Abstract
Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there are things in it that the person values (1) intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally and (2) above a certain threshold of intensity. This is a subjectivist account of meaning in life. I defend subjectivism about meaning in life from common objections by understanding statements about life’s meaning in quasi-realist terms.
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Notes
But if affectation is one’s game, then one cannot do better than to learn from a master. The term is, of course, modeled on Martin Heidegger’s (1926/1962) seinsfrage, the being question. ‘Sinnsfrage’ comes from ‘sinn’, meaning and ‘frage’ question.
Susan Wolf (2010) distinguishes between the idea of the meaning of life and that of meaning in life. The question with which I am concerned corresponds to the question of meaning in life in her sense. I doubt there is any such thing as the meaning of life.
Charles Taylor (1995) makes a cognate point about the notion of self-realization. If absolutely anything counts as self-realization then the idea is vacuous.
The answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is 42. The content of the question is another matter. In Being and Time, Heidegger noted that certain vicissitudes of history had rendered us, today, unable to properly formulate the seinsfrage: ‘What is being?’ He proposed adopted a hermeneutic approach to resolving this difficulty. We already, in a sense, understand what being is. At least a conception of being is implicated in our ‘ordinary, everyday’ practices. We make this conception explicit, and then work from there towards a greater understanding of the question.
The idea is supplied by Taylor (1970/2000: 256–268), although Taylor is not responsible for what I do with the idea.
Compare: sometimes, a few rare idle moments will allow me to peruse the files on my laptop. I am sometimes surprised, and more than a little disconcerted, to see papers that I, presumably, have written, but have no recollection of having done so. If I had agonized through the writing of a paper, only to subsequently discover that I had, in fact, written it before, it would be apt to describe my predicament as absurd. The same sort of absurdity would be Sisyphus’s fate on the current suggestion.
Schiller (1794: 2).
Although try telling that to Andres Escobar, the Colombian soccer player, murdered in the aftermath of the 1994 FIFA World Cup, reportedly as punishment for having scored an own goal that ensured his team’s elimination from the tournament.
“But whether we choose life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may dismiss for the present. For they seem to be bound up together and not to admit of separation, since without activity pleasure does not arise, and every activity is completed by the attendant pleasure.” Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, X, Sect. 4.
The story of Richard’s exploits, and their ultimately successful conclusion, can be found at http://www.737challenge.com/challenge.html.
Anorak: (British) A person obsessively interested in a thing or topic that doesn’t seem to warrant such attention. (Urban Dictionary). Train spotters are, apparently, real.
This may be true for Sisyphus Fulfilled. However, a non-negligible number of human beings do seem to enjoy trainspotting. Arpaly’s response is directed at Sisyphus Fulfilled rather than Derek Anorak (it could hardly be directed at Derek: I invented him on the previous page). Nevertheless, one of the problems with hybrid accounts is the more than occasional whiff of elitism emanating from their general direction. See Stephen Cahn (2008) for a compelling critique of elitism about the meaning of life.
This does not mean, of course, that the option should be rejected. Even if it does require abandoning subjectivism, this option might be thought to be a viable one in its own right: as a useful way of developing the hybrid approach. I shall explore this possibility further in the next section.
This is not a formal charge of question begging. Wolf can avoid that by stressing that her task is merely to specify conditions that a life must meet if it is to count as meaningful. Tolstoy’s worries about whether his life qualifies as meaningful (in her sense) are, therefore, unfortunate, but this does not affect the claim that his life must meet her conditions in order to qualify as a meaningful one. This response, however, avoids a formal charge of question begging only by undermining the utility of her position.
This is what we tend to think, anyway. Wittgenstein denied it. For him, ‘I am in a pain’ is an expression not a description—a slightly more articulated version of ‘Ouch!’ Since my purpose, here, is expository, I shall ignore this potential complication, and assume that ‘I am in pain’ is a description rather than an expression.
Blackburn’s quasi-realist program was developed in the age of typewriter. He uses ‘;’ as the combination operator. I think my symbol is a little more readily comprehensible.
I shall look at some problems with this assimilation, and suggest some solutions, later.
Blackburn seems to prefer bringing the candidate activities within the scope of the operator. Transposing an argument of Blackburn’s from the moral to the existential domain, suppose I have set S of attitudes, both first-order and meta: S = {|A!(φ-ing)|, |L!(|A!(φ-ing)|)|, and |A!(|L!(φ-ing)|)|}. Suppose, also, there is another set, S* = {|L!(φ-ing)|, |L!(|A!(φ-ing)|)|, and |A!(|L!(φ-ing)|)|}. If we to become aware of S*, I might, it is reasonable to assume, come to regard it as superior to S. This judgment can be expressed in the form of an approval: A! (S*). However, I might also not wish to abandon S. That is, as far as I’m concerned: A! (S). It is clear what needs to be done to ground the idea of improvement within this framework. Make A! (S* > S). That is: if “A!(φ-ing > ψ-ing)” expresses more approval of φ-ing than ψ-ing, then A! (having S* > having S). [See Blackburn (1984)].
Crispin Wright (1988: 12). Blackburn puts much effort in defending himself against this charge, which only makes sense if his quasi-realism is ambitious.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation/University of California Riverside, Immortality Project. I am very grateful to both parties.
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Rowlands, M. The Immortal, the Intrinsic and the Quasi Meaning of Life. J Ethics 19, 379–408 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9212-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9212-7