John G. Messerly's Blog, page 100

Richard Taylor on the Meaning of Life

Richard Taylor (1919 – 2003) was an American philosopher renowned for his controversial positions and contributions to metaphysics. He advocated views as various as free love and fatalism, and was also an internationally-known beekeeper. He taught at Brown, Columbia and the University of Rochester, and had visiting appointments at about a dozen other institutions. His best known book is Metaphysics.

In the concluding chapter of his 1967 book, Good and Evil (Great Minds Series), Taylor suggests that we examine the notion of a meaningless existence so that we can contrast it with a meaningful one. He takes Camus’ image of Sisyphus’ eternal, pointless toil as archetypical of meaninglessness. Taylor notes that it is not the weight of the rock or the repetitiveness of the work that makes Sisyphus’ task unbearable, it is rather its pointlessness. The same pointlessness may be captured by other stories—say by digging ditches and then filling them in forever. Crucial to all these stories is that nothing ever comes of such labor.

But now suppose that Sisyphus’ work slowly built a great temple on his mountaintop: “then the aspect of meaninglessness would disappear.” In this case his labors have a point, they have meaning. Taylor further argues that the subjective meaninglessness of Sisyphus’ activity would be eliminated were the Gods to have placed within him “a compulsive impulse to roll stones.” Implanted with such desires, the gods provide him the arena in which to fulfill them. While we may still view Sisyphus’ toil meaningless from the outside, for externally the situation has not changed, we can now see that fulfilling this impulse would be satisfying to Sisyphus from the inside. For now he is doing exactly what he wants to do—forever.

Taylor now asks: is life endlessly pointless or not? To answer this question he considers the existence of non-human animals—endless cycles of eating and being eaten, fish swimming upstream only to die and have offspring repeat the process, birds flying halfway around the globe only to return and have others do likewise. He concludes that these lives are paradigms of meaninglessness. That humans are part of this vast machine is equally obvious. As opposed to non-human animals we may choose our goals, achieve them, and take pride in that achievement. But even if we achieve our goals, they are transitory and soon replaced by others. If we disengage ourselves from the prejudice we have toward our individuals concerns, we will see our lives to be like Sisyphus’. If we consider the toil of our lives we will find that we work to survive, and in turn pass this burden on to our children. The only difference between us and Sisyphus is that we leave it to our children to push the stone back up the hill.

And even were we to erect monuments to our activities, they too would turn slowly turn to dust. That is why, coming upon a decaying home, we are filled with melancholy:

There was the hearth, where a family once talked, sang, and made plans; there were the rooms, here people loved, and babes were born to a rejoicing mother; there are the musty remains of a sofa, infested with bugs, once bought at a dear price to enhance an ever-growing comfort, beauty, and warmth. Every small piece of junk fills the mind with what once, not long ago, was utterly real, with children’s voices, plans made, and enterprises embarked upon.

When we ask what it all was for, the only answer is that others will share the same fate, it will all be endlessly repeated. The myth of Sisyphus’ then exemplifies our fate, and this recognition inclines humans to deny their fate—to invent religions and philosophies designed to provide comfort in the face of this onslaught.

But might human life still have meaning despite its apparent pointlessness? Consider again how Sisyphus’ life might have meaning; again if he were to erect a temple through his labors. Notice not only that the temple would eventually turn to dust, but that upon completion of his project he would be faced with boredom. Whereas before his toil had been his curse, now its absence would be just as hellish. Sisyphus would now be “contemplating what he has already wrought and can no longer add anything to, and contemplating it for an eternity!” Given this conclusion, that even erecting a temple would not give Sisyphus meaning, Taylor returns to his previous thought—suppose that Sisyphus was imbued with a desire to labor in precisely this way? In that case his life would have meaning because of his deep and abiding interest in what he was doing. Similarly, since we have such desires within us, we should not be bored with our lives if we are doing precisely what we have an inner compulsion to do: “This is the nearest we may hope to get to heaven…”

To support the idea that meaning is found in this engagement of our will in what we are doing, Taylor claims that if those from past civilizations or the past inhabitants of the home he previously described were to come back and see that what was once so important to them had turned to ruin, they would not be dismayed. Instead they would remember that their hearts were involved in those labors when they were engaged in them. “There is no more need of them [questions about life’s meaning] now—the day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life.” We must look at all life like this, its justification and meaning come from persons doing what “it is their will to pursue.” This can be seen in a human from the moment of birth, in its will to live. For humans “the point of [their] living, is simply to be living…” Surely the castles that humans build will decay, but it would not be heavenly to escape from all this, that would be boredom: “What counts is that one should be able to begin a new task, a new castle, a new bubble. It counts only because it is there to be done and [one] has the will to do it.”

Philosophers who look at the repetitiveness of our lives and fall into despair fail to realize that we may be endowed, from the inside, with the desire to do our work. Thus: “The meaning of life is from within us, it is not bestowed from without, and it far exceeds in both beauty and permanence any heaven of which men have ever dreamed or yearned for.” 

Summary – We give meaning to our lives by the active engagement our wills have in our projects.

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Taylor, “The Meaning of Life,” 142.

Summary of Bertrand Russell’s, “A Free Man’s Worship”

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (1872 – 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, atheist, and social critic. He is considered, along with his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the founders of analytic philosophy and is widely held to be one of the 20th century’s most important logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics in logic. His writings were voluminous and covered a vast range of topics including politics, ethics, and religion. Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” Russell is thought by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Russell’s view of the meaning of life is set forth most clearly in his 1903 essay: “A Free Man’s Worship.” It is truly one of the classics of the meaning of life literature. It begins with an imaginary conversation about the history of creation between Mephistopheles, the devil, and Dr. Faustus, a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for power and wealth. In Russell’s story god had grown weary of the praise of the angels, and thought it might be more amusing to gain the praise of beings that suffered. Hence god created the world.

