Weiye Loh's Library tagged Purpose →  View Popular, Search in Google

Moreover, does God actually ground the values by which we live?  Do we not, as Plato recognized 2500 years ago, already have to think of those values as good in order to ascribe them to God?

must the meaningfulness of our lives depend on the existence of God?  Must meaning rely upon articles of faith? Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different believers out of one another’s picture.   What seems called for is an approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that exists alongside or instead of religious views.

A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile.  The person living the life must be engaged by it.  A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game.

Often one defends an idea by giving reasons for it.  However, sometimes the best defense is not to give reasons at the outset but instead to pursue the idea in order to see where it leads.  Does it capture something important if we utilize it to understand ourselves?

a meaningful life is both valued and valuable — allows us to understand several important aspects of our attitudes toward ourselves and others.

If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively.  A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related.

if one reflected on one’s life, one could reasonably see it in terms of various story lines, whether parallel or intersecting or distinct.  This idea can be traced back to Aristotle’s “Ethics,” but has made a reappearance with some recent narrative conceptions of what a self is.

What makes a trajectory a meaningful one?  If Wolf is right, it has to feel worthwhile and, beyond that, has to be engaged in projects that are objectively worthwhile.  There is not much difficulty in knowing what feels worthwhile.  Most of us are good at sensing when we’re onto something and when we’re not.  Objective worthiness is more elusive.  We don’t want to reduce it simply to a morally good life, as though a meaningful life were simply an unalienated moral life. Meaningful lives are not so limited and, as we shall see, are sometimes more vexed.  So we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm. 

When a life embodies one or more of these values (or others), and feels engaging to the one who lives it, it is to that extent meaningful.

  There are narrative values expressed by human lives that are not reducible to moral values.  Nor are they reducible to happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling.  Narrative values are not felt, they are lived.  And they constitute their own arena of value, one that has not been generally recognized by philosophers who reflect on life’s meaningfulness.

Meaningful lives can be morally compromised, just as morally good lives can feel meaningless to those who live them.

We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between meaningfulness and morality.  They meet at certain moral limits.  An evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful.  But within the parameters of those moral limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is complicated.  They do not map directly onto each other.

  Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace.  It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us.  But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack.  This is as it should be.  Philosophy can assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.