long since evaporated into the mists of time.

What was the point of living those lives?

We might imagine that some of those individuals justified their existence by ‘making a contribution’ to society. Yet, however lasting their contributions might have been, realistically, the vast majority of those anonymous people didn’t make much of an impression, except for populating the earth with more anonymous ancestors. They carefully built houses that have since been turned to firewood, they lovingly tended farms that are now suburban shopping malls, and the world they believed in is gone.

Someday, my own photographic image may stare blindly into the eyes of someone who has yet to be born, and that person might be asking, ‘What did your life mean, whoever you were?’

I’d like to have an answer, both for that person and for myself.

The question of the meaning of life has bothered me for years. Of course, most adolescents go through a meaning-of-life inquiry, but I never outgrew it, and I often wonder why so few people seem to care about it.

Many of my friends accepted the teachings of their church without serious thought, which allowed them to bypass the question, and I suppose that’s how the church expects it to work. The purpose of the church is to remove questions about the meaning of life by providing canned answers.

But that didn’t work for me. Faith always seemed a defeatist strategy, a submission to ignorance. But what did I know? Despite having spent my entire adult life in a school setting, the only thing I knew was that I had no actual knowledge of what to make of my own experience.

In the 1970s, I resigned my position as a college professor and chair of the psychology department at a small western college and signed up with a large state university on the East Coast. They had an extended university program, teaching US citizens abroad, mostly members of the armed forces. So I became an itinerant teacher, reassigned every semester to some new city to teach psychology. In that way, I traveled around the world over a period of two years, living and working in Japan, Turkey, Germany, Italy, and Britain, and traveling in Thailand, China, India, and Eastern Europe.

When it was all over and I was back in the US, exhausted and penniless, I reflected on that experience. What I had learned was that nobody knows anything about the meaning of life. All over the world (based on the sample of it that I had observed), most people are hustling just to make a living, feed a family, build a house, teach their children, dig a well, stay warm, or any of a thousand other mundane things, and there really are no secrets hidden out there.

I even stayed as a guest in a Buddhist monastery in Kolkata (then called Calcutta) for a time, because I was sure that if there were answers to the great questions of life, they’d surely be found in India.

But if they were there, I didn’t find them.

The question of how to interpret one’s life experience became more urgent as I grew older. I felt as if I were just cooking in my own juices, so I left the academic world and built a second career in information technology. Despite some modest success over the course of two decades, that, too, eventually became a treadmill.

At some stage in life, you begin to feel as if you know the lay of the land, and you believe that if there were apparent answers to what it all meant, you would have noticed them. But I hadn’t noticed. So I quit my corner office, moved to a small island, and took up golf.

Soon I found myself reading psychology books again, attending conferences, and even writing a few papers. Gradually, I realized that, as a psychologist, my lifelong, idiosyncratic interest in how the mind works could eventually lead me to a solution to the question of the meaning of life. All I had to do was to articulate my tacit understanding of how the mind is structured and how it operates, because the meaning of life must be found within the human mind.

My understanding of how the mind works emerged from my training in cognitive psychology, from observing people and cultures around the world, from introspection, and from my reading in science and philosophy. The result wasn’t a scientific discovery, but an analytic finding, an articulation, which I’ll describe in the chapters that follow.

But as I was writing it all out, I began to wonder, ‘Of what use is this? Why would anyone believe it, and even if they did, what good would it do them?’

So I turned those questions on myself, and the following answers made themselves apparent:

First, I have confidence in my explanation of the mind because it’s based on careful observation and critical thinking, and fits coherently with the rest of what I know. Secondly, my theory’s usefulness stems from the fact that it integrates my experience into ‘the big picture,’ in terms of life as a whole.

Why wouldn’t that work for anybody?

Every person is different, of course, but at the level of the mind’s basic structure and operation, there are patterns that apply to all human beings. If so, my theory would account for the meaning of human experience in general. So if I knew how the mind worked, I could ‘easily’ discover the meaning of life.

I decided to present my explanation of how the mind works by starting with its practical application: a solution to the question of the meaning of life. And that’s what you’re going to discover in this book.

My reasoning depends on the concept that there’s no other way for a human being to know something except through the operation of the human mind. In other words, all human knowledge is human knowledge.

