The Most Important Question

The most important question in our lives. Something i wrote in 2010. Involves shariati, tolstoy, frankl, ghazali (r.a), a bit of hajj, suffering, pain, love. life. past. desires. centre. submission. time and space. a bit of all that, and a bit more.

This paper aims to discuss the most important question a human being needs to answer, as posed by Tolstoy and Shariati and other thinkers such as al-Ghazali and Frankl . It will compare and discuss the answers found in the lives of ordinary people, as Shariati and Tolstoy propose, and contrast these with the answers given by science and art, which the two thinkers reject as unsatisfactory. It then moves on to discuss how the acts of Hajj make one return to the primary identity of an ordinary man and answer the essential question and other questions that follow. I will conclude by proposing that though the question discussed throughout the paper seems inescapable, there is still one force that can render it (and then in fact any question) irrelevant, making the insights offered by Shariati and Tolstoy to be as futile as they are helpful.

First off, what is it that every person would want to have an answer for? This question, which cannot be ignored or suppressed by man, as it could not be by the authors under discussion, pertains to the self. It can be put into one word in its broadest sense: “Why?”. While “how” asks about the steps, procedures, stages of development and process of a phenomenon, and “what” calls for its definition and description, “why” demands an explanation of its meaning. It asks for a reason, a motivation or a purpose, and if a human being keeps asking it for any and everything he does, he regresses back to asking ‘why the self?’. So while the most important question can be put in a generic word “why”, it can put in a sentence as Tolstoy puts it: “what is the meaning of life?”(Briggs ed. 130). This is the most important question, for in knowing the meaning of life lies knowing the meaning of death, of a higher cause, of a transcendental ideal, and of man’s relation with space and time, finite and the infinite. There are many ways of asking this same question, such as why does man live, what is the purpose of life, what is achieved by some actions or intentions. All of these boil down to one question that both Tolstoy and Shariati consider as inevitable, although they diverge with respect to their approach towards the queries it further sets and directs.

Tolstoy, when he asks for a reason underlying his actions, values, worth and eventually life, directs his efforts in pursuit of knowing the meaning of life as well as death, seemingly suggesting that if one understands the meaning of death, one can understand life . This is from where he brings in the notion of infinite and finite: while man lives for a finite amount of time, he dies for an apparently infinite period. Similarly, while reason – measurable and applicable – is finitely possessed by man, it cannot be used to explain the infinite phenomenon of man’s existence. Man’s life is finite, bound by space and time, which are whole and infinite. Thus, the next pressing question for Tolstoy is that what is the relationship between the finite and the infinite; in other words, what is the position of man in the universe of existence, cause, time and space? This question becomes important as another way of asking the meaning of life.

Shariati, however, chooses to ask a different set of questions supplementary to the question about the meaning of life. He concerns himself more with the purpose and end outcome of actions – whether or not they have been successful in achieving the intent and aim of the actor. For Shariati, another way of asking the meaning of life is how closely has it been lived to its purpose. The question “for whom?” is life being lived runs parallel to the question of “why is life lived?”. Hence, we see that Shariati, unlike Tolstoy, starts with a basic first assumption that there is a centre, an unmoving, unchanging cause, who is True, Good and Beautiful at the same time; this centre is not open to man to set in anything. Asking the meaning of life is actually asking the proximity of one’s life – in word, action or intent – to this centre – God. While Tolstoy’s question is about the meaning of life as a whole, Shariati’s question is about the meaning of the same life as an aggregate sum of actions, behaviors and intentions. This is indicative in Shariati’s notion of life as a constant movement and approach towards the centre . Tolstoy’s treatment of the question of life suggests life to be the centre, capable of having a position of its own and a relation with other phenomena, whereas Shariati would argue that the question asks about the meaning of life vis-à-vis a centre external to the self. For Shariati, the tool for measuring the meaning or value of life is already present. When Tolstoy says, “To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life” (161), he brings the meaning of life along with the meaning of something else, which is external to it: God. To ask the meaning of life therefore necessitates asking the meaning of God too. Shariati would be far from questioning in the same manner, for while he would ask the meaning of life, he would foreclose questioning the meaning of the centre that is external to it.

Frankl approaches the question on meaning of life on the premise that man has to find the meaning himself (Frankl 133), and this meaning can be found in multiple sources – sometimes in suffering, sometimes in the past, at other times in the future. This suggests that for Frankl, the most important question gets different answers at different points in life, as meanings and their sources can change. The idea that meaning of life can be set at an individual’s own discretion and can (and inevitably does) change implies that life is a sum of actions and knowing the meaning of life means knowing the meaning of these actions and decisions at various, separate stages in life. This makes Frankl’s approach similar to Shariati’s, except with the fine difference that the centre – the true, good and beautiful – can keep changing for Frankl, while for Shariati, it is fixed. Interestingly, we can find traces of al-Ghazali’s approach towards the question of the meaning of life in Tolstoy's position, demanding a more abstract and fixed answer. Al-Ghazali knew his actions and intentions, but he himself could not place meanings in them separately, piece by piece, before he could find a broader meaning of knowledge and life (al-Ghazali 20). Like Tolstoy, he held it necessary that life be treated as a whole and meaning first has to be found in the whole to then be extracted and applied to separate actions such as worship, seclusion, resuming teaching and so on.

Despite their differences on direction and approach towards the same question on the meaning of life, both Tolstoy and Shariati agree on finding the answers in the lives of the ordinary people. These people are described by Tolstoy as simple, uneducated poor, who have neither the wisdom or insights of Solomon, Sakya Muni (Buddha), Schopenhauer, or Socrates, nor the rational knowledge or reason that education can instill in one. These people do not have anything to be vain about, and to Tolstoy’s surprise, nothing to be sad about either, though their lifestyles were those which the elite would consider as tough luck, misfortune, and deplorable. This category of ‘others’ is pushed to the margin by rationality, aesthetics, objectivity and education, and ignored when the society seeks the meaning of life from the hard sciences and liberal arts.

Hard sciences – at the extreme of which is mathematics – understands everything to be dictated by the universal laws of nature which capture all that there ever was, is and will be. The enormous predicting power that these laws afford to man leads to tendency to give clear-cut answers to everything – from meaning of a particular life to meaning of life in general. However, while laws of mutation can help explain ‘how’ we live and ‘what’ makes us live, they do not suffice to answer ‘why’ these laws exist in the first place to enable us to keep living. This inadequacy of science, masked by the label of objectivity and rationality, causes a world of binaries to exist, with science, rationality, objectivity and predictive power on one side, and abstraction, emotions and essence of being on the other side. According to Tolstoy, science attempts to fit life into a general standard model of cause and effect (135), but in its efforts, science violates the essence or meaning of being before reaching it. When Tolstoy says that ‘there could be no law of endless development’ (133), he seems to have realized that science treats laws as something greater and superior to life, and life cannot and will not mean anything outside of these laws. It is a lose-lose situation: science tells us that meaning is to be found in the meaning of the laws, but laws tell us only the ‘how’ about life, so we do not get any substantial answer on the “why”. At the same time, advocates of science claim that life is not only definitely nothing and meaningless, but it is not even an actuality outside the universal laws or ‘truths’. In either case, it alludes us to the meaninglessness of life.

This is a disquieting conclusion that science offers, but Tolstoy and Shariati do not dismiss it for this uneasy belittling of life. It is rather due to the inherent flaws in definition and attitude towards science that the two thinkers confess it to be unworthy of providing the meaning of life. Firstly, we have discussed that science’s task is to discover the already present truths and laws; it does not go into the metaphysical ‘why’ of anything. This forecloses for us science as a potential source of answer. Nevertheless, one still looks for answers in science because of the attitude that one tries “to know truth by men, and not of men by the truth”, as al-Ghazali suggests (al-Ghazali 38). By this, I mean that when one witnesses the great inventions, scientism, logic and rationality applied by the human mind, one is likely to consider reason to be the great sole instrument of knowledge and truth. The general attitude then becomes that if the scientific mind has discovered the laws of nature, then it must be capable of truly identifying the meaning of life also, notwithstanding multiple faculties such as heart, nature or the lower self – that may have a role to play in finding the meaning of life. Such an approach leads one to rely on science to confirm truth claims and values rather than values and truth assessing the conclusions drawn by science. This is what Tolstoy had a problem with when he says that experimental science “displays the greatness of the human mind when it does not introduce into its investigations the question of an ultimate cause” (135). The laws hailed by science are held in abstract like a matter of pure chance, but if regression is done all the way to the first cause, science’s inherent problem is exposed because it cannot explain anything about this cause. This overlook of regression to a first cause forms another problem with science.

Liberal arts are also not free from providing unsatisfactory answers. Abstract science and liberal arts, concerned with the ideals that all humanity should uphold, claim the meaning of life to be found in those ideals. However, the first basic problem that arises is the ability of humanity to find such ideals; do any universal ideals exist at all in the first place? All man knows is his particular life and specific life experiences, so how does he know and experience which of the ideals are felt by all across the worlds? Liberal arts run the risk of generalizing the particular. As Tolstoy belonged to the educated elite and had in the past promoted culture in the name of the ideal of ‘progress’, he understood this problem like no other. The educated tend to generalize their particular beliefs and ideals across humanity, being oblivious that what may be good for the majority nevertheless is not so for the minority, however small it may be, yet the majority tries to generalize by claiming to represent all. If we have take notice of this problem, the second problem remains, viz. there are mutual contradictions embedded when we put together various ideologies within the liberal arts. If meaning of life has to be found in the liberal arts theories or ideologies, then how does one decide amongst the competing ideas? How does one establish who is wrong, who is right, and then who is most right of the right? Tolstoy realizes that if what liberal arts generally offer – that man is part of the whole and to understand the whole humanity means to understand life – he should have satiated his queries much earlier, given that he was from the field of abstract sciences and arts. Yet this was not the case, rather the meaninglessness of life was exposed. Furthermore, there are tendencies found within the discipline to give abstract and vague answers; resultantly nothing substantial can be derived to find the meaning of life.

None of this is a problem when one looks at the lives of ordinary people, for they do not rely on reason alone (as hard science does), and they do not remain vague either about the meaning of life (like liberal arts would tend to do so). Their distinguishing characteristic is that they are ordinary: there is nothing that makes them rise above or think differently from others. This mediocrity leads one to immediately find a fall in ego amongst these people, leading them to rely less on the rational self and drawing attention to other faculties ignored by sciences, such as the heart. It is through the convictions of the heart that ordinary people find the meaning of life.

What Tolstoy finds as a marked feature of these people is their irrationality called ‘faith’ firmly held in heart. Faith is an anti-thesis to ego and reliance on the self. It makes one realize that not all questions are answered by the finite ability to reason, and meaning doesn’t have to be processed and consciously determined through rationality either. Faith is manifested in many areas of the daily life – in being content with ups and downs that come one’s way, in enduring and laboring quietly, in accepting the realities without complaining or challenging fate, and most importantly, dying a peaceful death. It would be false to assume that such lifestyle stems from the inability to fight the society’s norms, or to be stupid to not have found ways to make more money and fame; it is in fact faith in that which the ordinary man holds as true, good and beautiful – God – that he learns to know his existence as it is. Faith gives a poor, unsophisticated milliard’s finite sufferings an infinite meaning. Shariati would understand this faith as ‘submission’ of man to God, in the form of him shedding his false, man-made identity and joining the league of ordinary people to be once again only the man of God. The command of God to submit is in fact a call to return to true identity precisely because it is inherent in man to submit to the cause of its existence. This inherent relationship with God is discovered by man by means of what Tolstoy calls “some despised pseudo knowledge” (148). He realized that the ordinary people, by virtue of their simplicity, seem to have discovered and unveiled this pseudo-knowledge, which is otherwise hidden to man due to vanity, love for wealth, and obsession with rationality, wrong pursuits and evil desires. This pseudo knowledge uncovers man’s chief identity of being the slave of God and is called faith by Tolstoy, while for Shariati it comprises knowledge, consciousness and love, all of which rituals performed in Hajj manifest. Whether it is called faith or submission, derived consciously or unconsciously, the fact remains that the ordinary man is not self-centered. He dies peacefully and does not look down upon anyone because he doesn’t regard the self to be the most powerful, most intelligent or the best of planners. He endures hardships because he does not consider himself to be the most deserving, most evolved of mankind. The reason why he performs Hajj as God has commanded is that he is not loyal to the self, but to God. His attitude is that of self-negation, as illustrated by Tolstoy when he says …

Ordinary people seem to have resolved the dichotomy between reason and heart, science and emotions, through the rituals performed at Hajj. Right from the very start of the Hajj, there are attempts to return to the life of an ordinary man, first by changing clothes that create distinction between humans, then by donning those clothes that symbolize uniformity. A hajji intends to go to the House of Allah, which Shariati correctly recognizes as the “House of the People”, thereby implying that in order to get close to God, one necessarily has to become more and more like one of the masses. One’s ability to reason, one’s sharp mindedness and intelligence make one distinguished, so none of that is required to reach out to God and find the meaning of life. Instead of reason, one relies on the emotions of the heart, chief of which is faith. One has faith in his mediocrity and more than that on God that He will value whatever this poor, uneducated, simple laborer has to offer Him, just the way God accepted Hajar – a black Ethiopian slave woman who completely submitted to god’s will and whose grave is next to Kabah (the House of God). The lowest of the lowly – Hajar - was valued and exalted by God all because of her complete faith in Him. In her faith lies the answer to the question of the meaning of life. Life’s meaning can neither be found in man-made ideals that liberal arts propose, nor in man’s greatness of being rational, but in something beyond that- something in man that transcends worldly standards and excellence. When the Hajji prays in Miqaat, he adopts his chief identity, dismissing man-made identities such as being an artist, scientist, Marxist, feminist, conservative, post-modernist and so on. At Miqaat, he pledges to have faith in his identity as the slave of God, which will be enough to lead him to happiness, contentment and meaning. In the state of Ihram, one keeps on returning to this identity of being one of the million slaves of God, by not looking in the mirror, not fighting with anyone, basically not doing anything that would make one’s own logic, rationality and ego come in.

Faith is most strongly reflected in Tawaf (circumambulation), wherein one moves in a circle around Kabah seven times. The meaning of life gets clear as moving in a circle symbolizes one’s life to revolve around God, Who is the centre; moving in a group reflects the importance of being one of many, of having no highlighting features, but completely submitting to God with belief that He is the true reason worthy living and dying for. In the discipline that one needs to maintain in Tawaf, lies the answer to Tolstoy’s question of man’s relation with time and space. While everything is moving and changing, we need not stop the change to reach a static meaning of life. Discipline entails handling change in the proper way and in this propriety lies the meaning of life. If meaning of life is having faith in God, as Tolstoy experienced and Shariati elucidated, then by having faith the proper way, through obedience and submission, one find the purpose of living, dying, caring, suffering, worshipping and each and every other activity. As Shariati points out that God Himself recognized that Ibrahim was not a perfect Prophet, a perfect slave until he had perfect obedience (Behzadnia, Denny trans. 35). God too, in a way, disciplined Ibrahim’s submission through commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son Ismail. If God disciplined a Prophet to the point of complete submission, then the rest of humanity is obligated to submit as well for its own salvation. Discipline tells us that things are not randomly organized, neither is man. Man’s existence means something beyond particles and atoms, and he is not born out of mere chance. There is an arrangement present in the universe and he is arranged in a Master-save relationship with God. It is faith in this relationship that positions man with respect to God, Who is the centre, joins the finite (man) with the Infinite (God), and explains the purpose of life. But first man has to realize and admit his finiteness and for that he has to become an ordinary person with a simple life, heart and mind. The spirit of exertion and struggle in performing Say’ explain the hope that ordinary people have in the worst of situations. If Hajar, faced with hopelessness regarding her and her son’s survival, lived on, toiled around the mountains, and had hope, then the elite, the privileged facing void in their lives have no case for hopelessness. They too should move on, live on, take initiative and action, but all of this should be done by taking cues from the ordinary lowly person like Hajar, who endured and worked hard with hope and faith alive in the heart.

This orientation is possible in every man through the pseudo-knowledge. For Shariati, knowledge, consciousness and love in the rituals done at Arafat, Mashar and Mina respectively reflect this primordial nature. A Hajji goes to Arafat (knowledge) first, indicating that man naturally knows the meaning of life, before he is even aware of it. Knowledge coming before consciousness also means that one need not deliberately find a reason for living, or happiness in actions. Just like happiness is not something to be pursued, “it must ensue”, as Frankl rightly puts it (162), meaning of life also evades our minds but is always present in the heart in the form of knowledge, consciousness or love. One can find a similar relationship between Tawaf and Say’: an ordinary man must have faith and the ability to submit first, and then hope and optimism in rough times are possible. The last of three stages of Hajj is Mina (love), where one’s act of throwing pebbles at the Satan and celebrating victory (in the event of ‘Id) both take place. This signifies that in man’s primordial essence or nature is love – which is the ultimate state of the heart. Faith, submission and hope are imperfect and incomplete in understanding the lives of the ordinary people is love is not taken into account. While faith can give meaning to life, love makes life easier to live and meaning easier to remember at all times. Love for God allows one to suffer any how, endure any suffering, and find meaning in any endurance. It is like a weapon that allows the ordinary man to feel distinct, like Shariati mentions the impact that being in Mina among thousands of soldiers of God have on the self. This is interesting since Shariati calls Mina as the “battlefront” (29) yet the ordinary person is immersed in love because it stems not from his whims but faith, submission, knowledge and awareness of a higher purpose and cause. Hence he can fight, because for Shariati, “For the sake of truth and out of love, anything can be sacrificed” (42). Of all the things, love is surely one thing not reserved to those rational, objective or those indulged in high ideals, culture and development. It is specifically one aspect absent from the realm of science, as vividly explained by Nietzsche . Obsession with objectivity makes the scientific man unable to bear, beget, love or hate, all of which are defining features of the ordinary man and the Hajji. For Shariati, Hajj encompasses the three elements present in the heart, which suffice to bring a man to meaning in life, through the process of being one of the thousands of ordinary people at one place.

The insights offered by Shariati and Tolstoy into the features of ordinary people sheds light on the need to be active in life actions and decisions in order to save the self from episodes of anomie, meaninglessness and disenchantment, or worse: apathy. The texts call for caution against the potential apathy guised in ‘objectivity’ and science, and against the tendency to overdo the search for the true, good and the beautiful in the domain of liberal arts. One has to feel like an ordinary person to allow meaning to ensue like happiness, if one starts with the assumption that meaning is out there – regardless of whether it is native in the self or acquired. The perceptions of the two authors have been helpful to the extent of stimulating my mind to consciously make decisions. They made me realize that the seemingly “objective” reasons for which I took to take this course – to fulfill course requirements, to learn a new discipline – regress to the overarching meaning I hold of life, as a production and reflection of the favors and expectations from God, to which I must come up to by way of the means I have at my disposal. There is no decision, even as mundane as picking an elective course, that doesn’t reflect the underlying meaning applied to life. As it was discussed in the earliest sessions of the course, no matter what we are doing, what emotions we are feeling, our actions and decisions are an answer to what we conceive as the true, the good and the beautiful.

However, there is one thing that can render all of this exercise futile, and that is being trapped in the desirous lower self. The lower self – which I would define as a bunch of whims and desires, such as greed, lust – is not even bothered with the question pertaining to the meaning of life, for the lower self lives in the moment only and the true, good and the beautiful is indulgence in the moment only. If the notion of time is excluded, the meaning of life doesn’t even arise, and any level of discussion and insight offered by Shariati, Tolstoy, a man of science, a man from the liberal arts or an ordinary man makes no difference, for the first principle of “having a life” is denied by the lower self that just believes in living the moment. If the human being is trapped in gratifying lower self, then the most important question on the meaning of life completely ceases to be a question at all, but then we also need to ask whether the human being remains human anymore.

WORKS CITED

Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. Pocket Books, 1984.

Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Al Munqidh min al-Dalal, translated as Deliverance From Error by R.K McCarthy, Louiseille, KY: Fons vitae, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “We Scholars” from Beyond Good and Evil.

Shariati, Ali. Hajj, translated as The Pilgrimage by Ali A. Behzadnia, M.D. & Najla Denny. Jubilee Press.

Tolstoy, Lev. A Confession, edited by A.D.P Briggs, Everyman.