the meaning of life and death
A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man goes to India, consults a sage in a cave and asks him the meaning of life. In three sentences the sage tells him, the man thanks him and leaves. There are several variants of this story also: In the first, the man lives meaningfully ever after; in the second he makes the sentences public so that everyone then knows the meaning of life; in the third, he sets the sentences to rock music, making his fortune and enabling everyone to whistle the meaning of life; and in the fourth variant, his plane crashes as he is flying off from his meeting with the sage. In the fifth version, the person listening to me tell this story eagerly asks what sentences the sage spoke. . . And in the sixth version, I tell him.
A parody by Robert Nozick
Before his death in 2002, the Oxford philosopher R.M. Hare liked to tell the story of how a Swiss teenager staying in his house suddenly changed from his normal sunny disposition to one of morbid depression. Hare was moved to act after the boy ceased to eat his meals, took to wandering the countryside after dark and most tellingly, ‘surprised us one morning by asking for cigarettes – he had not smoked at all up until then’. The influence of French philosophy was unmistakable and, sure enough, it transpired that the young houseguest had suffered a psychological shock one evening after reading The Outsider by the existentialist Albert Camus. Like Mersault, the hero of the great novel, he had concluded that ‘nothing matters’. The cure was simple. Hare wrote:
My friend had not understood that the function of the word ‘matters’ is to express concern; he had thought that mattering was something (some activity or process) that things did, rather like chattering; as if the sentence ‘My wife matters to me’ were similar in logical function to the sentence ‘My wife chatters to me’. If one thinks that, one may begin to wonder what this activity is, called mattering; and one may begin to observe the world closely (aided perhaps by the clear cold descriptions of a novel like that of Camus) to see if one can catch anything doing something that can be called mattering; and when we can observe nothing going on which seems to correspond to this name, it is easy for the novelist to persuade us that after all nothing matters. To which the answer is, ‘“Matters” isn’t that sort of word; it isn’t intended to describe something that things do, but to express our concern about what they do; so of course we can’t observe things mattering; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter…My Swiss friend was not a hypocrite. His trouble was that, through philosophical naiveté, he took for a real moral problem what was not a moral problem at all, but a philosophical one – a problem to be solved, not by an agonising struggle with his soul, but by an attempt to understand what he was saying.’1
Hare’s houseguest might have been cured by another masterpiece by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the man who offended the gods by refusing to accept his death. He was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill, from where it would roll down to the bottom again. There the process would begin anew, and continue forever. Camus concludes:
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than rock…The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.2
The American philosopher Richard Taylor framed the terms of the debate on the meaning of life in the world of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Taylor served as a submarine officer during the Second World War, but ended his life a pacifist. He is remembered as an epicure, an authority on bee-keeping, a writer of books on love and relationships and a certified marriage guidance counsellor who had been married three times himself. He liked to smoke cigars while giving classes and, though he switched to flasks of tea in his later years, he died of lung cancer at the age of eighty-three in 2003. Taylor concurred with Camus that Sisyphus can find solace, but identified two opposing approaches to the problem. The first is from the outside – if, for example, ‘we supposed that these stones…were assembled at the top of the hill…in a beautiful and enduring temple’.3
To look at the issue ‘from the outside’ is to identify objective sources of meaning in the world that we might hope to cleave to. These are the sort of values that the Swiss boy apparently failed to find on his long walks. Traditionally, they came from a heavenly Creator, the ‘demise’ of whom led to the existentialists’ worries. However, if the question is asked, ‘How can life have meaning without God?’, the next question should be, ‘How exactly does life have meaning with God?’ The point is that God’s purpose must itself be a meaningful one, and it recalls the ancient conundrum of whether good things are good because the gods love them, or whether the gods love them because they are good. If God could have decreed that evil acts were good and vice versa, then to act virtuously in order to please Him is no more than to obey divine whim. Similarly, any purpose of human existence that the Deity has in mind must be meaningful regardless of His wishes. (Needless to say, the same also follows for the intentions of one’s mortal parents.) If it is worth living well in the sight of God, it is worth living well without it. It may be in our interests to follow the divine plan – so as not to go to hell perhaps – but in that case we are subject to duress. Whether this situation truly represents the meaning of my life may come down to my word versus His. Any meaning given from without is one that we can take or leave, though this is not to deny, of course, that some people will accept happily a purpose that has been imposed upon them. The same goes for the one-word answer to the meaning of life given by Darwinism: reproduction. Procreation is certainly in the ‘interests’ of our genes, because that is what they are geared to achieve, but many individuals feel that their own interests as idiosyncratic human beings are quite different and treat their biological imperative with the scorn Camus’s Sisyphus reserves for the gods.