For example, it doesn’t make sense to me that God just plants knowledge into our minds because, if that were the case, we wouldn’t be responsible for that knowledge, and it would have no personal meaning for us. By the same token, we can’t say that knowledge is just a side effect of genetics or brain activity, because that would mean that we really would know nothing. An entirely human approach insists that knowledge comes from nowhere except ourselves. We have the minds; we are the minds, and not just knowledge, but all human experience comes only from us, so nothing about human experience can be hidden from us - not even the meaning of human life.

What, then, is the appropriate way for a mind to examine the nature of the mind, if that is even possible? I think it is possible, and I’ll devote a few pages in upcoming chapters to explaining how that examination works, and why I feel confident that it leads to a real, empirical description of the human mind, not just self-delusion or fantasy.

The first question people always ask about this theory is ‘How do you know?’ I’ve tried to answer that question with an explanation of my methods of inquiry , so that anybody could follow the same methods and verify or disconfirm my findings. I’m afraid that many professional philosophers and psychologists may not take the methods seriously, since they don’t make much contact with the scientific literature of psychology in general, or with that of cognitive science in particular. But there are good reasons for that, which I’ll explain.

Once I’ve set forth my theory of how the mind is structured and how it operates, the meaning of life should flow clearly out of that explanation, because all meaning comes from the mind. The answer I’ll offer is this: we’re all trying to recognize ourselves, both in each other and in all things.

That, in a nutshell, is how the mind works, what it does for a living. It’s looking for itself. That’s what we all do for a living.

Another way to state it is by saying: the purpose of life is self-knowledge. That’s what we’re here for - to find out what we’re here for.

Socrates summed it up many centuries ago, when he said, ‘Know thyself.’

So what’s new here?

What’s new is a reasoned argument, based on experience, that shows why Socrates’ answer is right, and that it’s a surprisingly broader idea than the egocentric navel-gazing that it first suggests. In this book, I’ll offer not just the answer, but the justification for the answer. In other words, I’ll present a principled answer, not an authoritarian one.

The main title of the book asks What Does It All Mean? Maybe I should have added, ‘... If Anything.’

It’s legitimate to wonder if there really is any meaning to life at all, especially when life stands in the shadow of death. I’ll examine that question in the first chapter. My conclusion, predictably, is that there is a meaning to life. A more important conclusion, though, after considering several possible answers, is that we need to discover that meaning for ourselves, rationally, by looking at patterns of experience. Nobody is going to tell us the right answer.

In the second chapter, I’ll explain my understanding of experience from my humanist perspective. I don’t turn to biology for answers to psychological questions, and I don’t turn to God, either. That’s why the subtitle of the book is A Humanistic Account.

It’s a practical matter. God only knows what God knows, and biology is about the body - in this context, the brain. But meat and bones don’t know anything, in and of themselves. I’ll follow a path somewhere between those two common explanations of experience, and limit my explanation to what a normal, healthy, adult human being can know, first-hand, from personal experience.

Why isn’t it obvious to us what the meaning of life is? In chapter three I’ll argue that common sense is blocked from discovering the meaning of life by two wrong assumptions that are deeply embedded in Western culture: the certainty that subjectivity and objectivity are not connected, and the myth of mental privacy. I’ll explain those assumptions, where they come from, and how they block our understanding.

Based on the humanistic assumption that an answer to the meaning of life can be found within the mind itself, I’ll introduce, in chapter four, the central image of how the mind works. Bipolar consciousness, as I call it, is extremely simple - the kernel or abstract essence of consciousness that characterizes any mental process. All human experience can be simplified - or oversimplified - for purposes of understanding the schematic of bipolar consciousness.

In chapter five, I extend the explanation of bipolar consciousness into everyday life, based on an examination of how psychological motivation develops over a person’s lifespan. I’ll suggest that we’re all looking for something. We don’t know what it is, exactly, but we feel it. We want wholeness, completeness, and understanding, what I call ‘the telos.’ It is the psychological future that draws the mind forward toward its ultimate satisfaction. That overarching motivation is the expression of bipolar consciousness that animates us.

The next three chapters will use the concepts and terminology of bipolar consciousness to explain two radical new concepts - psychological projection and intersubjectivity - that overcome the inhibiting common sense assumptions about the mind. They won’t seem so radical after I’ve explained them, and they’ll provide an explanation of how the mind works that gives an answer to the question of the meaning of life.

In chapter nine, I’ll return to the beginning and ask, ‘What About God?’

