Maverick Philosopher

Even if one's overall purpose is not destructive, a life devoted to a dominating purpose might nonetheless lack positive objective intrinsic value if the purpose is either trivial or futile. One hesitates to say that a life devoted to parsing every sentence in Moby Dick is objectively meaningful: such a life is squandered on a trivial pursuit. Intuitively, a purpose-driven life can be a wasted life. Or suppose the cynosure of one's efforts is something unattainable such as the squaring of the circle or the construction of a perpetuum mobile. A life devoted to the unattainable might not be trivial but it will be futile.

The futility/triviality contrast can be thrown into relief by comparing religious and nonreligious lives. Thomas Merton joined the Trappists as a relatively young man, and Edith Stein, the brilliant student of Husserl, entered the Carmelite Order. Did these outstanding individuals throw their lives away? Both lives were consecrated to the highest conceivable purpose: to serve, love, and know God. Their common purpose was the exact opposite of trivial. But the worldling will say that their lives were exercises in futility: they aimed at the unattainable since there is no God. There is only this world, and all attainable purposes are immanent to it. Merton and Stein walled themselves off from the only life there is and spent their lives in illusion. They renounced the very things that make life worth living: family life, children, freedom, career, sex and the pleasures of life.

But if the worldling is wrong, then no matter what world-immanent purpose he pursues, no matter how highly esteemed the purpose is in the eyes of the world, his life will be trivial. For if God exists, then any goal short of God is utterly trivial in comparison. ("What doth it profit a man, etc.") So if God exists, the worlding wastes his life just as surely as the committed religionist does if God does not exist.

There are at least four ways a life can be meaningless. A life is rendered meaningless by purposelessness or directionlessness. But a life is is also rendered meaningless by being misdirected in one of three ways: either misdirected to an evil purpose, or misdirected to a trivial purpose or misdirected to a futile purpose.

So I think we can safely reject this biconditional: A human life is meaningful if and only if its constituent activities, events and projects are animated and organized by a central purpose. To get a truth we must replace 'if and only if' with 'only if': having a purpose is necessary but not sufficient for existential meaningfulness. This implies that existential meaningfulness cannot be defined solely in terms of teleology. Axiology must be brought in.

But I hear an objection coming. "What you are saying is right if by 'meaningful' you mean objectively meaningful. However, it seems correct to say that a life is subjectively meaningful if and only if it is organized by a central purpose, one supplied by the agent of the life."

I reject the notion of subjective meaning. To say that a life has a subjective meaning is to say that it has no meaning at all. For if I must give my life meaning, then it has no meaning. This is explained more fully in Whether the Meaning of Life Could be Subjective.

Some people have raised the issue of the after-life in connection with the meaning of life. The matter arises for these people I suspect as follows. If the meaning of life is to have any significance at all, it must be an objective matter; and for it to be an objective matter, it must feature something indestructible, something infinite, something that is immortal. Some form of after-life presents itself as a suitable candidate. And so the meaning of life must be somehow related to the after-life and therefore to a deity. This is how I see the connection people make, whether explicitly or implicitly, between the meaning of life and the possibility that there is an after-life.

I would like to raise certain questions (these are questions and I will not as yet challenge the conception of after life therein assumed).

The conception of the after-life here is one that is connected to infinity and therefore to immortality of something in each of us; something like a soul. But every entity that is infinite is also unchanging. Let us look at certain examples of things that persist infinitely: numbers, propositions, universals. These are all entities that if they exist at all, they never cease to exist nor do they change any of their non-Cambridge properties (one might add God to this list).

So let us assume that some or all of these entities exist. Then entities of this sort never cease to exist and never change any of their properties. It makes no sense to say that the number two, for instance, changed from being even to being odd or to not being a number at all or to not being less than the number three. In fact nothing about the number two can change; that is, nothing that characterizes what this number is.

By contrast, things that are not infinite, things that perish, are in constant flux: they always change. And I suspect that there is an intimate relationship between their perishable nature and the fact that they are subject to change. We, human beings, also are in a constant flux: we keep changing. This is true about our bodies; it is true about our doxastic states; and it is true about our psychological attitudes and emotions. And so our bodies, doxastic states, and psychological attitudes do indeed perish.

But some hold that there is something about us, something one might label as the soul, which never perishes and it is this thing that is linked somehow to the meaning of our lives. But, then, it would seem that this thing, our soul, cannot ever change, for it lives infinitely and is not subject to any causal conditions that force it to change. It is therefore akin to the number two, which remains forever like it forever has been.

And I ask: what is the advantage or the point of postulating something that is the centerpiece of our being and the meaning of our life that inherently cannot enjoy things, cannot learn, cannot suffer, feel pain, laugh, cry, see beauty, love, etc. For if the soul is like other non-perishable, infinite, and unchanging entities, then it cannot undergo any of these changes; for joy, suffering, love, pain, laughter, and the joy of beauty are all what they are because they change us. If the soul is the seat of after-life and it cannot experience any of these things, then why should I care about whether it exists or not, whether I have it or not any more than I care whether the proposition 'Snow is white' exists or not. By 'care' I mean here the kind of existential caring that is invested by some in the idea of after life.

Life may be too short and brief and we certainly would like a bit more of it. But would we prefer an infinity of the very same thing all over again? I would not!

I will begin my response by mentioning two points on which Peter and I agree:

a. If life is to have meaning, that meaning must be objective. I have explained this in detail in earlier posts.

b. So-called 'abstract entities' are not subject to real change, whether existential change or alterational change. The number 2, for example, did not come into existence, will not pass out of existence, and does not alter with respect to any of its intrinsic properties. No doubt it gains and loses such properties as the property of being thought of by BV, but such properties are not intrinsic but relational.

Now for some disagreements and/or requests for clarification:

1. Although God and the soul are ideas that naturally 'go together,' they are logically distinct, contra what Peter suggests in his first paragraph. McTaggart, for example, was an atheist who nevertheless argued for the immortality of the soul. And one can be a theist without accepting any sort of personal immortality.

