The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives (John G. Messerly)
OVERVIEW
What do we mean by meaning? Your life is an activity that you value or believe (or do not value/do not believe) is worthwhile. You may shun “meaning of life” questions and say you live because it’s instinct, or self-preservation, but this only explains why you do go on, not why you should go on. In “The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives,” John G. Messerly analyzes the essays, books, and philosophies of nearly 100 famous thinkers to answer the most significant questions we have about meaning and mortality.
This book is mostly a breakdown of all possible answers: nihilistic answers, agnostic answers, theistic and non-theistic answers. The nihilists believe life is meaningless and either begrudgingly accept this or affirm it as something to celebrate. An agnostic claim is that the question of meaning is unintelligible, or the question is intelligible but probably unanswerable. Religious believers think meaning is prescribed by some supernatural entity. And an atheist/naturalist response is that meaning can only be found in the natural world, with meaning either discovered (objective) or created (subjective). In the back third of the book, Messerly explores how death and meaning are connected and whether overcoming death would allow us to have more meaningful lives (he thinks it would). I feel confident saying that in this book you will find the most thorough review of all possible answers to our meaning-in-life questions.
We’ll skip the theistic responses to questions on meaning and sum it up thusly: we can’t prove that a god or gods exist, or that he/she/it/they have a divine plan for us that can imbue our lives with meaning. But even if there was a plan, and even if we knew what it was, we would still have to choose to live according to it (which would be a personal, value-based judgement). In the end, meaning is a boomerang that always ends up back in our hands.
Agnostic Answers – ultimate meaning questions are unintelligible, unanswerable, or unknowable (thinkers reviewed: Paul Edwards, A.J. Ayer, Kai Neilsen, John Wisdom, R.W. Hepburn, Robert Nozick, W.D. Joske, Oswald Hanfling, Ludwig Wittgenstein)
“Why is speech yellow?” is an unintelligible question, which is unanswerable because it is unintelligible. Several agnostics posit that ultimate “why” questions are unintelligible too. “Why does everything exist?” To answer this question you would have to go outside of everything, to somehow transcend it in search of your answer. But transcend into what? How can there be something beyond everything? This is also true of: “What does it all mean?” There would have to be something outside everything to give “it all” meaning. This makes the question unintelligible and therefore meaningless.
Ultimate “why” questions may, on the other hand, be intelligible but still unanswerable. Consider that even if we could find answers, those answers would always lead to another “why,” creating an infinite regress that would stymy our attempts to reach a satisfying conclusion. Ultimate meaning questions may also be unknowable because to know whether all life is meaningful requires that we know toward what end all life is moving – and how could we know this without having reached the end? So, some agnostics allow that we can frame intelligent questions about ultimate meaning, but they will remain unanswerable, or answerable but unknowable.
Any way you slice or dice it, asking about ultimate meaning is a meaningless exercise.
If you don’t agree, consider this humbling quote from Steven Pinker who sidesteps straight to our intellectual capacity:
“Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking.”
But appealing to the impossibility of a question or the ineffableness of an answer won’t satisfy most. And that’s because our real fear is not that the question is meaningless or unanswerable… it’s our intuition that there is an answer, and that the answer is that life is meaningless. Enter: nihilism.
Nihilistic answers – life is meaningless (thinkers reviewed: Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, Thomas Nagel, Westphal & Cherry, Walter Stace, Joel Feinberg, Simon Critchley, Milan Kundera)
Turning to Messerly’s definition: “Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine which denies the existence of one or more of those things thought to make life good such as knowledge, values, or meaning. A true nihilist does not believe that knowledge is possible, that anything is valuable, or that life has meaning. Nihilism also denotes a general mood of extreme despair or pessimism toward life in general.” Most of us live because living is an instinct, a habit, not because we’ve reflected on the meaning of life and found positive answers. Nihilists are those who have reflected and concluded that life is a “meaningless pantomime” (as Camus famously said).
How then should we live?
