Category: 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, an adequate supply of health and wealth, satisfying employment, a loving spouse, friends, progeny, long life, and the like. Why not rest our hopes in what is known to be possible rather than in what is not known to be possible, such as immortality, the resurrection of the body, the visio beata, entry into Nirvana? Why hanker for what is beyond our mortal scale? Why not accept the finite? Are we not just a particularly clever species of land mammal?

Continue reading “From an Old Journal: On the Meaning of Life”

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, full stop.  Am I my own source?  Can I 'recuperate' every aspect of my facticity by acts of goal-positing?  If my life depends on me for its meaning, then it has no meaning.  To suppose that an otherwise meaningless existence can be made meaningful by subjective acts of meaning-bestowal is like supposing that one can pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps.

If, for whatever reason, one denies that human life possesses objective meaning, then one ought to have the intellectual honesty to maintain that it has no meaning, and not seek refuge in the shabby evasion of subjective meaning.