“A Meaning to Life,” Reply to Ruse

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My last post expressed my effusive praise for Michael Ruse’s new book, A Meaning to Life. I am especially interested in Ruse’s counsel that we enjoy the meaning life has to offer without yearning for some salvific narrative—religious or scientific. The life we have, he says, is enough.

I very much like this idea of being content with what life has to offer and I have advocated this exact idea in my own writing. Here is an excerpt:

But should we be satisfied with the meaning available in life or should we want more? On the one hand, if we have too few desires we will be too easily satisfied with our lives and the current state of the world. On the other hand, if we have too many desires we will be too easily dissatisfied with our lives and the current state of the world. So we should be content enough to experience the meaning life offers while discontent enough to want there to be more. Still, I admit that it is hard to balance our outrage at suffering, injustice, and meaninglessness with a healthy dose of equanimity, acceptance, and serenity.

Again, we should be grateful to be the kinds of beings who can live meaningful lives. If that is all life can give, we should be satisfied. Still, we can imagine that the meaning in our lives prefigures some larger meaning. We can envisage—and we desire—that there is a meaning of life.

So I agree that the idea of eliminating or at least decreasing our desires—advocated variously by the Buddhists and the Stoics—is a good prescription for our own happiness, especially concerning desires for material things or physical pleasures. But my desire concerns wanting the lives of others to be better, especially those of future people. And as I have written I think transhumanism is a realistic, scientific philosophy that may allow us to live more meaningful lives than we do now. (Remember too that it is easier to be content if you’ve lived with access to quality health care, good education, clean water, political stability, etc. Much harder to be content for the millions who don’t have such luxuries.)

Ruse is thankful for the good life he has lived and doesn’t expect more from life than it now offers. He certainly doesn’t desire or entertain any ideas about personal immortality. I commend him for living, as E.D. Klemke put it, “without appeal.” My point is that life could offer more if we improve it. It is at least possible that our descendants achieve greater levels of being and consciousness, and experience more meaning. Now I fully acknowledge skepticism about whether this will happen, and I admit that only a reasonable hope keeps us going. My point is simply that there are some reasons to believe that the future may be better than the past or the present. That in large part is what keeps some of us going.

In the end, I’ll voice my agreement with both Ruse and Haldane: “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” That may not be much to hang your hat on, but it provides some small, and yet intellectually-honest, consolation.