Stalling on a response to Walter's comments about the universality of
moral maxims, I turn instead to Walter's question about the response to
"What is the meaning of life?"
Contrary to the response, the question need not be ill-formed in the way the response
suggests if one assumes that there can be meaningfulness apart from human life. I
believe the question of whether there is meaningfulness apart from human life is a
reasonable one, even though I actually believe there is no such meaningfulness, i.e. even
though I actually believe human life is "the very element of meaning itself",
as Walter paraphrases (I think) the responder.
I think the question about whether there can be a broader, non-human
meaningfulness in which human meaningfulness is embedded (I'm deliberately
generalizing what I imagine is an aspect of the Christian story about God) is
coherent because it might provide one sort of answer to the question of how it
is we can communicate with one another at all. It would do so by saying
something like: we can communicate with one another because there is a larger
framework within which our actions, including the noises we make as we do what
we call talking, all have a place and that place establishes what we think of
as 'meaning'.
As I say, I don't believe that picture myself. I think instead that we humans
grow into our adult selves in a community which is a community precisely
because its members are always enacting together various partly pre-defined,
partly improvised roles in partly pre-defined and partly improvised stories,
which means in my mind that we adult humans have grown into being the
improvising enactors of such roles ourselves. Those roles and stories, which
by the way can be and unfortunately all too often are full of roles locked in
hopeless mortal conflict, those roles and stories project, usually tacitly, the
existence of exactly the sorts of structures which the broad non-human
meaningfulness model would want established for us by some agency (hopefully
benevolent) outside ourselves.
All that said, I do not understand how one might go about answering the original question ("what is the meaning of
life?"). I understand "what is the meaning of the word 'bicycle'?", but I don't understand "what
is the meaning of bicycles?" except as code for some other question like "what story might people who ride
bicycles be dramatizing in their use of them?" in which case what I've already written is what my answer would be
about the meaning of life.
That, however, may simply reflect a serious lapse in my upbringing or
education. Maybe my teachers didn't respect my autonomy enough?
Regards to all,
Eric Dean
Washington DC
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:12:51 -0330
From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] The meaning of life
On another philosophy listserv the following question arose:
What is the meaning of life?
An intriguing transcendental response (not yet a riposte) was:
Life, human life to be precise, is a necessary condition of meaning, so the
question is inappropriate and "ill-formed." (Flayling gestures to
Wittgenstein's writings ensured.) It is senseless to ask after the meaning of
life since there is and can be no "meaning" independent of human life. Life is
the very element of meaning itself.
Comments welcomed.
Walter O.
MUN
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