Philosophy Now Forum

“In his novel Beware of Pity (1939), Stefan Zweig says, “It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.” To develop an argument for purpose based on feelings is dubious practice, since you could argue that anything that made you feel fulfilled constituted a purpose. This could include even the deluded obsessions of someone who felt fulfilled by incessantly tearing strips of paper evenly, or torturing small animals, or people. It makes fulfilling your purpose into the achievement of some kind of psychological disposition. To argue from experience we need something more than just feeling, then. Zweig’s statement does have some more validity, in that it is intended as a general comment about the human condition rather than a statement about a particular individual, and there is probably general agreement with it, too.” –from From Brian King’s ‘Looking For the Purpose of Life’ in issue 147

And I want to zero in on one point (the rest is just support for the point I want to make:

“In his novel Beware of Pity (1939), Stefan Zweig says, “It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.”

So ?: isn’t this why we do what we do on Facebook -or any other social media for that matter. And I’m not singing the praises of Mark Zuckerberg here or playing apologetics for any of it. It deserves every criticism aimed at it. I am merely pointing to the mixed package that social media actually is.

Once again: You really have to consider the hypocrisy of people who have access to a public platform dismissing the only platform everyday people have.

“Why do so many people believe their lives are meaningless? According to the philosopher Iddo Landau in his book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (2017), the main obstacle is often the untenable ambition he calls perfectionism :

‘ According to this presupposition, meaningful lives must include some perfection or excellence or some rare and difficult achievements, and lives that do not show this characteristic cannot be seen as meaningful. Meaningful lives, then, must transcend the common and the mundane… What marks perfectionists is that they fail to see the worth that inheres also in the nonperfect; they despise and reject it….Perfectionists believe that if our city is not the most beautiful in the world, it is disgustingly ugly; that if one is not Einstein one is a fool; and that if a person does not write as Shakespeare did, she had better just give up writing altogether… Thus, perfectionists are so busy with the search for the perfect that they neglect to see and find satisfaction in the good. And since it is rare, and sometimes impossible, to reach the perfect, perfectionists, who do not want to have anything to do with the good that is less than perfect, find satisfaction in nothing, continuing their desperate quest for the perfect.’ “ –from Lewis Vaughn’s ‘Why You’re (Probably) Wrong About the Meaning of Life’ in PN issue 147

Here I think we can bring in Lacan’s distinction between needs, demands, and desires. Needs are pretty much what we need from the moment of birth in order to survive and are usually easily satisfied as long as there are minimal resources available. Demands are what can never be satisfied because the subject is never really clear on what it is they want. We see this all the time with children who constantly ask for one thing after the other because they cannot understand what it is they actually want: which is often mere attention. And we carry this into adulthood. I mean what is love but an ongoing process of making demands on the other when all we really want is the security of their full devotion? Desire, according to Lacan, is what can be fulfilled but requires the work of figuring out what it is we want to fulfill in the first place. This is what this particular issue has described as finding one’s purpose in life.

That said, what we see in Vaughn’s understanding of “perfection” is the element of demand. The two terms are almost joined at the hip and have a lot of important implications all over the philosophical, social, and political spectrum. I mean what is the right if not a bunch of children stuck in the utopian mode of seeking perfection through their constant demands upon the system?