My account of human experience and the meaning of life explicitly doesn’t appeal to any spiritual or theological explanation. God was out of the picture. Is that reasonable? Can we really understand the meaning of life without a consideration of God? I’ll step out of my theoretician’s role and set a context for the theory of mind that I have presented. Although the theory itself is not theological, I’ll suggest that the best context for the theory is theological.

The last three chapters are like appendixes, supplementing the ideas that have been presented. Chapter ten, for example, answers some common questions people ask about my approach.

Chapters eleven and twelve answer the toughest question, ‘How Do You Know?’ To answer that question, I’ll describe what knowledge is, how we get it, and how we determine that it’s true. Then, in chapter twelve, I’ll discuss the specific methods of discovery and analysis that I used to come up with my theory of the mind and my answer to the question of the meaning of life.

Without the methods, this book might as well be fiction, but by explaining and adhering to them, I can say I’m writing about what I know, and what anyone can know. The result is, as promised, a strictly humanistic account of human experience.

1: The Meaning of Life

When we’re young, we assume that life’s meaning will become apparent from the many possibilities we face. Anything can happen, it seems. But as we mature, we start to wonder, ‘Is this all there is?’ and eventually, we ask ourselves, ‘What is the meaning of it all?’

But we don’t have to be in our senior years to wonder about that question.

The meaning of life has two main terms, meaning and life. A person can lose either one at any time, and the realization of that possibility is usually what provokes questions about the meaning of life. But most of the time, people are absorbed in the struggle to keep themselves and their families fed, healthy, sheltered, and connected to others. Such mundane concerns easily trump the need to reflect upon the meaning of life.

Even so, as is the case with the trumpets in Charles Ives’ short orchestral piece, The Unanswered Question, that insistent theme continues to force itself into our everyday lives. And as Ives’ music describes, our instinctive reaction is to bat the question down rather than deal with it.

But what if we did want to deal with it? The first order of business would be clarification of the question. What, exactly, is being asked?

We aren’t asking about the biological meaning of life. Frogs are alive and stones are not, and that difference, which we label as life, is mysterious, but it’s not the mystery we’re talking about when we consider the meaning of life.

It may seem as if we’re looking into the purpose of our own existence, asking, ‘Why do I exist?’

When we ask about the meaning of life, it’s more of a psychological question than a purely existential one. We want to know if our lifetime of hopes and disappointments, loves and losses, confusions and insights, has any purpose, or if it’s all been just a roller-coaster ride, with no point beyond the thrill itself. The reason we want to know this is because we realize that the ride eventually will end, and it’s distressing to think that there might have been some grand significance to our lifetime of experiences, but we simply didn’t ‘get it’.

Or what if life does have a purpose, but we’re either unable or unwilling to fulfill it, or we simply haven’t figured out what that purpose is, which causes us to do everything wrong? Maybe it’s better not to ask the question than to face those unpleasant possibilities. After all, if we don’t think about death, we don’t have to think about the meaning of life.

But when we inquire into the meaning of life, we implicitly acknowledge the possibility that there may not be one.

We phrase the question purposefully, asking, ‘What is the meaning?’ as if we already know there is some important meaning, and we just want to make sure we get it right. But, we have to admit that there is a possibility that life has no meaning whatsoever. It could be purely an accident, with no purpose, and that’s not a happy thought, because we want there to be a meaning to life.

We know there’s meaning in life. We find satisfaction in hearing a string quartet, recognizing a loving gesture, or solving a difficult problem, and that satisfaction itself is meaningful to us. Life offers plenty of satisfaction and plenty of meaning, and we’d like more of both. But as we move into mid-life and beyond, we realize that more experience lies behind us than ahead, and that we’ve seen most of what we’re going to see. Yet aren’t there still important things to do or understand, in order for us to get the most out of life? What are we supposed to do? What do we need to know before the end finally comes?

Meaning and Death

If we didn’t know we were going to die, we might never ask about the meaning of life. We might just live our lives, pursue our goals, and complete our various projects, one after another, indefinitely. Children and young adults don’t generally concern themselves with the meaning of life, because they’re not aware that life is measured. They may know intellectually that they’ll eventually die, but death seems a remote possibility, and is rarely considered.

When death occurs in a family, or among one’s circle of friends and acquaintances, it’s called ‘shocking’, ‘tragic’, or at least ‘untimely’. Those terms reveal the fact that we ordinarily conceive of death as an abnormality, and not the inevitable certainty it is.

