Susan Wolf (1952- ) is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She works chiefly in the field of moral philosophy and is known for her book Freedom Within Reason, as well as a number of influential essays.
What does it mean to search for meaning?
This question, “What is the meaning of life?” was once taken to be a paradigm of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and when the question is brought up by a naive student, for example, or a prospective donor to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable embarrassment. What is so wrong with the question? One answer is that it is extremely obscure, if not downright unintelligible.
Still, when people do ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing some concern or other and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven’t the faintest idea what that is. The question at least gestures toward a certain set of concerns with which most of us are at least somewhat familiar. Rather than dismiss a question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may well be many things going on when people ask, “What is the meaning of life?”, the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. It is a request to find out why we are here (that is, why we exist at all), with the hope that an answer to this question will also tell us something about what we should be doing with our lives.
If understanding the question in this way, however, makes the question intelligible, it might not give reason to reopen it as a live philosophical problem. Indeed, if some of professional philosophy’s discomfort with discussion of the meaning of life comes from a desire to banish ambiguity and obscurity from the field, as much comes, I think, from the thought that the question, when made clearer, has already been answered, and that the answer is depressing. Specifically, if the question of the Meaning of Life is to be identified with the question of the purpose of life, then the standard view, at least among professional philosophers, would seem to be that it all depends on the existence of God. In other words, the going opinion seems to be that if there is a God, then there is at least a chance that there is a purpose, and so a meaning to life. God may have created us for a reason, with a plan in mind. But to go any further along this branch of thinking is not in the purview of secular philosophers. If, on the other hand, there is no God, then there can be no meaning, in the sense of a point or a purpose to our existence. We are simply a product of physical processes– there are no reasons for our existence, just causes.
At the same time that talk of Life having a Meaning is banished from philosophy, however, the talk of lives being more or less meaningful seems to be on the rise. Newspapers, magazines, self-help manuals are filled with essays on how to find meaning in your life; sermons and therapies are built on the truism that happiness is not just a matter of material comfort, or sensual pleasure, but also of a deeper kind of fulfillment. Though philosophers to date have had relatively little to say about what gives meaning to individual lives, passing references can be found throughout the literature; it is generally acknowledged as an intelligible and appropriate thing to want in one’s life. Indeed, it would be crass to think otherwise.
But how can individual lives have meaning if life as a whole has none? Are those of us who suspect there is no meaning to life deluding ourselves in continuing to talk about the possibility of finding meaning in life? (Are we being short-sighted, failing to see the implications of one part of our thought on another?) Alternatively, are these expressions mere homonyms, with no conceptual or logical connections between them? Are there simply two wholly unconnected topics here?
What makes a life meaningful?
Let us begin, however, with the other question, that of understanding what it is to seek meaning in life. What do we want when we want a meaningful life?
Meaningful Experiences
What does meaningfulness in life amount to? It may be easier to make progress by focusing on what we want to avoid. In that spirit, let me offer some paradigms, not of meaningful, but of meaningless lives.
What does a meaningless life look like?: Examples of meaningless lives
For me, the idea of a meaningless life is most clearly and effectively embodied in the image of a person who spends day after day, or night after night, in front of a television set, drinking beer and watching situation comedies. Not that I have anything against television or beer. Still the image, understood as an image of a person whose life is lived in hazy passivity, a life lived at a not unpleasant level of consciousness, but unconnected to anyone or any thing, going nowhere, achieving nothing—is, I submit, as strong an image of a meaningless life as there can be. Call this case The Blob.
If any life, any human life, is meaningless, the Blob’s life is. But this doesn’t mean that any meaningless life must be, in all important respects, like the Blob’s. There are other paradigms that highlight by their absences other elements of meaningfulness.
In contrast to the Blob’s passivity, for example, we may imagine a life full of activity, but silly or decadent or useless activity. (And again, I have nothing against silly activity, but only against a life that is wholly occupied with it.) We may imagine, for example, one of the idle rich who flits about, fighting off boredom, moving from one amusement to another. She shops, she travels, she eats at expensive restaurants, she works out with her personal trainer.
