Death and meaningfulness (I)

It is clear why thinking about death naturally leads to reflection on life: death is the termination of life. It is not, however, as easy to understand why thinking about death may lead to the conclusion that (one’s) life is meaningless or that (one’s) life is not meaningful enough because of death. No one has expressed more directly than Tolstoy did the thought that death threatens meaningfulness:

Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself, and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist. What is all the fuss about then? How can a person carry on living and fail to perceive this? That is what is so astonishing! It is only possible to go on living while you are intoxicated with life; once sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick! That is exactly what it is: there is nothing either witty or amusing, it is only cruel and stupid. (Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, translated by J. Kentish (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p.31)

And he asked, rhetorically, “[I]s there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?” (p.35)  Since the inevitability of death awaits not only Tolstoy but all of us, what he said was supposed to apply to all human beings: death will annihilate any meaning in our lives. The implicit idea here is that if life really has meaning, it must consist in something that can defeat the threat of death to meaningfulness. In other words, life is meaningless unless we can find some kind of long-lasting and grand meaningfulness.

What reason did Tolstoy give for thinking that death implies meaninglessness? It seems to be simply this: whatever one has achieved “will be forgotten and will no longer exist”. Literally this is not true, at least not true of Tolstoy, for his writings still exist and we still read and appreciate them today. What Tolstoy had in mind might well be this: sooner or later, if not in ten thousand years, then in a million years, we will all be dead and nothing we have achieved will still exist. In a million years, there will not be any human beings; there probably will not be any intelligent beings on this planet to appreciate and value what some human beings have achieved or created; there will not be any traces of War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s conclusion seems to be that because of this none of the things anyone of us has achieved matters at all.

Let us grant that none of the things anyone of us has achieved will matter in a million years, but this is different from saying that none of the things anyone of us has achieved matters. ‘X does not matter’ does not follow from ‘X does not matter in a million years’. Besides, as Thomas Nagel argues:

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now? (Nagel, ‘The Absurd’, in Mortal Questions, p.12)

In terms of meaningfulness rather than mattering, we can say that the fact that in a million years there will not be anyone to consider one’s life meaningful does not imply that one’s life should not be considered meaningful. If one’s life is meaningful now, it is still a meaningful life even if no one in the further future will remember one’s life.

It seems that most of us would agree that a meaningful life will not cease to be meaningful simply because something happens in the future after the person whose life it is dies. Indeed, most of us would agree that a life does not even have to be long to be meaningful. Obvious examples are Mozart and Anne Frank.  But then why do some of us think death implies meaninglessness? Why is it so natural for some of us to conclude that life is meaningless (or not meaningful enough) when thinking about death? It is as if before we think about death, we see our lives as meaningful, but the meaningfulness suddenly disappears once we think about death. Why?

Clashing vanities

Nietzsche has the following observations about people with vanity:

Clashing vanities. Two people with equally great vanity retain a bad impression of one another after they meet, because each one was so busy with the impression he wanted to elicit in the other that the other made no impression on him; finally both notice that their efforts have failed and blame the other for it. (Human, All Too Human, section six, 338)

These observations seem right, but only roughly. A person who is trying hard to impress others will probably not be able to pay attention to things other than whether he succeeds in his attempt, and hence not be able to be impressed by others. But this is true of everyone, not just vain people. Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that people with vanity are more likely to try hard to impress others than people without vanity (are there such people?), for otherwise the phrase "with equally great vanity" could be deleted and he would still be making the same point.

Let's say Nietzsche is right, that is, that a vain person likes to impress others. However, it is reasonable to think that a vain person would not try to impress just anyone. Being vain, he would try to impress people who have impressed him in the first place, for it is impressing such people that would satisfy his vanity as far as impressing people is concerned.

Now suppose that two people with equally great vanity met, and that they tried to impress each other because each of them had been impressed by the other in some way. If they both failed in their attempt to (further) impress the other for the reason mentioned above, it is not clear they would blame the other for the failure. Indeed, the more they had been impressed by the other, the less likely they would blame the other for the failure. The psychology is fairly simple: the more they had been impressed by the other, the more they would understand why they failed to impress the other --- a person so impressive would not be easy to impress. In that case, their failure to impress does not hurt. And for people with vanity, if it doesn't hurt, it doesn't matter.

History and value

At the beginning of The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, in a section entitled ‘History and Value’ (pp.4-6), Milan Kundera discusses the relation between historical consciousness and aesthetic evaluation. He introduces the issue with an imaginary case:

Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.

Kundera is well aware of a possible, and natural, response to the above evaluation of the contemporary composer’s anachronistic piece. Indeed, he mimics such a response:

What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn’t that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?

