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Humans are strange creatures. They sing their own praises declaring that they are the greatest creatures made by God. All other creatures have, as if, no other purpose but to serve humanity. Whatever is good on earth must therefore be useful for man. For otherwise, goodness itself would lose its meaning and purpose!
Meaning and purpose, however, are two different thought categories. Meaning is about comprehensibility of a thing, be that abstract or concrete. There are also other connotations of meaning, for example, meaning of life. But in the latter sense of meaning, it becomes identical with purpose. Then again the question of clarity and comprehensibility is implied in the second nuance of meaning. But purpose per se is quite a different concern altogether. Because, one can be purposeful without being meaningful. Man himself is a classic example of purposefulness without meaning. Whatever man does, no doubt, he does it with a purpose. But should that necessarily have meaning? One of the most meaningless and also senseless things he has been engaged in since he descended on this earth from heaven is making war. Even war has arguments in its favour. But then arguments are but exercises in rationality used to justify actions people perform, meaningfully or not. First and foremost, war kills people and then unmakes what they make. Certainly these are purposeful activities, but what meaning might they have? Killing opposes living, and by denying life to the members of the same species the perpetrators of homicide deprive human life of its meaning. Nevertheless, one cannot say that the killers have no purpose. They have purpose like the soldiers and generals of the armies of great nations and heroes of revolution and their acolytes. They are all merchants of death and destruction and, of course, they belong to the category of humans who are praised, and hence, are especially famous for their strength of will, which is but the quintessential ingredient of purpose. Briefly stated, stronger the purpose or will in a person, the more value he carries in the eyes of his fellow people, because he also possesses a greater capability to destroy other people and their work of labour.
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There was a philosophical movement in the latter part of the 19th century called irrationalism. The ideas of Nietzsche, Dilthey and Simmel in Germany and Bergson in France were the leading lights of this "philosophy of life." The philosophy of life negated the material basis of life and universe or, more specifically, the basis of scientific world view. In the twenties of the of the 20th century Max Scheler and Oswald Spengler, the advocates of fascist "myth of the twentieth century" joined in to replace materialistic concept of life with an irrational stream or 'urge.' Irrationalism took the place of rationality and reason. For to them rationality could explain only dead matter, but not life, which is ever-flowing and changing and so reason kills life by its vivisection, called analysis. The philosophy of irrationalism driven by lust for life, naturally, gave rise to the lust for power and also war. For power, for its sustenance, needs war. Then killing and destruction follow as a corollary.
There were, wars and its fallouts-death and destruction-before. But then people never really liked or supported wars as a matter of principle. Strangely enough, the philosophy of the urge for life turned out to be a philosophy to destroy life. Then came the first great war-the First World War- that involved the entire civilised humanity. The spate of senseless killing and destruction shattered the ideals modern man so earnestly cherished since Enlightenment.
The German philosopher T. Lessing, aghast at the demonstration of madness of civilised man in a battlefield during the First World War, wrote:
"The best symbol of history seems to me that sugar factory near Souches in Flanders which during the war, between 1914 and 1916, was fifty times captured from the French by the Germans and as many times recaptured by the French; moreover, every time several hundred men were killed or wounded and every time the survivors, now on one side, now on the other, sounded the trumpets for a great victory.; but in the end they were back to where they started from with a new battle. This senseless hell of incessant fighting for a change of power, this unending struggle of all against all for the sake of which such huge energies and talents, labour and values are expended that a mere tenth of them, placed at the service of the spirit, would be enough to turn earth into heaven-when will this torment end? What god should have revealed himself in this awful uninterrupted chain of battle places and warriors, lootings and looters' chiefs, marauders and pigs, deceived and deceived deceivers, ambitious orators and lucky soldiers who all together, like the unlucky earth itself, move only in everlasting circles?" Lessing then asks: should not history then be history conceived of as an 'alienated and alienating meaningless force?" The new philosophy of irrationalism, denying the Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality, democracy and liberalism, thus wanted to see life through the prism of life, which again, denied life itself.
In a similar vein the philosophy of 'existentialism,' a modern form of irrationalism, also holds such view of life where existence itself is pointless. This branch of philosophy was also a product of the second decade of twentieth century. Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in Germany, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in France were the modern advocates of this new philosophical movement. German philosopher Edmund Husserl has also contributed to the ontological interpretation of life through his method of phenomenology, that takes 'pure human consciousness' as the basis of cognition or structure of knowledge. The existentialist thinker is an 'existing' or living individual, who through his subjectivity looks at the world and cognises it. The existential subjective thinker, unlike his rational objective counterpart, as conceived by the 19th century Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, adds individuality and emotion to the interpretation of the world outside him. To sum up, in this yet another branch of irrational philosophy, it is not the humans in general, but the individual that matters. Death, suffering, terror, struggle, guilt, ecstasy, madness, etc., offer the 'eine Grenzsituation' or 'frontier situation' through which the 'real depths' of existence is revealed to the individual, Jaspers, one of the main exponents of modern existentialism holds.
The living existential individual cannot see any rational world refracted through his impulses and emotions. So, he may have purpose but not meaning.
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