The Meaning of Life

Andrew will present this topic on Friday 16 October 2015.

What does it mean to ask 'What is the meaning of life?'? I don't think it necessarily means the asker believes there is an objective, discoverable, meaning and they want to discover it. Rather, I believe that – when asked sincerely – it is an expression of existential angst.

Many young people have such crises, and some not-so-young people. The hallmarks of the crisis is a lack of appreciation of life that combines with a feeling that it is a repetitive cycle of birth and death whose principal feature is suffering, whether that suffering be pain, grief, boredom, loneliness or something else.

I had a few bouts of existential angst when I was younger. For some reason I picked on any activities that assist in continuing the cycle of life and decreed them to be pointless. Teaching and Obstetrics were typical targets. Why become a teacher, if you just teach people so that they can grow up to become adults who then become teachers? Why be an obstetrician if you just help birth babies so they can grow up to become obstetricians or to birth more babies? It all just seemed pointlessly repetitive and self-serving. What I felt was missing was some sense of progress towards a final goal. This was in spite of the fact that I was a practising Roman Catholic at the time and ostensibly believed in an ultimate goal.

So in a sense I think when someone asks the question what they mean is 'How can I feel that everything is not pointless?'

Different people deal with this in different ways.

Some people just live uncomfortably with the pointlessness and become angst-ridden nihilists.

Others embrace the pointlessness and become merry nihilists, like Bill Hicks.

In the 20^th century there was much interest in the idea that life was absurd, which seems like a variant of pointless. The Existentialist Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus about the Greek, mythological figure Sisyphus who, for some misdemeanour or other, was condemned by the gods to have to roll a heavy boulder up to the top of a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom as soon as he reached the top, with the cycle continuing to eternity. Camus concluded that 'one must imagine Sisysphus as happy' (because even he had a purpose, even if it was an absurd one?).

Some adopt a purpose that is based on trying to comply with duty. There seem to be two main varieties of this. One is the approach of some religions in which the duty is imposed by an external agent, usually one or more deities of some form. When I was at uni I was good friends with a devout and thoughtful RC whose motto was that the purpose of life is 'To know, love and serve God'. That's fairly high-level and non-specific. It should allow one to live a reasonably normal life. Some religions get much more specific about duties. Examples are Orthodox Judaism, Wahabi Islam and the more extreme manifestations of Calvinist Christianity, with their strict rules.

The other main variety of duty-based purpose is Immanuel Kant's approach to ethics – that we have duties that arise from the Categorical Imperative, of which one formulation is 'Act according to that maxim that you would wish to be a universal law.' Kant's seems a fairly joyless view of duty. I am told he says (I haven't confirmed this) that if you are getting a warm inner feeling from doing good, then you are not really acting ethically. It's interesting that although Kant was a Christian – albeit a very unorthodox one – he seemed to conclude that duty did not come from God but was rather derivable by pure reason.

Sartre had an interesting variant of this. He asserted that there are no rules, that each person is completely free. It seems implied in his writing that that in fact places an obligation on each person to take responsibility for their decisions and actions, and presumably a responsibility to make something worthwhile out of their life.

Schopenhauer thought life was a miserable proposition and that we'd be better off if people stopped procreating. But he found meaning in his life through the arts, particularly music.

The contemporary South African 'anti-natalist' philosopher David Benatar goes further, to say that it is always immoral to procreate, because that will give rise to suffering that would not otherwise occur. Anti-natalists reject the usual crude retort 'Why don't you kill yourself then?' by pointing out that creating life, and ending it once it has been created, are two entirely different things. In any case, suicide of healthy people usually causes enormous distress to their family and friends, so it cannot be viewed as a reasonable option, however Schopenhauerian their outlook might be. There are many other reasons against suicide of the non-terminally ill, but that will do for now. There are exceptions, like the sacrifice of Sidney Carton in 'A tale of two cities', or the proverbial war hero that dives on top of a grenade, sacrificing his life to save his comrades. But these cases are very rare and beyond the scope of this note.

Nietzsche found meaning through the struggle against the odds, overcoming obstacles.

Buddhism, and some variants of Indian religions, set out a program of trying to obtain liberation from the prison of oneself. That can lead in the direction of monasticism – a life of withdrawal, contemplation, work and meditation – a tradition shared with Christian monks. Or it can lead in the direction of a life of service to others, such as 'engaged Buddhism' as is promoted by Thích Nhất Hạnh and others. There are strong traditions in Christianity of engagement as well. In Christianity it is often mingled with missionary work, because Christianity is an evangelical religion (one that encourages its followers to recruit new members).

One doesn't need to be religious to see the benefits of escaping oneself. It is easy to observe that people who are out there helping others a lot often seem happy, whereas those that mope around in their bedroom, dwelling on their woes, or whinge to others at work about how unrecognised their talents are, are not.