But he insists that there is “[n]o way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous”. Put more straightforwardly, his point is that “it is only within the context of an art’s historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen”.

Is Kundera right about the relation between historical consciousness and aesthetic evaluation? This is a big topic and I won’t attempt to show that Kundera is wrong. What I would like to point out is that he might have conflated aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic experience necessarily has phenomenological features; by contrast, although aesthetic judgment is usually accompanied by aesthetic experience, the judgment itself is cerebral and does not have to have its own phenomenology. In Kundera’s own words, there is “aesthetic pleasure” or “sensation of beauty”, and there is “perception of art” or “aesthetic value [that] can be seen”; my point is, the two don’t overlap perfectly.

The main subject matter of Kundera’s book is the (modern European) novel, but since he uses a musical example in the passage quoted above, let me use another musical example to illustrate my point.

Prokofiev’s first symphony, completed in 1917, was marked by imitation. As the composer confesses in his autobiography:

I had in mind the thought of writing a symphony in the style of Haydn … If Haydn were living today, I thought, he would keep to his way of writing, while at the same time incorporating some newer ideas. I wanted to compose just such a symphony --- a symphony in the classical style. I finally gave it the name Symphonie classique --- firstly because it was so simple: also in the hope of annoying the Philistines, and in the secret desire to win in the end, if the symphony should prove itself to be a genuine ‘classic’.

The last sentence is intriguing, particularly because of the combination of the word ‘genuine’ and the word ‘classic’ in scare quotes. Prokofiev’s first symphony can never be a genuine classic, but it can be a genuine ‘classic’. As a matter of fact, the symphony was well-received and is still enjoyed by classical music lovers today. It is not felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, or monstrous.

Is this a counterexample to Kundera’s view? There is no simple answer to the question. On the one hand, Prokofiev himself admitted that he imitated Haydn and tried to write a symphony in the classical style; on the other hand, it could be maintained that the symphony is not ridiculed because there are enough “newer ideas” in it to distinguish it from a mere imitation --- the classical style is more apparent than real.

In any case, we can still distinguish between the aesthetic experience one has when listening to the symphony and the judgment one may make about the aesthetic value of the piece. Even if the aesthetic judgment has to be made within the context of the historical evolution of the symphony as a form of art, it does not follow that the aesthetic experience cannot be independent of such a context. We don't have to deny that aesthetic judgment can affect aesthetic experience, but we can at least imagine that someone who knows nothing about Haydn, Prokofiev, or the classical style may still enjoy Prokofiev’s Symphonie classique.

The following is the charming, and very short, third movement of the symphony; experience it yourself:

The curious case of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Part II)

Sometimes an identity of a person has so many elements or aspects that it is not always easy to tell what it is about that identity that contributes to the meaningfulness of the person’s life. We have seen that it was by seeing himself as Wilkomirski the sufferer-survivor-reporter that Grosjean found meaning in his life. The fact that he was not really the sufferer or the survivor implies that he was not a genuine reporter either ¾ something that did not take place could not be reported. Yes, Grosjean was still the author of the book, but this was not an element of the identity in question that could contribute to the meaningfulness of his life, for the book was not what it was supposed to be. By contrast, if Grosjean’s book had been published as a novel, then his identity as the author of the book could have contributed to the meaningfulness of his life.

Grosjean’s case reminds me of a friend who is a devoted Christian minister, who presumably believes that his life is meaningful by virtue of his identity as a Christian minister, or, in his own words, as God’s servant. Let us imagine that in the last few years of his life he became skeptical about his religious beliefs and finally gave them up (this is, I have to say, extremely unlikely to happen). Suppose there were no other identities he identified himself with; should he then believe that his life was meaningless? It depends. On the one hand, he had to say that since there is no God, no one can be God’s servant. On the other hand, there might be other elements in his identity as a Christian minister that could contribute to the meaningfulness of his life. For example, he might have, in his capacity as a minister, helped a lot of people deal with their personal problems. If he himself valued this element of his identity as a minister, and other people valued it too, then his life could still be meaningful by virtue of his identity as a Christian minister.

It is risky to focus on one single identity in such a way that the meaningfulness of your life depends solely on it. If you have only one identity that you think makes your life meaningful, and if something goes wrong with respect to that identity, such as if you actually have a serious misunderstanding of the nature of that identity, or if you suddenly do not value it any more, your life may turn out to be meaningless. Grosjean’s is a case in point. If all goes well, then one identity will suffice; but things do not always go well. Although not all our identities are chosen by us, some are. It is thus wise, as far as the meaningfulness of our lives is concerned, to develop what psychologist Daniel Nettle calls ‘self-complexity’. As Nettle explains, “if I am just an academic, and I have an academic setback, then my whole self seems less efficacious and worthwhile. However, if I have many other facets to myself, then the effect of the setback on my identity is much less severe” (Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, p.156). He speaks in the context of discussing happiness, but it is clear that the same point applies to meaningfulness.

