A Meaningful life

Not the meaning of life, only a meaningful life

The first contention of this paper is that there can be no such thing as the meaning of life. There can be a life that is meaningful (or not) for a life that is lived, that is, meaningful for the person whose life it is. There can be meanings of lives. To ask for the meaning of life is senseless because it asks for there to be meaning in respect of life from a position where no meaning is possible, namely the position of no particular lived life. ^[1] Meaning attaches, if it attaches at all, necessarily to the life of someone who lives it. Life, if it may be said to be meaningful at all, is a matter of its appearing meaningful to someone as they live their life. It makes no sense to talk of the meaning of life as such because there is no life as such as a thing that might be lived meaningfully. Whatever gets ascribed as the meaning a person’s life has, it has to be something understood by them as the meaning their life has. Meaning in life cannot be detached from the understanding of the person whose life it is.

No definitive answers

It is not hard to see that the demand for the meaning of life makes no more sense than asking for the way to get from London to Prague, or the way to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, or the way to make love, or the way to insult someone. None of those requests and the accompanying implied questions have definitive answers, nor indeed are they beyond their bare grammatical form properly formed conceptually, since any proffered putative answer will patently and necessarily fail to deliver what is required. It could not be otherwise as the request and questions make no sense beyond their being applied to the particulars of circumstance and personhood. Yet some continue to hanker for the definitive, and feel they are floundering if presented only with various possible answers. All but the dogmatic struggle to respond to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”—and they are right to do so, for the struggle is intuitively indicative of there being something essentially wrong with the question. And that wrongness carries the implication that to answer it directly would be a mistake.

View from nowhere, form of life, meaning

What is sought and envisioned when addressing the question, “What is the meaning of life?”, is something that transcends the values and significances that individuals ascribe to their lives and that gives them meaning, so that the real meaning of life is discovered or revealed, compared to which the values and significances ascribed to life by individuals will be unfavourably compared and found parochial and inadequate in respect of life’s meaning; but as the putative real meaning has been discovered we may relax as the parochial attenuated meanings no longer matter, and need not be what we rely on to have a life that has meaning. This however is a profound mistake. It fails to understand that values and signification, required for meaning, only arise at all from a lived life bound to conditions of a certain kind that constitute a limited contingent existence, and that the notion of a view that transcends this, which would be a view from nowhere, sub specie aeternitatis, would involve meaning derived from a view, if such a view is possible at all, where value and signification is impossible. It is impossible because it is contradictory. It asks for meaning under conditions where no possible meaning could arise. A view sub specie aeternitatis is contradictory in respect to meaning because its conditions involve the absolute flattening of differential values and signification from which no meanings can arise. Meanings may only arise from the vagaries of determinate concrete worldly engagement of a limited contingent-bound existence that constitutes a certain form of life, ^[2] further defined by an individual creature of that sort. There can thus be nothing the values and significances ascribed by individual creatures of a certain sort fall short of because the alternative putatively transcendent perspective required for the comparison to make sense cannot exist. There is no real answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” in the sense usually meant, but only various answers corresponding to the meaning life has for individual creatures whose life it is. There can be no sense therefore in which one might say, as some may claim, that in that case if there is no such real meaning nothing really matters, or nothing really has meaning, for what would underpin the comparative of what gives meaning to individual lives and something else, which is the real meaning of life, cannot exist, as the transcendent view from nowhere required for one side of the comparison is an impossibility.

Why we attempt an answer

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what brings about the belief that, “What is the meaning of life?” is a meaningful question that one should attempt to answer. In doing so one may, in a Humean manner, separate normative rational justification and factual non-rational causes. The surface profundity of the question might certainly lead to the conclusion that it is the very kind of question that a philosopher ought to have something to say by way of an answer, and failure to address what appears to be such an important question, perhaps the most important question, would make a philosopher unworthy of the discipline. ^[3] However, to tackle it head on would already be to take the first steps in a long list of mistakes.

