Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide
There is a new volume out from Wiley Blackwell entitled: Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide edited by Joshua Seachris. The volume contains many of the classic essays from philosophers on the subject, most of which I have summarized in my recent book: The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives
Seachris begins by contrasting the passion with which a continental thinker like Camus approaches the question with the skepticism about the question expressed by an analytic philosopher like Russell. He wonders which approach is more appropriate. Furthermore, he contrasts the importance that most people give to the question with the disdain in which it is held by many professional philosophers is striking. However, he notes that some analytic philosophers are now less suspicious of the question.
Seachris further contrasts the cosmic dimension of the question, the search for a deep universal narrative to render our lives intelligible, with the local or individual dimension, which refers to the search for a good or valuable way of living. Most philosophers argue, as I did in my book, that these questions are related but exactly how is debatable. (In The Meaning of Life, I put these two issues together like this: “what does our individual life mean in the context of all actual, possible, and conceivable things taken in their totality?”) Seachris states that most of the essays in the volume are concerned with the individual dimension; thus issues of ethics, aesthetics, and happiness will be relevant.
Questions of meaning arise because humans can step outside themselves and ask questions like: “Who are we?” Why are we here?” “Does reality care about us?” In short, we can see our lives from an eternal, yet seemingly trivial, perspective. The question is born out of both existential angst and philosophical wondering about the nature of the cosmos and how best to live in it. But the question has taken on a new urgency in the Western world with the decline of the influence of the religious worldview, and the arrival of the modern scientific one. As religions lost cultural respectability, so too did the worldviews that accompanied them. In response to this loss, we are left with a question that torments existentialists like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, while the analytical philosophers simply try to clarify, understand, or assess the very meaningfulness of the question. Philosophers have made some progress in clarifying the question, especially by viewing it, not as one question, but as an amalgamation of many questions: “Why does anything exist?” “What’s it all about?” or “What makes life purposeful, valuable, worthwhile or significant?”
Most of the rest of this introduction covers the same territory that my book did, especially in setting up the supernatural, nihilistic, and naturalistic alternatives as possible answers. The author does note that work needs to be done in order to: 1) understand the extent to which death makes life futile; 2) clarify the relationship between the meaningful and the moral, aesthetic, and eudaimonistic; 3) determine the extent to which values can be part of the natural world; 4) satisfy our need to understand how evil can be related to meaning; and 5) investigate the question of whether something besides religious narratives can give life meaning. (I question whether religious narratives can justifiably do this.) But Seachris is correct—these are all issues that need work.
BRIEF REFLECTIONS
As long as the scientific worldview is incomplete—which it always is given its provisional nature—then a final answer to the meaning of life will never accompany the scientific worldview. Moreover, if humans have an innate need for a narrative, which I suspect they do, then humans desperately need new narratives to replace the less plausible religious ones. In my view, there are such narratives available, narratives of cosmic evolution leading to the realization of transhumanist dreams, accompanied by hope in a more meaningful future. And while these narratives lack the supposed eternal truth of religious narratives, they have the advantage of being much more likely to be true.