The above point about self-complexity may give us some ideas about how to live a meaningful life. This may also be true of the final point I would like to make, which is that a meaningful life consists in living it rather than in thinking about how to live it. Part of Grosjean’s problem might be that he was too much aware of the problem of meaningfulness and tried too hard to make his life meaningful. There is such a thing as thinking too much and too often about the problem about meaningfulness. This may be what Wittgenstein means when he writes:

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. … a man who lives rightly won’t experience the problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem, but a joy rather; in other words for him it will be a bright halo round his life, not a dubious background. (Culture and Value, p.27)

The curious case of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Part I)

In 1995, a book entitled Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 was published in Germany (the English translation of the book, published in 1996, was entitled Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood). The name of the author was Binjamin Wilkomirski, and the book was a vivid and supposedly accurate account of his horrifying experiences as a very young Polish Jewish boy in two Nazi concentration camps. Being an appealing survivor’s tale with high literary quality, the book quickly became an international best-seller and received numerous awards. Wilkomirski gave readings of the book everywhere, was interviewed on TV, met with and spoke to other Holocaust survivors publicly, and participated in academic symposiums on the book or on subjects concerning the Holocaust. He was compared to Anne Frank; if his story was not more moving, it was certainly more satisfying and probably more inspiring, for he survived while Frank did not.

But then it turned out that nothing described in the book about that little Jewish boy had ever happened. The author was not even Jewish, and his real name was ‘Bruno Grosjean’, not the obviously Jewish ‘Binjamin Wilkomirski’. Grosjean was a Swiss who had been born to an unmarried woman and later adopted by a childless couple, and who grew up to be a professional (but not outstanding) clarinetist. He was born in 1941, the year one of the concentration camps in which the story happened began to operate, and he had never left Switzerland before adulthood. The ‘memoir’ was based on history books, magazines, and novels Grosjean had read, as well as films he had seen. His account was first questioned by a Swiss journalist named Daniel Ganzfrield, whose arguments against the authenticity of it were, however, considered by some to be inconclusive. The Swiss historian Stefan Maechler was later commissioned by Wilkomirski/Grosjean’s literacy agency to investigate the matter, and Maechler proved in great detail that many of the things described in Grosjean’s book contradicted historical facts.

Graosjean’s book was not the first autobiography of an alleged Holocaust survivor that turned out to be a fraud, nor was it the last. What makes Grosjean’s case more interesting and relevant to our discussion is that Grosjean might actually believe, or at least believe that he believed, the story he told in his book. Grosjean certainly knew that he grew up in Switzerland, but he also knew that he was an adopted child. If he did not remember much the first few years of his life, it was not impossible for him to believe that he was a traumatized child rescued from the war and exchanged for a child named ‘Bruno Grosjean’. As social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson understand the Wilkomirski/Grosjean case, “Grosjean spent more than twenty years transforming himself into Wilkomirski; writing Fragments was the last step of his metamorphosis into a new identity, not the first step of a calculated lie” (Tavris & Elliot, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), p.84).

Let us assume that Tavris’s and Aronson’s understanding of the Wilkomirski/Grosjean case is correct. What Tavris and Aronson say next relates the case to the problem about meaningfulness: “Wilkomirski’s new identity as a survivor of the Holocaust gave him a powerful sense of meaning and purpose, along with the adoration and support of countless others”. Grosjean’s book was, according to Tavris and Aronson, a result of “a quest for meaning in his life” (ibid., italics added). They presumably do not have a fully developed theory of a meaningful life like mine when they relate the meaningfulness of Grosjean’s life to his identity, but their description of the case fits quite well the account of a meaningful life I have suggested: Grosjean’s sense of meaningfulness came from his newly found identity, which was valued not only by himself but also by others; and it was this newly found identity that allowed him to evaluate his life positively, that gave him directions for how he should live his life, that he could see as the reason for his existence, and that he happily believed to be who he really was.