Russell describes the epic cosmic drama, and how after eons of time the earth and human beings came to be. Humans, seeing how fleeting and painful life is before their inevitable death, vowed that there must be some purpose outside of this world. And though following their instincts led to sin and the need for god’s forgiveness, humans believed that god had a good plan leading to a harmonious ending for humankind. God, convinced of human gratitude for the suffering he had caused, destroyed man and all creation.

Russell argues that this not-so-uplifting story is consistent with the world-view of modern science. To elaborate he penned some of the most pessimistic and often quoted lines in the history of twentieth-century philosophy:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Still, despite the ultimate triumph of vast universal forces, humans are superior to this unconscious power in important ways—they are free and self-aware. This is the source of their value. But most humans do not recognize this, instead choosing to placate and appease the gods in hope of reprieve from everlasting torment. They refuse to believe that their gods do not deserve praise, worshiping them despite the pain the gods inflict. Ultimately they fear the power of the gods, but such power is not a reason for respect and worship. For respect to be justified, creation must really be good. But the reality of the world belies this claim; the world is not good and submitting to its blind power enslaves and ultimately kills us.

Instead let us courageously admit that the world is bad, Russell says, but nevertheless love truth, goodness, beauty, and perfection, despite the fact that the universe will destroy such things. By rejecting this universal power and the death it brings, we find our true freedom. While our lives will be taken from us by the universe, our thoughts can be free in the face of this power. In this way we maintain our dignity.

However, we should not respond to the disparity between the facts of the world and its ideal form with indignation, for this binds our thoughts to the evil of the universe. Rather we ought to follow the Stoics, resigned to the fact that life does not give us all we want. By renouncing desires we achieve resignation, while the freedom of our thoughts can still create art, philosophy and beauty. But even these goods ought not to be desired too ardently, or we will remain indignant; rather we must be resigned to accept that our free thoughts are all that life affords in a hostile universe. We must be resigned to the existence of evil, and to the fact that death, pain, and suffering will take everything from us. The courageous bear their suffering nobly and without regret; their submission to power an expression of their wisdom.

Still, we need not be entirely passive in our renunciation. We can actively create music, art, poetry and philosophy, thereby incorporating the ephemeral beauty of this world into our hearts, achieving the most that humans can achieve. Yet such achievements are difficult, for we must first encounter despair and dashed hopes so that we may be somewhat freed from the Fate that will engulf us all—freed by the wisdom, insight, joy, and tenderness that our encounter with darkness brings. As Russell puts it:

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay.

In our minds we can create beauty in the face of Fate and tragedy, and thereby thwart nature to some extent. Life is tragedy, but we need not give in; instead we can find the “beauty of tragedy” and embrace it. In death and pain there is sanctity, awe, and a feeling of the sublime. Such feelings allow us to reject petty and trivial desires, and to transcend the loneliness and futility we experience when confronted with vast forces which are both indifferent and inimical to us. To take the tragedy of life into one’s heart, and respond with renunciation, wisdom, and charity, is the ultimate victory for man: “To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things—this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship.” For Russell the contemplation of Fate and tragedy are the way we subdue them.

As for our fellow companions, all we can do is to ease their sorrow and sufferings, and not add to the misery that Fate and death will bring. In his we can take pride. Nonetheless the universe continues its inevitable march to universal death, and humans are condemned to lose everything. All we can do is to cherish those brief moments when thought and love ennoble us, and reject the cowardly terror of less virtuous persons who worship Fate. We must ignore the tyranny of reality that continually undermines all of our hopes and aspirations. As Russell so eloquently puts it:

Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish … the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Summary – There is no objective meaning in life. We should be resigned to this, but strive nonetheless to actively create beauty, truth, and perfection. In this way we achieve some freedom from the eternal forces that will destroy us.

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Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 61.

Review of Julian Baggini’s: What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life

Julian Baggini (1968 – ) is a British philosopher, author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience, and co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He was awarded his PhD in 1996 from University College London. His recent book, What’s It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, is a secular and non-hubristic inquiry into the question of the meaning of life. Baggini presupposes that we can’t know if religion is true and that there is no secret answer to the question of the meaning of life, for were there such an answer we would probably have discovered it by now. Baggini begins by looking at some of the proposed answers.

Can living life forward give life meaning? Why not look to some future goal, like avenging your brother’s death for meaning? The problem with this answer is that we can always ask of this future, or any future, why bring it about? And that question leads to the quest for some final end. In short any why/because series can be extended infinitely into either the past or future and never definitively puts an end to our questions. Other problems with looking to the future include: 1) we might die before we reach our goal; 2) even if we are immortal this does not solve our problem since meaning would always be in our future; and 3) if we do reach our goal, then what?

The main problem with a future-oriented life is that it locates meaning in a specific moment in time. This raises an obvious question: shouldn’t we expect some meaning from the present too? It seems then that meaning involves something enduring, something about which no further why questions need be asked, and this something must exist now. In other words, the key to meaning must be found in something that is an end in itself.

Baggini now turns to the notion that gods or an afterlife give life meaning. While believing in a god is no answer to the question of the meaning of life, we could stop worrying and accept that the gods provide meaning. However this is to give up the search for meaning. In this case you don’t know the meaning of life, you just stop asking the question. As for an afterlife, is there such a thing? The evidence suggests there is no afterlife, and even if there were what would be the meaning of it? The more important question is whether life can be meaningful without this assumption.

To fully answer our question we need to find a way that life can be meaningful that is not derived from the gods, or the past or the future, but from within us now. Baggini proceeds to investigate six ways (helping others, serving humanity, being happy, becoming successful, enjoying each day, and freeing your mind) that might provide life with meaning. He concludes that all of them may be part of a good or meaningful life, but they aren’t all of it. They don’t guarantee that our lives are meaningful because, of any of them, we can still ask: is such a life meaningful?

