Introduction

The question of the Meaning of Life is one of those questions that the layman thinks should be at the very heart of the philosophical enterprise, and yet it is not something that has been of much interest to serious philosophers in the past, whether professional or amateur. There have, of course, been some attempts over the course of the millennia, but nothing approaching the prolonged and systematic efforts directed at questions of such perennial interest as ‘What is Good?’, ‘What is Truth?’, ‘What can we Know?’, ‘Is there a God?’, or ‘What is Beauty?’ And even amongst the topics of recent interest it has not really featured as the centre of its own field of study as has mind, or language. Nevertheless, it has been taken up more recently – but with what success it remains to be seen.

What is the Question?

There’s an amusing scene in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy[1] where a vast supercomputer built by a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings is asked to answer the ultimate question of ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ After 7½ million years Deep Thought gives the answer “42.” Naturally, this is a disappointment, and Deep Thought is asked to explain itself:

“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

”But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!” howled Loonquawl.

”Yes,” said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly,” but what actually is it?”

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

”Well, you know, it’s just Everything . . . Everything . . . ” offered Phouchg weakly.

”Exactly!” said Deep Thought. ”So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”

We’re not quite in that position, since we do have a perfectly grammatically correct question to answer: to whit, “What is the Meaning of Life?” On the other hand our position is very similar because the meaning of the question itself isn’t exactly clear. And we can’t know what sort of thing would even count as an answer to this question until we get that clear – although we are pretty sure that “42” isn’t the answer.

So, how should we understand the question? Well, notwithstanding what I have just said, I don’t think that we can work it out by investigating the semantics of the terms involved. In fact the way to get at what people mean by this question is exactly to look at the sorts of answers that have been proposed. But don’t worry; this isn’t quite as absurd as it appears. (We’ll get to absurdity later, I assure you.) Think of it this way: people have felt the need for a solution to some vaguely felt problem – not yet well defined in their own minds. They have proposed solutions or responses that seem to them to be properly directed at this vaguely felt problem, and they have at the same time tried to express the problem with which they are concerned. From inspection of the answers, we can determine whether the question is well-framed. If not, then we modify the question so that the answer makes more sense. From inspection of the question, we can determine whether there is a coherent problem being addressed. If not, then we can either dismiss the whole pursuit, or modify the question to make it more coherent. (This is something like an approach we call ‘reflective equilibrium,’ where we adjust related but incoherent beliefs and intuitions piecemeal until they are coherent.) Luckily, we can start with better answers than “42,” and better questions than “What do you get if you multiply six by nine.”

It doesn’t always work, of course. It might be that there are, in fact, several different questions being asked and we would then need to distinguish them. Some people think that this is exactly what’s going on, and that no answer is going to be entirely satisfactory because if it perfectly answers one of the questions, it will leave others unanswered.

In any case, I’m not going to pursue that reflective process here – because life is short and time is brief – instead, I’m just going to mention a couple of the possible interpretations of the question that have been thought to be good. Thus:

1.       What is the significance of life – or of one’s life (or what should it be.)

2.       What is the purpose of life – or of one’s life (or what should it be.)

A Question of Significance?

So let’s consider this first possible interpretation. And again we notice that although this seems more precise than the original form, yet there are still several ways that this can be understood. We’ll just look at two.

Is Man’s Life Significant?

In the first place, they might be wondering what is the place of Mankind in the Universe. Are we important and how? And to whom? It would be nice to think that humans are objectively pretty special, but is that just a conceit? We used to think that we were the special creation of God – the purpose of the whole creation was tied up in our salvation. Our home, the Earth, was the centre of the Universe and we were the most important thing on it. But the story of our self-image since the beginning of the Modern era has been one of continued diminution. We have discovered that the Earth isn’t the centre of the universe, but goes around the Sun. And the Sun isn’t the centre either, it’s a perfectly unremarkable main sequence, yellow dwarf, middle-aged star 25,000 light years from the centre of a typical spiral galaxy in a universe so vast that it is literally beyond our comprehension. We’ve also discovered that our recorded history of 5000 years is about a tenth of the time that humans have existed, and only 1 millionth of the age of the Earth, and even less than that of the Universe. We’ve also found that Man was not distinguished by a special creation from all the other creatures of the Earth, but arose through the processes of evolution from some common, vanished, barely living non-cellular organism. We are an accident that has happened in no special time or place; tiny, momentary, and insignificant. Even our mighty brains are the development of smaller brains and eventually of the tiniest spinal bulges. The software which ran on them continues to run in us, and although Freud’s psychology is no longer credible, his original insight that our minds are much darker than we had imagined remains valid. We are closer to the beasts than to the angels that we have imagined.