2. Is the soul "something in each of us" as Peter says, or is the soul each of us? There are two main views which we could label 'Platonic-Cartesian' and 'Aristotelian-Thomistic.' On the first view, I am a soul, while on the second I am a composite one component of which is a soul. On the second view, then, the soul is a power or principle by means of which certain substances think or perceive, rather than being a substance which thinks or perceives.

3. Let's avoid Peter's word 'infinity' and use instead 'immutability,' which I believe better captures what he has in mind. Abstract objects such as numbers and Bolzanian-Fregean propositions are immutable or imperishable. Concrete things like tables and rocks and animals, by contrast, are subject to change, both existential and alterational. But I wouldn't say they are in "constant flux." For example, am I in constant flux? It depends exactly on what is meant by 'constant flux.' If it implies that I am continuously changing in every respect, then it is false: the number of my teeth is not continuously changing since I have had the same number of teeth for a long time now.

4. Technicalities aside, it is clear that abstract objects are immutable and the standard examples of concrete objects are not. This is because abstracta are causally inert while concreta are causally active/passive. But what about the soul? is it abstract or concrete? Peter is suggesting that the soul is an abstract entity: "It is therefore akin to the number two, which remains forever like it forever has been." Now if the soul is an abstract entity IN us, then it would be quite irrelevant to the question of life's meaning or purpose. If the soul were something inert and unchanging that could not think or feel, then to posit such a thing would be pointless.

5. But no defender of the soul from Plato to Augustine to Descartes to Moses Mendelsohn to Bernhard Bolzano to Roderick Chisholm has ever maintained anything so absurd as that the soul is an abstract object like the number 2. On the Platonic-Cartesian approach, the soul is precisely a thinking and feeling thing, a res cogitans in Descartes' phrase. Though immaterial, it is concrete, not abstract. It is subject to alterational change in that it is in different mental states at different times.

6. In sum, Peter has set up a straw man to knock over. If personal survival of bodily death is a necessary condition of life's having an objective meaning, then that which survives, the soul or person, is concrete and mutable: whether or not it is subject to existential change, it must be subject to alterational change.

What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realises himself in realising a type of humanity . . . . In this sense you may say, if you like, that every one of us makes the absolute by breathing, by eating, by sleeping or by behaving in any fashion whatsoever. There is no difference between free being – being as self-committal, as existence choosing its essence – and absolute being. And there is no difference whatever between being as an absolute, temporarily localised that is, localised in history – and universally intelligible being. ("Existentialism is a Humanism, Kaufmann anthology, p. 363, emphasis added)

The bolded portion is striking but puzzling. What does it mean? We can compress it into two main claims:

1. Free being is absolute being

and

2. Absolute being is universally intelligible being.

Every philosopher has his absolute, and Sartre's absolute is the individual subject whose mode of being is l’être pour-soi, being for-itself as opposed to l’être en-soi, being in-itself. As a subject for whom there is a world of objects, I am a case of being-for-itself and as such am entirely free. The freedom resides in the consciousness-of objects, objects that I am not. But I am also an object in the world. As such, I partake of the en-soi, the in-itself. Borrowing some terminology from Being and Nothingness, we can say that an individual human being is a compound of transcendence and facticity.

As a case of the pour-soi, I am ever beyond myself, ever transcending myself. As subject, I am not myself as object. For example, my body with all its current properties is part of my facticity. But I am not my body precisely insofar as I am aware of it. It is one of my objects. I 'surpass' it toward certain possibilities that lie in the future, e.g. the possibility of weighing less or having stronger abdominal muscles.

In a famous paradoxical formulation from Being and Nothingness, "The for-itself is what it is not and is not what it is." For example, I am my body but I am not my body insofar as I am aware of my body, insofar as my body is an object for me as subject. Or I lose myself in a certain project, seemingly becoming one with it, though I know I am not that project inasmuch as I freely chose it.

Man realizes himself by his choices. He freely commits himself to this or that project and in so doing freely makes his life. He is bound by no objective constraint, not by a pre-given human nature or an Aristotelean proper function (ergon), not by objective values, and not by divine commands. Not determined by any exogenic factor, he is self-determining. That he exists at all is a contingent fact; but what he makes of himself is entirely up to him. His free being-for-self is absolute being. And this free absolute being is "universally intelligible being." Perhaps this can be glossed by saying that, for Sartre, all intelligibility has its source in man, and man alone is intrinsically intelligible. Nothing apart from man in intrinsically intelligible. A rock or a tree is intelligible only derivatively, only as material for the for-itself's projects.

Each man, then, is a sort of contingent god. Although there is no "universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition." (362) Each is on the condition f being a 'thrown project,' ein geworfenes Entwurf in Heideggerian jargon. Our choices are free, but we must choose. Not to choose is to choose, and we cannot not choose. We are "condemned to be free."

Critique. For Sartre, man makes himself. His dignity resides in his free subjectivity, and there is nothing that can guide or objectively constrain his free choices. If he attempts to rely on anything ab extra that is objectively constraining, he falls into bad faith: he enters into a form of self-deception that consists in not facing up to his radical freedom. His existence cannot have any objective meaning or purpose. An objective purpose is inconsistent with radical freedom. Neither God nor nature can 'assign' him a purpose for he is not an artifact of God, nor is he as free subjectivity a product of nature. Man as subject, as 'upsurge' of the for-itself, is uncreated and undetermined. Refusing to own up to this involves one in bad faith. If man is to have a purpose he must assign it to himself.

A. One problem, though, is that one cannot give the very fact that one exists in the first place a purpose. A healthy, well-situated adult can assign purpose to his waking life, but that he exists at all is not within the scope of his 'purposing.' I can no more 'purpose' my existence as a whole than I can cause my existence as a whole. I can do various things to maintain my existence. But I couldn't do these things if I didn't already (both logically and temporally) exist. The same goes for 'purposing': I cannot give my existence as a whole a purpose. I remain on Sartre's scheme a fundamentally purposeless purpose-positer. I cannot 'retroactively' give my life as a whole a purpose. At best I can give my lucid hours a purpose, albeit a merely subjective one. I cannot 'recuperate' my entire existence from purposelessness by assigning myself tasks in the present. For example, if I just now 'wake up' in authenticity to my radical freedom and assume the burden of making myself, this does nothing to rescue my past, all the way back to infancy, from purposelessness.

