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Meaning in Life and Self-Cultivation

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Notes

  1. Neil Levy, “Downshifting and Meaning in Life,” Ratio (new series) 18 (2005): 176-189.

  2. Lucas Scripter, “Ordinary Meaningful Lives,” International Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2018): 79-91. This builds on Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 205-207.

  3. For another argument that focuses on the meaning-generating superiority a type of activity—namely, “cultured leisure”—see Joe Mintoff, “Transcending Absurdity,” Ratio (new series) 21 (2008): 64-84.

  4. In this essay, I will not consider the broader issue of education in relation to questions of life’s meaning. On this topic see, for instance, John White, “Education and a Meaningful Life,” Oxford Review of Education 35 (2009): 423-435.

  5. Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), ch. 2. I will return to an explicit discussion of my view of self-cultivation in relation to Taylor’s view of selfhood later in this section.

  6. For another discussion of ‘drifting,’ one that emphasizes its incremental nature, see Edna Ullmann-Margalit, “Big decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 58 (2006): 169-170.

  7. Thanks to Thad Metz for encouraging me to clarify this point.

  8. For the distinction between ‘concepts’ and ‘conceptions’ see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 5-6. This distinction has recently been applied to other areas besides Rawls’s topic of justice. For an application to the question of meaning in life see Thaddeus Metz, “The Concept of Meaning,” American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001): 137-153; Metz, Meaning in Life, ch. 2; Antti Kauppinen, “Meaningfulness and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2012): 352-355.

  9. There may be an internal connection of ends pursued and means adopted. This is suggested by Samuel Fleishacker in his writing on ‘spiritual practices,’ a notion allied with but not identical to self-cultivation. See Samuel Fleischacker, “The Jewish Sabbath as a Spiritual Practice,” in Spirituality and the Good Life, ed. David McPherson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2017), 134-5.

  10. Agnes Callard, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 48.

  11. Ibid., 8.

  12. Ibid., 183.

  13. Ibid., 74. As she summarizes the difference between her usage of ‘aspiration’ and ‘self-cultivation’: “Aspirational pursuits combine the property of being large in scale with that of being directed at change in oneself. Self-cultivation overlaps with aspiration on the latter front: when we cultivate ourselves, we engage in a pursuit that is self-directed but small in scale. Because self-cultivation presupposes the priority of the earlier self, it cannot engender major changes…the self-cultivation model of self-creation underestimated the possibility for radical, rational self-transformation” (229).

  14. For instance, see Tu Weiming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 1998).

  15. Aside from a few brief mentions of religious devotion, the one substantial exception to this tendency is Callard’s opening discussion of Alcibiades’ aspiration toward “Socratism.” See her Aspiration, 14-31. On the idea of “spiritual exercises” see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Clark (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).

  16. Callard’s conception of ‘aspiration’ possess all three of the major features I’ve outlined for ‘self-cultivation’, but not all cases of my sense of ‘self-cultivation’ would count as ‘aspiration’ for Callard because my account remains neutral with respect to how such transformation occurs.

  17. I thus bracket Callard’s illuminating discussion of how such radical internal change is possible.

  18. Cf. Michael Slote, “Preface,” in Ethics and Self-Cultivation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Matthew Denis and Sander Werkhoven (London: Routledge, 2018), vii-x. Slote praises contributions to this volume for considering self-cultivation in a broad way that goes beyond moral self-cultivation. While I use the term ‘self-cultivation’ in a broad manner, I maintain that we must also mark an important distinction between two types of self-cultivation—namely, between varieties of the thick and thin sort. As we shall see, the different relationships these forms of self-cultivation have to meaning in life justifies this distinction.

  19. This is not to be confused with the sense of ‘thick’ and ‘thin selves’ discussed in John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 66ff.

  20. My distinction between thin and thick self-cultivation does not correspond to Callard’s distinction between self-cultivation and aspiration. One reason is that many of her examples, e.g., becoming a doctor or learning to appreciate music, strike me as relatively thin self-cultivation, in my use of the term. Another reason is that some cases of thick self-cultivation are ambiguous and do not clearly fall into the category of aspiration because they are driven by existing value commitments that one is trying to live more fully and faithfully.

  21. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985), 6.

  22. Robert Carter, The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), ch. 2.

  23. See David McPherson, ed., Spirituality and the Good Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2017).

  24. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005); John Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2014).

  25. John Cottingham, “Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality,” in Spirituality and the Good Life, 14ff; Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life; Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?

  26. As he puts it elsewhere, this practical side of ‘spirituality’ constitutes “all the moral and practical components of religious observance that are left when one brackets off the doctrinal elements.” John Cottingham, “Spirituality, Self-Discovery and Moral Change,” in Conversion, ed. Ingolf Dalferth and Michael Rogers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 181.

