[di meliora]

The hard truth is a hard topic http://forums.psychcentral.com/showthread.php?t=259619. I make no claim to know with exactitude whether our lives have meaning. I am, however, a person of curiosity. I have some thoughts, limited by the sanction against religious discussion.

My threshold question is: Why does this world exist? Jim Holt wrote a book about this query:

There could have been nothing. It might have been easier. Instead there is something. The universe exists, and we are here to ask about it. Why?

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” sounds so fundamental a question that it should have perplexed humanity since the dawn of philosophy. Strangely, it hasn’t, or at least it has left no trace on early written literature. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and earlier Greek philosophers did wonder what the world was made of. Thales thought its primal substance was water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire. But they didn’t ask why anything was there at all. We find no one haunted by the specter of non-being until Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote in 1714, “The first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/bo...anted=all&_r=0

Holt asked a number of learned people for an answer. They were not learned enough. Some did say:

Several of Holt’s cosmologists explore the possibility of there being universes “as plentiful as blackberries” (C. S. Peirce’s phrase). Universes may be popping into existence right now: each moment may generate billions of new ones. Perhaps all possible universes have existed from the start, including one that contains nothing. Perhaps everything exists because of fluctuations in quantum particles, or because an initial zero separated itself into +1 and -1, forming matter and antimatter. Perhaps only mathematical entities are real, and our physical world is an “outcropping” of mathematics. Could the world be an outcropping of consciousness? Does all nature have a subjectivity of its own? Or is the universe a device for producing goodness?

A pertinent point:

Holt reminds us that no exploration of being — especially human being — can be separated from the human who undertakes it, complete with character and the play of moods. Updike felt that the universe had “a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm.” Surely this was a mood, even a quirk of biochemistry, but it opens a perspective on the universe, too. The question of being itself, as Updike and Holt agree, can seem profound in one mood, vacuous in another.

My next query: Why are beings put on Earth? There are some bizarre answers (For the maker's amusement is one?). This answer to me has some credibility:

From a scientific perspective, humans weren't "put" on earth at all. We are the product - like all other existing species of plants and animals - of millions of years of evolution. We have no divinely-given reason for being. The entire concept of meaningfulness was invented by our uniquely complex brains. http://community.babycenter.com/post...t_on_the_earth

Okay, so did we just come along for the ride? Perhaps we did. Kenneth Head, in a Pathways Essay, asks: Does life have a meaning? http://www.philosophypathways.com/essays/head1.html

It may be, in other words, that, although it is clearly important, for most human beings at least, to think of their lives as having some intrinsic purpose, this may not be the case, except insofar as that purpose is self defined. The meaning of life, in other words, may be what an individual decides that it will be. Equally, it may also be the case that the question as to whether or not life has any meaning is itself not meaningful.

The degree to which it is possible for individuals to find meaning in their lives may also have to do with their understanding of the concept of explanation. What constitutes an explanation of this type will necessarily be conditioned by the cultural context in which it is offered. An age which bases its religious beliefs and metaphysical or scientific view of the world on unquestioned or unquestionable certainties will certainly find answering questions as to why things are as they are rather more straightforward than will be the case for inhabitants of a time in which past certainties seem no longer sufficient to deal with what is known of the universe and mankind's place in it. In such an age, the laws of nature will be perceived to be less concerned with ends and purposes, than with processes and the observable and empirically verifiable regularities of the external world. This is certainly the case in the present age and goes at least some way to explain the contemporary preoccupation with the extent to which individuals do or do not find their lives to be meaningful.

The lack of a non-problematic life-world, one in which exists a structured series of beliefs, assumptions, feelings, values and cultural practices that constitute meaning in everyday life, removes the comforting sense that it is possible to live against a contextual background that speaks implicitly of firmly cemented meanings which there is no need constantly to re-justify. As a consequence, there may arise a preoccupation with ultimate questions: is it a good thing to have been born; what is the meaning of death; can individuals survive death; given the inevitability of death, how should life be lived; how may happiness be achieved; is death an evil or a good?