What all this means is that we are threatened with meaninglessness. It seems we must choose among the following: 1) life is meaningless; 2) the question is meaningless; or 3) meaning is impossible to discover. Regarding 1—while life is not meaningful in an objective sense, it can still be subjectively meaningful. Regarding 2—while the question may be meaningless, life can still have meaning for the person living it. Regarding 3—although we can’t know the meaning of life with certainty, we can still find our lives meaningful by living them. One might say that such a life isn’t sufficiently examined and thus not worth living, but that is mere intellectual snobbery. Unexamined lives can be worth living if the people living them find them worthwhile. So a life can be subjectively meaningful despite the lack of any objective meaning.

Baggini admits, “This kind of rationalistic-humanistic approach leaves many unsatisfied.” A fundamental objection to such an approach is that it separates morality from meaning. Can human values really be enough to ground value? In response Baggini says: 1) we might say that certain people have meaningful but immoral lives; or 2) we could say that subjective meaning is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful life—the life must also be moral. He prefers this second option. As to the charge that this second response is ad hoc, Baggini reminds the reader that life is meaningful only if it is worth living. All humans have an equal claim to a good life, and to make someone’s life go worse is a moral wrong. Still simply because life has to have value in itself and for the person living it “does not … mean that the only person able to judge the value is the person living the life…” Individuals may be mistaken about the value of their lives.

Another objection to a humanistic account of meaning says that we should accept and be attuned to the mystery in life, and that the rationalistic humanistic account doesn’t do this. Baggini responds that this is merely a plea from those who like mystery. He has not said that there are no gods, or that people can’t get meaning from them; he just doesn’t think there are good reasons to believe in gods, and he finds his meaning elsewhere. Furthermore, there is plenty of mystery about how to have meaningful lives; discovering what is meaningful is mysterious. Being attuned to the fact that we are alive at all is a to be in touch with the mystery. In fact this is a more noble kind of mystery than believing in the mystery of gods or afterlife, for fear motivates the latter beliefs.

The tragedy and fragility of life suggests that love, a topic on which philosophers are notoriously silent, is the answer to the problem of human existence. The desire to do good things is motivated, not by reason, but by love. What then of love and happiness? They are connected but they aren’t identical. Love persists thru unhappiness, and its object is the beloved. Love shows the value we place in authenticity, since we want to be loved for who we are. Love provides insight into true success, the kind that makes life meaningful. Love requires us to seize the day, otherwise we might let it pass us by. Love shows that we can have meaningful lives without philosophy, without a careful examination of our lives.

Philosophy is not good at examining love or the non-rational components of human life. The rational-humanistic approach is not misguided however; rather, it shows the limits of our ability to understand life, and it reveals the limit and fragility of love. “Sadly, it is not true that all you need is love. Love, like life, is valuable, but fragile and subject to no guarantees. It is fraught with risk and disappointment, as well as being the source of great elation and joy.” In the end the humanist accepts that morality, mystery, meaning, and love exist without transcendental support. This is a sign of one’s ability to confront and accept the limits of life. “The transcendentalist’s desire for something more is understandable, but the humanist’s refusal to succumb is, I believe, a sign of her ability to confront and accept the limits of human understanding and, ultimately, human existence.”

Baggini concludes his deflationary account of meaning by saying that the meaning of life is available to all, not only to the guardians who claim a monopoly on it. His view challenges the power of those who would control us, and gives us the responsibility of determining meaning for ourselves. But knowing about the meaning of life doesn’t provide a recipe for living it. It is hard to live meaningfully, it is an ongoing project, and one is never finished with the task. Baggini concedes that his is not the last word on the subject, that we need more than philosophers to work the problem out, and that no book is ever the final word on the subject. Also people are different, so we cannot offer an instruction manual for all—we can only suggest a framework within which persons might live meaningfully.

In the end the meaning of life is not that mysterious, it is something within our grasp, and we can live meaningfully. Hope rather than despair is called for, since there are many ways to live meaningful lives. We can recognize all the good and bad things in life, and still see that there are many ways to live meaningful lives. To find meaning then,

We can see the value of happiness … We can learn to appreciate the pleasures of life … We can see the value of success … We can see the value of seizing the day … We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives … And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all.

Summary – We can give our lives meaning by doing meaningful things and recognizing the value of love.

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Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, 188.

Summary David Lund’s, Making Sense Of It All

David Lund is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota where he taught for many years. His 1999 textbook, Making Sense of It All: An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry, concludes with a chapter devoted to the meaning of life. He asks: What is the point of it all? Is this point found in our daily lives, or is there a higher purpose to our lives? How can anything matter if all ends in death? The basic problem with answering such questions is that they depend upon our answers to other philosophical questions such as:  Is there objective truth? Are we free? Is there personal identity over time? Does a non-natural realm exist? Do we survive death?

It is tempting to think of the meaning of life as something beyond life, and we do say meaning of life instead of meaning in life. Yet, from the cosmic standpoint, it does not seem to matter much whether we lived or not, as all ends in universal death. Of course our day to day lives seem significant, as we concern ourselves with happiness, self-actualization, love or other aspects of our lives. But the universe does not care about our interests: “It is indifferent to our ideals, our achievements, our values, our very existence. It is a vast spiritual emptiness. There is no cosmic plan in which our lives have a permanent value.”

In response we might look to the gods’ purposes, but this merely pushes the question back. How does fulfilling the god’s purposes make our lives meaningful? For this answer to terminate our search for meaning, we must embrace the god’s purposes, they must become our own. So meaning comes largely from within us. The same with an afterlife, either it is intrinsically meaningful or not. If it is not meaningful, then we would have to look to some other world for its meaning; if it is meaningful, then this life could be too. This suggests that the meaning of life must be found within us, in this life. In fact most of us do think our lives are intrinsically valuable and most of us try to live well no matter what. Questions about the meaning of life then are about whether our lives are valuable beyond their intrinsic value.

