Category: Meaning of Life
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How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?
It is the hour of death. You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options. You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same. But if every last detail is to be the same,…
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The Gastroenterologist on the Meaning of Life
"It all depends on the liver."
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Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life
Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2) I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from…
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Imago Dei and the Meaning of Life (I)
This is a guest post by Peter Lupu. Lightly edited by BV with his comments in blue. In a post titled Imago Dei, (December 4, 2009), Bill clarifies the meaning of this important theistic concept. However, in his typical way, he does much more. He offers us guidelines to see and appreciate the broader implication…
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Middle-Sized Happiness
Life can be good. Middle-sized happiness is within reach and some of us reach it. It doesn't require much: a modicum of health and wealth; work one finds meaningful however it may strike others; the independence of mind not to care what others think; the depth of mind to appreciate that there is an inner…
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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two
Near the end of Part One of this two-part series, I wrote, . . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in…
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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part One
Suppose we divide theories of the meaning of human life into the exogenous and the endogenous. According to the exogenous theories, existential meaning derives from a source external to the agent, whereas on endogenous theories, meaning and purpose are posited or projected by the agent. Classical theism provides an example of an exogenous theory of…
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Kolakowski: No God, No Meaning
Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life (Westview 1999), pp. 116-117: . . . our reason naturally aspires to encompass the totality of being; and our will for order and our need to make sense of existence lead us instinctively to seek that which is both the root and the keystone…
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Why Are We Bothered by our Temporal but not our Spatial Limitations?
Our lives have definite limits both in space and in time. At any given time, my body occupies a vanishingly small portion of space, and if one were to plot my path over time, the resulting space-time ‘trajectory’ would pass through an exceedingly small number of spatiotemporal positions. And yet my spatial limitations do not…
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Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning
What do we mean by 'meaning' when we ask about the meaning of life? It is perhaps most natural to take the meaning of life or of a life to be its purpose, point, end, goal, or telos. Accordingly, (human) life is meaningful only if it has a central organizing purpose. Existential of life meaning…
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Milton Munitz on Boundless Existence, Cosmic Spirituality, and the Meaning of Life
The last book Milton K Munitz published before his death in 1995 is entitled Does Life Have a Meaning? (Prometheus, 1993). It is a fitting capstone to his distinguished career and exemplifies the traits for which I admire him: he is clear and precise like a good analytic philosopher, but he evinces the spiritual depth…
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Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One
Like many American boys, I read plenty of Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden, not to mention numerous short stories, some of them unforgettable to this day: "Love of Life," "Moonface," and "To Build a Fire." But I never got around to John Barleycorn until years later…
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Meaning and Immortality
Some feel that if the fact of bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then this fact, if it is a fact, consigns human life to meaninglessness. This is a very strong intuition among those who have it, and I have it. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to…
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From an Old Journal: On the Meaning of Life
The germs of these thoughts came to me while climbing the Allan Blackman trail to Circlestone Ruins in the Eastern Superstition Wilderness in May of 1998. Does it matter whether life has an ultimate meaning or not? Someone might be satisfied if he has a good chance of attaining middle-sized happiness: peaceful days, restful nights,…
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Against Subjective Existential Meaning
What is my life's point and purpose? How silly to say, as many do, that it is wholly up to the individual to give it sense and purpose! If I must give my life meaning, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning, which is to say that it has no meaning,…