Curiously, one might also take a very un-idle rich person to epitomize a meaningless life in a slightly different way. Consider, for example, the corporate executive who works twelve-hour, seven-day weeks, suffering great stress, for the sole purpose of the accumulation of personal wealth. Related to this perhaps is David Wiggins’ example of the pig farmer who buys more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs.
grow corn to feed his pigs so
he can buy more land to grow
corn to feed his pigs.
These last three cases of the idle rich, the corporate executive and the pig farmer are in some ways very different, but they all share at least this feature: they can all be characterized as lives whose dominant activities seem pointless, useless, or empty. Classify these cases under the heading Useless.
What happens if you fail?
A somewhat different and I think more controversial sort of case to consider involves someone who is engaged, even dedicated, to a project that is ultimately revealed as bankrupt, not because the person’s values are shallow or misguided, but because the project fails. The person may go literally bankrupt: for example, a man may devote his life to creating and building up a company to hand over to his children, but the item his company manufactures is rendered obsolete by technology shortly before his planned retirement. Or consider a scientist whose life’s work is rendered useless by the announcement of a medical breakthrough just weeks before his own research would have yielded the same results. Perhaps more poignantly, imagine a woman whose life is centered around a relationship that turns out to be a fraud. Cases that fit this mold we may categorize under the heading Bankrupt.
So where do we find meaning?
If the cases I have sketched capture our images of meaninglessness more or less accurately, they provide clues to what a positive case of a meaningful life must contain. In contrast to the Blob’s passivity, a person who lives a meaningful life must be actively engaged. But, as the Useless cases teach us, it will not do to be engaged in just anything, for any reason or with any goal—one must be engaged in a project or projects that have some positive value, and in some way that is nonaccidentally related to what gives them value. Finally, in order to avoid Bankruptcy, it seems necessary that one’s activities be at least to some degree successful (though it may not be easy to determine what counts as the right kind or degree of success). Putting these criteria together, we get a proposal for what it is to live a meaningful life: viz., a meaningful life is one that is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value.
According to Wolf, a meaningful life requires:
- A project
- that one is actively engaged in
- which has some positive value (rather than something useless)
- and some degree of success (though success is hard to define)
Qualification 1: What is a “project’?
viewed as a sort of project
Several remarks are needed to qualify and refine this proposal. First, the use of the word “project” is not ideal: it is too suggestive of a finite, determinate task, something one takes on, and, if all goes well, completes. Among the things that come to mind as projects are certain kinds of hobbies or careers, or rather, specific tasks that fall within the sphere of such hobbies or careers: things that can be seen as accomplishments, like the producing of a proof or a poem or a pudding, the organizing of a union or a high school band. Although such activities are among the things that seem intuitively to contribute to the meaningfulness of people’s lives, there are other forms of meaningfulness that are less directed, and less oriented to demonstrable achievement, and we should not let the use of the word “project” distort or deny the potential of these things to give meaningfulness to life. Relationships, in particular, seem at best awkwardly described as projects. Rarely does one deliberately take them on and, in some cases, one doesn’t even have to work at them one may just have them and live, as it were, within them. Moreover, many of the activities that are naturally described as projects—coaching a school soccer team, planning a surprise party, reviewing an article for a journal—have the meaning they do for us only because of their place in the nonprojectlike relationships in which we are enmeshed and with which we identify. In proposing that a meaningful life is a life actively engaged in projects, then, I mean to use “projects” in an unusually broad sense, to encompass not only goal-directed tasks but other sorts of ongoing activities and involvements as well.
Qualification 2: Active Engagement
emotionally invested in what they’re doing,
that can be considered “active engagement”.
Second, the suggestion that a meaningful life should be “actively engaged” in projects should be understood in a way that recognizes and embraces the connotations of “engagement.” Although the idea that a meaningful life requires activity was introduced by contrast to the life of the ultra-passive Blob, we should note that meaning involves more than mere, literal activity. The alienated housewife, presumably, is active all the time—she buys groceries and fixes meals, cleans the house, does the laundry, chauffeurs the children from school to soccer to ballet, arranges doctors’ appointments and babysitters. What makes her life insufficiently meaningful is that her heart, so to speak, isn’t in these activities. She does not identify with what she is doing—she does not embrace her roles as wife, mother, and homemaker as expressive of who she is and wants to be. We may capture her alienated condition by saying that though she is active, she is not actively engaged. (She is, one might say, just going through the motions.) In characterizing a meaningful life, then, it is worth stressing that living such a life is not just a matter of having projects (broadly construed) and actively and somewhat successfully getting through them. The projects must engage the person whose life it is. Ideally, she would proudly and happily embrace them, as constituting at least part of what her life is about.