Values, significations, and life

Values and significations, which make the world bumpy and differentiated, only arise from the contingencies of limited existence, a form of life, and further each of those forms of life will be different from each other. Each limited form of life shapes a world, and itself, according to a set of values and significances that emerge from the nature of its contingent being-in-the-world, its engagement in the world, and those values and significances will then be further honed by the nature peculiar to that individual. The view from nowhere, sub specie aeternitatis, requires the separation of a view from the contingences of limited existence, losing that which would make a view possible at all by extinguishing anything that could generate values and signification, and this would also make making meaning impossible. ^[4] Without differentiations of value and signification, meaning can find no foothold. This goes further than arguing that such a putative objective meaning or purpose would in itself be no use as it would still have to be something we choose to accept, rather it rules out there being any such meaning or purpose at all. Yet such an objective meaning or purpose is what is often in mind in considering the question, “What is the meaning of life?”. We can see that answering it by pointing to some objective meaning or purpose is a hopeless error for it is logically illusorily—but then it should not be mourned as a loss, compared to which our own supposedly puny individual human meanings may be deleteriously compared, for there was never a logical possibility of there being anything with which to juxtapose them with which might form an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”. It is not a matter then of saying shamefacedly that the individual human meanings we live by are second-best and all we have, for that too would imply that in some other manner there might be something better and ultimate—but there necessarily cannot be anything of that sort.

It is impossible to imagine a world viewed sub specie aeternitatis, a view from nowhere, a God’s-eye view, as it would be absolutely homogeneous, stripped of all differentiation whatsoever. ^[5] No attributes, properties, or differentiating concepts could be ascribed to it. It would certainly be something in which meaning, which requires variable valuation and signification, thence differentiation, could not subsist or supervene. ^[6] In order for differentiations of value and signification to arise at all one requires there to be limits, resistance, things one bumps into, existential encounters, only through which any sense of meaning may be generated. An utterly smooth (even that is going too far since it applies a differentiating concept) undifferentiated world would be devoid of values and signification, and thus meaning. Our meaning, the one generated because of the kind of contingent limited being we are, cannot fall short of any further meaning—it is our meaning, all the meaning we have and all we can have, and it is not in any sense lesser or inferior to some putative greater meaning, for the conditions for such a putative ultimate greater meaning, as opposed to just another construal of meaning which might be proposed, make any sense of meaning impossible. There are meanings, but a single definitive overarching meaning is an impossibility. ^[7]

Being-in-the-world and limits

We fail to notice the way the world differentiates itself into bumps and troughs of value and significance, giving it heterogeneity, for these form as we live in the world and are not primarily and fundamentally shaped by our will or choosing. They are what gives the world existence for any creature for whom the world can exist. We therefore take what we have for granted. We also take it as the way the world is, perhaps must be, failing to see that it is what forms as a result of our way-of-being in the world. Indeed this, as has been argued, is the only way that the world can differentiate itself by way of value and significance: by living in the world as a contingent limited being, a being that will take some determinate form, and will thus have a form of life or Dasein. ^[8] Many, perhaps most, of these differentiating values and signification will go unarticulated even on the occasions that they are noticed. They form our world. If we do start to think philosophically about the differentiating values and significations, although they are malleable to a degree, variable and varied, we might come to think they may be totally stripped away in a Cartesian act of denial of the contingent self and its life, to present us with something utterly purified of that contributed by our contingent being-in-the-world—but this as we have seen is not possible.

Sense and alignment

This brings us back to what a meaningful life might be. It is not for a philosopher, or indeed anyone else, to fill in the content of what might make a life meaningful for someone. No-one should set themselves up to instruct others, though many do, as to how to live their lives. ^[9] Any honest self-reflection ought to expose it as sheer hubris: as if we might know—the very idea—as if we had sorted out our own life even. But one may say something about the form taken by a meaningful life. This leaves open filling it with content according to the character, personality, and predilections of the individual whose life it is.

The form of a meaningful life will involve a combination of sense and alignment. These conditions, although they interact, are each necessary and jointly sufficient. Meaning may be maintained and meaning may be lost.

