13 Jul “Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It” (DANIEL KLEIN)
“Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It”
Reinhold Niebuhr, American social philosopher and theologian
(1892-1971), Christian realist
NOW YOU TELL ME!
This is the one that prompted me to close the book on “Pithies” in my midthirties. The whole enterprise struck me as naïve and futile.
Enough already.
But some forty years later, here I am again, fascinated by these philosophers’ ideas about how to live. And now, thinking again about Niebuhr’s quote, I am more perplexed by it than ever—which was probably Professor Niebuhr’s intent.
Like his mentor, the theologian Paul Tillich, Niebuhr analyzed man’s predicament in Existentialist terms. A basic question both men asked was, Why can’t man rid himself of sin if he has the radical freedom to create himself and his values?
The answer, Niebuhr said, is that even as man contemplates the divine, he remains stuck with a finite mind that can never get a comprehensive bead on transcendent values.
A perfect understanding of sin is ultimately beyond us. We cannot climb out of this existential duality; we possess the ability to ponder our mortality, good and evil, and the “meaning of life,” but we are unable to ever really see the Big Picture. We just don’t have the equipment for it.
Niebuhr was also concerned with man’s place in the immanent world, the world of cultures and societies and political creeds.
After the rise of Nazism, he began to focus on the “herd mentality” that Nietzsche had so abhorred. Niebuhr brooded over man’s weakness in the face of conformist human behavior. Also like Nietzsche, he believed that as long as we remain a product of our culture, we can-not rise above its values.
I think this is what was on Niebuhr’s mind when he quipped, “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” Like political creeds and advertising slogans, philosophies of life arise and fall in a culture. When I look back at the early entries in my “Pithies” notebook, I realize how much I had been influenced by the popularity of the philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s, how uncritically I accepted the social nihilism and self-centeredness of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary along with the ennui and melancholia of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In doing so, I was undoubtedly indulging in some herd mentality.
Still, these thinkers did help me to see philosophy as a way to thoughtfully in-form my life.
Right about now I can hear Adam Phillips admonishing me to stop thinking about my past and all the what-if scenarios that come along with it.
So suffice it to say that Niebuhr’s point is well taken:
Any minute now they are going to change the meaning of life.
Again.
Caveat emptor!
Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It
Daniel Klein