Thus my Sartrean making of myself presupposes a substratum of facticity that is beyond the scope of my making. And if there is no God, then it is beyond the scope of any divine making as well. Thus the substratum and presupposition of my meaning-giving activities is itself meaningless, purposeless, absurd. Sartre might say that this is just the way things are. But it does not seem quite satisfying, does it? What good is it to say that we give our lives meaning if we cannot give the substratum of our meaning-giving activities meaning? At most, we give our lucid hourse meaning. But the vast backdrop of our lucidity is darkness and absurdity.

B. A second problem concerns whether the central organizing purpose I choose is worthwhile. Whatever one chooses is open to doubt, and will be doubted by many. The choices I make are merely my choices and there is nothing to validate them objectively. We invent values and in so doing we invent the sense of our lives. We are creative like artists. (364) Aware of this, I must admit in all honesty that none of my choices can lay claim to being objectively worthwhile. Uncomfortable with this upshot, Sartre says repeatedly (e.g. 350) that when one chooses for oneself one chooses for all men. But he never, as far as I can see, gives any justification for the leap from oneself to all. He remains stuck in value subjectivism.

But much will depend on how God is conceived.

One can easily imagine forms of theism that exacerbate the apparent absurdity of life. If the Absurd consists, as Albert Camus maintained in The Myth of Sisyphus, in the world's refusal to satisfy our need to understand, then an irrational god, an arbitrary despot, a paradigm instance of willful omnipotence, would make things even more absurd. Suppose there is a god who guarantees our survival of bodily death, but he is the god of some but not all. He plays favorites. If you are not one of the chosen few, he terminates you utterly at bodily death. Or worse, you survive, but only to be arbitrarily thrown into Hell. Or punishment is meted out, but it does not fit the crime: Hitler gets a short stay in Purgatory while Hefner is consigned to Hell. Wouldn't that be absurd?

How can the apparent absurdity of the Diesseits be alleviated by the postulation of a mechanism in the Jenseits that is equally absurd?

As I argued earlier, human life has meaning only if it has an objective purpose that is subjectively appropriable. But we should now add the requirement that the subjectively appropriable objective purpose be rational and rationally administered. It would be irrational were rewards and punishments parcelled out unfairly. It would be irrational were only some to have a shot at salvation.

"But the ways of God are not the ways of men!" If the ways of God are irrational by our lights, however, then theism has nothing to contribute to the solution of the problem of the meaning of human life. The problem of the meaning of life cannot be solved by postulating a being who acts in ways which, by our lights — and what other lights do we have to go by? — are meaningless, irrational, and indeed evil.

Here below, reason is scandalized, not so much by the fact of evil, but by its abysmal depths and irrational distribution: the good often suffer and the wicked prosper. Outstanding specimens are cut down in their prime while mediocrities enjoy long life. Virtue and happiness are not properly adjusted one to the other. In such a world, one is often beset by the sense that the whole thing is insane, a bloody and cruel joke:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5)

Although this passage alludes more to the brevity and vanity of life as a ground of its meaninglessness than to its unfairness and irrationality as such a ground, it points us to the truth that human life cannot be meaningful unless it makes rational sense.

I conclude that it is not enough to situate life here below in the context of God and the soul in order to secure its sense. If the irrationality here is duplicated yonder, then absurdity is not alleviated but magnified.

A. How do existential and linguistic meaning differ? One difference, noted by Kurt Baier (Problems of Life and Death, Prometheus 1997, p. 48 f.) is that it is clear that words and sentences have meaning even when it is not clear what meaning they have. But it is not clear that life has meaning. In both cases, 'What is the meaning?' presupposes that there is meaning. But in the case of human life it is not clear that this presupposition is satisfied. Compare:

1. No word or sentence has meaning

with

2. No human life has meaning.

(1) is preposterous and indeed incoherent: if (1) were true, then (1) would be meaningless and hence neither true nor false. But (2) can be maintained with some show of plausibility. This is so even if we reject the positivist stricture against existential meaning. Suppose there is no categorial bar to a life's possessing meaning, in the way there is a categorial bar to a thought's having volume. Suppose, that is, that a human life (categorially) could have a meaning. It still might be the case that no human life does have a meaning.

The point, then, is that while the question 'What is the meaning?' presupposes that there is a meaning both in the linguistic and the existential cases, the presupposition is self-evidently satisfied only in the linguistic case. One should infer from this that existential meaning is not a form of linguistic meaning. "But that's obvious!" Really? To cop a line from Hilary Putnam, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

B. Although existential meaning is not a species of linguistic meaning, it is worth exploring whether a life could be a vehicle of linguistic meaning. Suppose a misspent youth issues in a man's life-long incarceration. One might say of such a man, 'His life shows that crime does not pay.' This is a bit of evidence for the thesis that a life can have lingusitic meaning: the life can be reasonably taken to express the proposition that crime does not pay. And since it is clear that gestures and looks have linguistic meaning, it is not too much of a stretch to suppose than an entire life could be a vehicle of linguistic meaning.

Meaningful looks: there is the look that says 'I don't believe a word you are saying.' I've even had students who gave me a look that bespoke a conjunctive proposition: I don't believe what you are saying & you don't believe it either. So if looks and gestures can carry linguistic meaning, then perhaps lives can as well.

But even if this so, it gives no aid and comfort to the notion that existential meaning is a type of linguistic meaning. For the connection between a vehicle of linguistic meaning and the meaning conveyed is based on convention. But the meaning of my life, if it has a meaning, is not based on convention.

I believe we can safely put paid to the notion that existential meaning is assimilable to linguistic meaning.

