The Religious Solution and the Scientific Dissolution

In my experience students who come to university to study philosophy are sometimes disappointed because it did not answer for them ‘the big questions’. When pressed about what they mean by ‘the big questions’, frequently they will respond by saying something such as, ‘Philosophy did not tell me what was the meaning of life’.

Certainly, to put a question like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ to a contemporary philosopher, particularly to a contemporary analytic philosopher, is a very interesting and often quite revealing thing to do. Overcoming his or her temporary paroxysm of incredulity and issuing a veto on any attempt to make it a topic for a seminar course this semester, the analytic philosopher is likely to begin by pointing out that a human life is not like a copyright sign. A life does not come with any agreed conventional meaning attached to it. Of course, our philosopher will acknowledge that those who believe in God will think otherwise. Religious believers, or many of them, will hold that each individual human is indeed created with an inbuilt sign or symbol, namely God's copyright sign or, perhaps more revealingly, God's ‘destiny sign’. Such believers hold that all humans are God's artefacts, and so at birth, or perhaps at conception, they have bestowed upon them a God-given destiny to love, honour and obey Him and thereby to gain eternal life in heaven with Him, His angels, prophets, martyrs and saints. While humans are not predestined to go in the direction of salvation, they are urged, strongly advised and at times threatened with punishment if they fail freely to take the path He has pointed out to them.

In A Confession, one of the greatest of novelists, Leo Tolstoy, admitted that he himself had once embraced the rationalist and scientific rejection of the religious view of life but that had only brought him deep unhappiness. He came to believe that only the religious account of the meaning of life would end his misery. This account was not to be found as a product of human reasoning but only and always as a gift of faith. So arguments and objections simply miss the point. As Tolstoy himself put it:

Sadly, since Darwin, taking refuge in pure, blind Tolstoyan faith and its ‘solution’ to the problem of finding a meaning for human life has lost its attraction. Nowadays not merely the majority of philosophers but the bulk of the comparatively wealthy, leisured and educated inhabitants of the so-called ‘developed’ portions of Planet Earth have become agnostic about the existence of any divine Creator and about the possibility of faith, and have embraced a materialistic, scientific outlook. In the science of ‘the Big Bang and Afters’ the origins and lives of all species of living things, including humans, should be viewed in much the same way as we view the evolution of the universe as a whole. Our universe has no divine destiny. Our universe as a whole has no copyright sign, nor does it have any ‘destiny sign’. It signifies nothing beyond itself. Our middle-sized planet is just one in a million or more. It is just a giant ellipsoid billiard-ball constrained by the gravity of a local, slowly dying star. Its existence is the result of forces that are blind, random, unthinking and uncaring. It just spins through the void on its merry or dismal causal way. It is going nowhere. We can no longer expect or hope for some noble, divinely ordained, apocalyptic ending for our planet or our solar system or our universe. Our little, local planet will probably be drawn slowly into the long and darkening death of our sun, perhaps to be transformed by some primal exchange of matter and energy into a process whereby there will eventually be a new localized Big Bang and so a new cosmic fallout, with new suns and new planets and a new process of evolution with new organisms that will remain forever ignorant of our previous existence.

We humans, so the story continues, are not even special. Quite likely there are other intelligent organisms in other solar systems in other universes. Their intelligence may be superior to ours in the way that ours is to a dog. We humans are Johnny-come-lately transient inhabitants of a minute portion of a vast cosmos.

