Baggini on Life's Purpose

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2017

explains in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on ''The Meaning of Life'' that when the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people often pose one of two questions. They ask: ''So, what is the meaning of life?'' or ''What are you talking about?'' The literature, Metz says, can be divided in terms of which question it seeks to answer. In his entry, Metz's focus is clearly on the first, substantive, question, while he only briefly discusses the meaning of the meaning question. One might think that Metz covers this abstract question quickly and then moves on to the substantive question, because it is fairly clear how the question about the meaning of life is to be understood. This, however, is not the case. Metz's brief overview of attempts to understand the meaning of the question shows that nobody has been able so far to identify a single, primary sense of ''life's meaning''. Therefore Metz considers it highly unlikely that those who are telling us what the meaning of life is answer the same question. What is more, it is even unclear whether ''the field is united in virtue of addressing certain overlapping but not equivalent ideas'' or whether, instead, the field is ''a grab-bag of heterogenous ideas''. 1 Metz then goes on, like most authors in this field, without bothering very much about this conceptual darkness.

Philosophers and psychologists have contemplated on the reason for human existence and brought forth their analysis in different forms such as theories, essays, novels and so forth. Each of them has his own set of logic to process the analysis of the given notion. Their personal experiences of life which compelled them to contemplate on purpose of human existence have significant role in their analysis. This article traces the contemplations on the meaning of life of some of the prominent philosophers and psychologists in the contemporary era which would depict the general idea of the contemporary secular response to the question of life's meaning.

Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love, 2015

The question, "What is the meaning of life?" was once taken to be a paradigm of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and when the question is brought up, by a naïve student, for example, or a prospective donor to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable embarrassment. What is so wrong with the question? One answer is that it is extremely obscure, if not downright unintelligible. It is unclear what exactly the question is supposed to be asking. Talk of meaning in other contexts does not offer ready analogies for understanding the phrase "the meaning of life." When we ask the meaning of a word, for example, we want to know what the word stands for, what it represents. But life is not part of a language, or of any other sort of symbolic system. It is not clear how it could "stand for" anything, nor to whom. We sometimes use "meaning" in nonlinguistic contexts: "Those dots mean measles." "Those footprints mean that someone was here since it rained." In these cases, talk of meaning seems to be equivalent to talk of evidence, but the contexts in which such claims are made tend to specify what hypotheses are in question within relatively fixed bounds. To ask what life means without a similarly specified context, leaves us at sea. Still, when people do ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing some concern or other, and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven't the faintest idea what that is. The question at least gestures toward a certain set of concerns with which most of us are at least somewhat familiar. Rather than dismiss a question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may well be many things going on when people ask, "What is the meaning of life?", the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. It is a request to find out why we are here (that is, why we exist at all), with the hope that an answer to this question will also tell us something about what we should be doing with our lives. If understanding the question in this way, however, makes the question intelligible, it might not give reason to reopen it as a live philosophical problem. Indeed, if some of professional philosophy's discomfort with discussion of the meaning of life comes from a desire to banish ambiguity and obscurity from the field, as much comes, I think, from the thought that the question, when made clearer, has already been answered, and that the answer is depressing. Specifically, if the question of the Meaning of Life is to be identified with the question of the purpose of life, then the standard view, at least among professional philosophers, would seem to be that it all depends on the existence of God. In other words, the going opinion seems to be that if there is a God, then there is at least a chance that there is a purpose, and so

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.

Philosophical models of human motivation tend to fall into two categories. Egoistic models conceive of human beings as moved and guided exclusively by what they take to be in their own self-interest. Dualistic models hold that people are capable of being moved not only by self-interest, but by something 'higher' as well. Thus, Kant, for example, famously thought that in addition to being subject to inclinations, people are capable of being moved and directed by reason alone. Closely linked to these two sorts of descriptive models of human motivation are prescriptive or normative models of practical reason. The descriptive thesis of psychological egoism, which holds that people exclusively do seek their own good is closely connected to (and frequently confused with) the normative thesis of rational egoism, which holds that people should do this if they are to be considered rational. Corresponding to the dual conception of human motivation we find a dual conception of practical reason. Sidgwick, for example, held that two perspectives offer people equally valid reasons to act-an egoistic perspective, which issues recommendations of what is most in an agent's self-interest, and an impersonal

Human Affairs, 2019

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2003

Two-hundred and thirty-eight quotations from 195 eminent people regarding their beliefs about the meaning of life were content analyzed. The main themes (in order of their frequency) are as follows: "Life is to be enjoyed," "We are here to love and help others," "It is a mystery," "There is no cosmic meaning," "We are here to serve or worship God," "Life is a struggle," "We must make a contribution to society," "Our mission in life is to seek wisdom/truth, and to become selfactualized," "We must create meaning for ourselves," and "Life is absurd or a joke." Discussion focuses on the meaning of the results and implications for practice.

Journal of the Philosophy of Life, 2017

James Tartaglia argues that the question of the meaning of life, when properly construed, is 'the keystone of philosophy,' that which 'locks its traditional preoccupations in place' and 'allows them to bear weight in an intellectual culture dominated by science.' He also argues that we ought to reject the question's premise and conclude that 'life is meaningless.' This paper critically examines what Tartaglia calls 'the real question of the meaning of life' and its implications. It concludes that Tartaglia provides no good reasons for maintaining that his version of the question is not, in the words of his imaginary interlocutor, 'a philosophical dead-end,' but that there is a broader sense of the question that might indeed qualify as a fundamental wellspring of philosophical inquiry.

The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret. This is the big question-the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure. The more we concentrate our critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude us, or to evaporate as any intelligible question. For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. The basic idea of the question of life's meaning is depicted, to rethink the age-old question again, in this article by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question and basic categories of the answer.

Prometheus, 2023

While the meaning of life may forever remain a mystery, we can find out what is meaning-making in life. Namely by examining how individuals in various historical periods and cultures have attributed purpose and meaning to their existence. Thus we can empirically explore the question "What is the search for meaning?" but not the question "What is the meaning of life?".4 Yet the latter question dominated thinking about meaning and purpose for centuries, probably because so many people yearned for an answer. As a result, the question we can actually answer - what is meaning-making? - was often pushed aside. Yet this very question is so fascinating. How can we get inspired by the many ways in which people in the past and present have attributed purpose and meaning to their lives? We will refer to these ways as forms of meaning-making. The common opinion is that "mankind has differed for thousands of years on the question of what the meaning of life is," and that "everyone searches in their own way for meaning and purpose in life."5 These statements seem so obvious that I have long thought myself too that research into forms of meaning-making is not worthwhile. Only in recent years have I noticed that the statements rely on unsupported and untested assumptions that are far from self-evident.