This seems to be germane to a couple of discussions here....
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/the-meaningfulness-of-lives/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1
September 11, 2011, 5:45 pm
The Meaningfulness of Lives
By TODD MAY
Who among us has not asked whether his or her life is a meaningful
one? Who has not wondered — on a sleepless night, during a long
stretch of dull or taxing work, or when a troubled child seems a
greater burden than one can bear — whether in the end it all adds up
to anything? On this day, too, when many are steeped in painful
reminders of personal loss, it is natural to wonder about the answers.
A meaningful life is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, without God, our lives
are bereft of meaning. He tells us in his essay “Existentialism,” “if
God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which
legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no
excuse behind us, nor justification before us.” On this view, God
gives our lives the values upon which meaning rests. And if God does
not exist, as Sartre claims, our lives can have only the meaning we
confer upon them.
This seems wrong on two counts. First, why would the existence of God
guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives? Is a life of
unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s
a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits?
That would be small compensation for a life that would otherwise feel
like a waste — a point not lost on thinkers like Karl Marx, who called
religion the “opium of the people.” Moreover, does God actually
ground the values by which we live? Do we not, as Plato recognized
2500 years ago, already have to think of those values as good in order
to ascribe them to God?
Second, and more pointedly, must the meaningfulness of our lives
depend on the existence of God? Must meaning rely upon articles of
faith? Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not
only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different
believers out of one another’s picture. What seems called for is an
approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that
exists alongside or instead of religious views.
A promising and more inclusive approach is offered by Susan Wolf in
her recent and compelling book, “Meaning in Life and Why it
Matters.” A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy
life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when
subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful
life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the
life must be engaged by it. A life of commitment to causes that are
generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or
ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating
in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to
be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of
tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter
how gripped one might be by the game.
Leif Parsons
Often one defends an idea by giving reasons for it. However,
sometimes the best defense is not to give reasons at the outset but
instead to pursue the idea in order to see where it leads. Does it
capture something important if we utilize it to understand ourselves?
It’s this latter tack that I would like to try here. The pursuit of
this core idea — that a meaningful life is both valued and valuable —
allows us to understand several important aspects of our attitudes
toward ourselves and others.
In this pursuit, the first step we might take beyond what Wolf tells
us is to recognize that lives unfold over time. A life is not an
unrelated series of actions or projects or states of being. A life
has, we might say, a trajectory. It is lived in a temporal thickness.
Even if my life’s trajectory seems disjointed or to lack continuity,
it is my life that is disconnected in its unfolding, not elements of
several different lives.
If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively. A
human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are
more or less related. This does not mean that the person whose life
it is must conceive it or live it narratively. I needn’t say to
myself, “Here’s the story I want construct,” or, “This is the story so
far.” What it means rather is that, if one reflected on one’s life,
one could reasonably see it in terms of various story lines, whether
parallel or intersecting or distinct. This idea can be traced back to
Aristotle’s “Ethics,” but has made a reappearance with some recent
narrative conceptions of what a self is.
What makes a trajectory a meaningful one? If Wolf is right, it has to
feel worthwhile and, beyond that, has to be engaged in projects that
are objectively worthwhile. There is not much difficulty in knowing
what feels worthwhile. Most of us are good at sensing when we’re onto
something and when we’re not. Objective worthiness is more elusive.
We don’t want to reduce it simply to a morally good life, as though a
meaningful life were simply an unalienated moral life. Meaningful
lives are not so limited and, as we shall see, are sometimes more
vexed. So we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life
outside the moral realm. Here is where the narrative character of a
life comes into play.
What is the point of understanding what makes lives meaningful? Why
not just live them?
There are values we associate with a good narrative and its characters
that are distinct from those we associate with good morals. A
fictional character can be intense, adventurous, steadfast or subtle.
Think here of the adventurousness of Ishmael in “Moby-Dick,” the quiet
intensity of Kip in “The English Patient,” the steadfastness of Dilsey
in “The Sound and the Fury” or the subtlety of Marco Polo in
“Invisible Cities.” As with these fictional characters, so with our
lives. When a life embodies one or more of these values (or others),
and feels engaging to the one who lives it, it is to that extent
meaningful. There are narrative values expressed by human lives that
are not reducible to moral values. Nor are they reducible to
happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling.
Narrative values are not felt, they are lived. And they constitute
their own arena of value, one that has not been generally recognized
by philosophers who reflect on life’s meaningfulness.
An intense life, for instance, can be lived with abandon. One might
move from engagement to engagement, or stick with a single engagement,
but always (well, often) by diving into it, holding nothing back. One
throws oneself into swimming or poetry or community organizing or
fundraising, or perhaps all of them at one time or another. Such a
life is likely a meaningful one. And this is true even where it might
not be an entirely moral one.
We know of people like this, people whose intensity leads them to
behavior that we might call morally compromised. Intense lovers can
leave bodies in their wake when the embers of love begin to cool.
Intense athletes may not be the best of teammates. Our attitudes
toward people like this are conflicted. There is a sense in which we
might admire them and another sense in which we don’t. This is
because meaningful lives don’t always coincide with good ones.
Meaningful lives can be morally compromised, just as morally good
lives can feel meaningless to those who live them.
We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between
meaningfulness and morality. They meet at certain moral limits. An
evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would
want to call meaningful. But within the parameters of those moral
limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is
complicated. They do not map directly onto each other.
Why might all this matter? What is the point of understanding what
makes lives meaningful? Why not just live them? On one level, the
answer is obvious. If we want to live meaningful lives, we might want
to know something about what makes a life so. Otherwise, we’re just
taking stabs in the dark. And in any event, for most of us it’s just
part of who we are. It’s one of the causes of our lying awake at night.
There is another reason as well. This one is more bound to the time
in which we live. In an earlier column for The Stone, I wrote that we
are currently encouraged to think of ourselves either as consumers or
as entrepreneurs. We are told to be shoppers for goods or investors
for return. Neither of these types of lives, if they are the dominant
character of those lives, strike me as particularly meaningful. This
is because their narrative themes — buying, investing — are rarely the
stuff of which a compelling life narrative is made. (I say “rarely”
because there may be, for example, cases of intensely lived but
morally compromised lives of investment that do not cross any moral
limit to meaningfulness.) They usually lack what Wolf calls “objective
attractiveness.” To be sure, we must buy things, and may even enjoy
shopping. And we should not be entirely unconcerned with where we
place our limited energies or monies. But are these the themes of a
meaningful life? Are we likely to say of someone that he or she was a
great networker or shopper, and so really knew how to live?
In what I have called an age of economics, it is even more urgent to
ask the question of a meaningful life: what it consists in, how we
might live one. Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character
of meaning that each of us should embrace. It cannot tell each of us
individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to
us. But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which
we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity
we might otherwise lack. This is as it should be. Philosophy can
assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while
remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.
The author will be speaking on the meaningfulness of lives at the New
School for Social Research in New York City on Thursday, Sept. 15 at 6
p.m.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the
author 10 books, including “Our Practices, Our Selves” and “Death,”
and is at work on a book about friendship in the contemporary period. _______________________________________________
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