Lund proceeds by distinguishing activities that have intrinsic value for people but which are not goal oriented, with activities that are not intrinsically valuable but which have derivative value because they are goal directed. Lund concludes that for an activity to be meaningful:

It must have enough intrinsic value to be worthwhile in itself; it must also have derivative value in virtue of being directed toward a goal; and this goal must be important and achievable. An activity would be meaningless if it lacked all of these features. And though it may still have meaning, it would be meaning-deficient to some degree if it lacked at least one of them.

Unfortunately our lives may be futile because of the nature of the world itself. If we cannot achieve our goals, the goals that if achieved would prevent life from being meaningless, then we can say that life is futile. We may think that our lives have value beyond their intrinsic value, but if they do not then our lives are futile whether we know it or not. Perhaps it is only our illusions that prevent us from seeing them this way. We might assume that there is objective truth and pursue it, but if we found there was no such truth our pursuit of it would be futile. Or it might be that moral values are subjective. If we had lived as if values were objective, then we gave our lives for things which were ultimately insignificant. Of course we could simply accept that moral subjectivism holds and find meaning in our subjective values.

The loss of theism makes the meaning problem worse for many people since the truth of theism solves the problem of the indifferent universe, and the futility that accompanies it. This is why atheism is so devastating for meaning and why it is so difficult to accept. In response, Lund suggests we face our probable fate with honor.

It is unbecoming of us, indeed unworthy of us, to be unwilling or unable to face the truth, whatever that should turn out to be. If a more uplifting view of the world—one more in accord with our hopes—can be sustained only with a faith that has no concern for the truth, then it is not worth having; and we should have the intellectual courage to reject it.

The quest for meaning is a quest for understanding and truth—a truth we must find for ourselves.

… there are churches and other institutions or organizations that would have us passively accept, without critical reflection, the dogmas they foist upon us. But we must not succumb to this, even if what we hear from these sources is what we would very much like to believe. We must insist on thinking things out for ourselves and on having our beliefs reflect our understanding of truth, rather than our desires or the opinions of some self-proclaimed authority.

To live this way is courageous and wise; it is to reject the dogma imposed by authority. It also evokes compassion at the real suffering and lack of meaning that we all endure. “Such compassion, especially in conjunction with courage and wisdom, will help us to live so as to leave a good legacy, and to see that one’s legacy is of great importance, despite the likelihood that it be short-lived.” The search for truth and meaning may never succeed, but the search itself is all the meaning that there probably is, and is as close to the meaning of life as we will probably come.

Summary – Our lives may well be futile, but we can find some small meaning by searching for truth, and accepting whatever it is that we find.

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Lund, Making Sense Of It All: An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry, 204.

Robert Solomon on the Meaning of Life

Robert C. Solomon (1942 – 2007) received his PhD from the University of Michigan and was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business at the University of Texas at Austin for many years until his death. In a chapter of his book, The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy, Solomon asks: “What is the meaning of life? This is the big question—the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure.” The question usually arises when we something has gone wrong in our lives, whereas if our everyday lives are filled with activity we seldom think about the question.

Solomon first considers the meaning of the word meaning in the question. Often the meaning of something is what it refers to—like a word or a sign—but what do our lives refer to?  We might say they refer to other people or the universe or a god, but this does not seem to be the same kind of reference. Nonetheless, many people do think of their lives as having meaning by reference to something outside themselves like their children, or gods, or an afterlife.

Regarding children, Solomon argues that if the meaning of someone’s life is their children we can immediately ask, what is the meaning of your children’s lives and their children, ad infinitum? It is hard to see how this all makes your own life meaningful. Regarding gods, it is again hard to see how this answers the question. For now we must ask: why did gods create us? If for some purpose, what was it? Why do gods need worlds anyway, what is the meaning of the world? It is not clear how gods would solve the problem. Regarding the afterlife, similar questions emerge. Is this life so insignificant that only reference to another one could make it significant? Why does the fact that the next life lasts longer make it more meaningful? What should we do in this life to be rewarded in the next? So the questions re-emerge: what should we do, what is important, how should we live? So while it is true that people dedicate their lives to their children or their gods or a possible afterlife, none of these answers really answer the question—they  just raise more questions like: What is the meaning of our children’s lives? How do I live to serve a god? What is the purpose of an afterlife?

Perhaps then life is meaningless, since nothing external can give it meaning.  Solomon replies that the fact that there is no external meaning outside of life does not imply that there is no meaning in life. In the same way that words have meaning in context, our lives may have meaning in context. If we truly devote them to our children or our gods, we can give our lives meaning.

Solomon further argues that the question of meaning in life does not require a specific answer so much as a vision of life in which you have a role. This vision is important since it colors the way you see the world. For example if you think life is a business contract you will probably see it differently than someone who sees it as a gift from the gods. Some of these grand images of life which can give it meaning include life as: a game, tragedy, mission, story, art, adventure, disease, desire, nirvana, altruism, honor, learning, frustration, relationships, or an investment.

If live is a game, you might not take it too seriously but still want to win or be a good sport. If life is a story, you might see yourself as the hero of an unfolding narrative to be judge by the quality of the role you played. If life is a tragedy, living one’s life bravely in the face of our inevitable death may be the best we can do. If life is a joke, we could see our lives less seriously and laugh at them. If life is a mission, you might convert others, bring about revolution, raise children, advance science or promote morality. If life is an art, we may want to create our lives as ones with beauty, style or class. If life is an adventure, we would live life to the fullest, taking risks and enjoying challenges. If life is a disease, then all ends in death. If life is desire, the satisfaction of desire brings meaning; if life is nirvana, then the goal is to eliminate desire and achieve tranquility. If life is altruism, we live for others even if they do not reciprocate. If life is honor, then we must fulfill expectations and do our duty. If life is learning, we derive satisfaction from learning, from growing and developing our potential. If life is suffering, perhaps the best we can do is detach ourselves through contemplation or self-denial. If life is an investment, we think of the time of our lives as capital invested to gain a reward—say money or fame. And if life is relationships, then love and friendship are most important.

