phylosophy 2

9.3

Optimists say human existence can be meaningful but are divided on how this meaning is possible. As noted earlier, some believe life’s meaning has an external source, and some think it arises internally. Meaning from Above Most of those who take the externalist approach view the matter from a religious standpoint. Typically, the central doctrine is that a human life has meaning only because it is part of God’s plan, a grand cosmic order that encompasses every entity in the universe. As participants in this plan, people have a preeminent role to play and a purpose preordained by God. To have a meaningful existence is to align your life with God’s plan, either by performing certain duties or by being a particular kind of person. To live contrary to God’s plan is to live a meaningless life. And, of course, if there is no God, there is no point to living. Tolstoy not only gave us a glimpse of his fall into pessimism, he also wrote about his gradual acceptance of a deeply religious understanding of life’s meaning: I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value. —Hermann Hesse 6 Do you think many people who say that life is meaningless are assuming that meaning refers to external meaning? 7 If we reject the religious view of meaning in life, are we forced to conclude that life is meaningless? 9.3 Optimism: Life Can Have Meaning 429 Leo Tolstoy, My Confession Long ago has been told the Eastern story about the traveller who in the steppe is overtaken by an infuriated beast. Trying to save himself from the animal, the traveller jumps into a waterless well, but at its bottom he sees a dragon who opens his jaws in order to swallow him. And the unfortunate man does not dare climb out, lest he perish from the infuriated beast, and does not dare jump down to the bottom of the well, lest he be devoured by the dragon, and so clutches the twig of a wild bush growing in a cleft of the well and holds on to it. His hands grow weak and he feels that soon he shall have to surrender to the peril which awaits him at either side; but he still holds on and sees two mice, one white, the other black, in even measure making a circle around the main trunk of the bush to which he is clinging, and nibbling at it on all sides. Now, at any moment, the bush will break and tear off, and he will fall into the dragon’s jaws. The traveller sees that and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while he is still clinging, he sees some drops of honey hanging on the leaves of the bush, and so reaches out for them with his tongue and licks the leaves. Just so I hold on to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death is waiting inevitably for me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why I have fallen on such suffering. And I try to lick that honey which used to give me pleasure; but now it no longer gives me joy, and the white and the black mouse day and night nibble at the branch to which I am holding on. I clearly see the dragon, and the honey is no longer sweet to me. I see only the inevitable dragon and the mice, and am unable to turn my glance away from them. That is not a fable, but a veritable, indisputable, comprehensible truth. The former deception of the pleasures of life, which stifled the terror of the dragon, no longer deceives me. No matter how much one should say to me, “You cannot understand the meaning of life, do not think, live!” I am unable to do so, because I have been doing it too long before. Now I cannot help seeing day and night, which run and lead me up to death. I see that alone, because that alone is the truth. Everything else is a lie. The two drops of honey that have longest turned my eyes away from the cruel truth, the love of family and of authorship, which I have called an art, are no longer sweet to me. . . . I lived for a long time in this madness, which, not in words, but in deeds, is particularly characteristic of us, the most liberal and learned of men. But, thanks either to my strange, physical love for the real working class, which made me understand it and to see that it is not so stupid as we suppose, or to the sincerity of my conviction which was that I could know nothing and that the best that I could do was to hang myself,—I felt that if I wanted to live and understand the meaning of life, I ought naturally to look for it, not among those who had lost the meaning of life and wanted to kill themselves, but among those billions departed and living men who had been carrying their own lives and ours upon their shoulders. And I looked around at the enormous masses of deceased and living men,—not learned and wealthy, but simple men,—and I saw something quite different. I saw that all these billions of men that lived or had lived, all, with rare exceptions, did not fit into my subdivisions, and that I could not recognize them as not understanding the question, because they themselves put it and answered it with surprising clearness. Nor could I recognize them as Epicureans, because their lives were composed rather of privations and suffering than of enjoyment. Still less could I recognize them as senselessly living out their Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith. —Paul Tillich 8 How do you think Tolstoy would respond to the claim that many people appear to have very meaningful lives? What would he say, for example, about meaning in the life of Mahatma Gandhi or Albert Einstein? 