Answer to Camus: To Be, or Not to Be, Is Not the Lo Lus Nug*

“The only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide,” Camus began. Whether life is worth living, whether one should kill oneself. To put it more clearly: in the face of the world’s silence, the human search for meaning goes unanswered, and this is where the absurd begins. And for someone who finds life meaningless, there is only one important question: Should they kill themselves because they find their own life worthless? The answer is a very simple “No,” followed by: “Don’t be foolish.” We will take this “no” apart and examine the reasons behind it.

 Meaning is a very broad set of contexts, and it is not an inherent property of either an object or the Cosmos. For the individual, there is only what is meaningful, and what is meaningful emerges within a network of relationships. In other words, what is meaningful is neither already present in the world nor something the subject grasps and brings forth by turning towards the world. Therefore, the question “What is the meaning of life?” is a category error—similar to asking what color laziness is. The question, properly formulated, might be: “How does the network of relationships through which our lives come to be understood as meaningful—or meaningless—form and take shape?” This point needs to be restated in another way: life in itself is not an object that can contain meaning—or meaninglessness—for the individual. It is a regime that temporarily sustains a context that can be meaningful—or meaningless—within a network of relationships established with the world.

 Let’s return to suicide and the search for meaning. At this point, we encounter a painful reality. In the human search for meaning, the world is not silent; on the contrary, it is a very noisy place and contains a seemingly endless number of answers. What is knowledge? What is reality? How does the mind turn toward the world, and how does it grasp it? These are questions philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. The human search for meaning is scattered among these questions, intertwined with them. Behind the world’s silence lies the fact that the question is being asked incorrectly. The real problem for human beings is that they frame their questions incorrectly and then cannot know which answers to choose from among all those scattered answers.

 If you seek meaning, you will not find it, because there is nothing there to be found. What is meaningful, however, is everywhere; that is, the context formed within the network of relationships we have been talking about is independent even of the subject. You kill yourself because the world is meaningless—because you believe the philosophers—and yet a friend whose heart you have broken, the longing your child will feel for you, a poem you have written, someone who loves or hates you, the thoughts about you of a driver you argued with in traffic whom you do not even know—all of these continue to live on within that network of relationships. It is impossible to destroy this regime, formed from historical sediment, by annihilating yourself, because “what is meaningful” is not the subject’s property. This is partly why Lacan keeps returning to Rimbaud’s line: “Je est un autre—I is another.” Yes, there can be no such thing as an individual standing alone, outside all relationships, because individuation is a process; it is not a fixed point in the universe. For that reason, it does not simply vanish when the biological entity disappears.

 Still, let us assume for a moment that there is a great “meaning,” a “single, absolute truth.” We would still gain nothing, because there is no direct relationship between life being worth living and its having meaning. This is, as we saw above, a false inference accepted within a particular context, within a regime of relations; a flower does not have to be meaningful in order to be valuable. These two categories—the value of life and meaning—amount to nothing more than a reduction invented to maintain a philosophical position.

 Of course, philosophers are intelligent people—or so we assume—but that does not mean they are more knowledgeable than you—even when it comes to philosophy. In fact, some of them are partially blind people, obsessively fixated on certain subjects. They constantly make category errors, constantly trying to refute one another; it is a kind of game to them. They are not in a position to say anything about the meaningfulness of your life. 

 The famous paradox is a good example of this: “This sentence is false.” All philosophers know that this “non-paradoxical paradox” arises because the sentence’s semantic claim is tested through its syntactic form; the sentence is correctly formed, but what the proposition tests is not whether the sentence is correctly formed, but whether it is logically false: a category error at the level of meaning and the value of life, in precisely the same way. Only the German mathematician Frege and the Polish-American logician and mathematician Tarski went far enough in their work to make this visible.

 But none of them actually told you that this wasn’t a paradox. It would therefore be a grave mistake to decide that your life is meaningless and commit suicide on the basis of these people’s inferences about meaning. This is what I meant by ignorance in the first place—not so much a lack of knowledge as a failure to agree on which category the knowledge belongs to.

 For the individual, there is only one way to avoid this kind of ignorance. And the remedy is not to be found in knowledge, nor in some pure and singular truth given to us as such. Perhaps it can be found in a question that emerges at the end of this chain of thought. I am aware of myself; I am aware, too, that I am aware of myself—we generally take this to be the most important distinction between humans and other living beings. If this is indeed the fundamental distinction that defines us, then what matters is the degree of this awareness, and therefore the real philosophical question is: “How aware am I of the fact that I am aware of myself?”

 The answer is not to be found in any philosophy, mysticism, metaphysics, or science. It lies in the astonishment that arises when we realize the scale of the thing we are part of—that regime composed of a web of relationships. I am not talking about an epistemological astonishment that arises every time we think about it and try to grasp its scale. I am talking about an ontological astonishment that the individual must inhabit at every moment. There is no reason for a sufficiently astonished person to commit suicide; the world we live in is valuable not because it is meaningful, but because it is interesting to an astonishing degree.

 *Lo Lus Nug means “Question” in Hmong; for a reader who does not know the language, part of the sentence is meaningless, while for someone who knows both languages, the original Shakespearean line remains meaningful to them. That is what I meant by the network of relationships.