  27. For a discussion of satori see D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1964) ch. 7.

  28. McPherson, 64. It’s noteworthy that McPherson builds the idea of ‘meaning’ into his account of what constitutes ‘spirituality.’ By this he means that our lives are structured by “spiritual needs” which is his way of glossing Charles Taylor’s idea of “strong evaluation” and an understanding of “how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things” (66). These express some but not all of the existential interests that I distill from the recent debates over the meaning of life/meaning in life in § 3. Moreover, in the introduction to his volume Spirituality and the Good Life, he observes that there is relatively little discussion in contemporary analytic literature on meaning in life on ‘spirituality’ save for the work of John Cottingham (3n7). The same might be said of self-cultivation. For Taylor’s view of “strong evaluation” see his Sources of the Self, pt. I and Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985), chs.1-2.

  29. Of course, it depends on how broadly one construes the ‘sacred’ or ‘reverence-worthy’. The wider one sees the ‘sacred’, the more the spiritual will align with what I’m calling thick self-cultivation, but this comes at the cost of deviating from our ordinary language. For contemporary reflections on the nature of the ‘sacred’ see Charles Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” Inquiry 54 (2011): 113-125; Peter E. Gordon, “Must the Sacred be Transcendent?” Inquiry 54 (2011): 126-139.

  30. Quoted in W.F. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1975), 26-27. As Humboldt puts it elsewhere, “The true end of Man…is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action [1852], trans. J.W. Burrow (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1969), 16. He conceives of self-cultivation in a highly individualistic fashion as different individuals harmonize the development and perfection of their various capacities in different ways (ch. 2).

  31. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, ch. 2. McPherson’s account of spirituality discussed above draws substantially on Taylor’s philosophical anthropology.

  32. Ibid., 47.

  33. Ibid., 52.

  34. Taylor characterizes his work as “philosophical anthropology” in Human Agency and Language, 1.

  35. Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character and Morality,” in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1981), 11-15. This idea of projects has been further developed in Todd May, The Fragile Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), ch. 1.

  36. Monica Betzler, “The Normative Significance of Personal Projects,” in Autonomy and Self, ed. Michael Kühler and Nadja Jelinek (Dordecht: Springer, 2013), 101; also see May, The Fragile Life, 8.

  37. Betzler, “The Normative Significance of Personal Projects,” 111-113; also cf. May, A Fragile Life, ch. 1. His discussion of ‘projects’ also highlights a connection to evolving social norms or what he calls ‘practices’ and our identities.

  38. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ [1471], trans. Robert Jeffrey (New York: Penguin, 2013).

  39. This may be one way in which we might say current self-help regimens fall short as projects of self-cultivation. Svend Brinkman has offered a persuasive analysis of the self-improvement industry as a pernicious manifestation of an evanescent late capitalist culture that needs adaptable workers. Here the self is ‘cultivated’ in an instrumentalist manner to be fluid and adaptable to various demands of a fast-paced economy. As a form of resistance to this trend, Brinkman recommends a return to the philosophy of the Stoics. See Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, trans. Tam McTurk (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017).

  40. While some authors inverence between these sest a lot in the distinction between these two phrases, I will neither analyze nor place emphasis on these different formulations. For one author who stresses the difference between these see James Tartaglia, Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness, and Reality (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3ff.

  41. For example, see the discussion of the multiple senses of ‘meaning’ in T.J. Mawson, God and the Meanings of Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ch. 3; Joshua Seachris, “From the Meaning Triad to Meaning Holism: Unifying Life’s Meaning,” Human Affairs 29 (2019): 363-378; Richard Kim and Joshua W. Seachris, “Confucius,” in The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers, ed. Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-9; Garrett Thompson, “Untangling the Questions,” in Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, ed. Joshua Seachris (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 40-47; Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981), 574ff.

  42. The most comprehensive organization and treatment of the divisions with contemporary philosophical work on the meaning in/of life can be found in Metz, Meaning in Life.

  43. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 658, italics mine.

  44. Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), 32, italics mine.

  45. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005), 78, italics mine.

  46. Todd May, A Significant Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 40, 57.

  47. Recent writers belonging to this “pluralist” tradition, their differences notwithstanding, include notably Metz, Meaning in Life and Mawson, God and the Meanings of Life.

  48. See Richard Taylor, Good and Evil: A New Direction (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 256-268.

  49. See Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004).

  50. See Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, ch. 6.

  51. For example, Iddo Landau expresses such a view when he writes, “Complaints that there is no meaning in life are complaints that there is insufficient value in life. Questions about the meaning of life are questions about what is of sufficient worth in life. A meaningful life is one in which there is a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value, and a meaningless life is one in which there is no a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value.” See Iddo Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017), 15-16.

  52. Aaron Smuts, “The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (December 2013): 536-562; Ben Bramble, “Consequentialism about Meaning in Life,” Utilitas 27 (December 2015): 445-459.

  53. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, 26.

  54. Kauppinen, “Meaningfulness and Time,” 357.

  55. May, A Significant Life, 62.

  56. It’s debatable whether or not meaning is best located in segments of life or the whole of it. For a discussion of whether whole or part perspectives are more suitable for analyzing meaning in life see Metz, Meaning in Life, ch. 3.

