In the visible world,
the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an
infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this
dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with
somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years,
until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.
They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of
dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of
their kind.
(Russell, “Dreams and Facts”, reprinted in his Sceptical Essays)
Compared
with Russell’s description of how small we are, which seems accurate, the usual
metaphor that human beings are tiny specks in a vast universe seems an
exaggeration of our size. If even the solar system is only a tiny speck, how
should we describe our smallness? However, what we should ask in this
connection is rather the question “What does the size of us have to do with the
meaningfulness of our lives?”. It does not seem that meaningfulness depends on
the relative size of our existence. If I think my life is meaningful, I would
not think that it was less meaningful simply because I had come to believe that
the universe had become several hundred million times bigger (while my size did
not change). As Frank Ramsey so pithily puts it, “[t]he stars may be large, but
they cannot think or love” (see “Epilogue” of his Philosophical Papers). Whether our lives are meaningful or not depends
on what we do and think and feel, rather than on how big or small we are.
But
then why do some people think the relative size of our existence matters to the
meaningfulness of our lives, or more specifically, why do some people think our
smallness implies that our lives as such are meaningless? I think the most
reasonable answer is that when people think in this way, they see their
smallness as a kind of limit of their lives. Death can be understood along the
same lines ¾ death is a temporal limit of life. Our
smallness is, by contrast, not just a spatial limit, but also a limit to our
abilities: being so utterly small relative to the universe, we are confined to
the extremely tiny space we are in and not able to achieve much even within
that tiny space. There is no better expression of this understanding of how
limits of a life and meaningfulness are related than the following passage by Robert
Nozick:
Consider the most
exalted and far-researching life or role imagined for man: being the messiah.
Greater effect has been imagined for no other man. Yet still we can ask how
important it is to bring whatever it is the messiah brings to the living beings
of the third planet of a minor off-center star in the Milky Way galaxy, itself
a galaxy of no special distinction within its particular metagalaxy, one of
many in the universe. Te see something’s limits, to see it as that limited
particular thing or enterprise, is to question its meaning. (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, p.597)
On
this understanding,“[t]he problem of meaning is created by limits, by being
just this, by being merely this”, and “[a]ttempts to find meaning in life seek
to transcend the limits of an individual life. The narrower the limits of a
life, the less meaningful it is” (pp.594-595). Hence the quest for grand
meaningfulness.