430 Chapter 9 The Meaning of Life meaningless lives, because every act of theirs and death itself was explained by them. They regarded it as the greatest evil to kill themselves. It appeared, then, that all humanity was in possession of a knowledge of the meaning of life, which I did not recognize and which I condemned. It turned out that rational knowledge did not give any meaning to life, excluded life, while the meaning which by billions of people, by all humanity, was ascribed to life was based on some despised, false knowledge. . . . Thus, outside the rational knowledge, which had to me appeared as the only one, I was inevitably led to recognize that all living humanity had a certain other irrational knowledge, faith, which made it possible to live. . . . The rational knowledge brought me to the recognition that life was meaningless,— my life stopped, and I wanted to destroy myself. When I looked around at people, at all humanity, I saw that people lived and asserted that they knew the meaning of life. I looked back at myself: I lived so long as I knew the meaning of life. As to other people, so even to me, did faith give the meaning of life and the possibility of living. . . . Then I began to cultivate the acquaintance of the believers from among the poor, the simple and unlettered folk, of pilgrims, monks, dissenters, peasants. The doctrine of these people from among the masses was also the Christian doctrine that the quasibelievers of our circle professed. With the Christian truths were also mixed in very many superstitions, but there was this difference: the superstitions of our circle were quite unnecessary to them, had no connection with their lives, were only a kind of an Epicurean amusement, while the superstitions of the believers from among the laboring classes were to such an extent blended with their life that it would have been impossible to imagine it without these superstitions,—it was a necessary condition of that life. I began to examine closely the lives and beliefs of these people, and the more I examined them, the more did I become convinced that they had the real faith, that their faith was necessary for them, and that it alone gave them a meaning and possibility of life. In contradistinction to what I saw in our circle, where life without faith was possible, and where hardly one in a thousand professed to be a believer, among them there was hardly one in a thousand who was not a believer. In contradistinction to what I saw in our circle, where all life passed in idleness, amusements, and tedium of life, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in hard work, and that they were satisfied with life. In contradistinction to the people of our circle, who struggled and murmured against fate because of their privations and their suffering, these people accepted diseases and sorrows without any perplexity or opposition, but with the calm and firm conviction that it was all for good. In contradistinction to the fact that the more intelligent we are, the less do we understand the meaning of life and the more do we see a kind of a bad joke in our suffering and death, these people live, suffer, and approach death, and suffer in peace and more often in joy. . . . I cast a broader glance about me. I examined the life of past and present vast masses of men, and I saw people who in like manner had understood the meaning of life, who had known how to live and die, not two, not three, not ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions. All of them, infinitely diversified as to habits, intellect, culture, situation, all equally and quite contrary to my ignorance knew the meaning of life and of death, worked calmly, bore privations and suffering, lived and died, seeing in that not vanity, but good. Figure 9.7 Gandhi was not a Christian. Did he nevertheless lead a meaningful life? What about Socrates? Einstein? Leo Tolstoy, My Confession 9.3 Optimism: Life Can Have Meaning 431 Is Religion Necessary for a Meaningful Life? Rick Warren, author of The PurposeDriven Life and the pastor who delivered the invocation at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration ceremony, maintains that religion is required if your life is to have meaning. “You were made by God and for God,” he says, “and until you understand that, life will never make sense.” Is that true? The results of a Gallup poll raise doubts about it. The pollsters surveyed thousands of people in eighty-four countries. They concluded that “there is some support in Gallup’s data for Warren’s premise that religious involvement makes devotees more likely to feel their lives have a purpose. On the other hand, the results also suggest that religious involvement is not necessary for most people to feel that way.” Here are some of the results. Do you feel your life has an important meaning or purpose? Among those claiming any religious affiliation: 92% yes; 6% no. Among those claiming to be secular, nonreligious, atheist, or agnostic: 83% yes; 14% no. Do you feel your life has an important meaning or purpose? Percentage answering yes: Christian: 93%; Hindu: 92%; Muslim: 91%; Buddhist: 90%; other: 89%; Jewish: 88%; secular/atheist/ agnostic: 83%. Do you feel your life has an important meaning or purpose? Percentage answering yes: elementary education or less: 88%; secondary education up to three years of tertiary education: 91%; at least four years of tertiary education: 91%; have a job: 92%; do not have a job: 89%. Gallup survey, 2007, data from one thousand adults per country across eighty-four populations; ±4 percentage points sampling error. Philosophy Now Do these results surprise you, or are they what you would expect? Do they corroborate the idea that people can have a meaningful life without religion? Do they show that meaning in life can arise internally? Explain. Figure 9.8 Suppose you are not religious, yet you have always felt that your life has meaning (just as many atheists believe their lives have meaning). Then someone tells you that your life cannot possibly have meaning because you are not religious. Would you think the person was denying the obvious or speaking truth? Why? 432 Chapter 9 The Meaning of Life I began to love those people. The more I penetrated into their life, the life of the men now living, and the life of men departed, of whom I had read and heard, the