Qualification 3: Positive Value
Finally, we must say more about the proposal’s most blatantly problematic condition—viz., that the project’s engagement with which can contribute to a meaningful life must be projects “of positive value.” The claim is that meaningful lives must be engaged in projects of positive value—but who is to decide which projects have positive value, or even to guarantee that there is such a thing?
I would urge that we leave the phrase as unspecific as possible in all but one respect. We do not want to build a theory of positive value into our conception of meaningfulness. As a proposal that aims to capture what most people mean by a meaningful life, what we want is a concept that “tracks” whatever we think of as having positive value. This allows us to explain at least some divergent intuitions about meaningfulness in terms of divergent intuitions or beliefs about what has positive value, with the implication that if one is wrong about what has positive value, one will also be wrong about what contributes to a meaningful life.
The exception I would make to this otherwise maximally tolerant interpretation of the idea of positive value is that we exclude merely subjective value as a suitable interpretation of the phrase.
It will not do to allow that a meaningful life is a life involved in projects that seem to have positive value from the perspective of the one who lives it. Allowing this would have the effect of erasing the distinctiveness of our interest in meaningfulness; it would blur or remove the difference between an interest in living a meaningful life and an interest in living a life that <merely> feels or seems meaningful. That these interests are distinct, and that the former is not merely instrumental to the latter can be seen by reflecting on a certain way the wish or the need for meaning in one’s life may make itself felt. What I have in mind is the possibility of a kind of epiphany, in which one wakes up– literally or figuratively— to the recognition that one’s life to date has been meaningless. Such an experience would be nearly unintelligible if a lack of meaning were to be understood as a lack of a certain kind of subjective impression … (It) may be precisely because one did not realize the emptiness of one’s projects or the shallowness of one’s values until that moment that the experience I am imagining has the poignancy it does. It is the sort of experience that one might describe in terms of scales falling from one’s eyes. And the yearning for meaningfulness, the impulse to do something about it, will not be satisfied (though it may be eliminated) by putting the scales back on, so to speak. If one suspects that the life one has been living is meaningless, one will not bring meaning to it by getting therapy or taking a pill that, without changing one’s life in any other way, makes one believe that one’s life has meaning.
Wolf is here arguing that in order for a person’s life to be meaningful it is not sufficient that their projects seem to have value, from their perspective. For if that were sufficient, then it would make no sense (it would be “unintelligible”) that someone might suddenly have an epiphany in which they realized that their life up until a point had been meaningless, that the projects that they formerly believed were valuable really were actually not, and thereby come to realize that their life up to that point had been meaningless. Such a person’s yearning for meaning in their life, moreover, would not be fulfilled by taking a pill that restored their former feelings about their projects, without changing their life in any other way. Assuming that their “epiphany” was not itself illusory but genuine, they would have to actually change the way they live their to bring objective meaning to it.
Is a meaningful life a “good” life?
Meaning is not the same as “moral goodness”.
The concern for meaning in one’s life does not seem to be the same as the concern for moral worth, nor do our judgments about what sorts of lives are meaningful seem to track judgments of moral character or accomplishment.
To be sure, some of the paradigms of meaningful lives are lives of great moral virtue or accomplishment– I mentioned Gandhi and Mother Teresa, for example. Others, however, are not. Consider Gauguin, Wittgenstein, Tchaikovsky—morally unsavory figures all, whose lives nonetheless seem chock full of meaning. If one thinks that even they deserve moral credit, for their achievements made the world a better place, consider instead Olympic athletes and world chess champions, whose accomplishments leave nothing behind but their world records. Even more important, consider the artists, scholars, musicians, athletes of our more ordinary sort. For us, too, the activities of artistic creation and research, the development of our skills and our understanding of the world give meaning to our lives—but they do not give moral value to them.