This condition of mind is recognisably modern, although it would be inaccurate to regard it as exclusively the product of our own century. Indeed, in going back much further, we discover that one of the central themes of Aristotle's Ethics reflects this preoccupation with the purpose of life and his intuition, that the special rational faculty of human beings is the key to our sense of purpose and fulfilment, is one that has come down to us through the centuries. In his Eudemian Ethics, for example, he argues that there are many factors, such as disease, pain and natural disasters, that might cause individuals to wish not to be alive, but returns to a predecessor, Anaxagoras, whom he supports in asserting that it is worth being born "in order to apprehend the heavens and the order in the whole universe" [Hanfling: p. 205]. In his Phaedrus, Plato, also, refers to Anaxagoras as a scientific man ... satiating himself with the theory of things on high" [Russell: Book 1, Part 1, Ch. 8, p. 79].

Head concludes:

If, as would seem to be the case, it is a universal truth that all human beings are born into some particular position in the world and that they very quickly learn the limits of the freedoms available to them to question this there clearly exist difficult issues to be addressed concerning the meaningfulness and purposiveness of life. The sense of meaning and purpose is surely never stronger than when an individual chooses freely and autonomously to act in specific ways. When this is not possible or not permitted, life is lived insincerely and under duress, in ways calculated to give rise to the sense that it is without worth or meaning. To be forced to be what they are not, to live constantly in a condition of bad faith, is, inevitably, to force individuals ever further from the realisation of who they are and what they perceive the purpose or meaning of their lives to be. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it in Being and Nothingness [Hanfling: P. 226], an individual will be forced to be "in the neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by aiming at myself ... through those gestures taken as an 'analogue' ".

One of the features characteristic of human nature is the felt need to live life seriously in regard to the choices that are made and the positions that are adopted, even though it may be perfectly apparent that other points of view and other choices might, logically, be equally acceptable. This quality of mind and general predisposition are not evident in other creatures. As Thomas Nagel makes clear in his essay "The Absurd" [Journal of Philosophy, 68 (20), 1971: Hanfling: P. 48-59], this inability to live with a diminished sense of the seriousness of life may be the fundamental reason for the sense that both Nagel and many others have that life is, in fact, absurd. He argues that the life of a mouse, for example, is not absurd because "he lacks the ... self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse." This is very far removed from the more usual position that the lives of animals serve only as examples of meaningless existence.

In the course of his argument, Nagel develops the view that the human quest for meaning and a sense of purpose in life is derived from the fact that we are preoccupied with such issues as the brevity of the human life-span, our minuteness within the universe as a whole, the inevitability of the eventual disappearance of all of mankind, our sense that life is, if possible, something to be escaped. Rather than attempt heroically to deny the truth of these perceptions and fight against the sense of our own absurdity with which they fill us, Nagel asserts, we would do well to accept what cannot be escaped and, in so doing, demonstrate our ability not only to understand our human limitations, but also to appreciate their unimportance in our situation:

"If sub specie aeternitatis* there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair."

*The term, "sub specie aeternitatis", is a Latin and translates to "under the aspect of eternity" in English.

Then there is Tolstoy's view discussed here: What is true progress? http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/...-progress.html and here: Does life have meaning? http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/...e-meaning.html

In Tolstoy's A Confession (the autobiographical account of his crisis of meaning I wrote about the other day), he argues that, if what we seek to achieve does not endure after our death, then our life itself has no meaning. As Tolstoy's reasoning goes, since everything he strived for in life--riches, fame, pleasure--would ultimately disappear when he died, life was essentially meaningless.

But then he reverses himself:

I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer -- an evil -- was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life -- a life of indulgence of desires -- was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, "Life is evil and an absurdity," referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

In other words, Tolstoy determined that his life the way he lived it was meaningless because the achievement of his life goals--riches, fame and pleasure--died along with him. That did not mean that everyone's life was meaningless, he realized. He admired people whose goal it was to be of service to the rest of life. Since the service that they did to the rest of life endured beyond their deaths, their lives had meaning.

When we use planetary resources, in the service of what do we use them? When we live our lives, in the service of what do we live them? Are we using our resources and living our lives meaningfully? Or are we wasting both?

Because if you agree with Tolstoy, whether or not our lives have meaning is determined only by what we use them for.

My belief is each of us must find a purpose in life that gives us meaning. Leaving the world in a better place is a worthy goal. To do otherwise is to enable a life of self-doubt and misery.