The world always disappoints. Except, perhaps, for the very fortunate, the circumstances into which all human beings find themselves thrown condemn us to a certain sense of estrangement. And although there are happy moments in every biography, there is a tragic suspicion at the heart of every existence. We are born without anyone asking us, and we discover life with the same surprise with which a helpless baby becomes aware of its own hands. We touch, eat and feel, first and foremost, all the things that lie within our reach. But fortunately, we are also capable of lifting our chins and looking beyond.

On not a few occasions, when our sight can reach no further, we are also capable of imagining something different from this precarious reality into which we were one day cast. Sometimes, even, we can be happy. But even in those moments, for far too many centuries now, human beings have suspected that immanent life is not enough. That reality is not exhausted by precarious proximity and that everything we are called upon to live through ought, in some way, to answer to an ultimate purpose from which we can reconstruct what we have done and what has happened to us. That ancient question, to which history has given different formulations, is none other than the question of meaning.

The finest philosophical concepts are those that also appear in ordinary language. It was not only the classical or the anguished philosophers of the twentieth century who were concerned with meaning. Hence, every ordinary person has experienced the urgency of having to give, or seek, meaning in quite a few experiences of their life. Fortunately, language always gives us away and sometimes says more than we would like it to. In Spanish, we say that things «have meaning», whereas in English that same meaning is the result of a process: «It makes sense». There is not even any need to choose. Meaning is discovered, made, produced, given and, above all, longed for. For if we persist in questioning ourselves about the meaning of our existence, it is because we sense that our life is not exhausted by the here and now. The fact that the world disappoints forces us to suspect that perhaps there was a time when we knew another reality, one that was more just, healthier, more beautiful or more truthful. If we can be disappointed by the present, it is because at another time we knew another reality. Plato was convinced of this and therefore identified knowledge with recollection. Drunk on style, and who knows whether also on melancholy, Albert Camus put it far more effectively: «A man's thought is, above all, his nostalgia».

But what is this meaning that we long for, seek and sometimes even invent? Once again, everyday language provides us with a wholly revealing clue. A sense is a direction, an arrow, the sign that indicates a direction and reminds us that everything, including this present moment, must lead us somewhere else. Meaning is an invocation of hope and destiny. It is a direction traced from the precarious present towards a future in which, hopefully, some kind of revelation or explanation will reach us for everything that has happened. It is an intimate mission through which to transcend our own circumstances, trusting that at the end of our days there will be something that will enable us to conclude that life was worth living. This expression is also a blessing, for it reminds us that suffering, sadness and pain have a value and, above all, a meaning.

We know with certainty that life has an end. The death of each one of our loved ones proves it. What we do not always establish with the same certainty is that life can have something resembling a purpose. For centuries, family lineage, occupational determinism or even religious identity provided a mission for every biography. The conquest of freedom brought with it an added difficulty and turned every life into a genuine challenge. Freedom is a gift, but it is also a responsibility and sometimes —Sartre, forgive me— almost a condemnation. T. S. Eliot recalled that the end is implicit in every beginning, but by freeing ourselves from our origins —from family, from the lost God, from tradition, from customs— we opened up a spectrum of possibilities that prevented us from living with a certain direction. Nevertheless, there is a difference between being unable to find meaning in existence and giving up the search.

Returning to language, it is symptomatic that meaning and significance should so often be confused. Perhaps it is worth remembering that the significance of something is, on many occasions, its own meaning. Words are not exhausted by the shape of their letters or by the sound of their phonemes. Meaning is always a form of transcendence, the overcoming of the material and immanent event of a term. For this reason, whenever we read the word justice or the word truth, we do not simply take in a collection of letters; we are compelled to think of all the things that are just or true.

But life is almost never just. Neither is the suffering of an innocent person nor undeserved misfortune. Hence, it is in suffering that the need to find meaning in existence becomes most urgent. Among many other things, we are creatures hungry for reasons, causes and explanations. That is why we cannot simply content ourselves with living, with experiencing harm or boredom, and why we always need to search for some sort of culprit or, failing that, some kind of justification. Injustice without reasons is always an aggravated misfortune; hence we return to implore that transcendent dimension which might allow us to justify the possibility that what now seems incomprehensible to us may, this time, have some kind of meaning.

It is no coincidence that the search for meaning becomes more intense in the most critical contexts of humanity. We recalled earlier a quotation from Camus dating from 1942, and in that same decade, four years later, Viktor Frankl published the celebrated essay that sums up the theme of our cover story. Man's Search for Meaning is an intimate testimony in which the Austrian psychiatrist describes his experience in the Nazi extermination camps. Frozen by cold and uncertainty, exposed to the punishments inflicted by their executioners and exhausted by forced labour and the awareness of imminent death, those men were forced to find a meaning for life. The extreme cruelty to which they were subjected failed to strip them —or at least not always— of a final refuge of spiritual freedom with which to confront the worst pain imaginable. In Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Dachau too, human beings felt the need to go beyond their unacceptable circumstances in order to give them some meaning.

That radical experience and, ultimately, a discreet consensus among all the philosophical, literary and spiritual geniuses who have questioned themselves about meaning teach us that life can only be explained by something other than itself. Without resolving whether the meaning of existence is discovered or invented, it seems clear that our mission will always lie outside ourselves. Explaining life through life is an attempt as futile as that of Baron Münchausen, who tried to prevent himself from sinking into a swamp by pulling himself out by his own pigtail. The meaning of life lies in those things for which we would be willing to lose it.

That meaning, however, is not usually found by sad intellectuals or philosophical melancholy. At times there are flashes of lucidity among the most exceptional minds, but more often than not it is the simplest and humblest people who have developed sufficient goodness and clarity to transcend the world. In contrast to doctrines that insist on self-care and the pursuit of material success, fulfilled lives tend to find meaning in places that are more certain and transcendent.

It is possible that there is no single meaning to life and that each human being has been given a truth to reveal or something to protect and safeguard. Some people live an entire lifetime to write a verse, create a family or care for another person. In all these cases, love functions as an unquestionable premise. The classical thinkers spoke of amor fati, the love of fate. But perhaps it is love for others alone that can save us from an insufficient reality. A meaningful life is a life with a mission. Not for nothing, etymologically, does missio derive from mittere: to be launched, sent, cast forth. Existentialism and its bourgeois pessimism imagined us as cast into the world. But perhaps the question is not so much why we were cast forth as towards whom. For if mission implies being sent, every sending presupposes a destination. And that destination, more often than not, is simply to have someone to love above ourselves.

See, El sapiens en busca del sentido

Illustration: Óscar Gutiérrez