Solomon does not prescribe any one of these over another; instead he presents them as various images or visions which can give meaning to human life. Thus meaning is something we create, by choosing to live in accord with our own vision of a meaningful life.

Summary – We create meaning by living in accord with our vision of life.

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Robert Solomon, The Big Questions (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010), 44.

Summary of David Schmidt’s: “The Meanings of Life”

David Schmidt (1955- ) is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and joint Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. In “The Meanings of Life” (2002) he admits that philosophy may not be able to deal with the question of the meaning of life, but he’ll try to understand “life’s meaning by reflecting on what it has been like to live one.” Schmidt begins by contrasting the existential attitude—that life’s meaning is of extreme importance and that we must give meaning to our lives—with the Zen attitude—that meaning is not something to worry about and that meaning is found simply by being mindful in the present. Schmidt doesn’t take sides on this matter, admitting that he is no sage and that it is hard to talk profoundly about such matters.

He next notes that while some lives mean more than others, meaning has limits. Why? Because: 1) meaning in life does not last; 2) meaning changes; 3) meaning may not be deep enough to fulfill our longings; 4) life may be the kind of thing that cannot have deep meaning; and 5) life is short. Ultimately our most lasting achievements are ephemeral. Although there are limits to meaning, that does not mean life is meaningless. Schmidt agrees with Taylor that being fully engaged in our lives, however trivial they might seem from a universal perspective, is what gives them limited meaning. Still, sadness accompanies knowing that the meaning of our lives is limited.

Schmidt now lists some of the components of meaningful lives, although he admits there are many ways to live them. First they have impact, maybe not on the cosmos, but on something important to you like your family. So you should not look for an impact where you don’t have any, but where you do. Schmidt wonders about Nozick’s claim that you need to leave permanent traces in the world—a higher standard for meaning—but suggests that we should probably be content with less. Features of meaningful lives are:

Meanings are symbolic – For example, we can give meaning to simple worms if we want. Meanings need not be intrinsic, only meaningful to us. Of course two persons could have the same experience with one finding it meaningful, the other finding it meaningless.
Meanings are choices – We choose whether our lives have sufficient meaning for us. If we choose to view them as meaningless, then we should not worry about it since that is meaningless too. And if we can’t enjoy meaninglessness, then we should choose to treat life as meaningful.
Meanings track relationships – Our lives derive meaning when they mean something to the people around us. Our lives communicate things to others—that they are important or we care about them—and maybe their meaning is in what they communicate.
Meanings track activity – Most of us don’t want to plug into “the matrix-like happiness machine” which suggests we want more than experiences; we want the meaning that comes from activities. This raises questions as to whether you would think life in the machine was objectively or only subjectively meaningful. Meaning also seems related to the activity of making contact with external reality, something we cannot do in the machine.

In order to experience deep meaning, we need to bring a personal touch to life or decorate our house in Schmidt’s metaphor. Life is the picture we put on the bare walls. As we age we may lament the path we chose, or regret that we could only choose one path. Maybe meaning is being attentive to the path we chose and, though we cannot state what the meaning of life is, we can still enjoy the process. Just engaging in certain activities—coaching little league football in his example—is sometimes sufficient.

Schmidt wrote a postscript to his original article after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In it he claimed that the encounter with death had not changed his view of the meaning of life. You cannot live each day as if it is your last and it is hard to make permanent traces in the world. Some say that life is meaningful if we finish painting one big picture which has an impact; others maintain that meaning comes from painting many smaller pictures, which has the advantage of something being done if the brush is taken away unexpectedly. Schmidtz says that our lives can be meaningful because of the little pieces of our lives that slowly add up, even if they never produce a completed work of art.

Summary – Being engaged in our lives is what gives them meaning. There are a few things we can say about life’s meaning, but we can never state its meaning with clarity. The best we can do is find meaning in what we are engaged in.

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David Schmidt, “The Meanings of Life” in Life, death, and meaning, ed. David Benatar (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 92.

Summary of John Kekes’: “The Meaning of Life”

John Kekes is Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Albany. He begins his essay “The Meaning of Life” as follows: “Most of our lives are spent in routine activities … It is natural to ask then why we should continue on this treadmill.” One answer is that nature, instinct, and training impel us to struggle. To seek more is to “misuse the respite we occasionally enjoy from the difficult business of living.” Many throughout the world struggle for the basics of life, without much time to worry about the meaning of life. Those in first world countries struggle instead for wealth, honor, and prestige, but when there is time left over for reflection they often wonder whether such things really do matter; they wonder about the meaning of it all.

What Gives Life Meaning? – Maybe life has no meaning. We may have evolved to ask questions, and have the time to ask them, but this doesn’t mean we can answer them. Life may just be a brute fact, to be explained only by laws of nature. There may be no other meaning. We could respond to all this with cynicism or despair, but these poison the enjoyment of life. “Despair and cynicism cleave us into a natural self and a preying, harping, jeering, or self-pitying self. We are thus turned us against ourselves. Reflection sabotages our own projects.” This is why so many avoid deep questions and go on living as best they can. However, such avoidance is possible only if we are doing well. For as soon as the young look forward, the old look backward, or the sick look at their present state, the question of meaning will arise. But even if we are doing well, shouldn’t we ask about meaning? Would it not be foolish to engage in projects which may not be valuable? In short, no matter what our situation, we are brought back to the question of the meaning of life.