more did I love them, and the easier it became for me to live. Thus I lived for about two years, and within me took place a transformation, which had long been working within me, and the germ of which had always been in me. What happened with me was that the life of our circle,—of the rich and the learned,—not only disgusted me, but even lost all its meaning. All our acts, reflections, sciences, arts,—all that appeared to me in a new light. I saw that all that was mere pampering of the appetites, and that no meaning could be found in it; but the life of all the working masses, of all humanity, which created life, presented itself to me in its real significance. I saw that that was life itself and that the meaning given to this life was truth, and I accepted it.13 So Tolstoy says he found the true meaning of life through a leap of faith, not through the rational knowledge of his circle of sophisticates. He chose the religious path trod by millions of the poor and unlearned. Critics of such externalist views argue that the notion of God creating people to be part of his plan is an affront to human dignity, that it’s difficult or impossible to know what God’s plan is, that his plan may not be as benign and agreeable as believers assume, and that a plan from God imposed on our lives undermines free will. They typically deny that death renders life meaningless or that a life can be meaningful only if it is immortal. Moreover, some critiques of Tolstoy’s view do not depend on a denial of God’s existence. Several philosophers have argued that the notion of a God assigning a purpose to humans should be objectionable to believers and nonbelievers alike. This is how Baggini expresses the point: Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? It is often said that we are here to do God’s will. If this were true . . . [o]ur lives would have a purpose for the being that created us but not a purpose for us. We would each be like Sartre’s being-in-itself—an object to be used for the ends of others and not a being-for-itself—a conscious being making choices meaningful for itself. If we found that our sole purpose was to serve God then we might think that was a worse fate than to have no predetermined purpose at all. Is it better to be slaves with a role in the universe or to be free people left to create a role for ourselves? This view that we are created to serve God is not only objectionable on the grounds that it robs humanity of its dignity. It also has to be seen as extremely implausible within the world-view of the religions that sometimes propound it. After all, what could seem more unlikely than that the supreme being would feel the need to create human beings, with all their complexity, and with all the suffering and toil that human life entails, solely so that it can have creatures to serve it? This is an image of God as an egotistical tyrant, determined to use its power to surround itself with acolytes and have praise heaped upon it. This is not the God which most religious believers worship, and so the idea that we are here just to serve such a God is not one that should be seriously countenanced either. . . . I think that most reflective religious believers would agree that saying God’s purpose for us is to serve it or live full lives is not adequate. They might prefer to say that Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. —Viktor E. Frankl 9 According to Baggini, how is God’s creating us for his purposes supposed to denigrate human life? Do you agree? Leo Tolstoy, My Confession 9.3 Optimism: Life Can Have Meaning 433 the existence of God shows that there must be a purpose, since God wouldn’t have created us without one, but that we do not know what that purpose is. Faith requires us to trust God and its purposes for us. As Jesus is reported in John’s Gospel to have said, “Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms” (14:1–2). This is a perfectly coherent position and probably the one most sensible religious believers occupy. But doing so requires an honest acceptance that they have no more idea as to what the purpose of life is than the atheist has. The leap of faith required to adopt such a position also needs to be clearly understood. This is faith that a God we cannot know to exist has a purpose we cannot discern for an afterlife we have no evidence is to come. Further, we would also be trusting that this purpose is one we would be pleased with. If it turned out that our purpose was to fight Satan’s hordes for eternity or just to have lived as a beacon of fortitude under duress on earth before dying, we might not be too pleased that God had a purpose for us after all. A belief that we were created by God for a purpose does not then provide us with the kind of adequate account of life’s meaning we might expect. Religions are not clear about what this purpose is. The idea that it is to serve God seems deeply implausible and contrary to most conceptions of God’s nature. The idea that it is to live life to the full is a platitude, only turned into something more by a belief in an afterlife. The idea that God’s purpose is something we just have to trust is an admission that we have no answer to the question of why we are here and must leave everything to the unknown.14 Meaning from Below Internalists believe they can have meaningful lives without relying on the concepts of God or transcendent realms. They hold that they can confer meaning on their own lives. The proof of this, they might say, is all around us. There are many people who seem to lead meaningful lives, and we would judge this to be the case even if we thought no external being or force existed to confer meaning. Consider Socrates, Figure 9.9 Baggini asks, “Is it better to be slaves with a role in the universe or to be free people left to create a role for ourselves?” Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life. —Paul Tillich 434 Chapter 9 The Meaning of Life Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King., Jr., Rosa Parks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie, George Washington, Confucius, Thomas Aquinas—these men and women, by all accounts, were driven by a sense of purpose and led lives full of meaning. But exactly what property or state of affairs is the conveyor of meaning? Internalists differ on that score. Here is Paul Edwards’s view: Paul Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy When we ask whether a particular person’s life has or had any meaning, we are usually concerned not with cosmic issues but with the question of whether certain purposes are to be found in his life. Thus, most of us would say without hesitation that a person’s life had meaning if we knew that he devoted himself to a cause (such as the spread of Christianity or communism or the reform of mental institutions), or we would at least be ready to say that it “acquired meaning” once he became sufficiently attached to his cause. Whether we approve of what they did or not, most of us would be ready to admit—to take some random examples—that Dorothea Dix, Pasteur, Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Anthony Comstock, and Winston Churchill led meaningful lives. We seem to mean two things in characterizing such lives as meaningful: we assert, first, that the life in question had some dominant, over-all goal or goals which gave direction to a great many of the individual’s actions and, second, that these actions and possibly others not immediately related to the overriding goal were performed with a special zest that was not present before the person became attached to his goal or that would not have been present if there had been no such goal in his life. It is not necessary, however, that a person should be devoted to a cause, in the sense just indicated, before we call his life meaningful. It is sufficient that he should have some attachments that are not too shallow.15 A common reply to any internalist view is that the prospect of death and the eventual obliteration of all human creations rob our lives of meaning. How can our lives be meaningful, they ask, when life is so short and death is certain? What’s the point of living if everything we are and do will soon sink into nothingness? Many philosophers reject this dismal outlook, arguing that the fact of death and the ephemeral nature of human endeavors are irrelevant to the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of a person’s existence. If life is meaningful, then it is meaningful no matter how long or short it is. Edwards is one of the philosophers who make this point: Let us consider some everyday occurrences: A man with a toothache goes to a dentist, and the dentist helps him so that the toothache disappears. A man is falsely accused of a crime and is faced with the possibility of a severe sentence as well as with the loss of his reputation; with the help of a devoted attorney his innocence is established, and he is acquitted. It is true that a hundred years later all of the participants in these events will be dead and none of them will then be able to enjoy the fruits of any of the efforts involved. But this most emphatically does not imply that the dentist’s efforts were not worthwhile or that the attorney’s work was not worth doing. To bring in considerations of what will or will not happen in the remote future is, in [this and other] human situations, totally irrelevant. Not only is the finality of death irrelevant here; equally irrelevant I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is. —Albert Camus 10 Do you agree with Edwards that the length of one’s life does not by itself determine whether life is meaningful? 9.3 Optimism: Life Can Have Meaning 435 are the facts, if they are facts, that life is an endless cycle of the same kind of activities and that the history of the universe is not a drama with a happy ending.16 Internalists can be divided into two camps: those who believe that meaning is something they create (subjectivists) and those who think meaning is something they discover (objectivists). Among the subjectivists, we can count not only Baggini and Edwards, but also the philosophers R. M. Hare (1919–2002), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Richard Taylor (1919–2003), Kai Nielsen, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Robert Solomon (1942–2007), E. D. Klemke (1926–2000), and Lucretius (c. 100–55 bce). For subjectivists, meaning is relative to each person and depends on his or her attitudes, desires, and goals. So subjectivists might say their lives are meaningful if they do what they deem most important or satisfy their strongest desires or act out of love or concern. A common criticism of subjectivist views is that it’s intuitively obvious that sometimes objective standards apply. If satisfying our strongest desires leads to obviously immoral or trivial acts, subjectivism is implausible. Things aren’t meaningful just because we say they are. The classic example of a subjectivist is Sartre. As one of the modern founders of existentialism, he argues that humans are profoundly free to create their own lives and thus are entirely responsible for defining the meaning and moral relevance of their existence. There are no objective standards to define what is and is not meaningful for them. “Man,” he says, “is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” Consider these two subjectivists who lived two millennia apart but came to much the same conclusion about meaning in life. E. D. Klemke, editor of the highly regarded anthology The Meaning of Life, was an astute subjectivist philosopher. In a well-known essay, “Living Without Appeal: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life,” he responded to those who claim that (1) there exists a “transcendent