Far from finding this scientific view of life empty and nihilistic, one of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein, rejoiced in the liberation it afforded him:

The Viewpoint of Philosophy

Now I am going to suggest that philosophy may have something useful and important and different to contribute to the search for the meaning of life. Both religion and, especially science, take an externalist view of human life. The former views it as God's creation and thereby imbued with God's destiny for it. Science views it as just a tiny impulse in the vast electrochemical machine, the universe. Philosophy, on the other hand, or at least much of it, has an internalist view of human life. For, from the point of view of philosophy, at least philosophy in the West since the seventeenth century, the most significant feature of humans is not their evolutionary or allegedly divine origins. The most significant feature is that, as far as we know at present, they are the only species able to create a meaning for its life. Just as an artist can create something significant from canvas, paint and brushes, so we humans, with our capacity for complex conceptual and rational thought and imagination, can create something significant, some meaning, out of the bits and pieces of our everyday lives. We humans have control over our lives in that we can plan the future, or at least our part in it, in the light of our knowledge of ourselves, both as individuals in society and as part of the human species. We humans can give personal direction to our lives in a way that no other known creatures can. We can decide what vocations, tasks, goals, causes or, in general, actions are worthwhile. We can produce Omega Points of our own individual making. It is called creating values or worthwhile things to do.

In short, in seeking to answer the question about the meaning of life, philosophy directs the student precisely towards that aspect of human life which science and the current scientifically oriented, analytic philosophy seem unable or unwilling to cope with and so generally ignore. It is, to use some old-fashioned phrases, in the interior life, in our stream of consciousness, that individual humans must first seek to give meaning to their lives. Animals experience fear and anger and other strong primal emotions and moods, but only humans experience personal failure or a feeling of insignificance and so in consequence misery. An animal can have no sense of failure or insignificance because it can have no sense of success or self-worth. It can have no sense of success because it can have no sense of a goal to be achieved and so any sense of achievement when the goal is attained. It can have no sense of self-worth because it can have no sense of worth, of any sort. Animals do not have values. So it is in major part due to our human ability to set ourselves personal goals and to seek out values that we humans experience failure, insignificance and misery or success, self-worth and happiness. If there is nothing, nothing at all, that a person wants to do that seems worthwhile, then the future must stretch ahead like a vista of the bleakest of bleak terrains, an endless dry desert, with no oasis in sight.

Quite often, a student's worrying over the meaning of life is a cry for help in finding something worth doing, something they could value as a goal. As the Existentialists, so often belittled by analytic philosophers, were fond of pointing out, sometimes in minatory fashion, it is only in our stream of consciousness that the world impinges on us as persons. It is only in consciousness that we can relate the world, as delivered to us by our senses, to what we think are our deepest personal and individual needs, interests, hopes, wants and desires. Thus it is only in our consciousness that we create value in our lives. On the other hand science, and a purely scientific philosophy, seeks to make sense of the world that is delivered to us via our senses by distancing it from us as subjects and a fortiori as individuals. Scientists seek a view of the world that is as far removed as possible from any subjective view of it. Science has and wants nothing to say to any individual as individual. It seeks in the most dispassionate and objective terms what might be the most general laws and theorems and theories and structures that explain the nature of the world and the humans in it. Science seeks to explain to Mary how her brain and the rest of her body functions, how they interact with the objective world, and how and why malfunctions occur, but it has no interest in helping Mary find meaning in her own life. At most science might be prepared to give her some Prozac to dampen down her anxiety and depression about not finding any meaning in her life or, if that doesn't do the trick, give her a good jolt of ECT to make her placid and tractable and unconcerned about such matters, and no trouble to her parents.

The Meaning of Life and the End of Life

So far I have posed the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ in the context of a young student being the questioner. But our question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ takes on a very different hue if it is asked by someone who is far removed in age from a troubled undergraduate student. Sometimes I visit someone who is laid low with the ills of old age and by any reasonable statistical consideration not too far from death. Sometimes such a person, recalling that I have spent most of my working life as a teacher in a philosophy department in a university, will say in a gently mocking sort of way, ‘Well then, what does philosophy tell me about the meaning of life? I can't see much sense in it myself if it all ends in the grave.’