Kekes now turns to the famous crisis of meaning experienced by John Stuart Mill’s. Mill had meaning in his life— he wanted to improve the world—and then lost it as he recounts in his autobiography. He thought that even if all his desires for a better world were satisfied he would still not be happy because, of any proposed meaning, one can always ask: “and why does that have meaning?” What happened was that Mill became disengaged from his projects, he became disillusioned. It was not that his life was worthless, pointless, destructive, trivial or futile—from an objective point of view his life was meaningful. What happened was that he no longer cared about or identified with his projects. Kekes responds that even if Mill’s life was intrinsically meaningful and subjectively engaging, that would still not be sufficient for meaning because one can always conclude that all projects are ultimately absurd.

A similar notion is captured by Nagel’s sense of the absurd—the pretension with which we take ourselves internally versus the apparent external insignificance of our lives. Still, many have taken the eternal perspective and remained concerned about human welfare; thus merely taking that perspective does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that life is meaningless. For Mill the issue was not that his life appeared absurd from a universal perspective but rather that he stopped caring about it, and he became desultory precisely because he stopped caring. Thus sometimes we lose commitment to our projects, not because they lack something, but because our will and emotions are not engaged in them. This leads Kekes to ask: “what is it that engages our will and emotions, and gives meaning to our lives, given that our projects are not defective and we do not suffer from a sense of absurdity?” Typically we respond to this question with religious and moral answers.

The Religious Answer – The religious approach says value must come from the outside in terms of a cosmic order. Specific religions are interpretations of the cosmic order through revelation, scripture, miracles, church authority, religious experience, etc. While science tells us something of this order, it does not tell us everything. But we want to know everything about the cosmic order gives meaning to our lives. Furthermore, the better we know the order, the better our lives will go. If we are like dogs tied to carts drawn by horses, if that is the cosmic order, then the best we can do is to go along with the order and not oppose it. The Stoics thought we must conform to the order, while religious thinkers generally believe that the order is good. The key to meaning then is to find this order and live in harmony with it.

But there are problems with religious answers. First of all we have no direct access to the cosmic order since all evidence comes from the natural world. Thus we cannot know if there is cosmic order or, if there is, what form it takes. Moreover, even if the natural world did point to a cosmic order, this would not be enough to give us meaning, since we still would not know anything about the nature of that cosmic order. Furthermore, even if we could infer something of the cosmic order from the natural world that still would not be enough. Think again of Sisyphus. He knows his fate but temple building was not his purpose, it was the gods. He was enslaved by them. How then can their purposes give his life meaning? Sisyphus, pyramid builders, and dogs tied to carts—none of their lives have meaning.

So not only must there be a cosmic order but that order must be both necessary and good. Do we have any reason to believe this? Kekes thinks not. Can we derive inferences about the cosmic order from the natural world? No. If we are hones we must accept that the cosmic order, if it really is reflected by the natural world, is good, bad, and indifferent. So if the cosmic order must be good for our lives to have meaning, then they do not have meaning, since the cosmic order is at most partly good. In sum, the religious answer fails because 1) we have no reason to believe there is a cosmic order; 2) if there is one we know nothing about it; and 3) if we did infer something about the cosmic order from the natural world, reasonable persons would conclude it was not exclusively good.

The Moral Answer – The moral approach concerns the good independent of the gods, even if a god’s will might reflect that good. We need to know what is good if we are to know how pursuing it gives meaning to life, and ethics looks for this in the natural world. Here we are concerned not with ethics in the narrow sense of what is right, but in the wide sense of what is good. To better understand this let us go back to Taylor. He thought meaning for Sisyphus could be subjective if he wanted to push rocks; that would make his life meaningful independent of the fact that the project seemed meaningless from an objective point of view. So it is wanting to do our projects that makes them meaningful, meaning comes from us. In other words meaning is subjective; it does not come from the projects themselves. Therefore the subjective view of meaning is that “a life has meaning if the agent sincerely thinks so, and it lacks meaning if the agent sincerely denies it.”35 By contrast the objective view states that “lives may lack meaning even if their agents think otherwise, for they may be mistaken.”

There are three reasons to reject the subjective view and accept the objective. First, if meaning is subjective, then there is no difference whether we want to pursue a project because we are being indoctrinated or manipulated, or because we truly think it meaningful after reflection. On this view discovering that we were simply wired to want something, say to push boulders up hills forever, would not change our minds about an activity’s meaningfulness. But this seems wrong; discovering any of this should change our minds about meaning! Subjective desire or active engagement may be part of the meaning of life, but it does not seem to be all of it.

Second, even if we truly want to roll rocks, and have not been manipulated into wanting this, such a desire alone does not make the act meaningful unless it matters to us that rocks are rolled. We could still ask of this non-manipulated desire, why do it? So even if we are not manipulated, and want to do something that matters to us, we still do not have enough for meaning because questions about the value of our desires remain. Are we being manipulated by gods, media, or indoctrination? Do things matter to us because of upbringing, education, or society? We simply cannot answer questions like these without considering how reality is independent of us. This leads us back to the objective view.

Third, we pursue projects because we think they would make our lives better but they may not do so. We may change our minds about a project when it does not make our lives better, concluding that the project was not meaningful after all. But if believing a project meaningful were sufficient to making it meaningful, the subjective view of meaning, then we would not change our minds like this. All of this counts against the subjective view of meaning.

Now it might be said in defense of the subjective view that these three objections show that the truth of our beliefs does not affect whether our lives are meaningful. This is partly right and partly wrong. It is true we may find our projects meaningful even if we are manipulated or our projects are not good, but it is false that meaning is subjective. Objective considerations about wants being manipulated and beliefs being false still matter, since knowledge of these may destroy our belief in meaning. Thus in addition to subjective considerations, objective ones matter as well, for example that we have non-manipulated desires and true beliefs. Subjective willing, whether of a god or human, is not enough for meaning; for a meaningful life we must subjectively want some objective things that really make our lives better. However, none of this presupposes a cosmic order; there can be things that are really good without positing a cosmic order. In summary the moral approach says that our lives are meaningful if: 1) they are not worthless pointless, futile, etc; 2) we reject the view that all projects are absurd; 3) there are projects we want to pursue; 4) our desired projects will actually make our lives go better.

