Julian Baggini: The Meaning Of Life
Introduction
Baggini keeps asking questions for what is the meaning of life through the chapters. Questions are bringing up in all the stages from birth to death. Though questions have been raising continuously, the answer of what is the meaning of life is not yet figured out. To discuss whether what is the meaning of our life, Julian Baggini quoted stories and sayings from different people, such as, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Satre and Soren Kierkegaard. He had also tried to lead us in searching the meaning of life from the past to the future of our life by using three different perspectives. The three positions illustrated by Baggini’s book including naturalism, creationism and existentialism will be explained in the following paragraphs in
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He argued that why human is being governed by the universe and the god, why can’t we just create our own life meanings. Therefore, he introduced the concept of existentialism to tell readers that human beings should self-consciously think for themselves. Humans should always “being-for-itself”. He then applied the case of a French stockbroker to inspire readers that one may have the tendency to risk everything in order to become the person who he wants to be.
Existentialism
Jean-Paul Satre embraced the term “existentialism in 1945. It is a theory telling that human are free and responsible for their own actions in the world without its own meaning (Hornby & Turnbull, 2010). He suggested that human beings should have some self-initiated actions in changing their life. Every moment is a turning point where we make decision for our life. We have our own freedom in choosing where to go and what to do.
We, however, as a human being, tend to deny our free choice of life and try to avoid the responsibility for making our own decision. It is because we are often anxious about other’s opinions and criticism after we had made our own decision. We are always being fearful of criticisms from others rather than following our heart. Baggini used the idea of bad faith from Jean-Paul Satre to criticize people who tried to escape from the responsibility to create their own life’s meaning after experiencing the
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