ultimate” (a deity, for example) with which we can have a relationship through faith; (2) without such an entity and faith in it, life is meaningless; and (3) without such meaning, life is not worthwhile. Regarding the first claim, he asks what evidence supports it. The assertions of some sacred text prove nothing, he says, since they prove only that “someone believed that a transcendent ultimate exists.” Likewise the testimony of large numbers of believers proves nothing. The traditional arguments for the existence of a god all fail to provide reasons for believing, and arguments from religious experience can prove no more than that “someone has had an unusual experience.” He concludes that there is zero evidence for the existence of a transcendent anything. As to the second claim—that without faith in the transcendent, human existence is without meaning—Klemke answers by distinguishing between objective meaning and subjective meaning. An objective meaning is one that is either structurally part of the universe (apart from human evaluation) or dependent on some nonhuman external agency. If there is objective meaning, he says, there is no reason why it must be linked to a transcendent being. But even more important, “I find the notion of an objective meaning as difficult to accept as I do the notion of a transcendent being. It seems to me that there is no shred of evidence for the existence of an objective meaning in the universe. . . . From the standpoint of present evidence, evaluational components such as meaning or purpose are not to be found in the universe as objective aspects of it.”17 436 Chapter 9 The Meaning of Life Klemke also rejects the related claims that subjective meaning is possible but only through the transcendent, or that even subjective meaning is impossible without faith in the transcendent. He says of the latter assertion, “I know of many humans who have found a meaningful existence without faith in the transcendent.”18 In response to the third claim—that without meaning, life is not worthwhile— Klemke says that it confuses objective and subjective meaning. He says that indeed life has no objective meaning, “but from this it does not follow that life is not worthwhile, for it can still be subjectively meaningful. . . . I, for one, am glad that the universe has no meaning, for thereby is man all the more glorious. I willingly accept the fact that external meaning is non-existent (or if existent, certainly not apparent), for this leaves me free to forge my own meaning.”19 He declares that he has found subjective meaning through knowledge, art, love, and work, for with his consciousness, he can endow events, objects, and persons with value. Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher, believes that life can be meaningful even in a completely materialistic universe bereft of the supernatural. He is best known for a seven-thousand-line poem on science and philosophy called The Nature of Things, or De rerum natura, a masterpiece that has influenced many thinkers throughout the centuries as well as in modern life. Lucretius was an atomist. Two millennia ago, some philosophers argued that the world consists entirely of atoms moving in space, just as modern science has shown us. He declares that everything—humans, animals, the earth, the stars, the sun—is made of atoms. The universe is infinite and entirely material. There is no designer who created everything. The universe is eternal; it has always been here. Things have come about through the laws of nature and chance. The soul is also material, which means that it dies just as the body does. There is no afterlife; the present world is all we have. This view may seem dreary, but Lucretius thinks the opposite. Because death is final, we need not fear it, because we will not be present to confront it. As he says, “Death is nothing to us.” There will be no pain, anguish, or torment after death. Religion causes pain, Lucretius says, because it instills a fear of everlasting torment or some other uncertain fate after death. Religion causes anxiety because it teaches superstitions about mischief or terror caused by demons, angels, or ghosts. Religion discourages the pursuit of happiness and pleasure, when these things should be central to our lives. Religion causes ruin when it holds out the false hope of miraculously transcending our finite lives. The most famous line of Lucretius’s poem refers to a particularly evil act performed in the name of religion. He says, “So potent was religion in persuading to do wrong.” Lucretius wasn’t an atheist exactly, for he believed there were gods, but he thought the gods had no interest in, and nothing to do with, humans. To be truly happy, he says, we must dispel illusions about our ability to live forever, find perfect satisfaction, control events, and be the center of the universe’s attention. By avoiding these delusions, we can attain a realistic measure of happiness, even joy. Lucretius declares that we can experience a sense of awe, gratitude, and reverence when we see that the universe is beautiful and boundlessly complex. We are made of the same stuff as stars and seas and trees and clouds. We humans are all connected— to each other and to every part of the cosmos. We also experience awe when we contemplate the mysteries that science reveals, and we feel the delight of discovery when we solve those mysteries. 