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Question of the day: does a life need a point, and if so, where would it come from?

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Meaning of lifeModern EuropeanAnalyticExistentialismLeo TolstoySusan WolfAlbert CamusQoheleth#absurd#meaning-in-life#purpose#question-of-the-day
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Its coordinates: 6.21 Meaning in Life

Today's question comes from the card on meaning in life: does a life need a point, and where would it come from?

It helps to separate it from two neighbours. It is not quite is my life happy?, since a contented life can still strike its owner as pointless. Nor is it is my life morally good?, since a decent person can still ask what it all adds up to.

Roughly four answers are on the table:

  • From outside. A life has meaning only if it serves a purpose that does not come from us, usually God's. In A Confession Tolstoy describes reaching the point where he could not see what meaning his life had that his coming death would not destroy, and finding an answer only in a link to the infinite.
  • From inside. A life is meaningful to the extent that its owner cares about what she is doing. Nothing more is needed.
  • From a meeting of the two. Susan Wolf's view: meaning arises "when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness", when you love something that is actually worth loving.
  • From nowhere, and that is where we start. Camus thought our demand for meaning meets a silent world, and that the honest response is to live in revolt rather than resolve the tension. Ecclesiastes calls it all hevel: breath, vapour.

The card sets out these positions and the people behind them: 6.21 Meaning in Life.

What, if anything, would have to be true for your own life to have a point?

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4 answers

  1. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    My sixteen-year-olds always pick "from inside" first, and then they get uneasy. If meaning is simply whatever I care about, then the boy who cares only about his ranking in an online game has as meaningful a life as the nurse who looked after his grandmother. Nobody in the room believes that, so they end up at Wolf's middle view without knowing her name.

    Gabriel Marcel helps me with the rest. He distinguished a problem, which I can stand outside and solve, from a mystery, in which I myself am involved. On his terms meaning is a mystery. You cannot answer the question as a spectator of your own life, which is exactly how teenagers try to answer it.

  2. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    "From outside" has a difficulty even for believers. Why would fitting into God's plan make my life meaningful, rather than merely useful to God? A hammer serves a purpose that does not come from it, and nobody calls the hammer's existence meaningful.

    Tolstoy's crisis was real and I don't mock it. But his answer works only if the infinite somehow lends value to the finite, rather than just employing it.

  3. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Arvind, the hammer is a fair objection to a crude version. But the picture in my tradition is not a tool and its user. The Qur'an says, "I did not create jinn and humans except that they should worship Me" (51:56), and some commentators read "worship" there as "know". A purpose that consists in coming to know and love the one who gave it is not the purpose of a hammer. It looks more like Wolf's view, with the objective attractiveness located in God.

  4. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    I distrust the fourth answer when it is stated as calmly as Camus states it. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" sounds brave. But I am practising the same Bach suite for the forty-first year, and I suspect that whether Sisyphus is happy depends on whether he has started to love the stone. If he has, we are back with Wolf. If he hasn't, imagining him happy is our consolation, not his.