In many respects this is a very odd thing to say, yet it is possible to discern what is really behind that way of putting the question. It is odd in appearing to say, at least on the surface, that if something comes to an end, particularly if this is an inevitable end, as a human's death is, then it really cannot have had much point in the first place and so must be more or less meaningless and worthless. This is an odd thing to say because almost everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. In particular, the things we most enjoy seem to. Think of breakfast in a foreign city in a comfortable hotel dining room overlooking a beautiful city square festooned with trees with their autumn leaves, or think of books, bottles of wine, films, nights at the opera, honeymoons, journeys, country walks, cricket and football matches, summer holidays, tennis in the sun, dinners with one's friends, lovemaking and sleep. But our knowing without a doubt that the honeymoon or holiday or indeed the enjoyment of any of these things will come to an end does not preclude our finding the experiences pleasant, engrossing, significant or rewarding.

What the suggestion might really mean is that, for those without religious faith, a belief in the ultimate, unasked for, unavoidable, unmerited and irreversible disintegration of our self and sense of self at death all too easily makes our life seem so pointless. It is like being given a glass of an extraordinarily fine and subtle wine only for the host to pour the rest of the bottle away before your eyes. In a somewhat similar manner it may seem pointless and cruel to be given life and its set of engrossing experiences, only to find out that it will all end quite soon and irreversibly so. Such well-meant advice as ‘Enjoy life while you can’ seems to bear testimony to the fact that many of us share this sense of life as ultimately pointless and cruel. The Existentialist philosophers have made much of this inescapable sense of the pointlessness and cruelty of such an existence, this feeling that we have been launched into a world which has no meaning and with a death sentence hanging over us. They have often depicted such a scenario as absurd, as an absurd juxtaposition of human aspiration and endeavour that leads us ever forward but with the certainty that what really awaits us is literally a dead end.

It is possible, I believe, to view things in a way that sees no need to take refuge either in the supposed solace afforded by the death-defying religious stories or in the self-indulgent wallowing in the angst-ridden nihilistic resignation of the Existentialists. If, quite unexpectedly, I am presented with a gift of the very last bottle in existence of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1945 and told that it is still in superb condition, comprising the last few mouthfuls of the first, great, post-Second World War vintage, this does not make me sad or sunk in despondency and despair. I think how supremely fortunate I am. What a rare and unexpected pleasure I am afforded. What joy. In the same way, quite literally, given the more or less random coming together of my parents, I feel that I am lucky to be alive. I realize, of course, that when my parents conceived me, they were not thinking of me. How could they have been, I did not as yet exist. Besides, their minds were on other things. But what luck! What luck that their meeting one another, marrying, and then their bringing about a recombination of their genetic material, enabled me and my consciousness and its subsequent wealth of experiences and activities to come into existence. That the sort of physiological machine that I am has a definite lifespan, as do my cat and the dog next door, does not detract from the magnificent experience of being alive now and for some foreseeable future. I realize, of course, that others have been less fortunate and have been born with irreversible physical or mental defects, or diseases that cause great disability and pain. But these, I believe, are in a minority and are indeed to be pitied and, where possible, aided and comforted.

That I know, as soon as I approach adulthood, that death is inevitable and will come sooner or later, does cast a shadow when now and again I reflect on it. But even that is diffused and softened by nature itself. For nature has fashioned living organisms with a consciousness that, among other tasks, acts as an internal note-taker about when the organism itself is running down. As we grow older, we know only too well not merely that we are ageing but also that we are growing decrepit. We see the signs. We sense the slowing down of the steps, the creaking of the joints, the lack of acuity in our vision, the growing deafness, the lapses of memory, the greater effort expended in climbing the stairs, the shortness of breath afterwards. We realize that, in such a condition, we are incapable of many of the activities of our youth and middle age, and incapable of experiencing all the joys of earlier periods of our life. Nature is telling us that time is almost up. Soon enough it will tell us more sharply and curtly, giving us a dose of acute pain here or there, or causing a breakdown of some bodily system or other. Just as a migratory bird, registering the lowering of the temperature, the thinning of the foliage on the trees and the scarcity of food, sees the signs of winter coming on and prepares for a long journey to a warmer and more hospitable place, so we see the signs of our eternal winter coming on and should prepare for it. With the ever-increasing signs and portents afforded us by ever increasing old age, death seems both natural and rightly ordered, and neither cruel nor pointless. A cricketer who has been at the crease for nearly a whole day and scored 154 runs does not really mind when in the penultimate over of the day, his concentration wandering and his arms and legs growing weary, he scoops the slower ball straight back into the leg-spinner's hands. In similar fashion, an old person often says of a friend of her own age who has just died, ‘She's had a good innings.’ Given that we know that we are organisms with a definite lifespan, death seems neither bewildering nor shocking nor unfair but fitting, it least if it occurs around about the end of an average lifespan. If old age brings with it a debilitating illness, as it often does, we might very well welcome death. When the gods wish to destroy us, they don't usually drive us mad, as the ancient Greeks believed, but more often make us so ill that we long for death as a release.