9.3 Optimism: Life Can Have Meaning 437 Perfectionism: The Enemy of Meaning Why do so many people believe their lives are meaningless? According to the philosopher Iddo Landau, author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, the main obstacle is often the untenable view he calls perfectionism: Of all the presuppositions that bring people to believe that their lives are meaningless, the most common is probably the perfectionist presupposition. According to this presupposition, meaningful lives must include some perfection or excellence or some rare and difficult achievements, and lives that do not show this characteristic cannot be seen as meaningful. Meaningful lives, then, must transcend the common and the mundane. . . . What marks perfectionists is that they fail to see the worth that inheres also in the nonperfect; they despise and reject. Both perfectionist and many nonperfectionist students think that receiving a grade of 100 percent on an exam is better than receiving any other grade, and both would be glad to receive it. But the perfectionists are those who, when they receive a 98, feel that they failed. For them, this 98 is like a zero. They do not want it; they fail to see the worth in receiving such a grade. Perfectionists believe that if our city is not the most beautiful in the world, it is disgustingly ugly; that if one is not Einstein one is a fool; and that if a person does not write as Shakespeare did, she had better just give up writing altogether. . . . Thus, perfectionists are so busy with the search for the perfect that they neglect to see and find satisfaction in the good. And since it is rare, and sometime impossible, to reach the perfect, perfectionists, who do not want to have anything to do with the good that is less than perfect, find satisfaction in nothing, continuing their desperate quest for the perfect.* Philosophy Now Are you a perfectionist? Why or why not? Is the perfectionist attitude reasonable? * Iddo Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31, 35–36. Lucretius believes that the meaning of life can be found in pleasure-seeking that is rational and realistic. One of his disciples said that it is not possible to live a life of pleasure “without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.” For objectivists, meaning is mind-independent. Objectively worthwhile activities or states convey objective meaning that everyone can recognize as such. If a life is 438 Chapter 9 The Meaning of Life meaningful, it is so because it has objective value, not because of someone’s subjective preferences or desires. An objectivist might say that helping others and creating art are generally believed to give meaning to life, and the best explanation for such beliefs is objectivism—some things are inherently worthwhile. Notable objectivists include James Rachels (1941–2003), Susan Wolf, Terry Eagleton, John G. Messerly, Christopher Belshaw, Thaddeus Metz, Victor Frankl (1905–1997), and Moritz Schlick (1882–1936). Susan Wolf, philosopher and author of Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, argues that meaning in life must consist of both subjective and objective elements. As she says, “Meaningful lives are lives of active engagement in projects of worth.”20 Active engagement is involvement in something that grips or excites a person, something that arouses passion. But this subjective response alone is not enough to add significant meaning to someone’s life. Mere passion about an activity is, in itself, insufficient to contribute meaningfulness to a life. The passion must be directed at projects that are in themselves worthwhile. “What is clear to me,” she says, “is that there can be no sense to the idea of meaningfulness without a distinction between more and less worthwhile ways to spend one’s time, where the test of worth is at least partly independent of a subject’s ungrounded preferences or enjoyment.”21 This view belies the often-expressed notion that what someone does doesn’t matter as long as the person enjoys it or prefers it or gets satisfaction out of it. Counterexamples abound. People do wonder sometimes if an activity they enjoy is in fact worthwhile. Some people with satisfying lives do feel that their existence is meaningless. Wolf lists some of the activities that seem objectively worthwhile: “Moral and intellectual accomplishments and the ongoing activities that lead to them. Relationships with friends and relatives are perhaps even more important for most of us. Aesthetic enterprises (both creative and appreciative), the cultivation of personal virtues, and religious practices frequently loom large.” She sums up her view in a slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.”22 The contemporary philosopher Christopher Belshaw, another objectivist, examines some of the reasons that lead people to think life may be meaningless. Perhaps life is meaningless because it is so brief, because we and our world are so minuscule compared to the inconceivably vast cosmos, because life for us is so filled with misery and loss, and because there is no god or creator to give us a purpose or plan for living. But, Belshaw says, none of these reasons shows that life is meaningless. Why should the brevity of life or our relative size matter? These facts seem irrelevant. Yes, life is fraught with suffering, but it also contains moments of joy and satisfaction. And as for being part of God’s plan, Belshaw wonders if our worries about the meaninglessness or pointlessness of our lives are really going to be put to rest because God has a scheme into which we fit. “Are we really going to be satisfied by finding that we fit into someone else’s grand scheme?” Belshaw asks. “There’s some sort of meaning and purpose in this, but is it the sort we want?”23 He suggests that what we really want is our own meaning that we find for ourselves. But the meaning can’t be completely subjective; meaning cannot be whatever we think it is. “Whether or not your life is successful depends on how it matches up against certain external criteria,” Belshaw says. “It doesn’t depend simply on how you Review Notes 439 feel about it. And I think it’s the same for whether your life is meaningful. Here, too, thinking doesn’t make it so.”24 What are some of the things that objectively matter? “Relationships,” he says, “pursuing some plan or project, living a good life.”2

2