subject: Exactly What Are We Doing Here And Why? [print this page] Exactly where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Thus asks the title of one of Paul Gaugin's most famous paintings, depicting tropical nudes in the daily tasks of picking fruit, gossiping, worrying, sleeping, and worship. Gaugin's personal intentions were to show the three broad stages of life as birth, young adulthood, and old age. The questions come from a individual catechism of his former teacher at Catholic school designed to lead young boys towards a consideration from the spiritual life.
For the existentialist, these are the only questions in existence, the only real puzzles that each and every man and woman have to solve for him and herself, on his or her very own. Such questions cannot be answered by science, or religion, or anyone else other than every individual within the context of his or her own personal everyday living - as lived, moment to moment and from year to year.
What are we? What are human beings? What does it mean to be a man or a woman?
Wherever do we come from? How did we get here? And exactly where are we going to go now?
These concerns are deeply evocative of our childhood fears and fantasies, despite their really serious very adult themes. They point to a yearning, yet a mature mind also understands that the yearning is illusory. For the desire to know can in itself be ignorance insofar as it presupposes there to be an answer on the unanswerable. Therefore Goethe cautions us against ascribing design to the accidental and chance to design - which advice finds applications throughout quite a few fields, just like when we think about that social inequality may perhaps be engineered instead of entirely natural.
In the end, nevertheless, we need to agree with Voltaire's Candide, who, in the manner of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, notes that one's only duty is to tend to one's garden - to work, and put all one's energies towards work: Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your heart. Whatever other purpose there is to existence, this much is clear: Work.