The sense part of this suggests something analogous to the everyday idea of having a sense and making sense: that the values and significances of life can be read; that these values and significances coalesce such that shape can be given to life by the person whose life it is so that the outcome is intelligible for that person; that the life is not something alien, something the person feels alienated from; that there is a non-alienated identification with the life, rather than making one think with subfusc unease or with analytic explicitness that the life one is living is not one’s own. ^[10] The sense of the life for the person whose life it is may be reflected and read or the sense may simply be instantiated in a certain way in the life being lived in the way it is. The values and significances shape the life and the life thereby lived shapes the values and significances recursively and continually until the end.

The alignment part of this involves a meeting up of life as it is, including relations with other people, with the life the person would want to a degree that is at least tolerable or acceptable to the person whose life it is. ^[11] This alignment inwardly creates a state of just enough dissonance to keep one enlivened without engendering distracted agitation and just enough consonance to give one a settled and peaceful mind without falling into comatose contentment. It should be carefully noted that alignment may be adjusted in two ways, both of which are not fully transigent to our will or retrained habits: internally by changing our view or attitude and externally by changing the content or order of the world—an adjustment that gives together a more-or-less alignment of the internal with the external. Practical circumstances will often dictate whether internal or external change is most effective, and will bring alignment about not of course in one manner and at one permanent level, but most naturally at the maximal level given the circumstances of one’s life. It is not clear in many circumstances whether one has more control over one’s inner state than one’s outer states. ^[12] However this may be, it will be a lifelong matter of readjustment—involving knowledge, practice and experience—of internal and external states that brings about satisfactory maximal alignment of the self and world.

Time

Something must be said about time, specifically the essential temporality of our lives. It changes nothing fundamental in the position taken here, but rather refines it. Time is essential to our lives because it is essential to our existing. ^[13] It is an essential feature of our limitation, part of our particular contingent form of life. Time introduces a further honing down of the proper attribution of a meaningful life to successively: a form of life, an individual of that form, and then finally to that individual at a particular time or period of time. Plainly put, the meaning, or not, both in kind and degree, that our life has will almost certainly vary over our lifespan. This not only applies to the time that coincides with now, but also to past times and future anticipated times, and what meaning they have will be a matter of endless revision and reassessment precisely as one’s life unfolds and appears recursively meaningful or not at the time the assessment is carried out. We may try to draw our life together into some meaningful whole, but in fact no picture of it is definitive as at any point we are still moving through life, such that any view concerning a meaningful life at other times in our life, or concerning its overall meaningfulness, will be from the current perspective of what constitutes a meaningful life. One should therefore hold that the view persons take towards or at the end of their lives has no more validity or authority than the view taken at any other time. None is definitive.

Meaning is not external to the lived life

While we may reflect on whether our life is meaningful or not, its meaningfulness is not something that stands apart from life as we live it. A meaningful life is not and could not be something external to the life that is lived, rather it is and must be just the life lived in a certain way. That a life is meaningful is constituted, or not, by the lived life and is manifest in the manner in which it is lived. As often as not no articulation of a life’s meaningfulness is made. Indeed, such reflective articulation tends only to occur when things go wrong. As humans we have the capacity to reflect on whether our lives are meaningful or not—but this needs to be distinguished from, and is separate from, the issue of whether life is meaningful or not. ^[14]

Changing meaning

Having a meaningful life will not guarantee that one will escape let alone eliminate the vicissitudes, horrors, terrors, of life, and finally of course death. The battle against time will not go away. ^[15] It is sometimes supposed that a meaningful life will somehow free one from the torments of life. Those sorts of things are an ineradicable part of the human condition. But having a meaningful life may make these things more tolerable, bearable, and understandable, rather than inchoate massacres of our psyche. There is the possibility of their fitting into something that makes sense and can be aligned. Of course anyone can be pushed over the edge to a point where life seems intolerable and suicide a way out. But then, I would argue, this would be when things have stopped being meaningful, stopped making sense and being aligned.

Art, the creative act of producing an artwork, may be seen as a way of making the inchoate choate and bringing into being something that has sense and alignment, and thus something with meaning. Indeed, it may often be a way of dealing with the meaningless in life, a way of showing that something can be done to manipulate things and shape them. This may save people—both artist and audience—from despair.

