The Human Voice: The Confessional Nature of Enquiring into Life’s Meaning

Abstract

My discussions so far, from the fact/value dichotomy to the implications of aspect-seeing for one’s understanding of life’s meaning, from the elusive boundaries between great and ordinary meaning to the fundamentality of our world-pictures in shaping our conception of life’s meaning, have been variations of a single theme: the limits of theory. The common, underlying theme in previous chapters is a non-theoretical examination of the way we deal with the question of life’s meaning. It is clear by now that the absence of Wittgenstein in the literature has to do with the nature of his philosophy. His philosophy does not offer a general theory of life’s meaning. It only proposes alternative ways of approaching the question. In this regard, my approach towards the conventional theories of the meaning of life is negative in that I am not trying to refute those theories by providing yet another theory. Rather, the aim is to bring about a change in our ‘way of looking at things’ (Wittgenstein 1958: § 144).¹ In the literature on life’s meaning we are often forced to look at the concept of a meaningful life in certain ways. But what I want to do is ‘suggest … other ways of looking at it’ (cf. Malcolm 1972: 50).

‘In the same town were two men, one rich, the other poor. The rich man had flocks and herds in great abundance; the poor man had nothing but a ewe lamb, only a single little one, which he had bought. He fostered it and it grew up with him and his children, eating his bread, drinking from his cup, sleeping in his arms; it was like a daughter to him. When a traveller came to stay, the rich man would not take anything from his own flock or herd to provide for the wayfarer who had come to him. Instead, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared that for his guest’.

— 2 Samuel, 12: 1–5