THE MEANING OF LIFE IS CONCRETE NOT ABSTRACT

"The basic modality of . . . collective control must be power over nature and mastery over our productive capacities and economic life, a control exercised through science, technology, and politics. Collective productive activities... are the kernel of a meaningful life. Furthermore, in a properly constituted economic and political order, the very distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental action can be broken down. . . . In a society in which work and collective social life was sufficiently satisfying, one might think, the very question of the “meaning of life” would not arise. The very fact that this question does arise for a particular person in a particular society is a sign that that question for that person (in that society) has no answer. “The meaning of life” ought not to be reified. To know “the meaning of life” does not mean to know any possible discursive answer that can be given to questions about life. Questions ostensibly about “the meaning of life” are really about whether the social processes are satisfactory or whether certain individuals have a certain capacity or skill, whether they “know how” to lead a life of a certain kind, and they exhibit this knowledge in the only way such knowledge can be exhibited: by actually leading such a life." Raymond Geuss, "World without Why," 101–2.  Princeton University Press 2016

 
It is true that "collective control," over the attributes which account for life's quality, is absolutely necessary to the quality of life itself. However, control over these attributes is not a guarantee of quality.... the conscious quality of the collective must precede that of control, and the surest guarantee of this quality is quality in education. It is education and not revolution which offers the greatest assurance of hope for the realization of a good society, a society which contains the essential, material prerequisites, for the qualitative cultivation and sustainability of life itself. 

Education is the guarantor of knowledge, and knowledge is the basis (the power) by which the energy of life can be directed intelligently toward that of quality. Without a knowledge of how to materialize quality no quality can be had. Further, differentiating quality from rusticity requires a sober, critical capacity within the material context of life.                 

The meaning of life doesn't hinge on the justification of a formal syllogism impervious to all contradiction, but on the social conditions of life itself. "By actually leading such a life," which is contrasted with reification (abstraction misrepresented as the concrete), grasping at idealism. In short, the meaning of life is a matter of the quality of material conditions and these conditions hinge on the intelligence of material processes, first and foremost the process of education, followed by democratic production and democratic control.

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