On the other hand of course, the Earth is the only place in all this vast universe that we know has life on it. And we are by a long, long margin the smartest things that have ever lived on the Earth. And we are not only smart but self-aware and conscious, and we can think about ourselves, and our awareness, and we can recognise Good and Evil, and True and False, and Beautiful and Ugly, and we can speculate on possibilities and necessities, in ways that no other creatures are able to do. And we can tell each other about all these things using language which is unknown outside humans. This means that we have value in a way that all the rest of creation does not. Just consider: a rock has no value in itself, but only as it is valued by a person or some other thinking, valuing creature. (Remember, we talked about this when we looked at Kant’s defence of the Kingdom of Ends form of the Categorical Imperative.) And it makes no difference how big that rock is. If it were the size of a planet it would have no value unless someone valued it. Now, If you look into the sky at night you can see vast numbers of stars and you can try to imagine the really immense numbers of planets and stars and galaxies and groups of galaxies that exist out there; but as far as we know they are all quite dead and empty, and thus without any intrinsic value other than that which we give to them. So in a way, we can still think that we are special – at least until we discover intelligent aliens or they discover us. But then again, even if there were other valuers in the Universe, it would still be true of us that even if there were no others our very existence would suffice to give the Universe value. In that case we – meaning humans – would be important in some way; but that doesn’t distinguish, say, my life as important, only that any valuer’s life is important. Whether you think that’s enough is a matter for you.

Does Life Signify Anything?

But perhaps the ‘meaning’ in the original question is more like the meaning in the question: “What is the meaning of the play ‘King Lear’?” In this case we now have a question of interpretation. We are asking “What does this play signify?” But by ‘signify’ now, we want to know how this play should be understood in some deeper sense. How should it make us feel and how should it affect our view of the world when we hear it conclude? I think this gets us closer to the idea behind the question, but now it looks as if there’s supposed to be some over-riding theme or intention in the story of our life that can be interpreted at its end – and most people will seriously doubt whether there is any such thing, because they’re too aware of the many contingencies (accidents and luck) that went into the forming of their life story. Did you pass that exam to become a pilot or did you get drunk the night before and fail? Did you speak to the girl at the shop who would have been your wife or was she distracted by a car going past and turned away from? So many trivial causes with such huge effects, this surely can’t be how a meaningful story is written.

And if we do think that this is the only way to give a life a meaning, and that no life can have such a theme or plan, then we may conclude that no life has any such meaning. Thus it follows that life is meaningless, and we might as well stop trying. Then we might agree with the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth[1] when he tells us that

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Thus, nihilism. What exactly is the point of going on living a life which has no meaning? Why go on living? But we’ll get back to Nihilism; we have other options to explore before that.

A Question of Purpose?

So now let’s consider the question of purpose. Again, we find that the question is possibly more precise – at least it seems to direct us toward certain answers while ruling out some others – and yet there are still several ways of taking it.

What Makes a Life Valuable?

One way of taking it is to ask what things there are that make a life have or gain value, so the question of meaning becomes the question of purpose becomes the question of “What Makes a Life Valuable?” And this seems naturally enough to point to the problem of determining what system of values is appropriate to us.  

Now, you might think that this is actually quite an easy question to answer, and that the answer would be the sort of thing that we might have treated in the section on Ethics. What are we to do? Why, the Good, of course; and the only difficulty – which we will claim has proved great but does not seem to be a priori insurmountable – is to decide what the Good is. At the very least, in this question we think we have something that we can get our teeth into. But let me remind you of some of the difficulties that are involved in this question (and note that they’ve been mentioned in passing earlier.) First, consider the Utilitarian definition of Good as being that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number. An essay question on this topic asks you to compare what you’d be required to do if you really believed this with what you’re likely to value doing more highly. Is this a fault in you or in the ethical theory? Second, remember the visitor to the hospital who goes only out of Duty and never out of spontaneous desire to see their sick mother. They value only doing the right thing, and we say, don’t we that that is not enough. Something of value is omitted from such a life. Finally, you might be some kind of Hedonist, possibly a utilitarian again, who thinks that the ultimate moral value is pleasure – or perhaps you even believe that the only thing worth pursuing is pleasure – but that doesn’t mean that you’d agree that a life spent in a happiness machine could be counted as a well-spent life. There’s some value determinative of a well-spent life which isn’t to be found by maximising that moral quality. And this is perfectly typical of moral theories. So it looks as if something is missing from such theories that we would require in the sort of theory that we’d take to be an answer to the question of meaning/purpose/value.

