The question this song by the group Kansas raises is, if it's true that all we are is dust in the wind what meaning or significance is there to our lives?
A character in a novel (The Nausea) by French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre is sitting in a restaurant ruminating on the pointlessness of human existence. The man reflects, "I was thinking ... that here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing."
Sartre also claims that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Pretty depressing, but that's the existential view in a nutshell.
Of course, one need not be an existentialist to think life is an absurd exercise in meaninglessness. All one need believe is that our existence ends with our death.
The psychologist Sigmund Freud wrote that "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence."
The filmmaker Ingmar Bergman adds that, “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”
And the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer perceived the problem more clearly than most when he noted that, "Unless the point of life is to suffer, there is no point."
He adds this lamentably droll observation: "Life is bad today, tomorrow will be worse, until we die," and, "Life is a task, the task of staying alive and staving off boredom." The world, for Schopenhauer, is a "penal colony" in which "happiness is measured by the absence of suffering."
Schopenhauer titled the book from which these quotes are taken, Studies in Pessimism. It's not hard to see why.
Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chair at Duke University, frames the problem of our human predicament succinctly when he writes: "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."
Bertrand Russell put the same miserable thought this way:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.What these thinkers are urging us to recognize is that death annihilates all, it's the big eraser, obliterating everything we do and rendering our existence on the planet a pointless exercise in absurdity.
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
They urge upon us a realistic view against those who agree on the one hand that death is the end of our existence but on the other that there can nevertheless be some purpose to our lives.
Maybe so, but the purpose is a bit like that of a prisoner who insists on making his bed and brushing his teeth before accompanying the executioner to the scaffold.
At least that's how the existentialist, and many others who reject the belief that human beings survive the death of their material bodies, see this life, and they're doubtless correct if indeed death really is a personal annihilation. Unless what we do matters forever it's hard to see how it can really matter at all.
Maybe, though, what we do in this life does matter forever. Maybe our physical death is not the end of our existence. If so, that changes everything.