The Hero/ine, the Saint and the meaning of Life

I had a very interesting but very heavy therapy session this morning with a client on the basis of meaning and direction. So I am clearing my mind of the thoughts it has unleashed I call it the cultural genome of hero/ine and Saint. I beg your indulgence

There is a paradoxical observation that I feel whenever in therapy or in discussion when someone tries to ask the question ..what is the meaning of life? The very act of asking the question seems to presume that there is. Or even could be, an answer to it. This makes me feel that instead of blindly insisting that there is an answer we should instead acknowledge that to live a human life is part of the question and that to live well is to wholly commit ourselves to that very question.. We must therefore acknowledge that both philosophy and spirituality is part of the search for a meaningful human life.

Perhaps the first step is to recognize a rich and diverse “wisdom tradition” upon which many different forms of awareness originate. These may be spiritual,, philosophical, political, practical , moral and artistic.. Western history and its consequences are illustrated by a tension between what we could call a Greco-Roman culture of secular humanism and the very different world view of Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. The first current could be represented by the figure of Socrates and originates in Greek culture and the other in the figure of Abraham who comes from and originates the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions

I have always tried to argue that the answer to this meaning of life question comes simply from a commitment to question everything even if the answer is very difficult to attain I am often tempted to argue that we must use a cultural metaphor of both saint and hero to understand this nature of questioning. I am almost tempted to call them “cultural genomes. As metaphors these two figures represent symbolically two very different world views and two distinct commitments to life. Heroes live to pursue self development, not selfishly but for themselves. We may consider them Homeric heroes. Saints by contrast live for others, accepting love from a deity or other humans and offer their own love in return.

A commitment to questioning constitutes a recognition and an acceptance of mystery of mystery as the most fundamental condition of human existence. In relation to reality as a whole. Etymologically, mystery is derived from two Greek words roots: one, muthos, which points towards words like story or narrative; the other steresis , which carries the sense of something unusual or expected. Taken literally mystery suggests something that leaves us in silence that invites or expects a response.

There are questions universally shared by all human beings. So new can take the hero and the saint as metaphors with two distinct paths through which humans have explored the search for meaning We carry forward our investigation through a western cultural trope. In one sense the analogy may be taken loosely with no implication of an exact correspondence in detail. On the other hand, the analogy does point emphatically between the scientific and the and cultural perspectives. The basic distinction between these the genetic and the metaphysical explanatory perspectives is the way of understanding the role of history in each metaphorical form. In other words . All scientific explanations function within the horizons of history, with no appeal to or allowance for metaphysical or transcendence beyond the historical.. Each “gene” has the tendency to strongly replicate itself within the very limits of the environmental conditions to which it is subject.

I try in all questioning to be guided by and disciplined by four types of questions which together constitute my attempts to find meaning. The first is existential , I take meaning both from the life I have lived and the life of others. The second is dialogical, meaning must be pursued together with others, thirdly , historical, the question of meaning that must evolve over time, and the question is more important than any one answer, finally I seek a metaphorical approach that can be answered by the metaphor of saint( both secular and spiritual and hero/one who battles with fate and facticity.

These have been some idle speculations over the last couple of hours. And I will conclude with a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke...

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke,in Letters to a Young Poet