If life was not linear and progressive, we might think differently. If we were not born as infants and then matured and grew old, if everyone was born at what we would now think of as aged twenty-one and stayed at that age, our health and abilities neither decaying nor lessening in any way, then death would seem cruel and arbitrary. It would not be a result of a natural causal process of a natural organism whereby it is wound up and then runs down. Biologically it would make no sense. Death would have come upon us suddenly, at some completely unpredictable moment in our unvarying prime, and cut us down without warning or sign. Every death would be a tragedy. For every death would be like some cruel and arbitrary act of an unpitying god. Indeed that is why the untimely death of someone young, struck down by a car or killed by some assailant or disease, seems to us so sad and cruel and unfair.

Life's Meaning is Varied and Variable

The question ‘What is the meaning of life’, even when it is rephrased as ‘What is the meaning of my life’, sometimes has another, hidden assumption in it. This assumption, which I believe is a false one, is that there is a meaning, a single narrative to be told, a single journey to be mapped. This is simply not so. We humans are conscious creatures that can plan ahead and adjust our plans in the light of the changing context and of our changing knowledge of our changing selves. We are clever creatures precisely because we are so readily adaptable ones. We are not stuck in a groove, not caught in cyclical, tropic behaviour like a homing pigeon or migrating salmon. We constantly recreate ourselves in the sense that we constantly produce new ideas and new perspectives, and so set ourselves new goals and new projects in the light of them. We do this partly to escape boredom, no doubt, but also in part to satisfy new needs, interests or passions. Among the animals we are the intellectual chameleons.

In her youth Michelle may have been a champion sprinter and spent most of her time in athletics, training and competing. As she grew older, she may have become an athletics trainer, then a sports journalist, then editor of a local newspaper, then taught journalism at a technical college, then become the headmistress of a technical school. And so on. There are connections but not ones that she could have foreseen and a fortiori not ones that she planned. There was no overall plot. The connections occurred ad hoc and depended upon opportunities arising, catching the eye, interesting it and being grasped, as well as on the human capacities for boredom and curiosity. There was a narrative but it was one that constantly changed its plot. It was an opportunist's narrative, constantly adapting itself to new times and new environments.

Most lives are like that, no overall plot but much chopping and changing. But such a life does not lack meaning because it changes its plot, because there is no ‘big picture’. A life has many phases with many directions and in that sense many meanings. It would be strange if it were otherwise. If, aged seven, I decided that I wanted to be an airline pilot, that would be a decision made in ignorance. When I grew up and arrived at the appropriate time for being trained as a pilot, I might realize that my eyesight is not good enough or that I have a fear of flying. Or, most likely, by then I would have other interests and prefer to do something else. If, aged seventeen, I decide to become a schoolteacher, I might find out at age twenty-seven that I am not really cut out to be a teacher. I might have discovered that I find it too hard to control a class, and that I am too shy and introverted to hold the attention of teenagers. So it will be sensible and meaningful for me to change direction and seek another occupation. I might have discovered that I am quite good at the careful and considered correction of other people's written work, and so seek to make a living on the editorial side of a newspaper or publisher. Then, later, having joined a publishing firm, decide to write a book myself.

