The meaning of life

“Life is something beautiful for the ones who appreciate it and ugly for the ones
who don’t.”
Life is a journey that everyone experiences with a mix of emotions that are full of drama and
everyone has a different way of seeing things like someone is positive someone is negative but
these ideologies developed with time only after Socrates was able to identify a different way of
life.
Life has a different meaning for different people but all of this is possible because of the
different types of ideologies that nurtured in the society and people with different perspectives
come together to form different opinions and hence form new ideas and feelings about life.
Socrates was a philosopher who believed in doing rather than talking. He was a person who
believed in morals and carried on the idea of justice, equity and believed that everyone must be
given an equal opportunity of growth. To live a philosophical life is therefore to live consistently
on the basis of reason so perceived by a person. It is not easy to live a vitreous life of a
philosopher as it demands sacrifice of personal time for attainment of better well-being in the
eyes of Socrates.
Socrates, living a philosophical life meant living with the idea that reason as the capacity for
argument and analysis in pursuit of the truth about things it is our highest and most essential
commodity. Socrates was not an appreciator of the general conception at his time of the
sophists who used to teach that, truth doesn’t matter but what matters is your ability to make
someone believe in what you speak. Socrates didn’t believe in this system and argued that
there is right and wrong in the society and it is the duty of the citizens to make this a general
conception and create a clear divide between the two.
Plato who was Socrates student didn’t completely agree with him as he had more of an
practical approach to life because he believed in what he saw and therefore created a sense
that what is present is present but what is present had a reason so he searched for the reason
for a thing to be present and formed rational conclusions that what could be classified under
the intelligible world and what could be classified under the sensible world.
Plato although was Socrates student he believed that everything could be classified under a
certain head and hence would form a complete meaning of life by forming a diagram depicting
that nothing in this world is without reason.
Plato’s disciple Aristotle is the first philosopher on record to subject the meaning of life to
systematic philosophical examination: he approaches the issue from logical, psychological,
biological, and anthropological perspectives, it turns out, in some fragments from his early
popular work the Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy). From an Aristotelian perspective, in
asking about life’s “meaning”, we may be asking either a theoretical question about the
definition of the term life (and this either generically or with specific reference to human life),
or a practical question about the final end or purpose of life (or human life). Aristotle carefully
considered both questions, and in his view answering the theoretical question is the key to
answering the practical question. In brief, his theoretical view is that humans are distinguished
from all other living things, and thus defined by their ability to use reason; thus his practical
view is that the end or purpose of human existence is intellectual activity, especially doing
philosophy.
Aristotle believed in the ideology of systematic things as he was a philosopher with direct
connection to Plato who was the disciple of Socrates himself but all of them had different
ideologies regarding the meaning of life and how one should live his or her life.
Life is nothing but what a person can think of it. It is upon a person who decides what to do
with his or her life and what kind of decisions to be made which would affect the life of the
person. Life is nothing but the sum total of all the decisions made irrespective of the fact that
the decisions are ethically or in any other sense good or bad. Life is the result of the moral
obligations that arise on the person during the period he/she utilizes the resources of the
society and after the expiration what they leave behind for the generations to come and enjoy
the same resources.
At last to conclude life is only meaningful if it is lived in a moral and ethical manner with all the
virtues fulfilled and social obligations completed and emphasizing on the fact of giving rather
than taking from the society.