Arthur Schopenhauer: Life is generally intolerable, and it would be better if there was nothing at all. Pity your fellow sufferers, and extend to them love, tolerance, patience, and mercy, which all of us are in need and therefore which all of us are due.
Albert Camus: Our lives are meaningless and futile, but we should live in defiance.
Thomas Nagel: Life is meaningless, but this is no cause for despair because we can still live ironically.
Walter Stace: Objective meaning does not exist, but we can still be content and noble in our living.
Joel Feinberg: Passively accept the absurdity of your situation; life can be fulfilling while also being absurd.
Simon Critchley: Enjoy the pleasures available to you – find happiness in spite of nihilism.
We may have accepted that there is no ultimate or cosmic meaning to life (or if there is, we’ll never know what it is), but a large cohort still hold out for more achievable goals, arguing that value and meaning do exist, at least on the scale of our individual lives. It’s to the naturalists and the prospect of subjective and objective meaning that we now turn.
Naturalist answers – subjective meaning exists (thinkers reviewed: Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Baier, Paul Edwards, Kai Nielsen, Hazel Barnes, Raymond Martin, John Kekes, David Schmidt, Robert Solomon, David Lund, Julian Baggini, Bertrand Russell, Richard Taylor, R.M. Hare, Irving Singer, E.D. Klemke)
For naturalists (atheists) who subscribe to the concept of subjective meaning, meaning is something we create, not something we discover or receive. Meaning is constituted by human minds. There is no “out-there-meaning,” only “in-here-meaning” (if you find that unsatisfactory it might be because you have unrealistic standards of meaning to begin with). You create meaning through your wanting, your desires and interests and attitudes that you then act on. For subjectivists, the question is not “What is the meaning of life?” but rather “What is the meaning of my life?” Mostly, they agree that you live a meaningful life by enthusiastically engaging in achievable projects you find interesting and important (they disagree on whether any projects can be objectively worthwhile). In this way, you bring meaning into the world. There’s no need to search for meaning because meaning isn’t hiding anywhere. You bring meaning into your life by doing the things you find important, and doing them with zest.
Julian Baggini offered six ways to create meaning: helping others, serving humanity, being happy, becoming successful, enjoying each day, or freeing your mind. Robert C. Solomon went further, suggesting our penchant for certain themes of meaning-making comes from our worldviews – meaning is tied to our vision of life. If life is a story, we see ourselves as the heroes in an unfolding narrative; we judge ourselves by the role we play (and how well). If life is about learning, then meaning comes from how much we learn. If life is an adventure, meaning comes from how many adventures we have and how many risks we take. If life is a joke, then how much humour we approach it with is most important. For Solomon there’s no general answer to “what is the meaning of life?” only varied answers to “what is the meaning of my life?” which is tied to what you take your life to be (a story, an adventure, a mission, an art, a game, etc.).
The last point to make here is an important one. Meaning is created through engaging in what matters to you, and “matter” is not an activity, it’s an expression of concern. Mattering is not something objects or people do – things matter when we care about them. It’s you who bestows the mattering by bestowing care and concern. Meaning is about what we value and what we find worthwhile, which is another way of saying that meaning is about what matters to us. And if mattering comes from within, then meaning is always subjective.
This might not feel fully satisfying. Is meaning just about doing the things we like doing? Can an individual create meaning all by themselves? You might like collecting baseball cards, it might even matter a great deal to you, but is there nothing more to life or meaning than this? If subjective meaning isn’t enough, there’s only one place left to turn: objective meaning.
Naturalist answers – objective meaning exists (thinkers reviewed: Joseph Ellin, Garrett Thomson, Karl Britton, Terry Eagleton, Moritz Schlick, Susan R. Wolf, Steve Cahn, James Rachels, Owen Flanagan, Victor Frankl, Christopher Belshaw, Raymond Belliotti, Paul Thagard, Thaddeus Metz)
Is it possible to find objective values in the natural world? Objectivists believe that at least some meaning is independent of human minds. None of the thinkers reviewed in this book believe that meaning is entirely objective, only that gradations of objective meaning exist.
