Wittgenstein once claimed that the problem with philosophical truths is that, once you state them, they are so obvious that no one could ever doubt them. I think this claim is, to some extent, correct. But â and this is the strangest thing about the answers to philosophical questions â their banality is no guarantee of their intelligibility. To understand a philosophical answer, you need to understand how to work it out yourself. To do that, you need to see where it comes from.You need to understand the force and urgency of the problem to which the answer is a solution; you need to understand the allure of the alternative solutions to this problem, and perhaps have succumbed to one or more of these alternative solutions at some point. In this respect, philosophical answers are utterly unlike the answers of any other domain of human knowledge or inquiry. If someone tells me that E = mc 2 , for example, I might say, âThank you very much; I now know that the energy contained in a body is the product of its mass and the square of the speed of light.â To understand it, I do not need to know how to derive this equation â which is fortunate, as I havenât the faintest idea. Philosophical answers are not like this. Unless you know how to work them out, you will not really understand them.
When the philosophical question is a question about life â about what is important or valuable in life â the power and urgency of the problem is something that you have to feel in your life. The allure of alternative solutions to the problems, the succumbing to this allure, these are things you feel and do in your life and not, fundamentally, in your head. Unless you can feel the problem of the meaning of life â the problem of value in life â you will not understand any answer that might be given to it.
In the end, it is not in our minds that this answer is to be found. It is in our blood and bones that we understand value. It is only through living that you feel the problem of lifeâs meaning. Through living you come to understand what life has in store for you. You understand this not just intellectually; you feel it viscerally, you taste it, an aching in the bones and a sourness in the blood. An answer to the question of what is valuable in life would tell us what redeems this life â what makes it worth living. To understand redemption inlife, you need to understand from what, precisely, life needs redeeming. This is what you understand when you feel yourself growing old, feel your blood become thin and cool, feel your physical and intellectual powers begin to slide. If there is a meaning in this life, there is something that makes it, as Albert Camus once put it, âworth the troubleâ. That is why the question of the meaning of life â of value in life â is the most important question there is.
There is a Platonic dialogue â The Meno â in which Plato teaches a slave boy, the eponymous Meno, some of the theorems of Euclidean geometry. Plato argues that he has not taught Meno anything new, but merely helped him remember something that he once knew but had forgotten. We are all born with this sort of knowledge, Plato claimed, but forget it because of the trauma of birth. âAnamnesisâ is the name he used for this process of remembering what we once knew. For Plato, the idea of anamnesis was bound up with the Pythagorean idea of reincarnation, and I certainly do not believe in that. But the systematic forgetting of some of the most important truths, I think, is real. It happens not when we are born, but as we grow up. Any child knows value â they know what is important in life â although they do not know that they know it. And they know it in the way children know things, a kind of knowing that the adult finds very difficult, and has to learn all over again. Once I knew value. I knew it in my body and not in my mind, and so I did not know that I
Dorothy Calimeris, Sondi Bruner