The point of all this is just that if we are going to find a value for Life then we’re going to have to look elsewhere than in the places that we’ve already looked for value. And if we locate a candidate it will have to be able to pass the sorts of tests that the ‘moral’ values just failed. Perhaps you can think of some candidates, but let’s now move on to another approach.

Does Life Have Some End at which it Aims?

Another way of taking the purpose question is to ask whether there is some overall goal at which Life aims or at which any individual life aims (or, in either case, should aim.) Thus the question as we’ll understand it is “What is the Goal of Life?” The answers to this question are usually divided (neatly, but somewhat naively) into those goals that come from within ourselves, and those that come from without. We’ll start with the latter.

i.        God’s Purpose Determines Our Purpose

The obvious external source of purposes is God. But that is not the only source: Marxists, for example, saw themselves as agents for the impersonal forces of History itself. But let’s deal with the more plausible alternative. (Note that in what follows I’m going to assume that it’s the Christian God that is at issue here. Other types of theism would presumably provide other types of meaningfulness.)

The Christian reasoning is fairly straightforward. God is the benevolent creator of the world. God rules the world, and does so according to rational principles. God has a rational plan for the world, which is to say, a plan to achieve some aims by means of the created world. (We know that God has plans with respect to the world because we know that God is rational and wouldn’t do anything without a reason.) ‘God … so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be realized.’[1] As parts of this creation, our purposes are subordinate to the purposes of God. It only remains for us to discover how our purposes ought to be so aligned, and what our subordinate purposes ought to be.

The best way to do this would be to determine what God’s purpose is and to adopt rhose subordinate purposes that reason would declare to be necessary to its achievement.  Unfortunately, God is never quite explicit about what His purpose is, and we are reduced to assuming that behaving in the way that God wants us to behave, or adopting the values that God wants us to have are sufficient to the purpose. So how do we determine those? Well, in the first place, God’s plan, that ‘so orders events,’ Aquinas identifies with “Eternal Law,” part of which is the “Natural Law” which gives us our moral guidance. And we are able to determine through reason, says Aquinas, what the Natural Law commands. Good. So that tells us how we are to behave. In the second place, the Christian tradition recognises a simple guide to the sort of things that make life worth living. We are supposed to feel love for our neighbours. A special sort of love that is denoted agaph in the tradition and which also denotes the type of love that God feels for us. Because we are loved by God, and because it is incumbent upon us to love what God loves, it follows that we should love one another, and so:

You have heard that it was said, 'Love (agape) your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.[2] If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?[3]

Love, then, of this special sort is the value that we derive from the assumption of God. And we have a perfectly comprehensible motivator for our actions. Especially those which satisfy the little rubric

            Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Of course, there are a few difficulties with all of this – even ignoring the arguments that led to this point. The first of these is a version of the Euthyphro problem that you might remember from earlier. If the necessary and sufficient condition for the goals we pursue being worth pursuing is that God says to pursue them, then we’d have to accept that if God said that we should stand on our heads, that would be our goal in life. This would be unacceptable, so we must have some criteria independent of God. If that’s the case, then we really haven’t solved the problem of the source of our goals.

Another problem might be that you doubt that there is a God anyway, and so there’s no getting a purpose by subordinating yourself to God’s purposes. But thinking of a world in which there is no God, would it seem reasonable to suppose that that lack by itself made our lives meaningless, whereas they would have had meaning otherwise. And looking at the people you admire: would you think it likely that what they were doing was meaningless if there’s no God, but meaningful otherwise? None of this seems reasonable to me.

ii.      We Determine Our Own Purposes

a.      Our Life as Lived Determines Our Purpose

Let’s put that aside then and consider the idea that our purposes have an internal source. Think of the lives of some people that we might admire: people such as Mother Theresa or Jonas Salk or Norman Borlaug or Shakespeare or Bach or Mahatma Gandhi or Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill, or others who’ve made a mark on the world. How much better the world is because they were in it! Some of these people may have adopted their forms of life because of some sort of deep thought about the sorts of things that they valued and how to advance their interests. Most probably did not, but simply got on with the business of living and found to their surprise that there were values that were worth their allegiance.