The meaning of your life is not a fact that can be transmitted. Indeed, even having the fact wouldn’t necessarily give your life meaning (imagine you discovered the purpose of life on earth was to feed a race of bloodthirsty aliens. Now that you have the answer, does your life feel more meaningful? No.). To make a life meaningful it’s not enough to have knowledge, it’s about acting on the knowledge. What we really want is practical and applicable guidance on how best to live our lives.
What might objective meaning look like? Here are some possibilities:
Acting on and investing in values that appeal to our intrinsic nature (things we naturally take an interest in). Values like beauty, friendship, truth, and goodness (aesthetic, social, intellectual, and moral values).
A slight spin on the above, Paul Thagard – a computer science, psychology, and philosophy professor – looks to what neurophysiology tells us about value: that humans value things our brains associate with positive feelings. Anything that gives us mental stimulation, anything that arouses the pleasure centres of the brain, and anything really that stimulates feel-good brain vibes are the foundation of value. Love, play, and work are the three most important “anythings” because they are connected to our psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Because this is all ingrained cognitive architecture, because what we find valuable is hardwired, objective meaning exists and is realized when we strive for things that we evolved to find valuable. This connects with Joseph Ellin’s belief that meaning is a feeling, a sense of well-being and contentment derived from striving for and achieving significant ends.
Intrinsic value is close enough to objective value that objective meaning can be found by engaging in activities of intrinsic worth – things that are worth doing for their own sake. Morris Schlick, in particular, felt that the ultimate worthwhile activity was play.
Terry Eagleton claimed objective values exist because individuals can’t personally invent/declare them (and they therefore aren’t entirely subjective). He said: “Meaning, to be sure, is something people do; but they do it in dialogue with a determinate world whose laws they did not invent, and if their meanings are to be valid, they must respect this world’s grain and texture.” So you may like collecting baseball cards, but it is not a deeply meaningful activity because our culture does not hold it as such. We don’t invent our values in vacuums, they are formed from our environment, so they are not entirely subjective (note: when we talk about objective values we don’t mean cosmic, universal, or supra-human values – all values are very much human).
Terry Eagleton’s philosophy feeds into Susan Wolf’s prescription for meaning: “lives of active engagement in projects of worth,” or where “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” Wolf was less confident in naming things that are objectively attractive, but pins meaning down to engaging in worthwhile projects and loving things objectively worthy of being loved.
Messerly finds most of our objective naturalist thinkers converge on a universal theme: “People find meaning in life by their involvement with, connection to, and engagement in, the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
This could be the end of our story. We should be satisfied. And yet, we’re not. Why? Because there is something that threatens every kind of meaning: the spectre of death.
Death and Meaning (thinkers reviewed: Leo Tolstoy, Vincent Barry, Stephen Rosenbaum, Oswald Hanfling, George Pitcher, Steven Luper, David Benatar, John Leslie, James Lenman, Nick Bostrom, Michaelis Michael & Peter Caldwell)
Messerly’s summation is that death is bad because it renders a completely meaningful life impossible. Longer lives may not guarantee meaningful lives, but longer lives are generally more meaningful than shorter ones; any one life has a greater prospect of being fully satisfied the longer it is lived. In addition, if projects of worth are what give our lives meaning, the possibility that they will be thwarted by death detracts from potential meaningfulness. The only way, Messerly muses, to live a fully meaningful and free life is to escape death (Messerly is clearly not persuaded or consoled by Epicurus’s pontifications on the subject).
