In the twentieth century, concern for the meaning of life transcended the limits of art, literature and intellectual circles; the gradual decline of absolute values, the disappointment of human cruelty and the lack of stable references have fueled the need for response. Jung captured this widespread anxiety and launched a hypothesis to identify the fundamental question about life, the answer of which could make sense of existence.
For Jung what was decisive was our sense of transcendence, that is, he believed that every person needs to feel that his life makes sense and that he must go beyond the immediate, what we do in the world must resonate one way or another, they have an impact on reality. In addition, he also stated that when life is perceived simply as a sum of moments, with no greater direction than small goals of little relevance, existential anxiety arises, the feeling that everything does not make sense.
- Before modernity.
- Religions gave meaning to the transcendence of life.
- The existence of the people did not end with their death.
- But continued into another way of life.
- A spiritual life.
- In which all actions on Earth were evaluated.
- Rewarded or punished.
Thus, with the gradual decline of religious beliefs, human beings have been abandoned to reality. It began to happen in Jung’s time, so he tried to shape a fundamental question about life.
“The more a man attaches to his false possessions and the less sensitive he is to the essentials, the less satisfying his life is. “Carl Jung.
According to Carl Jung, the fundamental question of life is: is the existence of a particular person related to something in infinity?Without realizing it, most of us seek to establish this connection with infinity in our existence, we are not always aware of it. , but we do it through religious activity, work, the construction of our convictions, etc.
Infinity is a set or series with an unknown ending or boundaries. Human life ends in death. But we all know that after the death of each of us, there is a reality that transcends us, was there before we were born and will remain there after we disappear from Earth.
Religion has been, throughout history, one of the most common ways to establish this contact with infinity, faith in a God answers the fundamental question of life, for those who are not believers or for whom this God does not have a decisive presence, things take on an un complicated meaning.
Then infinity begins to be sought through one’s own offspring: children prolong life; it is also possible for the person to seek to leave a certain legacy, whether in the workplace or social sphere, for example.
Since we have heard of the history of humanity, man has wanted to establish this contact with infinity, either out of fear, because of the impossibility of assimilating the idea of death, or as a means of consolidating an authority to which all human beings must obey. Sometimes love has also become the cornerstone that has answered this fundamental question of life.
However, the human being discovered that if the object of his love were something or someone expired or limited, that feeling would be doomed to generate suffering; to the extent that the object of love has an end, the sense of transcendence is doomed to die. as a result of the irretrievable loss of the object, that is why the human being began to create gods in every corner and loved them, they do not die, fate cannot deprive us of their company. a link was established with infinity.
Later in history, with the development of science and the arts, for many the concept of God went to the background. Precisely, science and the arts have become a new infinite, which has provided the necessary significance for a person’s life.
The importance of the fundamental question about life and the meaning of transcendence is that your answer provides an existential meaning that cannot be achieved in any other way, as the philosopher Spinoza expressed it very clearly, who said: “All our happiness or misfortune depends only from the quality of the object on which we fix our love [?] But does the love offered by an eternal and infinite object nourish the spirit of pure joy, without traces of sadness?