It seems then that meaning in life may not be especially moral, and that indeed lives can be richly meaningful even if they are, on the whole, judged to be immoral. Conversely, that one’s life is at least moderately moral, that it is lived, as it were, above reproach, is no assurance of its being moderately meaningful. The alienated housewife, for example, may be in no way subject to moral criticism. (And it is debatable whether even the Blob deserves specifically moral censure.)
Here, Wolf argues that meaningful lives are not necessarily morally good, citing examples of artists, athletes, and philosophers who are not necessarily morally better than others. How does this assertion line up with Aristotle’s view of what it is to fulfill your purpose or function as a human being?
Should you want to have a meaningful life?
That people do want meaning in their lives, I take it, is an observable, empirical fact. We have already noted the evidence of self-help manuals, and therapy groups. What I have offered so far is an analysis of what that desire or concern amounts to. I want now to turn to the question of whether the desire is one that it is good that people have, whether, that is, there is some positive reason why they should want this.
Since a meaningful life is not necessarily a morally better life than a meaningless one (the Olympic athlete may do no more good nor harm than the idly rich socialite), it is not necessarily better for the world that people try to live or even succeed in living meaningful lives. Neither is a meaningful life assured of being an especially happy one, however. Many of the things that give meaning to our lives (relationships to loved ones, aspirations to achieve) make us vulnerable to pain, disappointment and stress. From the inside, the Blob’s hazy passivity may be preferable to the experience of the tortured artist or political crusader. By conventional standards, therefore, it is not clear that caring about or even succeeding in living a meaningful life is better for the person herself.
Yet, those of us who do care that our lives be meaningful tend to think that it is a positively good thing that we do. We not only want to live meaningful lives, we want to want this—we approve of this desire, and think it is better for others if they have this desire, too. If, for example, you see a person you care about conducting her life in a way that you find devoid of worth—she is addicted to drugs, perhaps, or just to television, or she is overly enthusiastic in her career as a corporate lawyer—you are apt to encourage her to change, or at least hope that she will find a new direction on her own. Your most prominent worry may well be that she is heading for a fall. You fear that at some point she will wake up to the fact that she has been wasting or misdirecting her life, a point that may come too late for easy remedy and will, in any case, involve a lot of pain and self-criticism. But the fear that she will wake up to the fact that she has been wasting her life (and have difficulty turning her life around) may not be as terrible as the fear that she won’t wake up to it. If you came to feel secure that no painful moment of awakening would ever come because your friend (or sister or daughter) simply does not care whether her life is meaningful, you might well think that this situation is not better but worse. We seem to think there is something regrettable about a person living a meaningless life, even if the person herself does not mind that she is. We seem to think she should want meaning in her life, even if she doesn’t realize it.
What, though, is the status of this “should,” the nature or source of the regret? The mystery that I earlier suggested we should feel about our value in meaningfulness is reflected in the uneasy location of this judgment. If my own reaction to the woman who doesn’t care whether her life is meaningful is typical, the thought that she should, or ought to care is closer to a prudential judgment than it is to a moral one. (If there is a moral objection to a person who lives a meaningless life and is content with that, it is not, in my opinion, a very strong one. The Blob, after all, is not hurting anyone, nor is the idle rich jet-setter. She may, for example, give money to environmental causes to offset the damage she is doing in her SUV, and write generous checks to Oxfam and UNICEF on a regular basis.) The thought that it is too bad if a person does not live a meaningful life (even if she doesn’t mind) seems rather to be the thought that it is too bad for her.
If my analysis of what is involved in living a meaningful life is right, then the question of why one should care about living a meaningful life is equivalent to the question of why one should care that one’s life be actively and somewhat successfully engaged in projects of positive value. The source of perplexity seems, in particular, to be about the reason to care that one’s projects be positively valuable. As long as you are engaged by your activities, and they make you happy, why should one care that one’s activities be objectively worthwhile?
Meaning or Solipsism?
Devotion to Minimizing One’s Own Pain
The answer, I believe, is that to devote one’s life entirely to activities whose value is merely subjective,to devote oneself to activities whose sole justification is that it is good for you, is, in a sense I shall try to explain, practically solipsistic. It flies in the face of one’s status as, if you will, a tiny speck in a vast universe, a universe with countless perspectives of equal status with one’s own, from which one’s life might be assessed. Living a life that is engaged with and so at least partially focussed on projects whose value has a nonsubjective source is a way of acknowledging one’s non-privileged position. It harmonizes, in a way that a purely egocentric life does not, with the fact that one is not the center of the universe.