Parents of young children rarely feel existential angst. They have a very powerful sense of purpose, which is to help their children to grow up and thrive. They may be exhausted, irritable and stressed, but they at least don't seem to fear the existential gulf.

Another approach is the 'heedless' one, in which the person just doesn't bother thinking about the meaning of life. They just get on with it, doing whatever it seems good to them to do at the time. This might similar to the merry nihilist mentioned above. The only difference is that the merry nihilist has thought about it and concluded that there is no point, whereas the heedless person has never thought about it. Socrates, who allegedly said 'The unexamined life is not worth living', presumably would not approve.

I sometimes wonder whether all non-nihilist approaches to life are either based on aesthetics or duty, and sometimes a combination.

A good example of a combination might be the popular worldview that 'The meaning of life is to give and receive love'. That is aesthetically satisfying because both giving and receiving love is pleasing. It also aligns with a sense of duty since loving others requires treating them kindly, which most people would accept to be, at least to some extent, a moral obligation. It can also be applied in a religious or non-religious context, with the only difference being whether there is a deity with which to give and receive love, as well as Earthly beings.

Schopenhauer's view seems purely aesthetic. Nietzsche's looks like a combination. He found the excitement of struggle against adversity (those exhausting treks in the Swiss alps!) thrilling and inspiring – hence aesthetically pleasing. But one also gets the impression that he felt that there is almost a sort of duty to make something of one's life – to be a protagonist, rather than a passive accepter of what happens (to be a hero?).

Epicurus advocated an aesthetic approach to life. But since he held up friendship as the highest pleasure, that necessarily involved obligations towards others, as one cannot have friends if one does not treat them well.

The Stoics advocated an approach that was a combination of the aesthetic and the duty-bound. They argue that we should learn to appreciate what we have, rather than wishing for more (aesthetic) but that we also have duties towards society and should live as engaged citizens.

Aristotle's ethics doesn't seem to have any role for duty. It is a search for Eudaimonia – the Good Life – which he believes is achievable by becoming virtuous. So one acts virtuously for one's own sake rather than out of a sense of duty.

Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, and John Stuart Mill's nineteenth-century reboot of it, both seem to be largely based on a 'duty' of kindness. The most well-known modern advocate of Utilitarianism is Peter Singer, who ultimately justifies his recommended ethics on similar grounds to Aristotle – that we will find life more fulfilling if we live a life of compassion.

Kierkegaard is interesting, as a Christian Existentialist. He writes in 'Fear and Trembling' about being wracked with doubt and making the leap of faith in the presence of that doubt. Although Faith is seen as a very religious concept, the action of that leap of faith seems to me to be no different in kind from any other choice that a person makes to adopt a certain goal as the purpose/meaning of their life – whether that purpose be love, compassion, raising children, ending world poverty or obtaining as much money and power as possible (take a bow, Mr Murdoch). It reinforces my personal prejudice that, if an an individual doesn't feel an innate, imperative, purpose in their life, they have to freely select one, without having any objective basis for ascertaining whether it is 'the right one'.

This is just a short ramble. The wikipedia article on the meaning of life is longer – about 12,000 words excluding references, and covers a lot more ground. It has nice list at the bottom, of popular views of the meaning of life. Is yours amongst them (if you have one)?

Stanford has a slightly shorter article on it (8,500 words excluding the long list of refs) which is probably more scholarly, if SEP is true to form.

Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has the shortest article of the three, coming in at only 5,600 words, which is a pretty short read. That covers contemporary perspectives. It has a longer article (12,000 words) about earlier (1950 and before) perspectives here.

The wikipedia article has an interesting note about the Logical Positivists – a European band of philosophers from between the two big wars. They argue that the meaning of x must be something that is external to x – such as a consequence of, or a reason for doing, x, and that if life is everything then it cannot have a meaning outside itself. They also note that it may have an infinitely recursive interpretation, such as when we are told that the middle initial B in the name of mathematician Benoit B Mandelbrot (who did a lot of work with fractals) stands for 'Benoit B Mandelbrot'.

That's more than enough reading material, although just this note (2054 words) is enough to get started anyway.

I will keep a look out for good podcasts, and circulate them and link them here if I find any.

Here are some questions to consider and discuss:

What does the question 'what is the meaning of life?' mean?
Is it an important question? Would most people benefit from considering it? Everybody? Or on the contrary is it a topic we are better off avoiding?
Have you ever suffered from existential angst? Are you prepared to tell us about it? What was it like? Did you resolve it? If so, how?
What do you think of the different ways people have of avoiding existential angst? Do you feel the Duty or the Aesthetic path to be more helpful, or a combination, or is it something else?
Is nihilism a social problem in affluent societies? What harms does it bring? What might be done to reduce those harms?