What Life Should Mean to UsChapter1 The Meaning of Life(Excerpt)
Human beings live in the realm of meanings. We do not experience things in the abstract; we always experience them in human terms. Even at its source our experience is qualified by our human perspective. “Wood” means “wood in its relation to humankind”, and “stone” means “stone as a factor in human life”. Anyone who tried to consider circumstances, to the exclusion of meanings, would be very unfortunate: he would isolate himself from others and his actions would be useless to himself or to anyone else; in a word, they would be meaningless. But no human being can escape meanings. We experience reality only through the meaning we ascribe to it: not as a thing in itself, but as something interpreted. It is natural to conclude, therefore, that this meaning is always more or less unfinished, or incomplete, and even that it can never be altogether right. The realm of meanings is thus the realm of mistakes. If we asked someone, “What is the meaning of life?”, they would probably be unable to answer. For the most part, people do not trouble themselves with the question or try to formulate any answers. It is true that the question is as old as humanity itself and that in our own time young people – and older people too – will sometimes demand, “But what is life for? What does life mean?” However, it is fair to say that they only ask these questions when they have suffered some sort of setback. As long as life is smooth and they are not confronting difficult tests, the question is never put into words. It is, rather, in their actions that people inevitably pose these questions, and answer them. If we closed our ears to words and concentrated on observing actions, we would find that each person has formulated their own individual “meaning of life”, and that all their opinions, attitudes, movements, expressions, mannerisms, ambitions, habits and character traits are in accordance with this meaning. Each person behaves as if they could rely upon a certain interpretation of life. In all their actions there is an implicit summing up of the world and of themselves; a verdict, “I am like this and the universe is like that”; a meaning given to oneself and a meaning ascribed to life.There are as many meanings ascribed to life as there are human beings and perhaps, as we have suggested, each meaning is mistaken to some extent. No one knows the absolute meaning of life, and thus any interpretation that is at all serviceable cannot be called absolutely wrong. All meanings are variations between these two limits. Among these variations, however, we can distinguish some that work well and some where it is large. We can discover what it is that the better interpretations have in common and what it is that the less satisfactory interpretations lack. We can derive from these a common measure of the truth, a common meaning, which enables us to decipher reality in so far as it concerns humankind. Again, we must bear in mind that “true” means true for humankind, true for the purposes and aims of human beings. There is no other truth than this. Even if another truth existed, it would not concern us. We could never know it; it would be meaningless.我们都生活在“意义”的领域中。人的一生并不仅仅只是经历事物本身，更为重要的是，体验这些事物对我们的生活有什么样的意义。我们接触事物时往往都是以自身立场作为立足点对其加以衡量的，无论事物本身有多简单。比如，“木头”就是“与人类本身有关联的木头”, “石头”便是“作为人类生活元素之一的石头”。有些人想仅仅生活在单纯的环境中，跳出意义的范畴，那么，他一定会很不幸：这样的行为将使他失去与外界进行沟通的基础，因此，无论是对他本身，还是对其他的人，这样的行为都是无效的，都将失去意义。我们通常会以自己赋予现实的意义作为标准来感受现实，所以我们感受到的是现实被我们赋予的意义，而不是现实本身，或者说我们感受到的是自己对现实的理解。因此，可以这样说：因为意义原本就是一个充满谬论的领域，所以，我们所感受到的意义在一定程度上是不全面的，甚至可以说是错误的。
如果我们问一个人：“生活的意义是什么？”他很可能回答不上来。一般来说，人们不愿意让这个近乎于无意义的问题来困扰自己，因此，他们会循规蹈矩地找一些书面化的答案来搪塞，或是干脆就认为这是个没有任何意义的问题。然而，我们不得不承认，从人类历史开始的那一刻起，这个问题就已经存在了。在我们的时代，不仅青年，甚至连一些年岁已高的老人们也会时时为之困惑：“我们活着是为了什么？活着有什么意义？”而根据上述事实我们可以断言：一般情况下，人们只有在遇到巨大挫折的时候，才会发出这样的疑问。假如一个人的一生都平平淡淡，毫无波澜，那么，这也就不是个问题，当然也就没有讨论的意义了。
生活的意义有多种多样的表现形式，这是因为生活对于每个人来说都是不同的。我们会发现，其实每个人的生活意义当中也都存在或多或少的错误，没有谁的生活意义是绝对正确的。但同时我们也会发现，对于任何一种生活意义，只要有人持相同的意见，它就不是一无是处。世界上一切的生活意义都是在这两个极端之间变化的。这些所谓的变化，也就是不同的人赋予其生活不同的意义，却是有着高低之分的。它们有的错误较多，有的错误较少；有的很糟糕，有的却很美妙。我们还可以得出这样的结论：较好的生活意义具有某些共有的特征，而这些正是那些较差的生活意义所缺乏的。因此，通过不断的总结，我们得出了一种相对来说更科学的且足以让我们应对所有现实情况的生活意义，它便是真正意义的共同尺度。在此，我们必须记住一点：这里的“真实”，是指除了对人类而言的真实以及对人类目标和计划的真实以外，再没有别的所谓“真实”。倘若还存在其他的“真实”，也是与我们毫无关系的，我们无法认识它们，它们对于我们来说也没有任何意义。