Does life have a meaning?
Life, it might be argued, is the distinguishing
feature of all organisms and may most usefully be thought of as involving
various kinds of complex systems of organization providing individual organisms
with the ability to make use of those energy sources available to them for both
self maintenance and reproduction. Underlying this deceptively persuasive
definition, however, lie those persistent traditional problems inherent in the
search for an essential, distinctive substance characteristic of all forms of
life. Additionally, as evolution theory makes clear, there is the problem of
borderline instances, organisms of which it is not easy to say whether or not
they may be defined as being alive. One such case is that of the virus.
Viruses are the smallest, simplest living things, smaller than bacteria,
and the cause of some of the deadliest diseases known to humanity. They are
composed chiefly of nucleic acid wrapped in a coat of protein and are able to
multiply only from within living cells. As with all other organisms, the virus
depends for its ability to obtain energy and carry out the other processes
necessary to sustain life, upon its stock of DNA, the hereditary material that
makes up the genes, the "instructions" that determine the traits of every living
organism. What is interesting about viruses, however, is that their genetic
stock is very meagre indeed, so much so that reliance upon it alone cannot
enable them to survive. Nonetheless, viruses do persist from one generation to
the next, as if they were alive. How this is managed, as it clearly is in both
plants, animals and human beings, bears importantly upon the ways in which
"life", at least in the case of viruses, may legitimately be defined.
Advances in molecular genetics and the consequent growth in
understanding of the developmental processes of organisms have tended to lead to
the consensus, among both scientists and philosophers, that no explanatory
principles important to the life sciences are likely to be found anywhere but
within those sciences themselves. Vitalist notions that there is some feature of
living organisms that prevents their natures being entirely explained in
physical or chemical terms only have, as a consequence, been increasingly
eclipsed.
In vitalist doctrine, this mysterious additional feature may
be argued to be the presence of a further entity, such as a soul, although it
may also be explained as having to do with the existence in specific organisms
of sets of conditions derived from their complexity and necessitating some form
of life force or animal electricity injected in some way into inanimate bodies
in order for them to become alive. In his expression of vitalism, Aristotle puts
forward, in both De Anima and De Generatione, the view that the life of an
animal consists in its psyche , thus offering a principle of explanation which
determines the morphological development of an organism in terms of teleological
causation.
Although vitalism is currently perceived as having been
largely overwhelmed by modern scientific thinking, there remain problems of some
magnitude to which scientific solutions or explanations have yet to be found.
These may be felt to support the criticism often levelled at science, that it is
descriptive rather than analytical, that it explains how certain phenomena
occur, but not why. One problem of this type, by way of example, concerns the
difficulty of understanding how different levels of description and explanation
of the same thing, such as those of psychology, biology and chemistry, may be
said to relate to each other. The issue of whether or not solutions to these and
other deep metaphysical problems must be conceded to lie beyond the contingent
limits of human cognitive power continues to absorb some philosophers. Although
representing a fairly extreme position, such scepticism has been, for example, a
central preoccupation of the recent work of Colin McGinn [Problems in
Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry, Oxford, 1993].
To arrive at an agreed
understanding of the ways in which meanings may be derived from specific
life-contexts, when the subject of the analysis remains less than fully
understood, is problematic. It is clearly unsound to argue that there is some
proposition to do with meaning, either different in each case or uniquely common
to all, the existence of which may be presupposed in every investigation. As
Aristotle makes clear at the beginning of his Nichomachean Ethics, the
transitions between, for example, the following statements are also clearly
fallacious:
"There is something which is the meaning of all our
activities"
"Each of our activities has a meaning"
"There is a
purpose common to all of our activities"
It may be, in other words,
that, although it is clearly important, for most human beings at least, to think
of their lives as having some intrinsic purpose, this may not be the case,
except insofar as that purpose is self defined. The meaning of life, in other
words, may be what an individual decides that it will be. Equally, it may also
be the case that the question as to whether or not life has any meaning is
itself not meaningful.
The degree to which it is possible for
individuals to find meaning in their lives may also have to do with their
understanding of the concept of explanation. What constitutes an explanation of
this type will necessarily be conditioned by the cultural context in which it is
offered. An age which bases its religious beliefs and metaphysical or scientific
view of the world on unquestioned or unquestionable certainties will certainly
find answering questions as to why things are as they are rather more
straightforward than will be the case for inhabitants of a time in which past
certainties seem no longer sufficient to deal with what is known of the universe
and mankind's place in it. In such an age, the laws of nature will be perceived
to be less concerned with ends and purposes, than with processes and the
observable and empirically verifiable regularities of the external world. This
is certainly the case in the present age and goes at least some way to explain
the contemporary preoccupation with the extent to which individuals do or do not
find their lives to be meaningful.