In the end, as the Oxford philosopher David Wiggins writes:
‘Unless we are Marxists, we are much more resistant in the second half of the twentieth century than eighteenth or nineteenth century men knew how to be against attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves. But, whether temporarily or permanently, we have more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of emancipation or progress…is that these are marks by which our minute speck in the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the cosmos.4
But if we are orphans to meaning, this does nothing to devalue any purpose we find or create for ourselves. Many couples find it very difficult to conceive and spend a great deal of time and money on fertility treatments in order to fulfil their desire for a family. Yet is the life of a baby born to such parents more meaningful than that of a child conceived by two strangers during a drunken encounter? We know it would be offensive and absurd to suggest so. One cannot inherit meaningfulness any more than one can truly inherit nobility or the right to rule. The embryo in the IVF tube might grow up to be a delinquent, while the child of the broom cupboard might become the lynchpin of its family and a pillar of the community.
We seem to be left with Richard Taylor’s second approach: the attempt to find meaning internally, from within oneself. The problem with Sisyphus building a temple on top of the hill is that monuments do not last forever, and even those that do (like the pyramids, Taylor adds) soon become curiosities. One also has to wonder how long it is going to take Sisyphus to complete his temple: either he will finish it and then be condemned to boredom thereafter, or else it will never be finished, which makes the exercise rather pointless. But, Taylor writes:
Suppose that the gods, as an afterthought, waxed perversely merciful by implanting in [Sisyphus] a strange and irrational impulse…to roll stones…To make this more graphic, suppose they accomplish this by implanting in him some substance that has this effect on his character and drives…this little afterthought of the gods…was…merciful. For they have by this device managed to give Sisyphus precisely what he wants – by making him want precisely what they inflict on him. However it may appear to us, Sisyphus’…life is now filled with mission and meaning, and he seems to himself to have been given an entry to heaven…The only thing that has happened is this: Sisyphus has been reconciled to [his existence]…He has been led to embrace it. Not, however, by reason or persuasion, but by nothing more rational than the potency of a new substance in his veins…The meaning of life is from within us, it is not bestowed from without, and it far exceeds in its beauty and permanence any heaven of which men have ever dreamed or yearned for.5
This kind of hyperbole is more often heard from the mouths of lesser thinkers than Taylor – namely, mystics and gurus. The same point is expressed by the modern adage that ‘If you can’t have what you like, then you’d better like what you have’ and prompts the obvious concern that what you have may not be worth liking. As David Wiggins puts it, in Taylor’s scenario:
It seems to make too little difference to the meaningfulness of life how well or badly our strivings are apt to turn out. Stone rolling for its own sake, and stone rolling for successful temple building, and stone rolling for temple building that will be frustrated – all seem to come to much the same thing.6
As human beings we want not only to satisfy our desires, but also for those desires to be legitimate, or the best ones we could have. We want our achievements to mean something objectively, or at least compared to those of others, and not just as a way of proving something to ourselves. Nor would it make a difference if the substance put in Sisyphus’s veins had been flowing through them since birth rather than injected at a later date; the ‘mercy’ of the gods is no less deceitful for having a longer history. Just as any divine purpose would have to be meaningful regardless of God’s approval, so must the designs of individual mortals.