A tool made for a specific purpose is an example of something that has a purely objective purpose. For example, the Phillips heads screwdriver, named after Henry F. Phillips, has the specific purpose of driving crosshead screws. It was designed for just that job. Such a tool has an objective purpose which derives from the plans and intentions of human artificers. To invert the famous formula of Jean-Paul Sarte's manifesto, "Existentialism is a Humanism," its essence precedes its existence. Artifacts like screwdrivers are produced according to a plan or design that is logically antecedent to their production.

But the purpose of a screwdriver is not only objective, it is also purely objective in that there is no possibility of a screwdriver's subjectively appropriating its objective purpose. And this for the simple reason that no screwdriver is a subject of experience. No inanimate artifact can discern, let alone freely and consciously accept or reject, its purpose. It makes no sense to speak of a screwdriver existentially realizing, or subjectively appropriating, or living, its purpose. The purpose a screwdriver HAS, it cannot BE.

2. With us it is different. We may or may not have an objective purpose, but if we have one, it must be a purpose that can be made our purpose. But it is best to speak in the first-person. A purpose that I cannot make my purpose is of no consequence to me. Such a meaning or purpose would be meaningless to me.

I put this by saying that an objective purpose, if there is one, must be subjectively appropriable. To appropriate a thing is to make it one's own, to take possession of it. But this is not to be taken in a crass material sense. To subjectively appropriate an objective purpose is to existentially realize it, to realize or embody it in one's Existenz (you should recall Heidegger and Jaspers to savor the full flavor of what I have in mind). This is obviously consistent with the purpose's remaining objective. It is a bit like realizing an ideal. If a couple realizes the ideal marriage, the ideal does not cease being ideal in being realized. Or if you do what you ought to do, your doing it, which is a translation into fact, does not obliterate the distinction between facts and norms.

What do I mean by 'objective'? I mean that the purpose is (i) exogenous and (ii) available to all, the same for all. But to avoid triviality, a codicil must be appended: the objective purpose cannot be a vacuously general meta-purpose. It cannot be something like: the purpose of life is to do whatever you want to do and can do within the limits of your situation. That would apply to everyone but in a vacuous way that would allow the purpose of life for one person to consist in exterminating Jews, for another in collecting beer cans, for a third in medical research, etc. To put it somewhat vaguely, an objective purpose must impose first-level constraints on our behavior.

3. But why must an objective purpose be available to all persons? Why can't it be available only to some and still be objective? Why couldn't some be excluded from the meaning of life, 'predestined' as it were to be left in the cold? I would say that it is built into the very notion of an objective purpose that it be universally available. If it were not, it would not be an objective purpose.

But what I just wrote is perhaps too stipulative to be satisfactory. I need to do better. Let's try this. One source of a sense of life's absurdity is the observation that suffering is irrationally distributed. An observation as old as Ecclesiastes is that the wicked often prosper and the just suffer. Happiness and virtue are not properly adjusted one to the other in this life. Reason is scandalized, not by the mere fact of suffering, but by its intensity and unfair distribution. Now if life has an objective meaning or purpose, then this meaning or purpose must be rational. This strikes me as a near-tautology: life cannot make objective sense unless it makes sense, i.e., is rational, understandable, intelligible. And if the objective meaning or purpose of life is rational, then no person can be arbitrarily excluded from partaking of it. For that would be a form of evil, would it not?

On a theistic scheme, the objective purpose of life might be to participate in the divine life. Now if God were arbitrarily to exclude some from participating in it, for no reason, but just as a display of power, that would make no sense. It would be irrational, and indeed evil. But then would it not be obvious that the meaning of life would not be guaranteed on such a theistic scheme?

If God is an arbitrary despot, then God is a threat to life's having an objective meaning. A theism of divine despotism is a higher-order absurdity: both life here below and life beyond would be absurd on such a theism.

So I cannot see how life could have an objective purpose if that pupose is not available to all. It is perhaps not unnecessary to point out that not all will avail themselves of the available.

2. 'Human life' is ambiguous. We could mean a particular zoological species, Homo sapiens, or we could mean all or some human persons. This post will attempt to draw this distinction as sharply as possible. By my lights, when we ask about the meaning of human life, we are NOT asking about the meaning or purpose of a particular zoological species. Consider two possible cases that point up the ambiguity.

CASE 1. It is possible that the human species have a purpose, but no specimen thereof have a purpose. Suppose the purpose of the human species is to serve as a transition to a superior race of beings. Alternatively, one could suppose that the purpose of the human species is to serve as food for a race of superintelligent extraterrestial carnivores who interfered with evolution on earth for the precise purpose of breeding such tasty critters as us. The human species would on either supposition have a purpose (goal, end, meaning). But the species' having a purpose would be consistent with no particular human life having a purpose. For no particular life is necessary for the species to exist. This is easy to see diachronically: the human species has existed for many a century, but none of the present members of the species are identical to any 18th century members. A species can survive total replacement of its members over time. A species cannot exist without one or more members, but it is not dependent for its existence on any particular members. (Nothing I have said assumes the immutability of species.)

Since no specimen of a species is necessary for the species to exist and fulfill its purpose, if any, it is possible that the species have a purpose but some of its specimens lack a purpose. If a species has a purpose, it does not follow that the specimens have a purpose. To think otherwise is to commit the Fallacy of Division. For example, if the ultimate purpose of human animals is for their flesh to end up in an extraterrestrial delicatessen, this could be the case even if no presently existing human animal shares in this purpose.

CASE 2. It is possible that some or all particular human lives have a meaning, but that the human species have no meaning. Suppose each human is able to give his life a meaning. It would not follow that the collection of human beings has a meanng. To think otherwise would be to commit the Fallacy of Composition.

What these two possible cases show is that we must distinguish the question of the meaning of the human species from the question of the meaning of individual human lives. Furthermore, it is the latter question that is what we are asking or should be asking when we ask about the meaning of life. It is a question which arises within the subjectivity of the individual. It is not a question about a collectivity or about man as object.

