In this article for the paranormal contest of @onstellar I will present my point of view about the meaning of life, obviously based on the topic: "LIFE PURPOSE".
The purpose of life is probably the greatest cause of direct or indirect anguish for all people. Because if we do not have a reason to be, we are irrelevant in our own life, we are nothing more than an instant in time that sooner or later will succumb before nothingness. And there is nothing harder for our ego than to feel that we have no value, that we have no purpose.
Plato believed that the meaning of life is found in the sum of different forms of superior knowledge of the good, of which everything good and just gets its value. On the other hand, Aristotle, a disciple of Plato, believed that through Eudaemonism happiness could be achieved. Closer to our time, Ayn Rand explains that the meaning of life is acquired by each one working for himself, according to his desires. We give meaning to our life, it could be the summary of your theory, and just as there are hundreds and hundreds more.
What I am going to explain next is my point of view, my own summarized theory, because it requires a systemic perspective and the understanding of many other philosophical concepts, and although it has a certain degree of ambiguity, I think it will be understood without great problems.
To understand the meaning of life we must apply a proposition by Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Any possibility of states of affairs, must already be rooted in the nature of the thing."
That is, if an electron behaves in a certain way with another particle, it is because it is recorded in the nature of both that they can behave like this, and not in any other way.
Therefore we understand that whatever the meaning of life is, it must be engraved in our nature, in our nature as humans. But now comes the question: What makes us human? What is our essence?
This necessarily leads us to make a comparison with all other living entities: What does homo sapiens have that no other living being has? And it will quickly come to our mind that the reason we are at the top of the food chain is because of our brain and not because of our fragile and weak body.
Now we must ask ourselves: What is special about our brain? The answer is also immediate and obvious: A great cognitive power, to the point that we are aware, and it is the sum of all our mental qualities that makes us human, beyond all the rest of our body, which also gives us our identity as humans, but the most important thing is in our mind. In our person.
Therefore the meaning or direction of life is to develop more and more our consciousness, since we are not born being conscious, but with the ability to be, and as we learn, our consciousness expands: Consciousness is awareness of things .
And on the other hand we must correctly apply this awareness, what would be the point of just learning, and not using this knowledge correctly?
So we were born to be free, to free ourselves from both physical and psychological adversities, using our most powerful weapon, because there is no problem in the world that can be solved without using our privileged brain. We were born to evolve, but to evolve on a mental level, because otherwise we would be wasting what makes us the most capable animal on the face of the earth.
It should be noted that what is described above is the generic description of the purpose of life, in addition to this there is also a sense of the particular life, which is the sum of using our human potential as I said before, plus the particularities of each individual.
Because human progress, exploit our cognitive capacity, does not mean much, it is very ambiguous, to understand it better we must understand that each individual will be realized as a human being in different ways to others, doing all kinds of activities, careers, compliance of dreams, but always within the range of the ethical. Ethics and purpose of life go hand in hand, just like happiness. None of the maxims of life can be given if it is not correlated with the other maxims, but this is already entering the systemic perspective that previously spoke, but I was in only give a summary of my point of view of the meaning of life If I continue to expand on this article it would be too extensive.
I hope that at least this article stimulates the community of steemians to think and get something important from it, and if I am wrong about something, if they can refute me, let me know in the comments.
You got a 23.81% upvote from @bluebot courtesy of @azorahai77!
One of the biggest questions of all time. Great overview and well written.
Totally :)