The
Meaning of Life
Why are we here? What is our purpose? Mustn’t
there be a point to this vast, remarkably complex drama being
played out on this relatively tiny little speck in the cosmos?
In short, what is the meaning of life?
By definition,
there cannot be a more important question. Surprising,
then, how little attention it receives. Most academics will scoff
at attempts to approach the issue in a scholarly context. Popular
culture, meanwhile, offers far more questions than answers, and
generally concludes discussions on the topic with trite feel-good
anthems or recycled therapy-speak. Think, for example, of the
string of clichés that closed Monty Python’s delightful
romp on the subject: “try to be nice to people…avoid
eating fat…and try and live together in peace and harmony
with people of all creeds and nations.”
In truth, the meaning of life has never really
been all that contentious of an issue, as throughout history people
have somehow felt they knew what it was even while it was constantly
evolving. Ancient tribes were convinced that their everyday activities
kept the sun rising and setting and (where applicable) the seasons
turning. Early civilizations allowed only a fraction of their
populace to reflect on anything but the toils of labor, and those
that could (the ruling classes) saw no need to separate the concept
of meaning from the concept of power and authority. Plato shifted
the locus to a singular natural law he called the Good, a principle
curiously concerned with human affairs yet supposedly as objective
and discoverable as gravity or mathematics. Christians thought
all meaning flowed from one creator god and the role he set aside
for each individual, something that was still bound up in the
19th century notion that meaning was all about Progress.
Philosopher
David Wiggins suggests that we might be right to envy our ancestors
for the certainty and simplicity of the meaning of life in their
worlds, where a supreme being or principle dictated the rhyme
and reason for everything. But our ancestors were wrong, sometimes
dangerously (cf. Spanish Inquisition), and their beliefs were
not just factually incorrect, they were theoretically superficial.
Suppose the ancients’ daily activities did keep
the Sun rising and setting; that still doesn’t establish
why it was meaningful for the Sun to rise and set. And if the
Christian god confers meaning on human activity, what gives his
action meaning? How can he be the source of his own meaning, while
a human cannot?
In essence,
we have traded the comfort of certainty for the freedom of intellectual
independence. But what has that freedom bought us? Precious little,
thus far, as meaning, surprisingly enough, remains far from a
central philosophical concern. Richard Taylor, brave enough to
venture onto the topic in his book Good and Evil, tries
to approach the thesis from its antithesis by working backward
from a “perfect image of meaninglessness,” which he
finds in the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. King Sisyphus, cursed
by the Gods for betraying divine secrets to mortals, was condemned
by Zeus to push a single stone up a hill, only to have it tumble
back down again, at which time he would push it back up, and again
it would tumble down, and so on, forever. The opposite situation,
Taylor reasons, would be if Sisyphus did not let the stone fall
back down, but instead pushed many stones up the hill in order
to erect a great temple at its summit. But Taylor ultimately concludes
that this too would be meaningless because of the temple’s
inevitable impermanence. This is the same line of thinking that
purports to render all human accomplishment meaningless,
because all will eventually be incinerated when the Sun goes supernova
six billion years from now. But Taylor sees one other way to make
Sisyphus’ toil meaningful. If Sisyphus were somehow endowed
with the desire to push the same rock up the hill over
and over, then his life would suddenly become a sublime realization
of his wildest dreams. This is an example of a theory called emotivism,
which basically means that if it feels good, it’s meaningful.
It is the basic idea behind the popular wishy-washy notion that
“love” gives life its meaning, and is precisely what
most forms of Christianity fall back to when pressed (C.S. Lewis
used humanity’s innate moral compass as an all-too-brief
(and conclusive, he thought) argument against atheism).
Emotivism, however, has at least two fatal flaws.
First, since it relies on an actor’s desire or feeling as
the sole criterion for meaning, the theory is unable to make the
simplest distinction between the values of specific actions. Emotivism
finds the meaningfulness of Michelangelo painting the Sistine
Chapel or a scientist discovering the cure for cancer equal to
that of a blindworm burrowing through the muck (as long as that’s
what the blindworm wants to do). Also, since emotivism places
the basis for meaning entirely within a single actor’s mind,
the meaningfulness of any action is externally unverifiable, and,
by definition, completely subjective.
Wiggins makes several key additions to the theory,
the most notable being the mutual dependence of subject and object.
To illustrate, consider a red ball. The ball is not seen as red
by every life form; it needs the color-sensitive eyes of humans
and other higher primates for its redness to be recognized. But
redness is clearly not all in the eyes of the beholders, either;
that is, redness is most certainly a product of the ball’s
inherent properties. Wiggins suggests that humans see redness
in just the same way as they see meaning, value, or goodness.
In each case, human perception “lights up” a part
of the world that existed only as a potentiality waiting for a
specific “perception apparatus” to recognize it.
Still, Wiggins’
improved theory relies on a phenomenological approach
(a fancy term for a layperson’s perspective). Phenomenology
is really quite close to emotivism in this instance (both are
non-cognitive), and as such it can only provide us with
guide-posts toward a logical explanation of the meaning of life.
If those guide-posts
point us toward any solution, it must be through a fundamental
similarity to moral discourse, and toward something I call relative
meaning. Moral relativists believe that right and wrong can
only be determined relative to pre-existing frameworks composed
of socially agreed-upon values. That agreement is forged through
social negotiation, but no small part of it comes from what feels
right to the discussants. Consider, for instance, something
that is truly terrible, like the murder of a baby seal. The emotional
reaction to that atrocity will almost always comes first, followed
later by a logical rationalization. Moral relativists conclude
that there is not one right or wrong answer to a moral question,
but many. If this is also true of meaning, it helps explain the
frustration of philosophers and metaphysicians who search in vain
for the one meaning of life. In fact, there are many,
each relative to a given culture’s conception of reality
and discretionary values, with a largely emotivist explanation
for the social negotiation that leads to the adoption of those
values.
So, we must
put the meaning of life right next to morality in the category
of really important questions to which there is no one answer.
But is the difficulty we have with such giant dilemmas really
all that surprising? Poetically stated, humans are halfway between
atoms and stars – the number of atoms in a human body roughly
equals the number of humans it would take to equal the mass of
the average star. Our species evolved, and we ourselves developed,
in a medium-sized world. It was there that we learned how to think.
We are understandably baffled by things that happen on a very
large (cosmological) or very small (quantum) scale, and only mathematics
gives us clues as to what goes on in those domains. Similarly,
our world is entirely populated by finite objects, most of which
have a clear beginning and end. Thus, we can’t get our heads
around something that goes on and on forever in time or space
(except for our own lives, which we can’t comprehend as
finite because being alive is all we’ve ever known). And
although accepting the relativity of meaning leaves us with no
one defining purpose, no grand Aristotelian Good toward which
we can strive, it does equip us with the ability to construct
local paradigms and find meaning within them. That may not sound
lofty or magnificent, but it gives us the greatest of gifts: the
ability to scratch out a meaningful existence here, with each
other, somewhere between atoms and stars.
By
Les Beldo
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