Mortality and Meaningfulness

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a 'form of life', and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something 'beyond the human'. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the 'beyond the human' which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and 'intimate' with life itself.

Journal of Philosophy of Life, 2013

In his seminal reflection on the badness of death, Nagel links it to the permanent loss "of whatever good there is in living." I will argue, following McMurtry, that "whatever good there is in living" is defined by the life-value of resources, institutions, experiences, and activities. Enjoyed expressions of the human capacities to experience the world, to form relationships, and to act as creative agents are (with important qualifications) intrinsically life-valuable, the reason why anyone would desire to go on living indefinitely. As Nagel argues, "the fact that we will eventually die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would not be good to live longer. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for all of us." In this paper I want to question whether in fact there is no limit to the amount of life it would be good to have. My general conclusion will be that it is not the case that the eternal or even indefinite prolongation of any particular individual life necessarily increases life-value. Were death thus somehow removed as an inescapable limiting frame on human life, overall reductions of life-value would be the consequence. Individual and collective life would lose those forms of moral and material life-value that form the bases of life's being meaningful and purposive.

Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The question of the meaning and meaningfulness 1 of life has come to be neglected by today's philosophers. Meaning is implicitly assumed to be associated with individual choices and preferences. This article sets out by arguing that meaningfulness works in another way as well. It points out that we are appealed by something that provokes meaningfulness. The article then elaborates on the consequences of this vision, one of these being that there may well be implicit 'standards'. Some authors writing on meaningfulness or related subjects indeed believe that this is the case, but the point made here is that certain benchmarks -i.e. references concerned with our 'being-in-the-world' -have not been explored fully enough.

The book explores the perennial issue of the meaning of life and of a meaningful way of living. It seems that people have lost the hope that life has any meaning, and they may be right; but since we have been born, we should be curious enough to explore the wondrous and awesome phenomena of existence, life and death. The book first presents phenomena of life, mind, values, time and death; it then analyzes questions of the meaning of life and of the meaningful way of living. This is followed by critical outlines of dominant religious and secular responses to these questions. We speak about death and immortality, about the absurdity of life and reasons for living, about various attitudes toward life and ways of living. The book advocates a poetic view of life and way of living: we must aim to become the poets of existence and ephemerality, instead of being voracious consumers and destroyers of the soil from which we grow.

Representation and Reality in Humans, Animals and Machines, 2017

Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence, which is unique and irreplaceable. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to passively disintegrate, expresses a value inherent in its way of life, which is the ultimate source of more refined forms of normativity. This response to the problem of meaning will not satisfy those searching for a functionalist or logical solution, but on this view such a solution will not be forthcoming. As an intuition pump for this alternative perspective I introduce two ancient foreign worldviews that assign a constitutive role to death. Then I trace the emergence of a similar conception of mortality from the cybernetics era to the ongoing development of enactive cognitive science. Finally, I analyze why orthodox computationalism has failed to grasp the role of mortality in this constitutive way.

This article seeks an analysis of the concept that underlies prominent philosophical conceptions of what makes a person's life meaningful. It contends that no promising analysis captures all and only the theories that are intuitively about meaning in life. It concludes that conceptions of life's meaning are instead united in virtue of family resemblances. Specifically, theories of what makes a life meaningful are views that answer the following kinds of partially overlapping questions: how may a person bring purpose to her life beyond pursuing happiness? how should an individual connect with intrinsic value beyond his animal nature? how might one do something worthy of great esteem or admiration?

Philosophy Compass, 2007

In this article I survey philosophical literature on the topic of what, if anything, makes a person's life meaningful, focusing on systematic texts that are written in English and that have appeared in the last five years. My aims are to present overviews of the most important, fresh, Anglo-American positions on meaning in life and to raise critical questions about them worth answering in future work.

2016

Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there are things in it that the person values (i) intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally and (ii) above a certain threshold of intensity. This is a subjectivist account of meaning in life. I defend subjectivism about meaning in life from common objections by understanding statements about life’s meaning in quasi-realist terms.

The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2009

Objectives. The purpose of this exploratory study was to see if meaning in life is associated with mortality in old age. Methods. Interviews were conducted with a nationwide sample of older adults (N = 1,361). Data were collected on meaning in life, mortality, and select control measures. Results. Three main fi ndings emerged from this study. First, the data suggest that older people with a strong sense of meaning in life are less likely to die over the study follow-up period than those who do not have a strong sense of meaning. Second, the fi ndings indicate that the effect of meaning on mortality can be attributed to the potentially important indirect effect that operates through health. Third, further analysis revealed that one dimension of meaning-having a strong sense of purpose in life-has a stronger relationship with mortality than other facets of meaning. The main study fi ndings were observed after the effects of attendance at religious services and emotional support were controlled statistically. Discussion. If the results from this study can be replicated, then interventions should be designed to help older people fi nd a greater sense of purpose in life.