meaning of life

What is the meaning of "the meaning" of life?

In the final chapter of his book, What Does It All Mean?, Thomas Nagel explores the meaning of life, defining a “meaningful” life as one that makes a difference to the world around us, and debunking the plausibility of this. But significance has not always been thought to fulfil the requirements of a meaningful life; philosophers such as Cicero, and later, Kant, considered morality to be the key. What these interpretations of meaning both demonstrate is the desire for absolute reality, the feeling that what we hold to be true is the ultimate truth. However, I believe that none of these three systems – significance, morality or objective reality – are necessary to lead a meaningful life, as the answer to the meaning of life is ultimately subjective.

When Nagel discusses “the meaning of life”, he interprets “meaningful” in the sense of being significant, not just in a solipsistic sense to oneself, but to one’s surroundings. He opens the chapter by opening his readers to the possibility that their lives are meaningless, using the nearly clichéd axiom that soon “we’ll all be dead”. He describes how science has shown the human lifespan to be insignificant when compared against the timeline of the universe, and how we cannot therefore be of importance to the world outside our own selves. Nagel next shows that while we are perfectly capable of justifying the day-to-day things that we do “within life”, we cannot find a reason behind our existences as a whole. Whenever we observe our thoughts and actions from outside our own selves, it is as if they take place pointlessly. (Nagel, 1987) Evidently, if we are to have meaning in life, we will not find it by appealing to the universe or to eternity.

Nagel then deals with two well-known challenges to his reasoning. But the most common claim – that one’s life is of concern to other people – is easily refuted, because it begs the question of why other people’s lives in turn are so significant. If we continue trying to find meaning as a part of a whole, we sink into a pit of infinite regress, as we continue to ask, “What is the point of it?” Others use religious justification to invalidate Nagel’s starting point that our lives are insignificant to the world around us. If God is the world around us, and our lives matter to Him, then there can be no doubt that our lives are meaningful. God requires no explanation for Himself. Unfortunately, the idea that we cannot question this seems “incomprehensible” to many people, including Nagel. Nagel therefore argues that our lives cannot be significant and therefore meaningful, although he does soften his opinion on religious justification, saying perhaps that it is meant as an admission that the universe may not be able to be understood by us. Nevertheless, being a part of a whole cannot justify significance as the key to a meaningful life, and God is not easy to accept either. (Nagel, 1987)

As with all of Nagel’s chapters, his discussion about the meaningfulness of our lives is less of an argument for one particular point than a discussion, as he moves on to challenge his previous challenges, reverting to the point that meaning in life will not stem from significance; we can only be significant to ourselves. The way this group, whom Nagel appears to sympathise with, resolves the meaning and significance issue is by embracing the belief that “there is no point at all”. It echoes Albert Camus’ existentialist idea of “the Absurd”, the word Nagel chooses to end on. The conclusion, that we can lead satisfying lives by accepting that our lives are meaningless, is difficult to fault. The only problem is that many people feel disempowered by the idea that their lives do not matter in the grand scheme of things. (Nagel, 1987) In this way, Nagel reverts to his first conclusion: that we cannot use external recognition to give meaning to our lives.

Although Nagel characterised meaningfulness as significance, others have thought that a meaningful life is not so much “significant”, but morally upright. Cicero captured the idea with his concept of the “beata vita” or “blessed life”, based on a school of thought known as Stoicism (Wilson, 2002). In keeping with a virtue-based system of ethics, “living well” required a person to act with a “morally perfect frame of mind” (Sedley, 2005). Virtue was to be pursued for the sake of itself, so in order to live meaningfully, one would focus on having good qualities such as dignity, honesty and piety. In contrast to Nagel’s “religious justification scenario”, Cicero uses the Gods as moral exemplars for humans to follow, instead of the answer to everything. He claims that by acquiring “the virtues from where the blessed life comes into existence”, humans can equal the Gods “in every way except immortality”, which he feels has nothing to do with living meaningfully (Wilson, 2002). Kant concurs, saying that all the things we can do to make our lives worthwhile are morally right (Burnham, 2006). Thus, by living in accordance with virtue, Cicero and Kant thought we could make our lives meaningful.

However, the view of morality being equivalent to meaning is just easily countered as any argument for significance. Naturally, it invites opposition when the metal-ethical nature of moral value is considered. For life’s meaning to be based on virtue, these virtues must be universal throughout the whole human race. But many people would argue that morality is ultimately a subjective matter (Metz, 2007). Secondly, Cicero, with his “beata vita”, is putting forth an ideal impossible for us to live up to. Since nobody could be wholly moral for his or her entire life; would this not mean it is possible for nobody to live a fully meaningful life? Finally, Kant’s view in particular makes a mistake in treating humans as perfectly rational, without “human needs and feelings”. As Richard Taylor points out, all this virtuous behaviour “must not be done from any motive of compassion or sentiment of love.” (Taylor, 2000) Clearly, morality is too narrow a lens to value our lives through; the vision we get is just as bleak as Nagel’s use of external significance, which showed that life is meaningless.