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer complains:
Until my arrival in New York, I had never met anyone who was seeing a psychotherapist as much as once a week; but as I became acquainted with a circle of New York Professors and their spouses, I soon found that many of them were in daily psychoanalysis. Five days a week, eleven months of the year, they had an appointment for one hour, not to be broken under any circumstances short of a life or death emergency. They could not go on holiday unless their analyst was taking a holiday at the same time…Some of my colleagues, well-paid, successful academics, were handing over a quarter of their annual salary to their analysts! This was for people who, as far as I could tell, were neither more nor less disturbed than those not in analysis…I wanted to pick them up and shake them…In looking inwards for solutions to their problems, people are seeking the mysterious substance that, in Taylor’s second possible way of adding meaning to the life of Sisyphus, the gods put into Sisyphus in order to make him want to push stones up the hill.7
Singer strongly favours the temple option:
If these able, affluent New Yorkers had only got off their analysts’ couches, stopped thinking about their own problems, and gone out to do something about the real problems faced by less fortunate people in Bangladesh and Ethiopia – or even in Manhattan, a few subway stops north – they would have forgotten their own problems and maybe made the world a better place as well.8
The analysts of New York seem to have traded in a doctrine beloved of talk show hosts and Eastern gurus: that happiness and a meaningful life can be attained by simply altering one’s attitudes. The serum of Sisyphus has taken over from the elixir of youth as the exemplary target of a hopeless search. The unhappy are told that they must change their outlook when what they really need is to change their life – get a divorce or a new career or ensure that their child’s drug addiction is dealt with.
A student once asked the English linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin to explain what ‘existing’ was. Austin replied that it was ‘like breathing, only quieter’. It is not surprising that the naked background of life, divested of any meaning-giving activities, should often be thought rather purposeless. We might wonder how such a featureless vessel possibly could have a purpose. The very notion of purposes breaks down if we widen its scope too far. The purpose, meaning or value of any object is a relation it has to something outside itself. For example, the value of a hammer is the use to which a carpenter puts it, the value of a child is the emotional attachment felt by its mother, the purpose of antibiotics is to kill harmful bacteria. When we come to assess the value of an individual’s entire life, we must likewise look for something outside it – to his or her impact on history, perhaps, or to the family they nurture. Again, being something external to an individual’s life, it need not be something that he or she necessarily cares for. Many dogs are bought for the purpose of guarding property, but this does not stop some of them from greeting burglars by wagging their tails.
The problem of an individual life threatens to re-emerge in a wider theatre – the meaning of all things. If the context in which our lives have meaning itself has no meaning, then the canker of meaninglessness might spread all the way down. As the American moral philosopher Kurt Baier complains: ‘People are disconcerted by the thought that life as such has no meaning in that sense only because they very naturally think it entails that no individual life can have meaning either. They naturally assume that this life or that life can have meaning only if life as such has meaning.’9 John Wisdom, Wittgenstein’s successor as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, was sympathetic. He wrote that:
Whenever we ask, ‘What supports thing A or these things A, B, C,’ then we can answer this question by mentioning some thing other than the thing A or things A, B, C about which we asked ‘What supports it or them?’We must if we are to answer the question mention something D other than those things which form the subject of our question, and we must say that this thing is what supports them. If we mean by the phrase ‘all things’ absolutely all things which exist then obviously there is nothing outside that about which we are now asked ‘What supports all this?’ Consequently, any answer to the question will be self-contradictory just as any answer to the question ‘What is bigger than the biggest of all things’ must be self-contradictory. Such questions are absurd, or, if you like, silly and senseless…Perhaps someone here replies, the meaning, the significance of this present life, lies in a life hereafter, a life in heaven. All right. But imagine that some persistent enquirer asks, ‘But what I am asking is what is the meaning of all life, life here and life beyond, life now and life hereafter? What is the meaning of all things in earth and heaven?’ Are we to say that this question is absurd because there cannot be anything beyond all things while at the same time any answer to ‘What is the meaning of all things?’ must point to some thing beyond all things?10
Wisdom answers that the question is not entirely senseless. Rather:
we are trying to find the order in the drama of Time…We must however remember that what one calls answering such a question is not giving an answer. I mean we cannot answer such a question in the form: ‘The meaning is this.’ Such an idea about what form answering a question must take may lead to a new despair in which we feel we cannot do anything in the way of answering such a question as ‘What is the meaning in it all?’ merely because we are not able to sum up our results in a phrase or formula.11
Camus observed that ‘What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.’12 But a meaningful life and a meaningful death are not the same thing. History records innumerable no-hopers who met their end by saving another’s life, while Elvis Presley died on the lavatory. The meaning of death nonetheless has a mythical bearing on the meaning of life. In the first century BC, Lucretius wrote in On the Nature of Things:
Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight – anything depressing – anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?