'What is the meaning of life' is at least doubly complex. For it presupposes that (i) life is the sort of thing that could have a meaning, and that (ii) there is one meaning that is the meaning. The first presupposition is denied by those positivist stalwarts, luckily now rare, who maintain that all meaning is linguistic meaning, denying thereby that there is what we can call existential meaning. Their idea, roughly, is that it is a Rylean category mistake to ask about the meaning of life or lack theoreof because life is categorially disbarred from either having or lacking meaning in the way thoughts are categorially disbarred from either having or lacking volume. The second presupposition is rejected by those who deny the uniqueness of existential meaning, among them, subjectivists who maintain that the meaning of life is whatever the agent bestows upon it, a view which implies that there is no unique meaning of life.

On second thought, however, our question is trebly complex since there is a difference between life's being categorially fit to have a meaning and life's actually having a meaning. Suppose life has a meaning only if individuals give it a meaning, but that none do. On this subjectivist supposition, life is possibly such as to have a meaning -- there is no category mistake involved -- but as a matter of fact it has no meaning.

Our initial question -- What is the meaning of human life? -- thus divides as follows where the order is from the logically prior to the logically posterior:

1. Is human life the sort of thing that could have a meaning?

If the answer to (1) is negative, then we are done. If affirmative, we proceed to

2. Does human life actually have one or more meanings?

If we return 'yes' to (2) we advance to (3):

3. Does human life has a unique meaning, one that is the same for all?

If (3) is answered in the affirmative, we then move to (4):

4. What is human life's unique meaning?

Zev is questioning clause (ii). What does this clause say? To appropriate is to make one's own. To subjectively appropriate a purpose, then, is to make it one's own purpose, to adopt it freely and consciously and live it as an organizing and unifying principle of one's life. It is essential to realize that the question of the meaning (purpose) of human life arises within the subjectivity of the individual: it cannot be understood in a purely objective way. We are not asking about the purpose of a certain zoological species, or even of the purpose of a given specimen of this species viewed objectively, 'from outside.' The question, properly understood, is necessarily such that each must pose the question for himself using the first-person singular pronoun, and indeed using it indexically — for there are nonindexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun. The question is not: What is the purpose of the human species? Nor is it: What is the purpose of this specimen of the human species? The questions are: What is the purpose of my existence? Why am I here? and the like. The question must be posed from within one's life, and not directed at one's life from a third-person point of view. It is man as subject who asks the question, man as Dasein in Heidegger's lingo, not man as object.

But why must the objective purpose of human life — if it has one — be subjectively appropriable or available to all human beings? This is what Zev is asking. Now an objective purpose need not be one assigned by God. But theism is one way of fleshing out the notion of an exogenous purpose that is subjectively appropriable. Suppose the theistic purpose of life is to do the will of God so as eventually to enjoy what Aquinas called the visio beata, the Beatific Vision. Why couldn't God arbitrarily exclude some humans from this enjoyment?

Well he could — he has the power to do so — but if he did, then I would say that enjoyment of the Beatific Vision could not be the objective purpose of human life as such. For, according to (A) above, this purpose must be available to all. If God is an arbitrary despot who plays favorites, then the meaning of human life cannot be connected with doing the will of such a being. Rebellion against such a despotic deity would be a better candidate for the meaning of life.

But this prompts the question as to why we should accept (A) in the first place. Do I have an argument for it? It may be that (A) is too basic to be argued for. (I could give a circular argument, of course, but such arguments, though technically valid, are probatively worthless.) I am tempted to say that (A) is an analytic proposition: if we understand what we mean by 'objective purpose of human life' then by sheer analysis of this phrase we arrive at the result that such a meaning must be both exogenous and available to all.

For what we mean by 'human life' is human life in general, human life as such, not this or that particular human life. Of course, life is lived, existentially realized, only by individuals. As I said, we are not asking about human beings collectively. We are not asking about the purpose of the human race or the purpose of any subgroup, e.g. Caucasians or Asians. We are asking about the meaning of individual human existence as this meaning emerges from within human life in the first-person way. Nevertheless, we seek a general answer, an answer that applies to each human individual. If so, any purpose which is specified as the purpose of human life must be a purpose each human subject can realize. But 'can realize' does not entail 'will realize.'

If you balk at this, then I will say that (A) is essentially a stipulation: I am assigning a meaning to the phrase 'objective purpose of human life.' For we obviously need to know what we mean by this phrase if we are to advance to the substantive questions of whether there is an objective purpose, and what that purpose is. My stipulation obviously does not settle the question whether human life has an objective purpose. Indeed, one could argue that it does not, as follows:

1. If human life has an objective purpose, then this purpose is realizable by all.
2. The purpose is not realizable by all
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3. Human life does not have an objective purpose.

Zev writes that the divine purpose might be "historical rather than personal" and seems to be suggesting that if this were so, then God could exclude some persons from realization of the purpose of life without prejudice to there being an objective purpose of life. Zev will have to tell us what exactly he means by the historical/personal contrast. He might mean that there is a divinely ordered purpose to human history, but one that is no respecter of individuals. Accordingly, human life collectively — or perhaps only a certain tribe — has a purpose, but one that leaves some individuals out in the cold. (Abraham leads the chosen people to the promised land, but dies before he can enter. Or perhaps non-Jews are part of the divine plan but cannot partake of life's objective purpose in the way that animals are part of the divine plan on the Christian scheme, but cannot have a share in the divine life.) But as I construe the question about the meaning of human life, it is precisely about human individuals and not collectivities, as I tried to explain above.

1. Existence Precedes Essence. This is Sartre's central slogan. In the case of an artifact produced by an artisan for a definite purpose, essence precedes existence: the artificer works from a design-plan which is logically antecedent to the actual existence of the artifact. So the essence or nature of the thing to be produced — Sartre gives the example of a knife — precedes the existence of the thing produced. But man according to Sartre has no essence or nature prior to his existence. Having no nature, man has no Aristotelean proper function. So man qua man has no purpose; any purpose an individual human being has he has given to himself. In man, then, existence precedes essence. But why exactly? ". . . there is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it." (349) The argument seems to be:

There is no God
Essences or natures are divine concepts
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There is no human nature.