  57. Thomas Nagel, “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.

  58. Ibid., 4.

  59. Guy Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance,” Nous 48 (2014): 745-772.

  60. David Benatar, The Human Predicament (New York: Oxford UP, 2017), 47-51.

  61. For a recent defense of this idea see, for example, Mawson, God and the Meanings of Life; T.J. Mawson, Monotheism and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2019). For a comprehensive discussion of both theistic and naturalistic perspectives on the issue also see Thaddeus Metz, God, Soul, and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2019).

  62. See Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, 73-76.

  63. Taylor, Good and Evil, 265-66.

  64. Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017). He writes, “What gives purpose to your life is having goals. Yet in pursuing them, you either fail (not good) or in succeeding, bring them to a close. If what you care about is achievement—earning a promotion, having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide. Sure you have other goals, and you can formulate new ones. The problem is not the risk of running out, the aimless nightmare of Schopenhauer’s boredom. It is that engagement with value is self-destructive. The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life” (132-133).

  65. Setiya, Midlife, 133-134.

  66. See Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, ch. 11.

  67. See his “Downshifting and Meaning in Life,” 185-187.

  68. Indeed, in discussing ways of avoiding the ‘paradox of the end’ and the apparent meaninglessness that comes in the wake of completing a goal, Landau lists precisely those sorts of activities that belong to self-cultivation. His examples include “attempts to become a more moral person, to understand music ever more deeply, to learn more, to increase a certain ability or sensitivity, or come nearer to God” (Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 152).

  69. Carter, The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation, 18.

  70. Dale S. Wright, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 7.

  71. Cf. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 289-95.

  72. In this sense, they count as the sort of “inherently open-ended” work that Levy thinks produces “superlative meaning.” See his “Downshifting and Meaning in Life,” 185-187.

  73. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, pt. III.

  74. May, The Fragile Life, ch. 1.

  75. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, 69.

  76. Susan Wolf, “The Meanings of Lives,” in The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love (New York: Oxford UP, 2015), 93.

  77. Cf. Williams, “Persons, character and morality.”

  78. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, 67ff, quote at 68. On the idea of the “fragility” of life also see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1986).

  79. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, 73ff.

  80. May, The Fragile Life, ch. 3.

  81. This does not entail that thick self-cultivation can withstand all of life’s challenges. Struggles with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, for example, may render such projects difficult or impossible. I owe this point to John Pittard.

  82. Matthew 7: 24-27.

  83. This was the concern expressed in Williams’s idea of a “ground project.” See his “Persons, Character and Morality,” 12ff.

  84. For example, Nozick, 594. One reason Levy may neglect self-cultivation is precisely his reliance on the connection between meaning and transcendence. He writes, “A meaningful life is…one devoted to (the promotion of) goods beyond the self” (“Downshifting and Meaning in Life,” 179).

  85. Peter Singer, How are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self Interest (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 253-259.

  86. Ibid., 258-259.

  87. Ibid., 244-253.

  88. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981), 594.

  89. John Dewey quoted in Robert Louden, Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), 16.

  90. Ta Hsüeh 2. “The men of old who wished to cause the light of their inner moral force to shine forth before the entire world had first to establish orderly rule in their kingdoms. Wishing to establish orderly rule in their kingdoms, they had first to put their royal houses into proper balance; wishing to put their families in proper balance, they had first to cultivate their own moral character as individuals; wishing to cultivate their own character as individuals, they had first to set straight the seat of their emotive and cognitive faculties; wishing to set these faculties straight, they had first to achieve a state of integral wholeness in the inner depth of their consciousness; wishing to achieve a state of wholeness in their inner-most consciousness, they had first to expand to the utmost their range of comprehension.” Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung, trans. Andrew Plaks (New York: Penguin, 2003), 5-6.

  91. For a contemporary interpretation and development see Tu, Humanity and Self-Cultivation, chs. 1-2.

  92. Wright, The Six Perfections, 11-12, 41-42, quote at 12.

  93. John Cottingham writes, “Good actions, modern ethicists tell us, are those we have reason to perform right actions are those we have conclusive reason to perform; but implicit in the philosophical literature one often finds a curious kind of Socratic optimism, as if morality consisted in a proper grasp of the relevant array of reasons, and a firm disposition to act on them. Perhaps it does, but until this abstract picture is supplemented with a deeper moral psychology, its relevance to any plausible theory of the good life must remain pretty thin.” Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension, 141, italics mine.

  94. Ibid., 148.

  95. Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2011), 183-185, quote at 183. Cf. Taylor, Sources of the Self, ch. 25, §§ 4-5.

  96. I would like to thank Gregory Jones-Katz and Bai Zongrang for comments on a draft of this paper as well as comments from audience members at conferences held at Waseda University and Hong Kong Baptist University.

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Scripter, L. Meaning in Life and Self-Cultivation. J Value Inquiry 56, 241–261 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09774-x

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