Death also seals off any potential future meaning, so if in pre-mortem reflection we find our lives weren’t meaningful, weren’t well lived, there’s nothing we can do to rectify the situation. I think Messerly nails this in a previous chapter when summarizing Raymond Martin’s thoughts on mortality and meaning: “Why do we think that death threatens meaning? Because death puts an end to our search for satisfaction; and the nearness of death shows us that we will never fully be satisfied.” That’s really the crux, isn’t it? We’re unsatisfied most of the time, and the nearness of death means we can no longer live inside the hope of a better, more meaningful future. Rather than a prescription to strive for immortality, I’d take this as a call to live more meaningfully in the present. (I also agree with Martin Hägglund in his book “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” that finitude and fragility are what make things matter, are what drive us to keep faith with anything, but this perspective is not addressed by Messerly).
Conclusion
Messerly’s final chapters explore why we can and should defeat death (reviewing thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Ray Kurzwell) and then onto whether evolution and progress make the cosmos meaningful (Will Durant, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, etc.). In the end, Messerly is critical of those who don’t agree that we should pursue earthly immortality (the “deathists” he calls them). He thinks those who prefer a society with death are simply afraid of having their comfortable, stable worldviews shattered. But I could be (and am) critical of this conclusion. There’s nothing new or modern about wanting not to die. You can wrap it up in futuristic fantasy and call it progress, but really it’s just good ol’ dread of death in a technologically-advanced society. Messerly says “the defeat of death completely obliterates most world-views that have supported humans for millennia; no wonder it undermines psychological stability and arouses fierce opposition.” But does this hold up under scrutiny? I’ve read several convincing books (“Immortality” by Stephen Cave and “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker come instantly to mind) that argue humanity’s most predominant preoccupation has always been the pursuit of immortality, literal or not (and that culture is, and always has been, a massive immortality project). If that’s true, is there a more ordinary and unoriginal worldview than wanting badly to be immortal? The deathists, I think, are in the minority.
But Messerly and I do converge on this beautiful thought: “What’s wrong with loving life so much that one never wants to let go?” I may be content to live within the paradox while Messerly seeks escape velocity, but we both agree that life is rich and exquisite and beautiful and heart-breaking when it ends.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Nikos Kazantzakis, Andre Maurois, and Will Durant each believed that meaning was found in life’s activities. We might feel despair when reflecting on the lack of cosmic meaning or the certainty of death, but when immersed in the world we don’t find meaning as much as transcend the need for it. A beautiful vista, a moving symphony, a beach day with your kids – at these times life seems to be sufficient unto itself. Messerly says: “we live deeper than we can think.” That doesn’t mean that we should avoid hard questions, because they do give us a deep and rich interior life, but it is an invitation to spend at least some of your time in the world, not wrapped up in cerebral ponderings about its significance.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Most of the time when we wonder “what is the meaning of life?” we’re looking for a statement, some authority on the subject: “The meaning of life is to leave a legacy,” “The meaning of life is to love,” “The meaning of life is to pursue truth and beauty.” Hoping for a unifying answer is problematic for two reasons though, 1) because there doesn’t appear to be any one answer that applies to everyone (meaning seems to be derived or created from the ends that we pursue, and we all pursue different ends), and 2) even if someone gave you an answer, an answer alone would be insufficient (in the chapter on theistic answers Messerly explores in depth why even a supernaturally-bestowed meaning would not be sufficient – but you can simply refer back to our alien example and infinite “why” regress). Where does this leave us?
A.J. Ayer believed questions of meaning ultimately collapsed down to the question: “How should I live?” And this question is tied not to factual statements about meaning, but about what you value and what you therefore find to be worthwhile uses of your time. For better or worse, whether it makes you feel good or bad, what we are left with are subjective evaluations about how we think we should live. “Meaning of life” questions reduce to questions about what ends and pursuits we find worthwhile. Whether or not you think values are objective or subjective, that they come from evolution or culture or personal ratification, living a meaningful life is living a life in joyful pursuit of your values – activities you find worthwhile and are satisfied by.
What those are, only you can say.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes (even though it does explore religious versions of meaning).
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? The most utterly comprehensive review of possible answers to meaning of life and meaning in life questions.
Who should read this book? If you want to explore every facet of meaning and can only read one book, let it be this book.