Another argument Sartre may have in mind is this:

Man has a nature only if man is a divine artifact
There is no God and hence no divine artifacts
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Man has no nature.

Neither argument is persuasive. As for the first, why must natures be divine concepts? As for the second, it is not clear why man must be a divine artifact to have a nature. (In Aristotle's system there are natures, but man is not a divine artifact.) Of course, if man is a divine artifact, then he has a nature. But what Sartre needs for the second argument to be sound is the converse of this proposition, namely, if man has a nature, then he is a divine artifact.

Perhaps one should not expect rigorous arguments from phenomenologists. I am not being sarcastic. Their approach to philosophy is descriptive rather than dialectical, or more the former than the latter. In the analytic 'camp' argument is often overrated even though anyone can see that argument, even tediously rigorous argument, has not gotten us very far. You cannot argue without premises and premises need grounding. Phenomenologists seek their grounding in the givennesses of ordinary experience. Zu den Sachen selbst! This, Husserl's battle cry, is in part a protest against philosophy that has lost touch with lived experience, as a good portion of analytic philosophy has. Think of all the rubbish that has been published under the rubric 'eliminative materialism.' This stuff is a prime example of how philosophy goes off the rails when it loses contact with what anyone can verify for himself in his lived experience, for example, that he has beliefs and desires. (If you think I'm just gassing off, read Eliminative Materialism Defined and the posts chained to it.)

How does an existentialist like Sartre see our predicament? We find ourselves 'abandoned' in the world, 'thrown' into it. This is Heidegger's famous Geworfenheit. Our ultimate Whence and Whither are shrouded in darkness. (After the First World War, the traditional assurances about the Whence, Whither, and Wherefore struck the leading thinkers of Heidegger's generation as hollow and unconvincing.) And yet we exist, but not in the manner of a thing with properties, but in the manner of a project. Man as 'thrown project,' geworfenes Entwurf in Heidegger's lingo. "Man is indeed a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus, or a cauliflower." (349)

To appreciate what Sartre is saying, you must appreciate that he is referring to man as subject, man as a conscious and self-conscious being, not man as member of a zoological species. A good Cartesian, Sartre philosophizes from the first-person point of view. He is right to do so, because if you try to understand human reality in wholly objective, third-personal, terms, you will fail. You will fail because you will have left out the Main Thing: subjectivity.

Since Heidegger was a key influence on Sartre, we can put the point in Heideggerian jargon by saying that Sartre is talking about man as Dasein, not man as present-at-hand (vorhandenes) organism in nature. Sartre is saying that man as subject has no pre-defined nature or cookie-cutter essence, that he is 'nothing' until he makes himself something by his choices. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism." (349)

2. Towards an Evaluation. There is something to this, of course, quite a lot in fact. I experience myself as free to choose this or that. What I am not free to do is not choose. (363) Not to choose is to choose. Trying to evade hard choices and their consequences, I end up choosing evasion. If I drink myself blotto to avoid commitment, I freely choose to do so. Ditto if I lose myself in mundane distractions. There is no evasion of freedom. I do not succeeed in 'going on automatic pilot' as it were, even though there are times when I would like to. I cannot transform myself into a deterministic system short of blowing my brains out. I cannot avoid the "anguish" of having to choose and take responsibility for my choices. (This Sartrean anguish has in its lineage Heidegger's Angst and Kierkegaard's dread.) The anguish stems from my freedom, but also from the nonexistence of any exogenous guides to action.

For Sartre, there is no God and no substitute for God; thus no objective values "inscribed in an intelligible heaven," in a Platonic topos ouranos. Sartre appears to subscribe to the Heideggerian notion that the axiology of the late 19th and early 20th century is a sort of stop-gap measure that results when one fails to draw all the consequences of God's nonexistence. Values are, to put it in the Gallic manner, a sort of ineffectual band-aid placed over the gaping wound which is the death of God. The existentialist, Sartre tells us,

. . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that 'the good' exists, that one must be honest or not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Doestoevsky once wrote, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or without himself. He discovers forthwith that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism — man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man in condemned to be free. Condemned because he be cause he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything that he does. (353)

Part of what our man is saying here is that human beings do not have a nature that prescribes a set of norms for their behavior in the manner of an Aristotelian proper function or ergon. (For Aristotle, man has by nature a specific function which prescribes how he ought to behave if he is achieve his potential and achieve eudaimonia.) Nor can we derive norms from divine commands since there are no divine commands. And even if there were divine commands, one could never know (i) whether it was God or an ambassador of God who was commanding (as opposed to a malevolent entity) and (ii) whether the addressee of the command was indeed oneself as opposed to some other person. (Abraham to God: You talking to me?? Cf. 351)

Objective values cannot provide guidance either since they cannot 'float free' in ideal space but must be anchored in an intellect, and only the divine intellect is capacious enough for such anchorage — an intellect which doesn't exist. We are thus without objective guidance. We cannot justify our behavior by appeal to anything exogenous such as the will of God. Thus we are thrown back upon ourselves as the only source of moral justification.

What is curious, though, is that Sartre conflates having a justification with making an excuse. He thinks there is something shabby about justifying one's moral choices by appeal to exogenous factors. We are told that everthing is permitted and man is without excuse. But surely if I justify my behavior by appeal to some objective factor, that is not the same as making an excuse, or failing to take responsibility. For example, suppose I am in a situation in which I am tempted to behave cruelly but instead act with kindness and forebearance. And suppose that, in explanation and justification of my behavior, I claim to intuit that kindness is a value and that cruelty is a disvalue. That is, I lay claim to a sort of moral perception whereby I 'see' by a visio intellectualis that kindness is an objective value, cruelty an objective disvalue, and thus that these types of behavior are objectively not morally neutral, and thus that it is not the case that "everything is permitted." Sartre's idea is that in a situation like this I am 'in flight' from a full recognition of my (abysmal) freedom, that I am submitting to a sort of determinism — the determinism involved in the perception, the passive reception, of something external to my consciousness — and that I am insofar forth deceiving myself by failing to own up fully to my responsibility as value-creator and am to that extent in self-deception.