The lack of a non-problematic
life-world, one in which exists a structured series of beliefs, assumptions,
feelings, values and cultural practices that constitute meaning in everyday
life, removes the comforting sense that it is possible to live against a
contextual background that speaks implicitly of firmly cemented meanings which
there is no need constantly to re-justify. As a consequence, there may arise a
preoccupation with ultimate questions: is it a good thing to have been born;
what is the meaning of death; can individuals survive death; given the
inevitability of death, how should life be lived; how may happiness be achieved;
is death an evil or a good?
This condition of mind is recognisably
modern, although it would be inaccurate to regard it as exclusively the product
of our own century. Indeed, in going back much further, we discover that one of
the central themes of Aristotle's Ethics reflects this preoccupation with the
purpose of life and his intuition, that the special rational faculty of human
beings is the key to our sense of purpose and fulfilment, is one that has come
down to us through the centuries. In his Eudemian Ethics, for example, he argues
that there are many factors, such as disease, pain and natural disasters, that
might cause individuals to wish not to be alive, but returns to a predecessor,
Anaxagoras, whom he supports in asserting that it is worth being born "in order
to apprehend the heavens and the order in the whole universe" [Hanfling: p.
205]. In his Phaedrus, Plato, also, refers to Anaxagoras as a scientific man ...
satiating himself with the theory of things on high" [Russell: Book 1, Part 1,
Ch. 8, p. 79].
Along with Anaxagoras himself, it would seem, then, that
both Aristotle and Plato share the view that it is the acquisition of knowledge
and the insights which it offers into the nature of the universe and mankind's
place in it which make the choice of life worth making. More than two millennia
later, this same view is reinforced in the comment of Albert Einstein [Brian: p.
175], in a newspaper interview given in 1929. He is discussing relativity
theory:
"Now, but only now, we know that the force which moves
electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force which
moves our earth in its annual course about the sun, and is the same force which
brings to us the rays of light and heat which makes life possible on this
planet."
The search for knowledge does not, however, offer a universal
panacea for the anguish of being. This point, also, is emphasised by Aristotle,
again, in his Eudemian Ethics [Hanfling: P. 205], when he speaks of "those who
admire Sardanapallus, or Smindurides of Sybara or one or other of those who live
the pleasure-loving life...... All of these, he asserts, "appear to place
happiness in enjoyment...". in his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle develops his
conception of happiness more fully, when he speaks of it as a virtuous activity
of the soul, rather than as amusement or a permanent state, a possibility which
he rejects since, "if it were it might belong even to a man who slept all
through his life, passing a vegetable existence; or to a victim of the greatest
misfortunes." [Hanfling: P. 206].
What Aristotle meant when he defined
happiness in this way has to do with his belief that human beings have a
function to fulfil in their lives which has to do with their proper use of the
rational principle, a quality unique to mankind and not possessed by either
plants or animals. He goes on to argue that when human beings function in such a
way as to do excellently whatever tasks fall to them, such as playing the harp,
for example, then it may be said that they are demonstrating an activity of soul
in accordance with the rational principle and so in accordance also with virtue.
As a result, they may be said to be leading good lives from which happiness will
grow.
The view that the purpose or meaning of life may or may not have
to do with the achievement of happiness and the problem of how such happiness
may be defined have been and remain philosophical staples. At one point in his
Gorgias, for example, Plato has Socrates and Callicles develop an argument in
which the issue is to decide whether or not "a man who itches and wants to
scratch and whose opportunities for scratching are unbounded" can be said to
lead a happy life spent continually scratching. In the same passage [Hamilton:
pp. 90-96], Socrates relates his analogy to the life of a catamite and confronts
Callicles with the need to consider whether or not feeling enjoyment, of
whatever kind, may be said to be the same as being happy. Is there not, he
insists, a distinction between pleasures which are good and those which are bad:
"Tell me once more; do you declare that pleasure is identical with
good, or are there some pleasures which are not good?"
In his
Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill returns to this argument. He wishes to define
his Principle of Utility, or Greatest Happiness Principle, which he regards as
the foundation of morals, and, in the course of this passage [Ch. 2, P. 6 ff],
he asserts, that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote
happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness
is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the
privation of pleasure." He goes on to argue that, in differentiating between the
qualities of both "high" and "low" pleasures:
"if there be one to
which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference,
irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more
desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently
acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even
though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would
not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is
capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a
superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in
comparison, of small account."
