Abstract
Three distinct but related questions can be asked about the meaningfulness of one’s life. The first is ‘What is the meaning of life?,’ which can be called ‘the cosmic question about meaningfulness’; the second is ‘What is a meaningful life?,’ which can be called ‘the general question about meaningfulness’; and the third is ‘What is the meaning of my life?,’ which can be called ‘the personal question about meaningfulness.’ I argue that in order to deal with all three questions we should start with the personal question. There is a way of understanding the personal question which allows us to answer it independently of any consideration of the cosmic question, but which nonetheless helps us see why the cosmic question should be dismissed as a bad question. Besides, a recommendable answer to the general question can be derived from my understanding of how the personal question should be answered. Two notions are essential to my account, namely, the notion of identities and the notion of a biographical life. And the account can be epitomized in this enticing way: a person’s life is meaningful if it contains material for an autobiography that she thinks is worth writing and others think is worth reading.
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Notes
For a survey of how the question is understood and tackled in recent literature, see Metz (2002).
I am indebted to Robert Stewart for suggesting the name ‘the cosmic question about meaningfulness.’
Some philosophers who try to answer the question ‘What are the conditions for a meaningful life?’ do not presuppose that the conditions they suggest can be satisfied by some human lives. The question they try to answer is for this reason not what I here call ‘the general question about meaningfulness.’
An anonymous referee thinks the analogy breaks down here because a negative answer to (1) implies a negative answer to (3), while, as I will try to show, a negative answer to the cosmic question about meaningfulness may not imply a negative answer to the personal question. In response I would like to make three points. First, the relation between the cosmic and the personal questions about meaningfulness is prima facie analogous to that between the epistemological questions (1) and (3) in this respect, which is why, as I pointed out in the opening paragraph, the cosmic question seems to trivialize the personal question. Second, even if the analogy breaks down in this respect, it does not mean that the analogy totally breaks down. The two sets of questions are still analogous at least in the following respect: in both sets a positive answer to the first question does not imply a positive answer to the second question. And third, there may be a way of construing (1) and (3) such that a negative answer to (1) does not imply a negative answer to (3). The Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the empirical can fill the bill: transcendentally we do not know anything about the world, but this is compatible with the truth of my claim that I know (empirically) this and that about the world; so can a contextualist account of knowledge: (1) is asked in the philosophical context and the answer may be ‘No,’ but this is compatible with my knowing this and that in the everyday context.
See Quine (1969).
(2) is about the causal conditions for human knowledge, while the general question about meaningfulness is about the constitutive conditions for a meaningful life. In this respect the two questions are not analogous. I owe this point to Niko Kolodny.
I think Camus confuses the personal question with the cosmic question when he remarks that “[t]here is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” (Camus 1955, 11). No one would (decide to) commit suicide simply because of a philosophical conclusion.
This seems to be the case of Tolstoy in his A Confession, though he asks not only the personal question but also the general question and the cosmic question. See Tolstoy (1987).
After writing this I realized that William James refers to some of the people who are bothered by the question ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ as suffering from “speculative melancholy” and notes that some of them “have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria” (James 1895, 42, 48).
Robert Nozick in his discussion of the meaning of life distinguishes eight kinds of meaning(fulness), and there may be more (see Nozick 1981, 574–575). For an attempt to look for a concept of meaning(fulness) common to the major theories or conceptions of a meaningful life, see Metz (2001). Although Metz fails to find such a common concept, he suggests that those theories or conceptions are united by family resemblances, for they all address some of the questions in a group of related questions. This suggestion would render the notion of meaningfulness less obscure only if there was a clear way of relating the questions in the group or determining whether a question should be put in the group, but Metz gives us only examples of such questions (“questions such as the following: how may a person bring purpose to her life, where this is not just a matter of pursuing happiness or acting rightly? How should an individual connect with intrinsic value beyond his animal nature? How might one do something worthy of great admiration?” (150–151)).
The question ‘Is my life worthwhile?’ may be taken to express some other questions, such as ‘Is my life enjoyable?,’ ‘Is my life beneficial?,’ and ‘Is my life useful?,’ but these questions are, I think, too narrow to reflect the concerns of those who ask the personal question about meaningfulness.
An anonymous referee objects that since the sense in which every life has value simply because it is a life cannot supply the answer to the question of whether one’s individual life is meaningful, this constitutes a reason not to identify ‘Is my life meaningful?’ with ‘Is my life of value?.’ I agree that we should not treat the two questions as the same when the value of a life is understood in that general sense, but what I am suggesting here is that there is another sense of the value of a life in which the answer to the question ‘Is my life of value?’ is not necessarily ‘Yes.’ It is in this sense that ‘Is my life of value?’ is a personal question, and that this personal question can be taken to be what the question ‘Is my life meaningful?’ means.