Derek Parfit concludes:
If we are afraid of death…the object of our dread is not our nonexistence. It is only our future non-existence. That we can think serenely of our past non-existence does not show that it is not something to regret. But since we do not in fact view with dread our past non-existence, we may be able to use this fact to reduce our dread, or depression, when we think about our inevitable deaths. If we often think about, and view serenely, the blackness behind us, some of this serenity may be transferred to our view of the blackness before us.13
The Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued that dread has its place, as it is death that gives life its meaning – on the grounds that the prospect of certain doom works wonders for self-discipline. ‘If we were immortal,’ he wrote, ‘we could legitimately postpone every action forever. It would be of no consequence whether or not we did a thing now; every act might just as well be done tomorrow or the day after or a year from now or ten years hence.’14 In contrast to this eternal Mexico, we must instead take our earthly opportunities while we can. But it is not as though we can miss opportunities when we are dead, as there will be no ‘us’ to miss anything. The advice would be valid for someone looking to pack as much activity as possible into a two-week vacation, but it cannot apply to an entire lifetime in quite the same way. Besides, death makes us question whether it is worth bothering to do anything while we are here, given that one day no trace will remain of our accomplishments.
This last thought partakes in the obsession with size that bedevils the debate. Science shows us that human beings on Planet Earth are, on the one hand, a speck of dust on a speck of dust – barely noticeable on the cosmic scale – but also shows effectively that the smaller something is the closer to true reality it comes, for macroscopic events and objects are no more than the effects of the microscopic processes of microscopic particles. This is the level upon which the fundamental laws of nature operate. Although medium-sized objects such as ourselves may seem to have been left out somewhere in the chain of being, it should not be assumed that physicists have therefore rendered us irrelevant, or ever intended such a thing. Irrelevant to what, we might ask. Thomas Nagel reminds us that: ‘It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.’15
Our meagre bodies may limit the scope of our physical undertakings, but this is different from undermining their significance. Olympic gold medals for sprinting are not devalued because cheetahs and horses can run even faster. Neither, in the same way, does the finite duration of our lives reduce their significance. The American philosopher Robert Nozick ridiculed the idea that it should: ‘Consider those things people speak of as permanent and eternal. These include (apart from God) numbers, sets, abstract ideas, spacetime itself. Would it be better to be one of these things?…Is anyone pining to lead a setly existence?’16 Even if we could do this, this would not make our lives more meaningful. We are each of us out-existed by rocks, oak trees and giant tortoises, yet only extreme environmentalists deem such objects to be more important than the human race. As Ludwig Wittgenstein mused:
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?17
I might be appalled at the thought that I shall live forever, without, at any particular time in the future, wanting these to be my last five minutes. (That is, I might never want to die without wanting never to die.) More starkly, I might be appalled at the thought that I shall live forever and appalled at the thought that I shall one day die… There is no reason why either option should attract me – though there is no third alternative.18
The second option is the one that occupies us most. As Thomas Nagel averred: ‘Given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week…I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.’19 Wittgenstein remarked that: ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.’20 And, as Moore puts it, ‘My death never comes for me.’ However, Wittgenstein added that: ‘If we take eternity to mean not temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.’
Unfortunately, most of us do indeed take eternity to mean temporal duration, which is why we spend so much time worrying about eternal life. And while our life may not have limits that we experience just as our field of vision does not have borders that we can see on both sides of, this no more means that we possess life eternal than its corollary means that we can see all things on Earth. Unlike the problem of life, the problem of death admits of no dissolution. Our fear of non-existence is a set-up on the part of Nature. There would be no point in a creature fearing something that it could not hope to change, such as the time of its birth. However, there is a great deal of point in being afraid of one’s death, because one has some degree of control over the timing. Instinct is a blunt instrument. It continues to hope, and continues to make us cower, even where death is inevitable.