When someone asks the question, “What is the purpose of (human) life?”, they usually do so from an individualistic perspective, and in this process they isolate many concepts from their broader socio-historical context. The question, which certainly holds great significance, cannot be asked as something alien to things like society, politics, history, and culture.
To illustrate this point more feasibly, we can look into different periods of human history and analyze the human condition in different historical epochs. Here, let us imagine the primitive homo-sapien. What would be the purpose of life for the primitive human? Would primitive humans even need to ask this question? Certainly not, due to two primary causes: first, they simply couldn’t have asked this question due to the absence of language and speech, and second, they wouldn’t have felt any meaninglessness in the life that they lived. The primitive individual relied only on their visceral instincts (what Freud would refer to as the instincts of the id of the contemporary human) and looked forward only to fulfill their basic desires of sex, hunger, self-preservation, and compassion for fellow members of their species (Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality). They would only pursue sex and food and would live a life more fulfilling than any civilized man could ever imagine.
We can now get a better sense of how, in different periods of history, what it means to be human differs, and hence the nature and existence of the asked question (and its answer) will differ accordingly too. But, of course, the common individual would be concerned with what it means to be human and the purpose or meaning of life in the current social context and in the current historical epoch. Perhaps this question can’t just be answered, at least in the form of language. But the fact that so many people feel such a meaninglessness in their lives to ask this question (if they didn’t, this question wouldn’t be as pervasive as it is) does reveal a horrifying characteristic of the kind of society and the socio-economic system we find ourselves in. Therefore, this question is not just an individualist-existential question, but manifests as a social and political problem. Instead of finding the answer to questions like “what is the meaning of existence”, one should try to understand what causes existential meaninglessness in the first place—it is the nature of the global socio-economic order, capitalism, that causes a lack of meaning in life. How it does so is something that we shall now investigate.
Alienation
Capitalist society alienates individuals from each other, nature, their work, and most importantly, from their very selves (Marx, Estranged Labour):
Alienation from each other, because we learn to see each other as competitors competing for wages, power, status, attention, etc. Competition is one of the major forces that drives capitalism.
Alienation from nature, because nature becomes nothing but another dead, commodified object to extract capital from.
Alienation from one’s work or labor, because the product of one’s labor is not owned by them but by the capitalists they are working for.
Alienation from one’s own self, because capitalism makes it impossible for individuals to realize their species-being. According to Marx, the species-being or species-essence (the characteristic that makes one human) of individuals is to not be separate from their creative or productive activity, their work. Capitalism alienates individuals from their species-essence by, as mentioned before, alienating them from their work and, secondly, by not letting individuals be free in the choice of the kind of activity (work) they want to engage in, thus alienating them from their own selves.
This alienation is then bound to cause the loss of meaning in one’s life as no activity feels fulfillingly human—no matter how much existential literature and poetry one engages with; no matter how much Sartre or Camus one reads; no matter how much one tries to find meaning and happiness through things like art, music, therapy or religion—all of which surely provide a temporary relief and pleasure—at the end one is bound to fall into the melancholic nihilism that capitalism enforces upon us as we all live in it and are shaped by it. As long as the work you do and its product are owned by someone else, as long as you find yourself under the authority of something other than your own will, and as long as all of your human creative energy is consumed in only ensuring your survival and not in what you actually want to do, the question, “What is it that I actually seek?”, will always haunt you.
Consumerism
There is another aspect of contemporary capitalist society that adds to this meaninglessness: consumerism. It would be safe to assume that most people have a general idea of what this term means, but not many are familiar with its causes and effects. The basic social phenomenon that lays the foundation of consumerism is what Marx would call “commodity fetishism”, the process that assigns commodities an inherent value, abstracted out of all other social processes. People directly equate value with commodities instead of seeing the value of a commodity as a result of the labor put into making it. Commodities are thought to have some mystical properties trapped within them.
Commodity fetishism has existed as long as capitalism, but in contemporary capitalist societies, this process is taken to its extreme by the dominance of sign-value. In classical Marxian economics, a commodity gains value from the labor put into it; this value then manifests itself into exchange-value (the ratios in which commodities can be exchanged) and use-value (the utility of a commodity). The theorist Jean Baudrillard, however, introduced a third kind of value, which he observed in the rising consumer culture of the late twentieth century: sign-value. This is the value commodities gain by using different signifiers (signs) to differentiate themselves from other commodities. A typical example of such a signifier is a brand logo. It doesn’t matter if the material component (the amount of labor put into making the commodity, the color, the fabric, etc.) of two commodities, let’s say two shirts, is exactly the same; they can still hold different values if one of them has a logo that signifies prestige.
This is one of the many contradictions of contemporary capitalism: although all commodities of a particular kind are infected with sameness and monotony (materially), they still present themselves in a hierarchy by just using signs that are not materially real. As commodities are things actually consumed by people, this contradiction is something that we can observe among the people too: the capitalist subject tries to differentiate itself from others by simply owning and consuming different objects (commodities), but it is in this very process of irrational consumption that the individual becomes just one sign among others. Therefore, consumerism leads to the loss of a true identity, or more precisely, the loss of one’s authentic self. This loss of the self inevitably leads to a meaninglessness in one’s life. The capitalist subject tries to escape this meaninglessness through consumerism, but what consumerism does is exactly the opposite; it actively destroys meaning from one’s life.
Conclusion
This nihilism that contemporary society produces can only be destroyed by the destruction of our current socio-economic order, capitalism, by a radical socio-economic change, something that surely doesn’t seem to be happening in the near future. The point is, one can’t solve the problem of meaninglessness on an individual level, except if one ends their life altogether. Some would say that such a pessimistic attitude achieves nothing, but not being pessimistic in the contemporary condition would be like living in delusion—we can’t just deny these obvious problems that society faces today. But this very pessimism, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes, is what gives us the chance to be creative and to think about how we can overcome these issues—we honestly recognize the problem, no matter how complex and abysmal, and only then can we make an attempt to solve it—this is the courage of hopelessness.
References
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. London, Routledge, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. 1923. New York, Clydesdale Press, LLC, 2019.
Kellner, Douglas. “Jean Baudrillard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 22 Apr. 2005, plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/.
Marx, Karl. Capital. The Classics US, 1867.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 1844. London, Moscow, 1977.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 1755. United States, Empire Books, United States, 2013.
Aitkenhead, Decca . “Slavoj Žižek: “Humanity Is OK, but 99% of People Are Boring Idiots.”” The Guardian, 10 June 2012, www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring.
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