The problem with all this is that Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.

Note also there there is no man, there are only men. God is one, but man is many. So Sartre's deification of man amounts to a deification of men: each is a god unto himself. This leads to a radical subjectivism about value contrary to Sartre's intentions: he wants values to be intersubjectively valid. Thus he wants somethign impossible. He wants the source of all values to be human subjectivity, which is in each case an individual's subejctivity; but he also wants these values to be intersubjective.

I will develop this line of critique in the next post in this series.

2. The subjectivist theory is identitarian as opposed to eliminativist. The claim is not that there is no meaning, which would amount to nihilism, but that there is meaning but it is subjective by its very nature: objective meaning is incoherent. Thus E. D. Klemke speaks of being "free to forge my own meaning." (The Meaning of Life, 1st ed., p. 172) Klemke tells us that he finds his meaning in "knowledge, art, love, and work." (173) These are the things he values, but on his theory it is only his subjective acts of valuation that posit these things as valuable. Someone who valued ignorance, hatred, and sloth would not be evaluating incorrectly on Klemke's subjectivist theory but just differently. I would say that Klemke values the right things, but he couldn't agree with me, at least not without qualification. For by my lights, knowledge, art, love, and work are objectively valuable, valuable in themselves; this Klemke would have to deny. He would have to say something like: they are valuable, but only for me or those like me.

3. The subjectivist view of existential meaning strikes me as deeply incoherent. If the activities of my life have only the meaning that I give them, then this would have to hold also for the acts of meaning-bestowal whereby certain goals and activities become meaningful for me. Suppose knowledge is the central value from which depends the meaning of my life. On the subjectivist theory, the value and meaning of knowledge-acquisition derives from a subjective process of meaning-bestowal. This process, which is integral to my life, must be meaningful if my life is to be meaningful. But the process of meaning-bestowal cannot be intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory: nothing is intrinsically meaningful on the subjectivist theory. So I must be the source of the meaning of my acts of meaning-bestowal if these acts are to have meaning. And this seems to lead to an infinite vicious regress. Suppose we spell this out.

Let A be an act of meaning-bestowal, M a meaning bestowed, and O an object on which meaning is bestowed. A is either meaningful, meaningless, or neither. Those are the only three possibilities.

If A is meaningful, and no meaning is intrinsic as per the subjectivist theory, then A can acquire meaning only if I freely bestow meaning on A by means of a distinct act of meaning-bestowal A*. Now if A* is meaningful, then its meaning must derive from a third act of meaning-bestowal A**. And so on into an infinite regress. The regress is vicious because every A is in need of a meaning that it cannot itself provide.

If A is meaningless, then the life of which A is a part is meaningless. For if a life is meaningful due to acts of meaning-bestowal, and these latter are meaningless, then the life as a whole is meaningless. Consider a person who organizes his life around the central goal of the alleviation of animal suffering. On subjectivism, this goal is worthwhile, not intrinsically, but only in relation to a a free decision on the part of the agent to give it meaning and value. But if this free donation of meaning and value is itself meaningless, then it is difficult to see how the person's life can be said to be meaningful. A meaningful life, one wants to protest, is one in response to objective values, where one's responding is itself an objective value. But the objectivity of value is precisely what the subjectivist will not countenance.

Could it be said that the acts of meaning-bestowal are themselves neither meaningful nor meaningless inasmuch as they are at the foundation of all existential meaning? Accordingly, when Klemke projects value upon knowledge, art, work, and love, the various acts of projecting are neither meaningful nor meaningless. But these acts of meaning-projection are integral to a life as meaningful. It is difficult to see how they could fail to be meaningful if the life of which they are parts is meaningful.

4. In nuce, the subjectivist appears to be astride the horns of a dilemma. Either the acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningful or they are meaningless. If the former, then a vicious infinite regress ensues. If the latter, then the life of which they are essential parts is meaningless.

5. Note that the objectivist avoids the above difficulties. Suppose I organize my life around the pursuit of knowledge. If the value of knowledge is objective, then this value does not depend on any value-positing acts of mine. My response to the value, my subjective apropriation thereof, is meaningful as a response to what is intrinsically worthy of pursuit. A value-response, as opposed to a value-positing, does not engender an infinite regress. A value-response is objectively valuable as the response to an objective value. But if values are subjective posits, then the value of the positing is a problem.

All of these things and a few others, but above all: the wisdom to be satisfied with what one has. In particular, no hankering after more material stuff; no lusting after a bigger house, a newer car, a bigger pile of the lean green.

So much for middle-sized happiness. It falls short of true happiness for various reasons one of which is that one cannot be truly happy in the knowledge that many if not most will never have even the possibility of attaining middle-sized happiness.

Another reason meso-eudaimonia is not true happiness is that it it under permanent threat by impermanence, which argues the unreality of everything finite, as noted in an earlier meditation. But middle-sized happiness has an irrefragable advantage over true happiness: it is certain for those who have attained it for as long as they abide in it. And when it is over, there are the memories, and the knowledge that nothing that happens can change what was, which fact confers upon what was a modality the Medievals called necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. True happiness, however, the happy life St Augustine speaks of, is uncertain and for all we know chimerical. You can believe in it, of course; but I for one am not satisfied with mere belief: I want to know.

Perhaps it is like this: one day you die and become nothing for ever. Anyone who claims to know with certainty that death is annihilation is most assuredly a fool. But it still might be the case that the death of the individual is the utter destruction of the individual.

Well, suppose that is the case: you die, you are utterly dead, and that's it. All of that struggling and striving and caring and contending and loving and despairing come to nothing. You and all your works end up dust in the wind. Your fall-back position is this meso-eudaimonia I have been scribbling about. You have it in your possession; it is here free and clear and certain while it lasts. Part of it is the rational hope that there is some sort of completion unto true happiness if not here below (which is arguably impossible), then yonder. A hope exists whether or not its intentum is realized. So, immanently speaking, you have the benefit of hoping whether or not the goal is ever attained.