Birth and death frame the question regarding the meaning of life. We know when the clock started ticking and, assuming we’ll meet our end due to ‘natural causes’, we know approximately when our time will run out - and in between, while the clock is still ticking, is what we call life.

How Old Are You?

I find it odd that people are preoccupied with their age and the age of others, without being consciously aware that age represents not just an aspect of self-definition, but also the relentless ticking of the clock. Children learn to keep track of how old they are almost as soon as they’re able to master language. From that point on, keeping track of that count is encouraged by their parents and by other children. Throughout their lives, annual birthday celebrations help measure the inexorable march of time, reinforced by a huge greeting card industry. But why is it so important to know how old we are?

There are practical reasons, such as determining when a person is qualified to attend school or get a driver’s license, but those reasons don’t seem important enough to explain our cultural obsession with age. The real reason for that fascination is because knowing our age is really all about death - it’s a measure of how much time we have left. Children don’t know that, of course, and they’re happy just to have their annual cake and ice cream party. But parents know, if only tacitly and subconsciously, and they’re the ones who enforce the annual ritual, unwittingly perpetuating our cultural anxiety about death.

Advertising, calendars, life insurance rates, and fashions relentlessly goad us into continuing to be anxious about death in our sub-conscious mind. Death is a prominent feature of our thoughts, even though, paradoxically, we hardly ever think about it. We judge people, in large part, in terms of ‘how old’ they are, and we evaluate ourselves the same way. But it’s nearly all tacit, without full awareness of what it means.

When we meet people, we instinctively try to guess how old they are, because that’s how we gauge what they should have achieved, should understand, and should be concerned about at that particular point in their life journey. We all keep our dreaded countdown timer in subconscious awareness at all times but we don’t like to consciously confront what it’s actually counting down. Age may be a useful scale for organizing life’s memories, ambitions, and expectations, but as a culture, we don’t give much thought to the final endpoint of that scale.

When someone we care about dies, one would think that event would force us to consider our own mortality. But though our loved-one’s absence is palpable, it doesn’t help us grasp what has happened. It’s as if a bird flew in through a high window, across the room, and then out another window. Inside the room, we may wonder where the bird came from and where went, but the bird is gone - and the meaning of its brief transit escapes us. We may try to look out the windows, but when we do, we see that they’re really mirrors, because our experience is limited only to that room - there is no outside, as far as we’re able to experience.

Death is that sort of incomprehensible boundary, separating us from nothingness. Someone else’s death should remind us of our own eventual end and jolt us into wondering about the meaning of living. But most people, often with the aid of clergy, prefer to imagine that the deceased has simply ‘passed on’ to another place. But that euphemism lets them avoid the possibility that the deceased has become utterly nonexistent. It also allows them the opportunity to formulate a positive, pragmatic plan for moving ahead with their own lives, and thereby escape any intuitions they might have that there is no point to life.

Fear of Meaninglessness

Why do we avoid thinking about death most of the time? I think psychologist Ernest Becker (1973) got it right when he said that a thorough denial of the certainty of death helps people avoid asking the question of life’s meaning. In short, it’s not death we’re really afraid of, but life - or more exactly, the potential meaninglessness of life.

The problem we face is that death seems arbitrary, undeserved, and unscheduled. One day, we’re enjoying life’s satisfactions (spiced with occasional failures and disappointments), and then, all of a sudden, our time runs out. No matter how old we are or whether we saw it coming, the end still feels like ‘all of a sudden’, because every moment we’re alive, we’re involved with our projects, ideas, and expectations. But suddenly, our time’s up, and the Grim Reaper is at the door.

The arbitrariness of death can give us a feeling of meaninglessness. Our meaningful life experiences are strong evidence that life, as a whole, is meaningful, but the single fact that it will all be terminated - suddenly, unreasonably, and unfairly - seems to negate everything that came before.

We’re afraid of the meaninglessness that seems to stem from death’s indifference to human experience. We’re afraid of death now, before it’s happened, because its certainty threatens to transform the meaning we’re experiencing into meaninglessness.

But what we’re fearing is loss of meaning, not loss of life, because death is not an experience. Since there are no survivors to describe what death is like, death is the opposite of experience - the negation of experience.

If we knew that death would wait for the conclusion of a major phase in our lives, such as the affirmation of a relationship or the completion of an important project, it would all be different.

We could say, ‘I did my best, and now I’m satisfied