Clearly, Mill finds the problem as
intractable as did Callicles and, in addition, seems less than aware of the
difficulties inherent in depending upon the judgements of individuals
"competently acquainted" with "low" pleasures and in the elitist assumptions
that underpin his argument concerning the relationship between "better/worse
than" and "different from".
The essential nature of a living creature,
then, that which provides the means by which it achieves survival, reproduction
and the creation of its own social formation or culture, may be defined in a
number of ways. It may be perceived, on the one hand, purely in terms of
biological structure and function in relation to physical environment, or,
particularly in the case of human beings, it may be regarded as having to do
with much more complex metaphysical presuppositions as to our significance in
the universe, our feelings as to the existence of God, a god or gods and our
sense that some part of our natures transcends death and is immortal. What,
precisely, this may mean marks the point at which knowledge must be set aside in
favour of what Kierkegaard called "the leap of faith". The search for knowledge
and the development of the rational faculty also form part of man's perception
of his purpose in living, as do the desire to be happy, to experience pleasure
and to achieve fulfilment in those ways deemed valuable within particular social
groups or cultures.
New-born children are not, of course, born into an
uninhabited desert, but into societies and into a world already fully defined by
the dominant values of each particular age and by the behaviour of the physical
environment against which life has always to be lived. Given this, such
questions as "How should I live my life?", "What is my station and what are my
duties?" [My question deliberately echoes F. H. Bradley's, "My Station and Its
Duties" in his Ethical Studies], "What purpose is served by living life as
others before me have lived it if, finally, I must die?" are likely already to
have been answered by the framework of law, morality and convention embodied in
the principle institutions of whichever communities individuals happen to be
born into and to which they will be expected, very largely, to conform.
If, as would seem to be the case, it is a universal truth that all human
beings are born into some particular position in the world and that they very
quickly learn the limits of the freedoms available to them to question this
there clearly exist difficult issues to be addressed concerning the
meaningfulness and purposiveness of life. The sense of meaning and purpose is
surely never stronger than when an individual chooses freely and autonomously to
act in specific ways. When this is not possible or not permitted, life is lived
insincerely and under duress, in ways calculated to give rise to the sense that
it is without worth or meaning. To be forced to be what they are not, to live
constantly in a condition of bad faith, is, inevitably, to force individuals
ever further from the realisation of who they are and what they perceive the
purpose or meaning of their lives to be. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it in Being
and Nothingness [Hanfling: P. 226], an individual will be forced to be "in the
neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical
gestures of my state and by aiming at myself ... through those gestures taken as
an 'analogue' ".
One of the features characteristic of human nature is
the felt need to live life seriously in regard to the choices that are made and
the positions that are adopted, even though it may be perfectly apparent that
other points of view and other choices might, logically, be equally acceptable.
This quality of mind and general predisposition are not evident in other
creatures. As Thomas Nagel makes clear in his essay "The Absurd" [Journal of
Philosophy, 68 (20), 1971: Hanfling: P. 48-59], this inability to live with a
diminished sense of the seriousness of life may be the fundamental reason for
the sense that both Nagel and many others have that life is, in fact, absurd. He
argues that the life of a mouse, for example, is not absurd because "he lacks
the ... self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see
that he is only a mouse." This is very far removed from the more usual position
that the lives of animals serve only as examples of meaningless existence.
In the course of his argument, Nagel develops the view that the human
quest for meaning and a sense of purpose in life is derived from the fact that
we are preoccupied with such issues as the brevity of the human life-span, our
minuteness within the universe as a whole, the inevitability of the eventual
disappearance of all of mankind, our sense that life is, if possible, something
to be escaped. Rather than attempt heroically to deny the truth of these
perceptions and fight against the sense of our own absurdity with which they
fill us, Nagel asserts, we would do well to accept what cannot be escaped and,
in so doing, demonstrate our ability not only to understand our human
limitations, but also to appreciate their unimportance in our situation:
"If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that
anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our
absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair."
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Bibliography:
Brian, Denis Einstein: A Life John Wiley and Sons,
Inc., 1996
Hanfling, Oswald (ed.) Life and Meaning: A Reader Blackwell
F, Open University, 1987
Mill, John Stuart Utilitarianism Dent Dutton
(Everyman), 1962
Plato Gorgias trans. Hamilton, W., Penguin, 1960
Russell, Bertrand History of Western Philosophy Allen and Unwin, 1962
Works consulted following initial assessment of essay:
Murdoch,
Iris The Sovereignty of Good Routledge, 1991
Nagel, Thomas The
Possibility of Altruism Princeton Paperback, 1978