Of course there are people who eventually develop a meaning in their life, one single meaning. Sometimes they are saints like Mother Teresa who dedicated her adult life to helping the poor of Calcutta. Sometimes they are fanatics like the ‘Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski, who, after being educated at Harvard, dedicated the latter part of his life to mounting a continual series of attacks, by means of his own home-made bombs, on all forms of modern technology. There is no denying that those who make such passionate commitments to a single purpose or goal may have richer, emotionally richer, lives than the rest of us. But it is frequently the case that people who have such a single point or meaning to their life have not set that goal for themselves, rather they have signed up to pursue goals set long ago by others. In that sense they have become servants of some religion or political viewpoint or national cause or global campaign. Many people are religious and support various causes, but few dedicate their whole life to their religion or cause. They attend a church or synagogue or mosque on the appropriate days, say their prayers and perhaps pay some tithe in support of their religion. They support a political party by going to their local branch meetings, paying their dues, campaigning and then voting at election time. But they also work in the bank or drive a bus or teach in a school or work in a shop, support a cricket or football team, collect stamps or china figurines, love certain sorts of clothes or cars, have a thing about Chianti or Cornish pasties, and so on. Their religion or political party does not dominate their lives and could not be said to be the meaning of all they do.

To have a single meaning in all or almost all one does is very rare. So rare that we are likely to look with admiration, incomprehension or horror on such persons, depending on what it is that comprises their one meaning. To have such a singular meaning to one's life is so rare as immediately to attract our attention or curiosity, in part because such single-mindedness must be so difficult to achieve. To have such a reversed-telescope view of one's future life must make heavy demands. It must take great effort, at times a painfully distorting effort, to block out one's natural inclination to be interested in and intent on pursuing many different things, to cut off one's natural inclination to be free to change one's mind about one's interests or to wait for something new and interesting to come along. To travel in only one direction, looking neither left nor right but only straight ahead, without heed for other traffic or for road signs, will often cause great havoc.

I have contrasted this unusual case of a person who has a single all-consuming purpose or goal or meaning in life with what I take to be the more usual case, namely that of a person who has many and changing interests, and so many and changing purposes, goals and meanings to his or her life. But there is a third case, the most unusual of all and one that deserves our sympathy. The person I have in mind might well be one of the students whose complaint about philosophy started this discussion. For sometimes such a student may suffer from having not merely no great goal or purpose or meaning to his or her life but seemingly no interests at all. Such a person suffers, and ‘suffers’ is the right word, from a deep kind of ennui that hinders all enterprise and enjoyment. When it reaches clinical dimensions, we call it a deep depression, and advise professional help. If we are unfortunate enough to fall into such a terrible state, we find that nothing seems to engage us as persons. Everything seems meaningless. Life does not seem to be worth living. It is monochrome, boring, trivial, not worth getting out of bed for, and not worth living any longer. It is like a perfectly healthy and sane person developing a condition where they pass from being an ordinary engaged and interested and interesting person to the exact opposite and, for this is where the deepest pain lies, they are profoundly aware of this retreat from the sunlight of a normal life into an ever-shrinking world of darkness. This makes them feel guilty as if they have failed in life, failed those around them, failed as a human. This in turn may lead them to think that they are valueless as persons.

Of course one tries to help by explaining that such depressions are not uncommon, that everyone to some degree experiences them, that they will probably pass, that they can be caused by bereavement or by a sense of failure or by feeling cut off from others through shyness or by a myriad of things. Very often, sadly, such depressions are immune to any such advice or indeed any professional ‘talking out’ cure, which is why they are described as a mental illness rather than a form of ignorance or a failure in rationality.

