Chapter One
we all need wisdom
Why Live?
Why don't you kill yourself? Albert Camus began his book The Myth of Sisyphus with the startling
assertion “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” A French
novelist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, Camus said that judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. If
life is meaningless, there is no point to pursuing traditional philosophical questions about the nature
of reality, knowledge, and morality.
Why life is worth living is indeed an urgent question, but it is rarely the question of suicide. The
question of why you don't kill yourself arises only if you think that there are reasons why you would
kill yourself, and people's lives are rarely so miserable that such reasons become prominent. If
depression, disease, and despair were the overwhelming character of everyday life, then people
would have a daily struggle about whether to go on at all. Unfortunately, such a struggle is not rare
among young adults: an American survey of university students found that 10 percent said they had
seriously considered suicide during the preceding year.
Most of us face the much less drastic question of how to go on, of how to live our lives. Then the
question of the meaning of life is not the skeptical one of whether there is any meaning at all, but
rather the constructive one that can have informative answers concerning what aspects of life make it
worth living.
For most people today, religion provides a major source of answers to such questions about the
meaning of life. When I was a child in Catholic school in the 1950s, I learned from the Baltimore
Catechism that “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be
happy with Him forever in the next.” From a religious perspective, meaning arises not from any
meager aspect of our daily lives, but from our profound connections with God, who brought us into
existence and who provides the possibility of eternal happiness. However, for Camus and others like
myself who have abandoned the beliefs produced by our religious upbringings, the theological
answer to the meaning of life is implausible. Does this imply that life is absurd, ridiculous, and
pointless, so utterly devoid of meaning that suicide should be a daily preoccupation of everyone?
Not at all. The eminent clinical psychologist Martin Seligman remarked that the three great realms
of life are love, work, and play. For most people, these realms provide ample reasons to live. If your
life is rich with love of family and friends, with work that is productive and pleasant, and with
varieties of pastimes and entertainments that bring you joy, then the general issue of the meaning of
life need rarely trouble you, eliminating Camus' extreme question of suicide. In Chapters 7 and 8, I
will use evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show how love, work, and play make life
meaningful for most people, whether or not they are religious.
In the absence of the threat of absurdity, narrower issues about the meaning of life arise when the
three realms conflict. For example, couples with young children often experience severe conflicts
between love and work, when the intense needs of children compete for time and energy with the
demands of career development. Young adults need to figure out how to render compatible the
delights of playful pastimes such as sports and music with the imperative to get a job and support
themselves. One of the few advantages of growing older is that the reduction of family
responsibilities and the satisfaction or diminishing of career goals can make conflicts between the
realms of love, work, and play much more manageable. I will describe how the meaning of life is no
single thing such as a devotion to God, but rather depends on multiple dimensions that shift in
importance over the course of a person's life. Hence life need never sink into the kind of absurdity
embraced by Camus when he was writing in his twenties.
My aim in this book is to use experimental and theoretical research in psychology and neuroscience
to provide a much richer and deeper understanding of how love, work, and play provide good
reasons for living. Thus an answer to Camus' philosophical question about the meaning of life
becomes tied to scientific findings, which many philosophers and religious thinkers would consider
cheating. They think that philosophy should be concerned with truths that are eternal and absolute, not
with the messy and sometimes transient findings of empirical science. Unfortunately, philosophy has
been no more successful at finding such eternal truths than religion has been. In contrast, I will try to
show that neuropsychology is richly relevant not only to the question of the meaning of life, but also to
questions that I think are just as fundamental, concerning the nature of reality, knowledge, and
morality.
Without any ranking, here are what seem to me to be the most fundamental philosophical questions:
What is reality?
How do we know reality?
Why is life worth living?
What makes actions right or wrong?
In contrast to Camus, I think that it is useful to address the question of the meaning of life after
considering the nature of our knowledge of reality, although we will see that all these questions are
intimately interconnected. For example, the question of why life is worth living raises issues about
the moral legitimacy of ends such as love, work, and play. Moreover, issues about the nature of
knowledge and reality are crucial for the pursuit of questions about morality and the meaning of life.
We need to know what persons are and how they can gain knowledge in order to be able to figure out
how to assess the objective value of human lives and the rightness or wrongness of actions.
Sources of Wisdom
The word “philosophy” arose from Greek words for love of wisdom, but what is the wisdom that
philosophy is supposed to be seeking, and how can it be found? Wisdom is not just knowledge, as
there are many pieces of knowledge of little general importance. I know that Toronto is a city in
Ontario, but would hardly claim that this knowledge makes me wiser. Rather, we should think of
wisdom as knowledge about what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it. Knowing what
matters should guide us to acquire other kinds of important knowledge rather than acquiring a wealth
of beliefs that may be true but rather trivial. At the deepest level, wisdom involves knowing not only
what kinds of things are important to human beings, but also why they are important. For example, to
be wise you need to have some understanding that love matters to people, that there are psychological
and biological reasons why love matters, and that there are better and worse ways of finding love.
All people need wisdom of this sort in order to conduct their lives effectively, but wisdom may
take on different forms as people go through the stages of life. Small children have scant need for
wisdom, fortunately, as their needs and plans are normally taken care of by parents and other
caregivers. But adolescents and young adults face important transitions, from play as their major
focus to concerns with careers and families that elevate the importance of work and love. Finding
coherence among work, love, and play is key to finding satisfaction and happiness in middle age. As
people grow older, they need to figure out how to shift this balance in keeping with changes in family
responsibilities and diminished capabilities due to reduced health.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus eloquently expressed the need for wisdom across the life
span: