ways. Strain my attention as I would, I saw no way except those
four. One way was not to understand that life is senseless,
vanity, and an evil, and that it is better not to live. I could
not help knowing this, and when I once knew it could not shut my
eyes to it. the second way was to use life such as it is without
thinking of the future. And I could not do that. I, like Sakya
Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age,
suffering, and death exist. My imagination was too vivid. Nor
could I rejoice in the momentary accidents that for an instant
threw pleasure to my lot. The third way, having under stood that
life is evil and stupid, was to end it by killing oneself. I
understood that, but somehow still did not kill myself. The fourth
way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer -- knowing that life
is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing
oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This
was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that
position.
I see now that if I did not kill myself it was due to some dim
consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. However convincing
and indubitable appeared to me the sequence of my thoughts and of
those of the wise that have brought us to the admission of the
senselessness of life, there remained in me a vague doubt of the
justice of my conclusion.
It was like this: I, my reason, have acknowledged that life
is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is
not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator
of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no
life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or
to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not
exist; therefore reason is life's son. Life is all. Reason is its
fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was
something wrong here.
Life is a senseless evil, that is certain, said I to myself.
Yet I have lived and am still living, and all mankind lived and
lives. How is that? Why does it live, when it is possible not to
live? Is it that only I and Schopenhauer are wise enough to
understand the senselessness and evil of life?
The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult,
and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have
lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of
doubting the reasonableness of life?
My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown
me that everything on earth -- organic and inorganic -- is all most
cleverly arranged -- only my own position is stupid. and those
fools -- the enormous masses of people -- know nothing about how
everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they
live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged!
...
And it struck me: "But what if there is something I do not
yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always
says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it
says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that
there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood
the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not
live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot
live.
"Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. well then,
kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill
yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life --
then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing
that you do not understand it. You have come into good company
where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you
find it dull and repulsive -- go away!"
Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of
suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most
inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing
about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted
hussy? For our wisdom, however indubitable it may be, has not
given us the knowledge of the meaning of our life. But all mankind
who sustain life -- millions of them -- do not doubt the meaning of
life.
Indeed, from the most distant time of which I know anything,
when life began, people have lived knowing the argument about the
vanity of life which has shown me its senselessness, and yet they
lived attributing some meaning to it.
From the time when any life began among men they had that
meaning of life, and they led that life which has descended to me.
All that is in me and around me, all, corporeal and incorporeal, is
the fruit of their knowledge of life. Those very instruments of
thought with which I consider this life and condemn it were all
devised not be me but by them. I myself was born, taught, and
brought up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us to cut
down the forests, tamed the cows and horses, taught us to sow corn
and to live together, organized our life, and taught me to think
and speak. And I, their product, fed, supplied with drink, taught
by them, thinking with their thoughts and words, have argued that
they are an absurdity! "There is something wrong," said I to
myself. "I have blundered somewhere." But it was a long time
before I could find out where the mistake was.
VIII
All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less
systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt
that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning
the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest
thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was
in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did
not know -- I only felt that the conclusion was rationally
convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions
could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my
reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an
untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought
me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else
was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A
force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this
and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my
desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction.
This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and
a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that
I did not yet know the life of mankind.
Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people
who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and
drowned it in life's intoxication, or had understood it and ended
their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living
out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me
that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to
which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those
milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of
some sort -- not real people.
Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me
that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life
of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a
degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon's
and Schopenhauer's, is the real, normal life, and that the life of
the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention -- strange
as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my
pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and
Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and
exactly that nothing else was possible -- so indubitable did it
seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet
arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question --
that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring
to me to ask: "But what meaning is and has been given to their
lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived
in the world?"
I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in
words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and
learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical
affection I have for the real labouring people, which compelled me
to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we
suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could
know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang
myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live
and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not
among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among
those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who
support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I
considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor
people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite
different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards
who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and
that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for
they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary
clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life
consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments.
Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a
meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as
death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they
consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a
knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of
life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the
meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to
life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some
despised pseudo-knowledge.
Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies
the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of
mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that
irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not
but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the
devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as
I retain my reason.
My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along
the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there
-- in faith -- was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet
more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational
knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it
is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and
I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and
an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the
meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which
alone a meaning is required.
IX
A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either
that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or
that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I
supposed. And I began to verify the line of argument of my
rational knowledge.
Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found
it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was
inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that
my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The
question was: "Why should I live, that is to say, what real,
permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life --
what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?" And
to reply to that question I had studied life.
The solution of all the possible questions of life could
evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first
appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in
terms of the infinite, and vice versa.
I asked: "What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause,
and space?" And I replied to quite another question: "What is the
meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?" With the
result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached
was: "None."
In my reasonings I constantly compared (nor could I do
otherwise) the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the
infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result:
force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the
infinite, nothing is nothing -- and that was all that could result.
It was something like what happens in mathematics, when
thinking to solve an equation, we find we are working on an
identity. the line of reasoning is correct, but results in the
answer that a equals a, or x equals x, or o equals o. the same
thing happened with my reasoning in relation to the question of the
meaning of my life. The replies given by all science to that
question only result in -- identity.
And really, strictly scientific knowledge -- that knowledge
which begins, as Descartes's did, with complete doubt about
everything -- rejects all knowledge admitted on faith and builds
everything afresh on the laws of reason and experience, and cannot
give any other reply to the question of life than that which I
obtained: an indefinite reply. Only at first had it seemed to me
that knowledge had given a positive reply -- the reply of
Schopenhauer: that life has no meaning and is an evil. But on
examining the matter I understood that the reply is not positive,
it was only my feeling that so expressed it. Strictly expressed,
as it is by the Brahmins and by Solomon and Schopenhauer, the reply
is merely indefinite, or an identity: o equals o, life is nothing.
So that philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that