From now on I will use ‘meaningful,’ ‘worthwhile,’ and ‘of value’ interchangeably to predicate of a life.
Such understanding does not have to be accompanied by any sense of self-importance or egocentricity.
When revising this paper, I chanced upon Peter Singer’s reference to the distinction made by James Rachels between a life that is merely biological and one that is biographical (see Singer 1993, 126). Rachels also characterizes the distinction as that between being alive and having a life. I am not sure whether Rachels’ notion of a biographical life is exactly the same as mine, but it seems to me that they are very similar, for Rachels also emphasizes the narrative aspect of such a life: “It is the story of [a person’s] history and character, her aspirations and disappointments, her activities and projects and personal relationships” (Rachels 1993, 73). For a detailed discussion of Rachels’ notion of a biographical life, see Ruddick (2005). I would like to thank Robert Jones for helping me locate the texts in which Rachels discusses his notion of a biographical life.
The evaluative content of the ideal biography and that of the ideal autobiography may, however, be different. As will be seen, such difference is relevant to the meaningfulness of the life concerned, for according to my account the evaluative content of one’s ideal biography and that of one’s ideal autobiography should overlap at least to some extent if one’s life is to be meaningful. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for raising an objection that helps me see the need of distinguishing between the descriptive and the evaluative content of a biography or an autobiography.
This is comparable to the understanding that only a being who can tell right from wrong would ask questions about the moral rightness or wrongness of actions, and only actions of such a being are subject to the moral evaluation of rightness or wrongness.
From now on ‘life/lives’ should be taken to mean ‘biographical life/lives’ unless the context suggests otherwise.
Besides, what I mean by ‘value in itself’ is not the same as what some philosophers call ‘intrinsic value’ when they argue that the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic value should be separated from the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental value. According to these philosophers, to say that something has intrinsic value is to say that it is its own source of value; non-instrumental value is not necessarily intrinsic in this sense. For a helpful discussion, see Korsgaard (1983).
But ruling out such an answer, as we will see, does not imply that a person cannot answer the personal question positively by appealing to her religion.
A view of this kind can be much more sophisticated than this, such as the one advanced by Harry Frankfurt. Although Frankfurt thinks that the meaningfulness of one’s life is a matter of “selecting final ends,” he argues that “a certain final end of much less inherent value might require invigoratingly complicated and wholehearted attention; adopting that end, then, would fill the person’s life with purposefulness, and in this respect his life would be more meaningful” (Frankfurt 1992, 86–87), for “the activities in which we pursue our terminally valuable final ends [do not] have only the instrumental value that is characteristic of means” but “are themselves terminally valuable” (91).
See, for example, Kekes (2000).
I am not, however, suggesting that helping others is in itself sufficient for making my life meaningful.
It is not necessary for our purposes here to look into the problem of personal identity through time; suffice it to say that this conception of what defines who I am is compatible with most philosophical theories of personal identity through time. It does not contradict, for example, the Lockean theory, for one of my most important identities is being the person who has the memories that I have.
Although Wolf proposes that “a meaningful life is one that is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value,” she later on qualifies the proposal by adding that a person whose life is meaningful has to “proudly and happily embrace” such projects, to “identify with what she is doing” (66). Wolf would not, I suppose, object to (P1). I am indebted to an anonymous referee for clarifying Wolf’s position.
For simplicity, I will, unless otherwise indicated, use ‘my identities’ to mean ‘identities of mine that I identify myself with’ and ‘value’ to mean ‘value non-instrumentally.’
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for urging me to compare what I say about identities with Korsgaard’s notion of practical identity.
This is somewhat misleading because a person can satisfy (G1)–(G5) without ever thinking of writing an autobiography. In any case, the epitome should not be taken to imply that a person who is illiterate or lives in a culture with no literary tradition cannot have a meaningful life, for it states only a sufficient condition but not a necessary condition for a meaningful life.
According to my account, if a person satisfies none of (G1)–(G5), then her life is meaningless even if some of what she did or some of her identities have objective value; her life cannot be meaningful without her valuing and identifying herself with some of her identities. What if she satisfies (G1)–(G3), but not (G4) and (G5), while some of the identities involved have objective value? This will be an indeterminate case: her life is not completely meaningless, but it is not clearly meaningful either, or at least not as meaningful as if she had satisfied (G4) and (G5) as well.
