Reality is shrouded in mystery.

(Continued from last Saturday)

Causally - chronologically speaking, the question of whether life has a meaning, and if so, what it lies in, was posed in a certain way at the very dawn of philosophical thought in European culture. Greek philosophers, in the earliest stage of thought of ancient civilization Sokrat, Plato i Aristotel They dealt with the question of logos, cause and purpose, the reasons for existence. Plato speaks of longing and philosophical eros towards eternal forms, which, by participating in the world, ensure their meaning according to perfect standards, and thus he links the meaning of life to an ideal world that is true in itself, in contrast to life on earth, which is an illusion.

Eager to show the realization of the absolute spirit as soon as possible Hegel will later wish for the end of history which means the end of the creative - meaningful future, while Plato will remain a lasting inspiration to those philosophical authors who seek meaning in the ideal. This is followed by Viktor Frankl the idea that the will to meaning, meaning gained through suffering as in the Greek tragedians, is the basic human aspiration that makes man special in nature. Plato in Feasts, through the mouth of a woman, the wise prophetess Diotima, expressed his deepest understanding of the philosophical desire for meaning, because it is the opposite of Eryximachus's discourse on love, Aristophanes the idea of ​​a dual nature - androgynous, which is divided and hence the search for the other half is continuous, taught Socrates in the sense of love, explaining that love is connected with the ascent of the soul to the knowledge of truth. It is the ladder by which we ascend to the ideal, using myth, imagination, fantasy, moral virtue, spirituality and rational consciousness to realize the supernatural order of values ​​and their objective foundation in the metaphysical region. But can meaning be exhausted in the material with the satisfaction of the senses, without taking into account that there is a personal source of meaning, which guarantees personal meaning that is obtained through thought, feeling, suffering, resignation.

At the core of Platonic thinking, we can see a crucial thesis for understanding the purposefulness of the real world, because it is created according to an eternal pattern of values, and because of this causal sequence, it is causal and necessary, and not accidental and contingent. Taught by the Socratics that the meaning of human life is a moral virtue that is identical to the highest s-knowledge, and by the Heraclitians Panta Rei, Plato found meaning in eternal beings, but also adopted the view that earring (virtue) impossible without conceptual knowledge, which is achieved eudaimonia (happiness), and this constitutes the purpose of human life.

Plato focused attention on the freedom of our spirit and its activity, which requires self-denial from this world because it is a reflection of a higher world through an aesthetic enjoyment of the idea of ​​beauty that enables moral transformation and elevates us into the sphere of the boundless, all the way to the realm of the spirit.

Philosophers in the ancient period understood the existence of the world through polemos (war) as Heraclitus or Parmenides, but also logos, because there is a mental harmony immanent to being, which is interpreted quite differently in the sophistic relativization of concepts. Meaningfulness is decided because meaning belongs to the order of human abilities, it depends on our power of imagination. Reality is neither tangible nor immediate as it is commonly imagined, it is shrouded in a veil of mystery that hides its identity, and this has significant consequences for the anthropological understanding of our place in the universe.

Meaning is felt as a desire for meaning, the evidence in this area is as much theoretical as it is personal. A person sometimes feels the need to be guided through love. ad extra, combined with a supersensible symphony that fills him with admiration, sometimes, and not always, he longs for it. That is the meaning of the science that contains in its name the desire for love fillet - sofiaThis is what philosophical eros speaks about countless times through the idea that man is torn between the earthly and the heavenly, the transitory and the imperishable, about the unearthly merging of the soul (the soul) with that which is fundamentally similar to it.

In ancient philosophy from Heraclitus to Parmenides in the so-called cosmological period, up to the anthropological period with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the idea of ​​logos is present, the thought that reality is - rational, logos. Everything that exists is logos - meaningful, so man can speak meaningfully in language, know reality, since he has reason (logos) within him, so that he can speak and think meaningfully with his intellect. Socrates was the first among the philosophers of the Hellenic period to direct his attention from phisisa, nature on man, considering the thesis that the meaning of life consists in the knowledge of moral concepts and the search for truth, in order to question virtues, and the relationship between earring i eudaimonia (virtue - happiness) established the balance of spiritual life, and the individual received the principle of practical morality. For Plato, the highest task of our intellect is the cognition of perfect forms, which are transcendent to human consciousness, exist in themselves, but at the same time are set up in the process of cognition as value patterns and criteria of truth. In Feast The philosopher, in Diotima's words, explained the meaning of love towards the ideal realm, by awakening eros in the soul which, through the perception of sensual beauty, develops into the moral behavior of the individual, and well-ordered relations in the polis, so that from the aesthetic and ethical, one ascends to the spiritual region which is unchangeable and absolute, providing meaning to the various phenomena of our earthly existence. In this relationship between the metaphysically ideal and the reality which is an illusion, a lawful order is achieved, in which that which is spiritual resides, so that the physical world is a direct reflection of the world of ideas.

Plato's student Aristotle wanted to overcome the distance between the sensible and the supersensible world by introducing internal entelechy, in things in which there is also a teleological cause, purposiveness and goal-directedness, without which the system of existence is inconceivable. His intention is that the four causes that the Latins translated from material cause, efficient cause i formal cause connect body, purpose - the perfect cause, which is also the main landmark of Hellenic civilization, embodied in the attitude that in everything that is, nature, the cosmos, the state, there is necessarily meaning as the target point of movement, without which the logos structure of being as being is unthinkable, that is, being in a meaningful way. The world of antiquity does not know freedom in the modern sense, except for submission to necessity, freedom that passes into arbitrariness and rebellious affirmation of man, freedom as a search for meaning. Let us mention here the words of the great Russian writer. My Hosanna went through the hell of doubts, says Dostoevsky. If everything is allowed to man, then freedom turns into slavery to himself, his body, his instincts and impulses. This is the least free man, the man of free spirit in whom the meaning of the human species is embodied. The basis of such an orientation, on the onto-epistemic level, was the assumption of meaningfulness (logosity), teleological cause, which is supported by the perfectly ordered laws of nature. He later thought about this in the form of subjective consciousness Descartes as about rational I think, emphasizing the idea that thought is an axiomatic proof of existence. For Kanta meaning is a regulative idea of ​​the mind, so the task of education is know Aude the order to the mind to know the world under the assumption of its inner purposefulness, since our cognitive apparatus through concepts and categorical thinking imposes meaning on the world, all concepts, categories and ideas, even the representation of space and time. Mystical theology understands meaning through connection with spiritual foundations, so the medieval thinker, Saint Thomas Aquinas to reason that the meaning is in God, and that God is the meaning and He as the Creator bestows meaningfulness on creation. At the same time, the meaning of man is inseparable from the personality which is based on the relationship between man and God, in the eschatological hope of eternal life. This has been fundamentally changed in the modern worldview to that point of view which seeks truth not in the macrocosm but in the depths of the microcosm, not outside of man but within man, so that the idea of ​​freedom should be at the center of the anthropological understanding of meaning.

(Continued next Saturday)