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WillowOne's Positions

Meaning

Overview

Meaning, in the sense of "the meaning of life", is the demand that existence as a whole should be for something: that there be a purpose written into the universe which a life can fulfil or fail. Religions supply one; Existentialism says there is none and that each person must make their own; nihilism says there is none and draws the gloomy conclusion.

The word also has a humbler sense, the one in which a conversation, a piece of work or a friendship is meaningful. Nothing in the second sense depends on the first.

Notes

  • The absence of cosmic meaning is not a problem. The problem is having a need for meaning where there is none, and then treating the need as evidence that it must be met. That is the move the Argument from Meaning and Purpose makes, and it is the same shape as the Argument from Desire: wanting something is not a reason to think it exists.
  • Meaning in the humbler sense is abundant and does not need a sponsor. People, projects, curiosity, music and dogs are quite enough, and anyone who has found them insufficient without a god has usually been told to find them insufficient.
  • The religious version comes with a cost that is rarely priced in: if the meaning of life is to serve a purpose set by someone else, then the life is not the person's own. I would rather have a life that means nothing to the universe and something to me.
  • The feeling of meaninglessness is a real experience and sometimes a symptom. It responds to sleep, company, exercise and occasionally medicine far more reliably than it responds to metaphysics. See Happiness.
  • The human need for religion is largely the need for meaning in the first sense, and the evidence that the need is universal is weak; whole societies manage without it.

Also see