(G1), (G2), and (G4) can be satisfied to different degrees, and a person’s life is impressively meaningful if she satisfies these three conditions to a great degree (plus satisfying the other two conditions). A person can also have an impressively meaningful life by having many identities that allow her to satisfy (G1)–(G5).
Taylor does not hold such a view in his later writings on the topic; see, for example, Taylor (1987).
This seems, by the way, also true of the case of David Wiggins’s pig-breeder, who “buys more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs to buy more land, to grow more corn to feed more hogs …” (Wiggins 1976, 100), if the pig-breeder, without divine mercy, identifies himself with and values his identity as a pig-breeder.
For example, Frankfurt thinks that “[d]evoting oneself to what one loves suffices to make one’s life meaningful” and that Hitler’s life was meaningful even though “[t]he Nazism to which Hitler devoted his life was a dreadful evil” (Frankfurt 2002, 248–249). Although Wolf disagrees with Frankfurt’s view of a meaningful life and hence with his judgment about Hitler’s life, she agrees that immoral people’s lives can “chock full of meaning” (Wolf 2007, 67). John Cottingham argues, by contrast, that an immoral life cannot be meaningful because immoral activities “have to be conducted at the cost of sealing off one’s rational awareness and emotional sensibility” and “to pursue meaning in these inhuman ways risks being self-defeating” in the sense that the conflict between the immoral activities and the need for “human conversation, emotional warmth, the cultivation of friendships, [and] family ties” would “create a psychic dissonance” leading to “either a breakdown of his ability to continue [the immoral activities] or a breakdown of his ability to live a fulfilling home life” (Cottingham 2003, 27–28). I find this unconvincing, for four reasons: first, one’s life can be meaningful without one’s pursuing meaning; second, it seems that some immoral people are highly rational and emotionally sensitive even when they are engaging in immoral activities; third, it is not clear why meaningfulness cannot coexist with psychic dissonance; and fourth, there is no reason to believe that such psychic dissonance will inevitably result in a breakdown.
Don Giovanni might be an example.
There are also cases in which people come to believe that an identity of a particular person that was once valued, such as the identity of Antonio Salieri as a composer, was overvalued or should not be valued at all. According to my account, the life of such a person was still meaningful because he had satisfied (G1)–(G5), though his life would have been even more meaningful if he had been able to satisfy (G4) and (G5) continuously.
As I mentioned in the case of the miserable scientist, a meaningful life does not have to be successful or happy. The point here is that failures can trigger reflection on the meaningfulness of one’s life, but the reflection may result in one’s conviction that one’s life is meaningful regardless of the failures.
And we will see our lives as absurd, Nagel suggests, if we see the conspicuous discrepancy between the objective meaninglessness of our lives and the seriousness we ascribe to our lives from the subjective or internal point of view, a point of view which we cannot live without.
An anonymous referee points out that sometimes people feel their lives are meaningless because of a lack of cosmic meaning even without being philosophers. I agree. A person does not have to be a philosopher in order to philosophize sometimes. The referee’s point may be that my diagnosis of why we answer the cosmic question about meaningfulness negatively does not cover all cases, but the example he or she gives is not one that cannot be covered by my diagnosis: a person “who loses a loved one, or comes to reflect on the fact that the earth will go dead in the fullness of time, may feel there is no point in day-to-day activities in light of this fact.” If a person thinks her life is meaningless because of losing a loved one, this can be explained by her seeing herself as losing an identity that she identifies herself with and values very much. If she thinks her life is meaningless because she reflects on the fact that the world will come to an end, she is treating all lives equally in the light of such a fact and thereby does not see those lives as biographical lives.
We do not have a corresponding reason to ignore the epistemological question, for it really does not matter whose knowledge it is when we ask whether we know anything about the world.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Laird Easton, Andrew Flescher, Eric Gampel, Troy Jollimore, Niko Kolodny, Robert Stewart, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments, and to Laird Easton for inviting me to present an earlier version of the paper at the Humanities Center, California State University, Chico. I would like to thank Susan Wolf for providing me with a copy of her manuscript ‘The Meanings of Lives’ and permitting me to quote from it (the paper is now in print). Special thanks are due to Louise Lee and Mason Wong, who together have, unwittingly, inspired me to develop the view suggested in this paper.
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Wong, Wh. Meaningfulness and Identities. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 11, 123–148 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9076-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9076-4