It may be that this is the most common way of discovering a meaning in life. We experience life as meaningful if we live it in pursuit of values that have the capacity to inspire us and to claim our attachment to them. And those values need not be discovered through philosophical thought – indeed, they might not be able to withstand even slight philosophical scrutiny as final values – but can be discovered in the course of simply living one’s life. These are the sorts of values that are created for one who accidentally becomes responsible for a child and learns to value that child’s welfare, or who discovers injustice in their place of work and becomes a union organiser, and so on. If this is really the source of the values that motivate us then the appropriate advice for us all is the phrase seen on Australian TV:

            Life, be in it.

b.      We Can Simply Declare a Meaning and Live Accordingly

That, however, is a pretty unphilosophical way to go about things. It leaves one vulnerable to the charge that one is not living a fully considered life; and, of course, it means that the meaning one has found in life is vulnerable to the criticisms of the cynic and the nihilist.

A more robust, and I think more respectable philosophy of life can be found in an alternative option: that we choose what our life is to mean. This is the sort of thing that has in recent times been most often associated with the philosophical position of Existentialism, very popular during the 50s in France and Germany and later fashionable in other places. We saw this in the case of Sartre earlier, who declared that it was our duty to live authentically – or perhaps he would say that we have the choice of living authentically or of living in ‘bad faith;’ and that it was up to each of us to choose well. In any case, if we agree that values come from people then we’ve pretty much already decided that it is the decisions of people themselves which are going to provide the meaning in their lives. Human beings find meaning in life through pursuing goals that they have themselves decided to value. This means, however, that every person is ultimately responsible for the values that they are pursuing, and they have to make an effort to discover them.

It’s an open question how satisfactory any of this is, however, since we might well choose to pursue goals that are not, according to my intuitions, the sorts of things that would give life meaning. We might for example, think that watching TV all day and all night was worth doing, or collecting stamps, or jumping on one foot. Once again, it looks as if we have intuitions of what could be valuable that don’t allow the free choice of ends that this position would defend. But are our intuitions grounded in anything substantial/objective/real? It seems that we haven’t actually gotten very far in this enquiry.

Nihlism?

The apparent failure of these attempts to find a meaning for Life has led some to adopt the position called Nihilism: that is, to deny that there is a meaning. This fits in nicely with the rest of our sceptical philosophizing. What can we know? Nothing. What is good? Don’t know – so possibly nothing. Is there a self? Probably not. How does the mind come from matter? Don’t know – it doesn’t look like it can. Is there such a thing as a Mind? Maybe not. And so on. It is also an old temptation, which we can see in Ecclesiastes (1:2), for example,

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,

which probably dates to the 3^rd century BC; and also in the words of some of the Classical philosophers. It was dormant in the time of the Christian dominance of learning, but came roaring back with Nietzsche in modern times.

Absurdity

But if we adopt the nihilist point of view, we then have an apparent incoherence or paradox or something unwelcome, because if Life is Meaningless or without Significance, or it has no Purpose, then there is nothing to do with your life but just to keep living it while accepting that nothing you do has any Meaning/Significance/Purpose. But the thing about going on living is that you can’t just resign yourself to it and cease to engage with life. In order to carry on living you really have to make decisions about the things that you are required to do from year to year, day to day, and moment to moment. You need to put out the rubbish on Tuesday mornings, you need to go to work and try to perform up to the appropriate standard, you may even need to put on a happy face and wish people a nice day if you’re in the service industry. And all of this while you are aware of the crushing burden of the futility of life. Thomas Nagel[1], I think, makes a special note of the obvious mismatch between the consciously considered worth of our actions and lives, and the degree to which our lives must be dominated by these ‘pointless’ actions. This mismatch, he says, accounts for the persistent feeling amongst some of our sensitive souls that life is absurd. That feeling of absurdity would be greatest for nihilists, of course, but it is a likely feature of anyone who thinks that life is basically trivial.

In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus referred to the old Greek myth in which Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, and when it rolled back down, to start again, and to continue this forever. This never ending, unavoidable, ultimately futile task Camus claimed was a model for our own lives. What, then, is to be done? We may, of course, fall into despair and commit suicide; but this, Camus says, is simple cowardice. We may accept a supernatural solution to the problem and take the meaning of our life from some supposed transcendental source; but this is merely a suicide of the rational mind, says Camus, and no more respectful of our humanity than the previous option. Finally, we may accept the absurdity of life and even embrace it. We accept the truth of the situation we are in and we face it. This makes us heroic. Which I guess is worthwhile.