Conclusion – But when we ask about making our lives go better, do we have in mind morally or non-morally better? We could follow Socrates and say the morally good life is both the satisfying and the meaningful life, but this will not do and the moral answer fails. Why? First, morally good projects may not be satisfying; and second, even if morally good projects are satisfying it does not follow that only morally good lives are satisfying. It could be that either immoral or non-moral projects give meaning. That people can get meaning from immoral projects shows that the moral answer is mistaken.

Both moral and religious answers fail because they seek a general answer to the question, thereby failing to sufficiently emphasize individual differences. This seems to lead us back to the subjective view but, as we saw earlier, we had multiple reasons for rejecting that view.  Since neither the subjective nor objective approach works we might be led to again consider the religious or moral approaches but, as we saw previously, they both failed. The former because there is no reason to think there is a cosmic order that confers meaning, and the latter because immoral lives can be meaningful.

This all leads Kekes to advancing a pluralistic approach to meaning in life—meaningful lives take a plurality of forms. A central claim of the pluralistic approach is that all approaches giving general answers are mistaken. The other basic claim is that morally bad lives may be meaningful and morally good lives may not be. Thus, contrary the orthodox view, what makes a life meaningful and what makes it good are distinct.

Summary – Meaningful lives are not pointless, futile, trivial, or absurd and involve pursuing activities agents find engaging and life-bettering. These activities are found in the natural world, thus excluding a religious answer; and these activities may be immoral, thus excluding the moral answer. There are no general answers as to what activities or projects a subject will find rewarding and engaging.

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Kekes, “The Meaning of Life,” 250.

Raymond Martin: The Meaning of Life is A Fast Car and a Good Woman

Raymond Martin is Crichton Professor of Philosophy at Union College. He spent most of his career at the University of Maryland. In his 1989 piece, “The Meaning of Life” Martin notes that problems in life—poverty, sickness, suffering, pain, etc—challenge the meaning of them. If we can avoid these problems, we should; if we cannot, we must accept them. Learning the difference between those we can and cannot avoid is part of the problem. Death is a special problem that challenges meaning in life, but Martin is unsure it is related to the question of whether our lives are worth living.

For Martin then, the problem of the meaning of life is in determining how our lives can be worth living. This question is related to speculative questions about whether there is objective meaning in reality, but more importantly the question is a practical one—how to live our lives so that they are as worthwhile as possible.  However, for some people the problem of how to live well includes demanding an answer to the speculative meaning of life question. Tolstoy is the classic example of a man whose existential angst leaps from his pages, causing us to wonder—what is it all for?

While many things challenge our belief in life’s meaning—bad times, death, having our beliefs disputed—Martin also wonders if philosophical questions are often a source of psychological despair even when things are going well. He cites Nagel as a philosopher who argues that questions about the meaning of life often result in psychological crisis, and Tolstoy thought such questions could destroy you if you did not have faith.

But Martin thinks the foregoing analysis suspect, asking us to consider “a time when your life was at its subjective best … Whatever your peak experience, were you worried then about the meaning of life?” He thinks answer is no. At such moments we had solved the problem of life and questions of meaning did not arise. This indicates that happiness is the crucial issue, primarily because happy people do not turn questions into problems. If there is a problem of life then, it is how to be happy.

Martin now turns to Taylor’s view that meaning and values derive from actions in which we are truly engaged. But Martin finds Taylor’s optimism too easy, just as he had found Nagel’s pessimism too hard. As a middle way he argues that meaning is neither inevitable nor impossible but meaningful “largely to the degree that you are doing what you love to do.” Or, to go even further, life is meaningful when you get all the things that you want. So if we reflect on a time when we were really satisfied, we realize that then the meaning of life question did not arise. But still such satisfaction does not last. And that is because even when you get what you want, you always want more or you want something different or you want what you have in a different way. In short we are not easily satisfied. And that was largely Tolstoy’s problem. He had everything but even when he got it he found that it did not last, that it was not completely satisfying.

Since getting what you want will satisfy you, we are led to Buddha’s answer—do not want anything. Martin claims that while this may have worked for Buddha, it does not work for most of us. Moreover, not wanting just adds another thing to our list of wants; we want to not want! So we may have to accept that life offers only fleeting satisfactions and that doing what we love is the best we can do. Of course this does not solve the basic problem that satisfaction does not last—we are often dissatisfied with our lives even when they are going well. In that case the best we can do is whatever satisfies us: “a fast car and a good woman, or whatever you think will do it for you.” In the end it is disappointing to realize that we will never get the deep and lasting satisfaction we crave.

Finally, Martin believes his analysis illuminates the relationship between death and meaning.  Why do we think that death threatens meaning? Because death puts an end to our search for satisfaction; and the nearness of death shows us that we will never be fully satisfied. Death symbolizes defeat in our struggle for serenity. But in moments of complete satisfaction, in the ecstasy of love for example, death seems not to matter and we temporarily defeat death. But soon our desires return, our struggle to be satisfied continues: “Until death ends the struggle—perhaps forever.”

Summary – The only meaning life has comes from doing what you love. But in the end we cannot attain complete satisfaction.

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Martin, “The Meaning of Life,” 714.

Summary of Hazel Barnes’ “The Far Side of Despair”

Hazel Barnes (1915-2008) was a longtime professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She played a major role in introducing French existentialism to the English-speaking world through her translations and scholarship.

In her 1967 essay, “The Far Side of Despair,” Barnes asks why people assume that a lack of meaning or a grand purpose for the universe is bad. She argues that individuals project meaning onto a meaningless universe because of a desire for immortality, a desire to share in the eternal goodness of the gods and their reality. The positive side to these beliefs is that it follows from them that what we do really matters, and a heaven awaits those who act correctly. The negative side is that there is a hell which corresponds to this promise of heaven. Of course not all views of higher meaning depend on the idea of personal immortality—Aristotelianism and Hebraism do not—but they still suggest there is some proper place for humankind in the world.