The basic idea is this: The recognition of one’s place in the universe, of one’s smallness, one might say, or one’s insignificance, and of the independent existence of the universe in which one is a part involves, among other things, the recognition of the “mereness” of one’s subjective point of view. To think of one’s place in the universe is to recognize the possibility of a perspective, of infinitely many perspectives, really, from which one’s life is merely gratuitous; it is to recognize the possibility of a perspective, or rather of infinitely many perspectives, that are indifferent to whether one exists at all, and so to whether one is happy or sad, satisfied or unsatisfied, fulfilled or unfulfilled.
In the face of this recognition, a life that is directed solely to its subject’s own fulfillment, or, to its mere survival or towards the pursuit of goals that are grounded in nothing but the subject’s own psychology, appears either solipsistic or silly.
A person who lives a largely egocentric life who devotes, in other words, lots of energy and attention and care toward himself, who occupies himself more specifically with satisfying and gratifying himself, expresses and reveals a belief that his happiness matters. Even if it doesn’t express the view that his happiness matters objectively, it at least expresses the idea that it matters to him. To be solely devoted to his own gratification, then, would express and reveal the fact that his happiness is all that matters, at least all that matters to him. If, however, one accepts a framework that recognizes distinctions in nonsubjective value, (and if one believes, as seems only reasonable, that what has nonsubjective value has no special concentration in or connection to oneself) this attitude seems hard to justify.
To accept that framework is, after all, to accept the view that some things are better than others. To me, it makes sense partially to understand this literally: Some things, it seems to me, are better than others: people, for example, are better than rocks or mosquitoes, and a Vermeer painting is better than the scraps on my compost heap. What is essential, though, is that accepting a framework that recognizes distinctions in nonsubjective value involves seeing the world as value-filled, as containing with it distinctions of better and worse, of more and less worthwhile, if not of better and worse objects per se, then of better and worse features of the world, or activities, or opportunities to be realized. Against this background, a life solely devoted to one’s own gratification or to the satisfaction of one’s whims seems gratuitous and hard to defend. For, as I have said, to live such a life expresses the view that one’s happiness is all that matters, at least to oneself. But why should this be the only thing that matters, when there is so much else worth caring about?
I am suggesting that we can have a reason to do something or to care about something that is grounded not in our own psychologies, nor specifically in our own desires, but in a fact about the world. The fact in question in this case is the fact that we are, each of us, specks in a vast and value-filled universe, and that as such we have no privileged position as a source of or possessor of objective value. To devote oneself wholly to one’s own satisfaction seems to me to fly in the face of this truth, to act “as if” one is the only thing that matters, or perhaps, more, that one’s own psychology is the only source of (determining) what matters. By focusing one’s attention and one’s energies at least in part on things, activities, aspects of the world that have value independent of you, you implicitly acknowledge your place and your status in the world. Your behavior, and your practical stance is thus more in accord with the facts.
Wolf argues (a) that disregard for leading a meaningful life is rational only if you are a practical solipsist, i.e., only if you don’t recognize value that exists independently of your own psychology. But (b) if you are not a practical solipsist, i.e., if you do recognize value that exists independently of your own psychology, such as persons, activities and object that are worthy of care and pursuit independently of your own desires, then it is irrational not to care about leading a meaningful life.
Meaning and Our Place in the Universe
Perhaps, however, I have not made it clear why this is an appropriate response. The question may seem especially pressing because the thought that we are tiny specks in a vast universe, and the sense that it calls for or demands a response has, in the past, tended to move philosophers in a different direction. Specifically, the thought that we are tiny specks in a vast universe was in the past closely associated with that murky and ponderous question to which I referred at the beginning of my [paper]– the question of The Meaning of Life. The thought that we are tiny specks in a vast universe has indeed often evoked that question, and, to those who either do not believe in or do not want to rest their answers in the existence of a benevolent God, it has more or less immediately seemed also to indicate an answer. Considering their answer to the question of the Meaning of Life and contrasting it with my response to the fact of our smallness, may clarify the substance of my proposal.
