The Meaning of Life: Various Questions
The topic of the meaning of life* is quintessentially philosophical. Some folks say that life is meaningful and obviously so because we humans value things, develop our own purposes, act on the basis of our desires and choices (which are different mental states), and so forth. But this is merely subjective meaning. We are capable of imposing our valuing attitudes onto the world like a scholar who engages in eisegesis imposes his subjective concerns onto the text he interprets. Yet just as a scholar’s eisegesis leaves untouched any meaning a text might have beyond his subjective imposition**, our effort to press our own attitudes onto the world does not address the meaning — or its absence — of the world itself. Instead, one’s eisegesistic interpretation of the world is likely to leave one with an unjustified belief that the world’s value wholly reflects his own wants, likes, and dislikes, somewhat like the user of horoscopes believes that the stars move and have their being merely to provide guidance to her daily decision-making.***
No, this merely subjective reading of the world is insufficient. Deeper questions remain: Does human life have any objective value or purpose? Does our existence fit into any larger context which provides our experience with cosmic intelligibility, and if so, does this cosmic context have objective value? If there is a transcendent purpose for human life, is it fair that this purpose is bestowed on us without our consent? If there is a non-subjective meaning of human life, arguably, we cannot know that there is, nor can we know what it is. This is a particularly vexing problem if knowledge requires epistemic certainty. And this problem raises a concern about absurdity that I raise in an upcoming journal article and address briefly here. Moreover, if we cannot know the answers to such questions, how then can we freely accept and practice any objective purpose bestowed on our lives from a transcendent realm? At best, we can only take ourselves to accept and practice some transcendent purpose that we reasonably believe applies to us.
These are just some of the interesting questions associated with the topic raised in the first sentence of this entry.
*’The meaning of life’ is not univocal but rather is pregnant with various senses, such as the significance or worth of human life, the purpose of human life, and the intelligibility of our existence with respect to the wider world.
**One might think here of the so-called ‘living constitutionalist’ scholar who views the U. S. Constitution as a “living document” whose meaning is relative to the ever-changing desires and values of its many readers, or of the Biblical scholar who interprets the scripture by foisting his own ideological commitments onto the text rather than reading the text for what it is independent of his own axe grinding. Or one might think of the introductory students of aesthetics who insists that “A work of art means whatever I want it to mean, and it has no meaning apart from my perspective!”
***Here, I borrow and modify an insight from Schopenhauer found in Counsels and Maxims, Ch. III, Section 26.