The meaningful life is not equivalent to the happy life, but it is plausibly a necessary condition for it. By the same measure having a meaningful life does not guarantee that one will have a life that fully reaps the bonuses and benefits of life, but is it again arguably a foundation and a necessary condition for it.

The meaningful life should not be confused with the morally good life. We might like to think that some justice falls out of events, making it that the wrongdoer has not only an unhappy life, but one that ends up soul-destroyingly meaningless—but this cannot be guaranteed. My concern here is giving an entirely amoral account of what a meaningful life means.

A meaningful life is a life that appears and feels meaningful to the person whose life it is. May they be mistaken? In the end probably not, although we must allow for a life being viewed at different times by the person whose life it is, and a past life that seemed meaningful at the time coming to seem not so. They may also look forward and consider that they are entering into a life that will be less meaningful. In both cases, one might take the view that one has made a mistake in one’s life. But that perceived mistake is not perceived by comparison to some cosmic plan which one failed to adopt and live up to, but is rather a matter of not being truthful to oneself about how things appear and feel ^[16]—a kind of meaning-corrosive inauthenticity. The important point here is that the view one takes of the meaningfulness of one’s life is at any point a view from a place in one’s life which the meaningfulness of one’s life at that time, its meaningfulness at previous times, and the meaningfulness one projects into the future, will all contribute in forming. At no point is it possible to step outside one’s life to say what the “real” meaning is, either considered as one of the several meanings life may have in terms of sense and alignment or considered in relation to some transcendent external meaning. If one looks for the latter one will look in vain as the object of one’s search is as impossible an object as one that is both round and not-round. But no-one thinks the world deficient because it does not contain contradictory objects. Such a putative world would in fact be no world at all, for all distinctions whatsoever, required for any possible world to exist, would be elided.

No life, no meaning

Consider an earth-annihilating, our-world-annihilating, event—a huge planet-like object many times the size of the earth crashes into us at high speed obliterating the earth, wiping everything out. Would this mean that the meanings that people’s lives had are rendered meaningless? Certainly not. They had the meaning they had. Would it mean after the event that there were no longer meaningful lives? Yes. This is because there are no lives to be lived meaningfully. ^[17] Only a world with meaning-creators has the possibility of being a world where there is meaning. A world where there is meaning is a world with meaning-creators.

Only a lived life is meaningful

A meaningful life is one that makes sense (the world may be read and assembles in some apparent shape and order) and is aligned (how the world is and how we want it to be sufficiently match up) as applied to a limited particular contingent form of life, to a particular individual of that form, and then further to that life at a particular time or period of time. A meaningless life is simply the converse of the conditions of a meaningful life, that is a failure of one or both of the conditions of sense and alignment. A meaningful life will be one where one is not in extremis, in a state of despair, contemplating, or committing, suicide. Thus, what a meaningful life is said to be here is a modest claim, pitched low, which is as it should be, because it is a starting point for the bonuses and penalties of life. Life being meaningful or meaningless may come and go over the course of one’s life. The honing down of whatever meaning, sense and alignment, life has proceeds through a form of life, a particular life of that form, a particular individual life of that form at a certain time. There can only be a meaningful life, and not the meaning of life, because for meaning to make sense here in respect of life it cannot stand detached from lives as lived. This is because only through the being-in-the world of any particular contingent form of life can values and significances arise at all. These then populate sense and alignment. Separating form of life and individual life gives the plausible possibility of common features found to give sense and alignment for the generality of a limited particular contingent form of life, while allowing for diversity following from the particular differences of nature possessed by each individual of that form. One may speculate that individual diversity increases and play a greater part as the mental capacities of genus forms of life increase. ^[18] This allows for both commonality and diversity in talking of a meaningful life, while humans are particularly prone to diversity, so that what is a meaningful life for one person would be quite unsatisfactory as such for someone else.

This returns us to the point that we should not set ourselves up to instruct another how their life might be a meaningful life or what they should do to bring this about, for in doing so we are trying to determine what a meaningful life would be for them as individuals, something that we have no expertise in at all and a vanishingly remote chance of getting right since we simply are not them. If someone lives a meaningful life they will have come to it by only one means, living their life, and it will be meaningful only as something lived by them.