阿爾弗雷德·阿德勒/Alfred Adler
If we asked someone,“What is the meaning of life?”He would probably be unable to answer. For the most part, people do not trouble themselves with the question or try to formulate any answers. It is true that the question is as old as humanity itself and that in our own time young people—and older people too—will sometimes demand,“But what is life for? What does life mean?”It is fair to say, however, that they only ask these questions when they have suffered some sort of setback. So long as life is smooth sailing and they are not confronting difficult tests, the question is never put into words. It is, rather, in his actions that each person inevitably poses these questions and answers. If we closed our ears to words and concentrated on observing actions, we would find that each person has formulated his own individual“meaning of life”and that all his opinions, attitudes, movements, expressions, mannerisms, ambitions, habits, and character traits are in accordance with this meaning. Each person behaves as if he could rely upon a certain interpretation of life. In all his actions, there is an implicit summing up of the world and of himself. The verdict,“I am like this and the universe is like that,”has a meaning given to himself and a meaning ascribed to life.
There are as many meanings ascribed to life as there are human beings, and perhaps, each meaning is mistaken to some extent. No one knows the absolute meaning of life, and thus any interpretation that is at all serviceable cannot be called absolutely wrong. All meanings are variations between these two limits. Among these variations, however, we can distinguish some that work well and some that are less effective; some where the mistake is small and some where it is large. We can discover what it is that the better interpretations have in common and what it is that the less satisfactory interpretations lack. We can derive from these a common measure of the truth, a common meaning, which enables us to decipher reality insofar as it concerns humankind. Again, we must bear in mind that true means true for humankind, true for the purpose and aims of human beings. There is no other truth than this. Even if another truth existed, it would not concern us. We could never know it; it would be meaningless.