HUMAN EXISTANCE

Part 1
What Is The Purpose Of Human Life?
Our human minds are constantly asking questions about many things. We ask about the physical
world that we live in and we construct many sciences which express these questions. We are
puzzled about the actions of the people who live in this world with us and we create innumerable
psychology books which attempt to answer our questions. We wonder about what happened in
the past and our historians try to satisfy that wonder as they give us descriptions of that past.
There is a question which is more basic than all of these, a question that is always present in
the background of our lives. This is the fundamental question about the purpose of human life itself.
As we live our human lives we cannot help but ask why. Why are we alive? What is the purpose
of our human existence? We cannot avoid this question since it is always there in an implicit way
in our human awareness. No matter what we are doing this question follows us. We humans live
in a questioning way.
But there is a problem here as we discover that this question cannot be answered in the way that
science explains the physical world, psychology explains human behavior and that history
describes the past. The precise techniques of these types of thinking are not capable of dealing
with such a question. In fact the more that we are caught up in the way of thinking of physics,
psychology and history the more difficult it is to begin to understand such a question. From the
viewpoint of these other questioning approaches a question like “What’s it all about?” just doesn’t
make sense.
The situation is further confused by the fact that we are surrounded by people who answer this
question in many different ways and who live their lives according to those different answers.
Some people spend their lives seeking to achieve an affluent life style; others focus their lives on
a search for various pleasures, while others seek to achieve a status of respectability in their
communities. Some center their lives on building happy families; others give their energies to the
pursuit of careers while still others focus their lives on some form of religious commitment.
Amidst all this diversity of lifestyles we can’t help but ask: Is it possible to decide what is the
true purpose of life? It seems that we are arrogant and narrow-minded when we affirm that
life has a particular purpose. Such a consideration leads us to refrain from even asking such a
question.
But we are encouraged to persevere in our questioning by presence of words such as “wise” and
“foolish” in our languages. These words testify that we humans experience that life can be lived
in a true and wise way as well as in a way that is false and foolish. Life can be judged and there
is a basis for making such a judgment(sự phê phán). It is possible to consider the various ways
that human beings live their lives and to make a wise evaluation of these various ways. We can
reasonably decide whether(liệu) these approaches to life are the way that life was meant to be
lived.