But take away the hope, and then what do you have? If you believe that it is all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, then you ought to find life more difficult to construe as meaningful. Indeed, if you really believe this, can you live it without flinching, without evasion?

It is a curious predicament we are in. If you believe in this Completion of the fleeting present whether in a temporal eschaton or in eternity, and the Completion doesn't exist, then in a sense you are being played for a fool. If, on the other hand, you believe both that life is a tale told by an idiot, etc., and that it is nonethless meaningful, then you are also being played for a fool: you are playing yourself for a fool.

In the immortal words of Brenda Lee, "Am I fool number one, or am I fool number two?"

The refutation of this lowering of one's spiritual sights and acquiescence in middle-sized happiness is death and impermanence. Impermanence argues unreality. It did so for Plato, and rather more recently it did so for Nietzsche the anti-Plato in a backhanded way. What is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same if not a mad attempt at wringing eternity from flux by one who was "grieved by the transitoriness of things" as he put it in a letter to Franz Overbeck? All metaphysicians, East and West, feel the unreality of the impermanent. That's what makes them metaphysicians. If wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, as Plato said in the Theaetetus, the sense of the unreality of the impermanent is the feeling of the metaphysician.

What is impermanent (anicca) is unreal (anatta) and thus also unsatisfactory (dukkha). To lose oneself in the ultimately unsatisfactory can strike the metaphysician as horrifying. Death, as signalling radical and irreversible change, is the muse of philosophy. What Jack London in John Barleycorn called "The Noseless One" refutes myopic worldliness.

To one on his deathbed, this fleeting life, about to vanish, must appear empty and worthless, much ado about nothing, a vain struggling and jockeying for position in a parade going nowhere. But the possiblity of death is here right now for all of us, and this metaphysical insecurity demonstrates the impossibility of myopic world-immersion for one who sees clearly. One cannot be satisfied by a merely mundane meaning. Whether or not life has an ultimate meaning, one cannot live meaningfully except in quest of it.

You say you are capo di tutti capi in the actual world in respect of such-and-such? That may be so, but for how long? It is quite easy to be flying high in April, but shot down in May. And what about all the other possible worlds in which you exist, not to mention the ones in which you do not exist? To really be the best in respect of F-ness you would have to be maximally F (assuming F-ness admits of degrees) in every possible world. You would have to necessarily F (F is every possible world) and not just essentially F (F is in every possible world in which you exist). But to be really the best it is not enough to be the best in respect of one attribute; you would have to be necessarily F for all values of 'F.' But you wouldn't want to be the best in respect of slovenliness or stupidity, so it looks as if being the best entails being the ens reallisimum. But the competition for that job is stiff indeed.

A little thought along these lines should convince one that the project of besting others is doomed from the start. In the end we are all going to lose at the comparison game, the game of "competitive finite selfhood," to borrow a fine phrase from a fine book by A. E. Taylor. So why not try to be oneself? It is impossible to be the best, but the actualization of one's individuality is within the realm of possibility. Not easy, given the toxic state of contemporary society, but possible.

Collateral reading: Kierkegaard, Royce.

Thus his life acquired point and purpose. Would that he could have found a purpose doing something positive from the start. Sobriety, fiscal responsibility, lack of obesity -- these should be 'default settings' of a human life, starting points, not goals.

It strikes me as decidedly suboptimal to start life as a screw-up and then spend the rest of your life unscrewing yourself. There is something pathetic about people whose whole quest in life is to lose weight, get rid of credit card debt, and learn to get along with other people.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a) where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by our very own William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility.

If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility. How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the univere is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions:

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one. And I am sure Mangan doesn’t in general either, as witness his thoughts on Brahms.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, especially in matters political, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources of the other’s view. That may lead to toleration, which is good within limits. (Radical Islamists and others who do not respect the principle of toleration must not be tolerated, but opposed and in some instances killed.)

Apart from the pleasures of civil discussion, and the understanding of self and other that it often engenders, there is the solitary pleasure of inquiry which is undoubtedly the highest of pleasures as Aristotle recognized. For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.

If death is the utter annihilation of the individual person, then life is ultimately senseless and ultimately hopeless. This cannot be evaded by saying that one's life can acquire meaning if it is placed in the service of the lives of others. For their lives too (and the lives of their progeny and their progeny's progeny ad indefinitum) are, on the annihilationist assumption, ultimately senseless and hopeless. Human life is in every case the life of an individual; so even if human beings existed at all times, that would do nothing to insure ultimate meaningfulness.

Of course, there are proximate meanings, hopes, and purposes even if ultimately it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." One can lose oneself in them. But to do so involves self-deception: one has to mistake the proximate for the ultimate. One has to burden fleeting concerns with a meaning they cannot bear. One has to fool oneself.

For example, one has to fool oneself that writing a book, starting a company, founding a family are all ultimately meaningful when the only way they could have any ultimate meaning is if they were part of a life that had a direction that wasn't about to be cut short in a few years.

To put it bluntly, we have no future if naturalism is true. But we cannot live without meaning. An existential trilemma looms. Either we cultivate self-deception by ascribing to fleeting concerns ultimate meaning, or we recognize their transiency and ultimate meaninglessness when considered in and of themselves and put our faith and hope in a transcendent meaning, or, avoiding both self-deception and the life of faith, we embrace nihilism.

Now I don't expect any naturalist to accept what I just said. I will be told that it is a false trilemma. There is a fourth way: one can live in and for the finite without self-deception. That will perhaps be followed by the claim that one who looks to the infinite is more justly accused of self-deception.

The four paths can be given names: the way of Nietzsche's Last Man; the way of Faith; the way of Nihilism; the way of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

It is no easy task to decide among them. But decide we must.

Filed under: Against Naturalism, Meaning of Human Existence