The train of thought I have in my mind is one that has, with variations, been expressed by many distinguished philosophers, including Camus, Tolstoy, Richard Taylor, and curiously, Nagel himself. For the, the recognition of our place in the universe– our smallness, or our speckness, if you will– seems to warrant the conclusion not only that there is no meaning to life as such but also that each individual life is necessarily absurd.
On the view of these philosophers, a life can be meaningful only if it can mean something to someone, and not just to someone, but to someone other than oneself and indeed someone of more intrinsic or ultimate value than oneself. Of course, anyone can live in such a way as to make her life meaningful to someone other than herself. She can maintain her relationships with her parents and siblings, establish relationships with neighbors and colleagues. She can fall in love. If all else fails, she can have a child who will love her, or two children, or six. She can open up an entire clinic for God’s sake. But if a life that is devoted solely to yourself, a life that is good to no one other than yourself lacks meaning, these philosophers not implausibly think, so will a life that is devoted to any other poor creature, for he or she will have no more objective importance than you have, and so will be no more fit a stopping place by which to ground the claim of meaningfulness than you. Nor, according to this train of thought, will it help to expand your circle, to be of use or to have an effect on a larger segment of humankind. If each life is individually lacking in meaning, then the collective is meaningless as well. If each life has an infinitesimal amount of value, then although one’s meaning will increase in proportion to one’s effect, the total quantity of meaning relative to the cosmos will remain so small as to make the effort pathetic.
From the perspective of these philosophers, if there is no God, then human life, each human life, must be objectively meaningless, because if there is no God, there is no appropriate being for whom we could have meaning.
Finding Your Place
The philosophers I have been speaking about — we can call them the pessimists — take the fundamental lesson to be learned from the contemplation of our place in the universe to be that we are cosmically insignificant, a fact that clashes with our desire to be very significant indeed. If God existed, such philosophers might note, we would have a chance at being significant. For God himself, is presumably very significant and so we could be significant by being or by making ourselves significant to Him. In the absence of a God, however, it appears that we can only be significant to each other, to beings, that is, as pathetically small as ourselves. We want to be important, but we cannot be important, and so our lives are absurd.
The pessimists are right about the futility of trying to make ourselves important. Insofar as contemplation of the cosmos makes us aware of our smallness, whether as individuals or as a species, we simply must accept it and come to terms with it. Some people do undoubtedly get very upset, even despondent when they start to think about their cosmic insignificance. They want to be important, to have an impact on the world, to make a mark that will last forever. When they realize that they cannot achieve this, they are very disappointed. The only advice one can give to such people is: Get Over It.
well make the best of it!
Rather than fight the fact of our insignificance, however, and of the mereness of our subjectivity, my proposal is that we live in a way that acknowledges the fact, or, at any rate, that harmonizes with it. Living in a way that is significantly focused on, engaged with, and concerned to promote or realize value whose source comes from outside oneself, does seem to harmonize with this, whereas living purely egocentrically does not. Living lives that attain or realize some nonsubjective value may not make us meaningful, much less important, to anyone other than ourselves, but will give us something to say, to think, in response to the recognition of perspectives that we ourselves imaginatively adopt that are indifferent to our existence and to our well-being.
The connection between “the Meaning of Life” and “the meaningfulness of lives”
At the beginning of this paper, I raised the question of how the meaning of life– or the absence of such meaning– was related to the meaningfulness of particular lives. As I might have put it, does it really make sense to think that there can be meaningful loves in a meaningless world? In light of this discussion, we can see how the answer to that question might be “yes” while still holding on to the idea that the similar wording of the two phrases is not merely coincidental.
If I am right about what is involved in living a meaningful life– if, that is, living a meaningful life is a matter of at least partly successful engagement in projects of positive value– then the possibility of living meaningful lives despite the overall absence of a meaning to life can be seen to depend on the fact that distinctions of value (that is, of objective value) do not rely on the existence of God or of any overarching purpose to the human race as a whole. Whether or not God exists, the fact remains that some objects, activities and ideas are better than others. Whether or not God exists, some ways of living are more worthwhile than others. Some activities are a waste of time.