Freedom, Transcendence and Love

I have suggested that, by and large, it is we, individual humans, who give meaning to lives, namely our own lives, and that we do it by becoming immersed in plans, projects, tasks, careers, hobbies, creative endeavours, lifestyles, causes, religions, or, in extremis, in merely surviving. Now someone might respond to this suggestion by saying, ‘Is that all there is to life? If so, then it is all rather disappointing and humdrum. I had hoped for something more, something better, something richer, something deeper.’ In place of the ‘religious picture of life’ that bestows from the outside such a ‘deep and dignified, indeed magnificent picture of a human's ultimate goal and so role in life’, I have substituted a sort of supermarket picture. On offer are a variety of goals that can make a life meaningful for a human, with a warning that, if any particular person fails to find anything to catch his or her eye among the goods on display, then life will appear meaningless. Put more bluntly, you might complain that ‘If that is your answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?”, then it is a very disappointing one.’

But to respond in that way is, I think, to reveal that you may have missed the point of what I am trying to say. For those with genuine religious faith, it must indeed be comforting to know what life is all about and what one ought to be doing. On the other hand it can be frightening, intoxicating, unnerving, exhilarating not to know what life is all about or what one ought to be doing, but to have to work it out for oneself. Not to be given an official template for our life, but to be told that we ourselves are free to form our own individual sui generis template, is Freedom with a capital ‘F’. It is all ‘up to us’. That, I think, has been an important theme, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of a great deal of modern post-Enlightenment philosophy.

A short while ago, I acknowledged that this view of the meaning of life, as ‘up to us’ and ‘not a matter of any particular goal’ but simply ‘a matter of what takes our fancy’, might well strike someone as a poor substitute for a religious faith that promises such transcendental purposes and rewards and a ‘solution’ to the problem of life's meaning. But I would be giving an incomplete picture if I lay down my paintbrush at this point. For there is a secular aspect of our life that can be transcendent, though not in the way that religion promises. An appreciation of great art, and a fortiori a creative involvement in it, especially in that most abstract and sublime of the arts, music, can deliver moments when we transcend the pedestrian events of our everyday life. The manner in which great art can be said to be transcendent might best be expressed by adopting a Platonic vocabulary for a moment. With great art, we are, at least momentarily, blessed with a vision of the Forms. First, the skills involved in producing, say, great works of music, and in their performance, so transcend the abilities of the majority of humans that we can only marvel at them. Second, an informed appreciation of a great work of art, such as a great symphony, literally engages us so deeply and completely, so intellectually and emotionally, that it seems similar to the way in which Plato described the vision of the Forms with which the true philosopher would be blessed. The irony in this account is that Plato himself was so suspicious of the arts, believing that they were dangerous precisely because they led us to avert our eyes from what he meant by the Forms and to immerse ourselves in the world of the senses.

I mentioned that one aspect of the deep depression that humans can fall into is a complete loss of any sense of their own worth, of their own value. This is usually accompanied by a sense of isolation from others. Indeed ‘the outsider’ who is in deep despair is a staple of Existentialist literature. But this gives us the clue that the deepest and most secure sense of our own worth comes not from ourselves but from others. I do not mean the appreciation or approval of others for something we have done. For this can be all too transitory, as any author reading his reviews knows. Rather I mean that the deepest and most secure sense of self-worth comes through love, through someone loving us. In the jargon of academic philosophers, the ‘intentional object’ of the emotion love, that is to say, the way the object of love is viewed by the lover, is that the beloved is of such value as to be cherished, aided, protected and, in general, be the target of our most altruistic and unconditional benevolence. Love is the most other-regarding attitude of which any human is capable. It involves one person, the lover, finding unquestioned and unquestionable value in another, indeed often blindly and foolishly so. Nevertheless it follows that to be loved in that way is to know that one has value, that one's life is worthwhile, at least for one other person. It is, as most children who have known a loving mother will agree, the most secure foundation for one's sense of self-worth.

If this is a peculiar place to end an article about ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’, then hurrah for the peculiar!