These two visions of a meaningful life – external recognition and virtue – both display our yearning for something independent of us. In the first case, we have our existence validated by the world around us – friends, family or God; in the second case, we have our actions validated by an independent moral reality – the Virtues. They mean that our quotidian actions, such as earning money, eating and sleeping, which Nagel raises in his chapter, are either in response to a valid cause, or done with morally valid intentions. In short, we would like there to be some sort of objective reality that underlies everything we do. Most people would agree that life in a “virtual reality machine”, à la Neo in the film The Matrix, would be a meaningless existence, because the day-to-day “reality” which Neo acts on is not actually real. Conversely, we are repulsed by Cypher, who chooses to return to “the Matrix” from the real world (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999). Our search for a “Theory of Everything” also reflects our deep-rooted faith in reality. We think that there is something “out there” to be found which explains everything about our existence. Essentially, it is a question of the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, the search for something beyond the physical realm that can only be reached through reasoning (Mautner, 2005). Metaphysics is greatly concerned with “ultimate” explanations (Conee & Sider, 2005). In comparison to the random and chaotic world which we live in, these facts can impart greater meaning to our lives.

However, the case for an objective meaning of life is riddled with flaws, even if we ignore sceptical arguments against absolute reality, which were discussed in Nagel’s first chapter (Nagel, 1987). Objectivism in the context of metaphysics and the meaning of life holds that there are “certain inherently worthwhile or finally valuable conditions that confer meaning for anyone”, and are independent of us and our minds, as well as any God-figure. (Metz, 2007). Pure objectivism ignores subjective, but essential factors such as our attitudes towards our actions. We would question the meaningfulness of someone’s charity work if it bored them because they did it solely to raise their public image. Even if we adopt a more lenient view, allowing our emotions to interact with the objective conditions, we do not address the way these conditions can be universal and work with the vast plethora of human emotions. Most importantly, all objectivist theories only allow segments of our lives to impart meaning with their contents, even though we know that the way the parts come together should be important too (Metz, 2007). The mythological Sisyphus was punished by the Gods for disobedience, forced to push a giant boulder up a mountain. The difficulty of his labour should have made it meaningful. But, because the rock rolled back down the slope at the end of every day, he had to repeat this ad infinitum, whereby it became meaningless. No matter how we attempt to appeal to an objective reality, we will be unsuccessful in finding meaning in our lives.

Like Douglas Adams, who turned the solemn idea of a deep “meaning of life” on its head with the number forty-two, I do not believe we need an objective reality to lead meaningful lives; our lives are meaningful if they are meaningful to us. As David Schmidtz says,

“Life is a house. Meaning is what you do to make it home…if our walls are bare, the solution is not to spend our days stoically staring at bare walls, or philosophizing about their meaning, or lack thereof, but to put up a few photographs…we need not fear bare walls. We need not deceive ourselves about their bareness. We need not dwell on the ‘fundamental underlying’ bareness of walls we have filled with pictures.” (2001).

Subjectivism permits meaning to vary from person to person, depending on our unique circumstances and mental states (Metz, 2007), thus encompassing infinite possibilities. Hence, the idea that our lives are meaningful while we do what we think is important to us, which is the opposite of objectivism, has great appeal.

But the way in which subjectivism is applied is controversial. While it is easy to conclude that subjectivism is a matter of trying to fully engage ourselves in some activity or experience (Schmidtz, 2001), this implies there must be some objective element to the way we value our activities. Taylor refers to Sisyphus, showing how even if he enjoyed rolling boulders up mountains, his life would not be meaningful. It would only show that “like most mortals, he has been rendered content with a meaningless existence” (Taylor, 1999). The usual defence is that no one actually desires to do trivial things, at least not after “some sort of reflective thought” (Metz, 2007). A more convincing interpretation comes from Albert Camus, who imagines Sisyphus as “happy” because he retains his “conscious” freedom of thought, and can see that his fate was “created by him” (Camus, 1942). The Gods can punish Sisyphus for eternity, but they cannot alter his contempt for them. We can give our lives meaning by embracing this freedom, “making our own assessments of value” and “living accordingly in the situations where we find ourselves” (Blackford, 2003). I believe that by interpreting subjectivism in this light, that we are masters of our destinies, it is less easily refuted. It is both emotionally attractive, and intellectually convincing.

The meaning of “the meaning” of life has undergone a wide variety of interpretations. Some people will only be satisfied if their actions leave a permanent mark on the universe, others will be content if their actions are morally immaculate. Still others have thought that it hinges on the authenticity of an external world, but evidently, all we need to be sure of is our freedom to defy “absurdity” with our minds. In this respect, Nagel was not completely right in searching for meaning “in some larger sense”. As God says in the film Bruce Almighty, “That's everybody's problem. You keep looking up.” We should not be looking up for answers – we should be looking inside ourselves.

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