People are sometimes tempted to think that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing matters. They are tempted to think that if we will all die, and eventually all traces of our existence will fade from all consciousness, there is no point to doing anything; nothing makes any difference. Tolstoy evidently thought this sometimes, and gave eloquent voice to that view. But the reasoning is ridiculous. If one activity is worthwhile and another is a waste, then one has reason to prefer the former, even if there is no God to look down on us and approve. More generally, we seem to have reason to engage ourselves with projects of value whether God exists and gives life a purpose or not.
Putting things this way, however, fails to explain why we use the language of meaning to describe lives engaged in activities of worth. Putting things this way there seems to be no connection at all between the question of whether there is a meaning to life and the question of whether individual lives can be meaningful. I believe, however, that there is a connection, that shows itself, or perhaps that consists in the fact that the wish for both kinds of meaning are evoked by the same thought, and that, perhaps, either kind of meaning would be an appropriate and satisfying response to that thought. The thought in question is the thought (the true thought) that we are tiny specks in a vast universe. It is a thought that is apt to be upsetting when it first hits you– at least in part because, looking back from that position, it may seem that one had until then lived “as if” something opposite were true. One had lived perhaps until then as if one were the center of the universe, the sole possessor or source of all value. One had all along assumed one had a special and very important place in the world, and now one’s assumption is undetermined. One can see how, in this context, one might wish for a meaning in life. For if there were a meaning– a purpose, that is, to human existence that can be presumed to be of great importance, then, by playing a role, by contributing to that purpose, one can recover some of the significance one thought one’s life had. Like the pessimistic philosophers I talked about a few minutes ago, I doubt that path is open to us. But there seems another way one can respond to the thought, or to the recognition of our relatively insignificant place in the universe, that is more promising, and that can, and sometimes does, provide a different kind of comfort. If one lived one’s life, prior to the recognition of our smallness, as if one was the center of the universe, the appropriate response to that recognition is simply to stop living that way. If one turns one’s attention to other parts of the universe– even to other specks like oneself– in a way that appreciates and engages with the values or valuable objects that come from outside oneself, the one corrects one’s practical stance. If, in addition, one is partly successful in producing, preserving, or promoting value– if one does some good, or realizes value, then one has something to say, or to think in response to the worry that one’s life has no point.
Only if some suggestion like mine is right can we make sense of the intuitions about meaningfulness to which I called attention in the earlier part of this paper. According to those intuitions the difference between a meaningful and a meaningless life is not a difference between a life that does a lot of good, and a life that does a little. (Nor is it a difference between a life that makes a big splash and one that, so to speak, sprays only a few drops.) It is rather a difference between a life that does good or is good or realizes value and a life that is essentially a waste. According to these intuitions, there is as sharp a contrast between the Blob and a life devoted to the care of a single needy individual as there is between the Blob and someone who manages to change the world for the better on a grand scale. Indeed, there may be an equally sharp contrast between the Blob and the monk of a contemplative order whose existence confers no benefit or change on anyone else’s life at all. Ironically, along this dimension, Tolstoy fares exceptionally well.
Thus it seems to me that even if there is no meaning to life, even if, that is, life as a whole has no purpose, no direction, no point, that is no reason to doubt the possibility of finding and making meaning in life–that is no reason, in other words, to doubt the possibility of people living meaningful lives. In coming to terms with our place and our status in the universe, it is natural and appropriate that people should want to explore the possibility of both types of meaning. Even if philosophers have nothing new or encouraging to say about the possibility of meaning of the first sort, there may be some point to elaborating the different meanings of the idea of finding meaning in life, and in pointing out the different forms that coming to terms with the human condition can take.
Wolf concludes by arguing that the wish for both types of meaning arises from the same thought: that we are tiny specks in a vast universe. This is upsetting insofar as prior to having this thought, one might have been living one’s life as though it were not true, as though one were the center of the universe, the sole possessor of value. And either sort of meaning might allay this worry: the first because if there were a purpose to the universe, we might recover some of the significance we thought our lives had by contributing to this it; the second because if there are other sources of value outside ourselves, even if they are just additional specks, then we might recover some of the significance we thought we had by appreciating and engaging with them.