Susan Wolf maintains that “meaningful lives are lives of active engagement in projects of worth.” To be actively engaged is to be “gripped, excited, involved.”
1 As for “projects of worth,” they are those that are “worthwhile,” a term Wolf recognizes as suggesting “a commitment to some sort of objective value,” while admitting that she has “neither a philosophical theory of what objective value is nor a substantive theory about what has this sort of value.”
2
She does, however, offer numerous examples of activities she believes are sources of meaning and ones that are not. Among those that yield meaning are moral or intellectual accomplishments, relationships with friends and relatives, aesthetic enterprises, religious practices, climbing a mountain, training for a marathon, campaigning for a political candidate, caring for an ailing friend, and developing one’s powers as a cellist, cabinetmaker, or pastry chef.
3Among those that do not yield meaning are collecting rubber bands, memorizing the dictionary, making handwritten copies of
War and Peace, riding a roller coaster, meeting a movie star, finding a great dress on sale, loving a pet goldfish, lying on the beach on a beautiful day, eating a perfectly ripe peach, watching sitcoms, recycling, playing computer games, solving crossword puzzles, and writing checks to Oxfam and the ACLU. Wolf warns especially against “focusing too narrowly on the superficial goals of ease, prestige, and material wealth.”
4Controversial cases for her include a life single-mindedly given to corporate law, one devoted to a religious cult, and, an example she takes from David Wiggins, a pig farmer who buys more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs.
5Individuals she cites as paradigms of having had meaningful lives are Mother Theresa, Einstein, Cézanne, and “Gandhi, perhaps.” Among those she mentions whose lives may lack meaning are “the alienated housewife, the conscripted soldier, the assembly line worker.”
6These lists, unfortunately, raise more questions than they answer. Why are involvements with religious practices clearly meaningful but not devotion to a religious cult? Why is caring for an ailing friend meaningful but not providing support for a sick stranger? Why is solving crossword puzzles not an intellectual accomplishment? Why is meeting a movie star meaningless? Does Wolf suppose meeting a famous philosopher would be more meaningful? Why is having met David Lewis more meaningful than having met W. C. Fields?
Why is single-minded concentration on corporate law a controversial case? Would single-minded concentration on labor law, patent law, or constitutional law also be controversial? Does single-minded concentration on epistemology escape controversy?
Why is developing one’s powers as a pastry chef meaningful, but eating a peach is not? If we can find meaning by preparing food, why can’t we find meaning by eating it? Why is meaning found in campaigning for a political candidate who is an advocate of the ACLU, yet not found in providing funds to support the activities of the ACLU?
Why is meaning absent if one is drafted and then fights to defend one’s country? Is the problem supposed to arise from having been drafted or from fighting a war? Why is launching a business to become rich considered superficial? Does an enterprise that generates large earnings thereby lose worth?
Wolf’s warning against a focus on achieving “ease, prestige, and material wealth” is ironic, given that, as any academic dean knows, the tried-and-true method of recruiting professors is to offer them the ease most of them find in a reduced teaching schedule, the prestige of joining other well-known colleagues, and a sizable increase in salary. Trying to persuade noted scholars to join a department without offering them greater ease, prestige, or material wealth is not likely to succeed.
As for hobbies, collecting rubber bands is no doubt unusual, but people have devoted their lives to collecting stamps, coins, baseball memorabilia, beer bottles, theatrical programs, medieval works in astrology, and comic books. Are some collections meaningful and others not?
One philosopher we know has devoted innumerable hours to practicing and playing golf. Another friend, also a philosopher, finds golf an utter waste of time. Is one of them right and the other wrong?
Wolf suggests that “mindless, futile, never-ending tasks” are not likely to be meaningful.
7 These criteria, however, are questionable. For instance, running on a treadmill is mindless, trying to persuade all others of your solutions to philosophical problems is futile, and seeking to eliminate all disease is never-ending. Are these activities, therefore, without meaning? Lifting heavier and heavier weights may be mindless, futile, and never-ending, but we see no reason to derogate weightlifting.
Why not allow others to pursue their own ways of life without disparaging their choices and declaring their lives meaningless? After all, others might declare meaningless a life devoted to philosophical speculation that leads to writing articles that leads to others reading those articles that leads to more philosophical speculation that leads to writing more articles that leads to others reading more articles. Why is such activity more meaningful than that engaged in by Wiggins’s pig farmers?
The tangle in which Wolf finds herself is apparent in her explanation of why Woody Allen, in his movie
Manhattan, includes in the protagonist’s list of things that make life worth living the crabs at Sam Woo’s. She hypothesizes that Allen “regards the dish as an accomplishment meriting aesthetic appreciation.”
8 A simpler, more obvious explanation is that he finds the crabs tasty.
Wolf herself admits that she enjoys eating chocolate, exercising in aerobics class, and playing computer games.
9 Why, then, does she insist on devaluing these activities? After all, if a person can find delights that bring no harm, such a discovery should be appreciated, not denigrated.
A fundamental question about Wolf’s approach is whether in her view individuals are the best judges of the worth of their own lives. Here Wolf waffles. She speaks of a need “to see one’s life as valuable in a way that can be recognized from a point of view other than one’s own.” Yet “no one need accept someone else’s word for what has objective value.”
10In what way, then, are we to decide which activities are of worth? Wolf’s suggestion is that “we are likely to make the most progress toward an answer if we pool our information and experience.”
11 How to proceed with such a collaborative inquiry is unclear.
Even with all these problems, however, Wolf’s theory faces an even more daunting difficulty, which appears when she tries to address a criticism of her theory from psychologist Jonathan Haidt. As a counterexample to her claim that a meaningful life requires focus on “objects worthy of love,”
12 he presents the case of one of his students, a shy woman who was passionate about horses: riding them, studying their history, and making “‘horse friends’” with others who shared her passion. Haidt argues that this woman found meaning in life through her interest in horses, but he recognizes that “all of her horsing around does nothing for anyone else, and it does not make the world a better place.”
13 Thus, according to Haidt, in this case Wolf’s theory of objective value fails.
Remembering the long list of activities whose worth Wolf does not accept, we might anticipate that she would dismiss horses as aninappropriate subject on which to build a significant life. Surprisingly, however, she agrees with Haidt that horses might contribute to the meaningfulness of the woman’s life. The reason Wolf offers is that a person’s liking some activity, whatever it may be, can lead to its becoming valuable for that individual.
But then what becomes of objective value? Wolf senses the problem and admits that her discussion “may leave others either disappointed by what they see as a watering down of what is distinctive about my conception of meaningfulness or confused about what the point of it is, if it is to be understood so broadly.”
14Such confusion is understandable, especially when Wolf goes on to find the possibility of objective value in lawn mower-racing, being a basketball fan, and even solving crossword puzzles, the same activity she had previously declared meaningless. No wonder Wolf warns us that her views “will be of little or no
practical use.”
15This limitation is clear if we try to apply Wolf’s views to the cases of Pat and Lee. After all, if riding horses, racing lawn mowers, being a sports fan, and solving crossword puzzles might give meaning to life, then Pat can surely find meaning in teaching, playing bridge, and practicing the cello, while Lee can find meaning in swimming, driving luxury cars, and traveling to distant locations.
Is one of these individuals living a more worthwhile life than the other? Trying to resolve this question by determining who has undertaken projects of worth does not provide the answer we seek.