Existentialism rejects all pronouncements of meaning. “Humanistic existentialism finds no divine presence, no ingrained higher meaning, no reassuring absolute.” Still, it is a fallacy to draw the inference that my life is not worth living from the fact that the universe has no meaning. Our lives may have intrinsic value both to ourselves and to others, although the universe does not care about us. In this context Barnes quotes Merleau-Ponty: “Life makes no sense, but it is ours to make sense of.” And Sartre argues: “To say that we invent values means nothing except this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you live it, life is nothing, but it is for you to give it a meaning. Value is nothing other than this meaning which you choose.”

To contrast traditional views of meaning with existentialist ones, Barnes compares life to a blank game board with pieces but no instructions. Theological, rational, and nihilistic views all suggest that unless we can discover the correct pattern of the board and the correct instructions or rules, there is no reason to play the game. In contrast the existentialists maintain that though there is no pre-existing pattern imprinted on the board and no set of rules provided, we are left free to create our own game with its own patterns and rules. There is no objective truth about how to construct the game or live a life, but if the individual who constructs a life finds value in the creating, making, and living of a life then it has been worthwhile. Creating our own lives and values gives us satisfaction, elicits the approval of others, and may make it easier for others to live satisfying lives.

Still, for many this is not enough, they want some eternal, archetypical measurement for their lives. Barnes acknowledges that life is harder without belief in such things, but wonders if the price we would pay for this ultimate authority is too high. Given such an authority, humans would be measured and confined by non-human standards. We would be like slaves or children with our futures, not open to our choices, but prescribed for them. Humans “in the theological framework of the medieval man-centered universe has only the dignity of the child, who must regulate his life by the rules laid down by adults. The human adventure becomes a conducted tour … The time has come for man to leave his parents and to live in his own right by his own judgments.”

Another problem for many with creating your own meaning is the implied subjectivity of value. How do we understand that what some people find meaningful others think deplorable? Barnes responds that she welcomes the fact that we possess the freedom to create our own values and live uniquely, it is part of the growing up process.

A final difficulty manifests itself when we contemplate the future. What difference will it make in the end whether I live one kind of life rather than another? What is the point of it all if there is no destination, no teleology? Barnes counters: “If there is an absolute negative quality in the absence of what will not be, then there is a corresponding positive value in what will have been.” In other words if nothingness is bad, it is so only because some existing things were good. Moreover, “The addition of positive moments does not add up to zero even if the time arrives when nothing more is added to the series.”

Barnes rejects the view that human life is worthless and meaningless just because it is not connected to a non-human transcendent authority. We are right to rebel against the fact that our lives must end, but still we do continue to exist in a sense because “We live in a human world where multitudes of other consciousnesses are ceaselessly imposing their meaning upon [the external world]…and confronting the projects which I have introduced. It is in the future of these intermeshed human activities that I most fully transcend myself. In so far as “I” have carved out my being in this human world, “I” go on existing in its future.”

 

Summary – We must grow up and create meaning for ourselves, rather than imagining some outside agency can do this. And through our projects we have a limited immortality.

Hazel Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E.D. Klemke (Oxford University Press, 2000), 162.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 162.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 162.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 162.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 165.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 165.

Barnes, “The Far Side of Despair,” 166.

Summary of Kai Nielsen’s “Death and the Meaning of Life”

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Kai Nielsen (1926 – ) is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Calgary. Before moving to Canada, Nielsen taught for many years at New York University. He is a prolific author and a well-known contemporary philosopher.

In a 1978 essay, “Death and the Meaning of Life,” Nielsen argues that for intellectuals in the modern world belief in an afterlife is virtually impossible to hold. Nonetheless he wants to resist the common view that death renders our lives meaningless. He claims to feel no terror or dread when contemplating death, despite the fact that he is convinced it means his utter annihilation. He admits to enjoying life and not wanting to die but, powerless to prevent the inevitable, he “takes rational precautions against premature death and faces the rest stoically … Death should only be dreadful if one’s life has been a waste.” He also wonders why must we “suffer angst, engage in theatrics and create myths for ourselves. Why not simply face it and get on with the living of our lives?”

Of course critics claim that life is meaningless without an afterlife, gods and morality. Concerning morality Nielsen argues that things are right and wrong independent of gods. To support this claim he summons Plato’s famous argument against equating the god’s power with what is right. The key is that naked power does not imply goodness—we do not want to reduce morality to power worship. “The crucial thing to see is that there are things which we can recognize on reflection to be wrong, God or no God, and that we can be far more confident that we are right in claiming that they are wrong, than we can be in claiming any knowledge of God’s or God’s order.”

Furthermore, the absence of a god and an afterlife does not mean that life is pointless. True there may be no meanings of life, but that does not mean there are no purposes in life. It may be that the cosmos does not grant the former but that hardly denies us the latter. And the goals and ends that we seek in this life are sufficient “to make life meaningful in the sense that there are in our lives and our environment things worthwhile doing, having or experiencing, things that bring joy, understanding, exhilaration or contentment to ourselves or to others.” That such things are not eternal does not make them meaningless.

He admits that critics will argue that something is missing in this account—namely an objective meaning independent of the success of our subjective projects. This had led some to postulate hope in an afterlife that fulfills their aspirations, and has led others to abandon hope altogether. Nielsen advocates a different position. Why not hope that through our strivings we can make this world a better place: “a truly human society without exploitation and degradation in which all human beings will flourish?” Such hope is consistent with both secular and religious ideals, and is far more intellectually respectable than positing other worlds to give life meaning.

Summary – We can have subjective meaning primarily found by creating a better world, even if there is no objective meaning.

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Nielsen, “Death and the Meaning of Life,” 158.