What exactly was Grosjean’s newly found identity which he thought made his life meaningful? It may appear that the answer is straightforward: it was his identity as a Holocaust survivor, or more precisely, his identity as a Jewish boy who suffered from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and survived. But suffering in itself does not give meaning to a life. We would not say that the lives of all the Jews who were tortured and murdered in concentration camps were meaningful lives simply by virtue of their suffering, nor would we say that at least the lives of those who survived were meaningful simply by virtue of their suffering and their survival. What Grosjean thought made his life meaningful was his identity as the young Holocaust survivor who lived to tell his story, which inspired and moved a lot of people. According to Maechler, Grosjean “truly blossomed in his role as a concentration-camp victim, for it was in it that he finally found himself”, but what we should note is that “[v]ideotapes and eyewitness reports of Wilkomirski’s presentations give the impression of a man made euphoric by his own narrative” (Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Ttruth, p.273, note 14, italics added). It was not being the sufferer, not being the sufferer-survivor, but being the sufferer-survivor-reporter, that counted for the meaningfulness of Wilkomirski’s life.*

*  If you are inclined to disagree, just imagine that Anne Frank survived but had not written her wartime diary, or that she had written the diary but neither she nor the diary survived. Would Frank’s life have been as meaningful as it actually was?

Meaningfulness and divine purpose

[Although I do not believe that God exists, in what follows I will, for simplicity, sometimes speak as if God exists. I will also assume that it is compatible with God’s nature that God has purposes or plans.]

Some people believe that a human life is meaningful only if it fulfills God’s purpose (call it divine purpose). There are two ways in which we can be related to divine purpose. In the first way, God created us to serve a particular purpose, just as a watch is made to serve the purpose of telling time; there is a divine purpose in us. In the second way, God did not create us to serve a particular purpose, but God has some purpose or plan which we can participate in, just as we can participate in an author’s purpose of writing a book to raise consciousness about global warming ¾ by reading the book. These two ways do not have to be independent of each other, for God could create us to serve a particular purpose such that we can participate in another purpose God has simply by fulfilling the former purpose.

It is obvious that divine purpose is not sufficient for meaningfulness. The mere fact that God created us to serve a particular purpose does not imply that our lives are meaningful, for we may fail to serve that purpose. Likewise, the mere fact that God has some purpose or plan that we can participate in does not imply that our lives are meaningful either, for we may fail to participate in it. In either case, even given the divine purpose, whether our lives are meaningful still depends on what we do.

So what we should examine is whether divine purpose is necessary for meaningfulness. Let us begin with Kurt Baier’s well-known criticism of the view in question; his criticism concerns only the first way in which we are related to divine purpose. According to Baier, no human being’s life can be meaningful by virtue of being used to fulfill another being’s purpose, even when that being is God. As he elaborates:

To attribute to a human being a purpose in that sense is not neutral, let alone complimentary: it is offensive. It is degrading for a man to be regarded as merely serving a purpose. If, at a garden party, I ask a man in livery, ‘What is your purpose?’ I am insulting him. I might as well have asked, ‘What are you for?’ Such questions reduce him to the level of a gadget, a domestic animal, or perhaps a slave. I imply that we allot to him the tasks, the goals, the aims which he is to pursue; that his wishes and desires and aspirations and purposes are to count for little or nothing. We are treating him, in Kant’s phrase, merely as a means to our ends, not as an end in himself. (Baier, “The Meaning of Life”, p.120)

How forceful we consider Baier’s criticism to be depends on whether we agree with him that God, by creating human beings to serve a particular purpose, treats them merely as a means. When we treat another human being as a means to our end, but not merely so, we do not necessarily degrade him. I treat, for example, my piano teacher as a means to my end of learning to play the piano, but my treating him that way does not degrade him, for I also treat him as an independent individual who has his own wishes and desires and aspirations and purposes that have nothing to do with his being my piano teacher. It can be argued, however, that if God created us to serve a particular purpose, then God can only treat us merely as a means. If my piano teacher decided not to give me piano lessons any more, I could still treat him respectfully as a valuable independent individual in many other ways (as a good pianist, as a polymath, as a loving and devoted father, etc.) that have nothing to do with the ends I have. But if God created me to serve a particular purpose and I decided not to fulfill that purpose, there does not seem to be anything else in me which would allow God to see me not as bad (on some religious understanding I would indeed be considered by God to be so bad that I deserve eternal punishment) ¾ God would see me in the way a watchmaker sees a broken watch.

Divine purpose and meaningfulness can be related by the idea that, in Nozick’s words, “[a]ttempts to find meaning in life seek to transcend the limits of an individual life” (Philosophical Explanations, p.597). If God created us to serve a particular purpose or if we can participate in God’s purpose or plan, then we will be able to transcend the limits of our lives by serving God's purpose or participating in his purpose or plan. We will be, in a sense, bigger than our earthly lives allow us to see ourselves.

But the problem with this view is that transcending the limits of our lives this way does not imply that our lives will then have no limits. The only being who is not limited in any way is God. If being unlimited were necessary for meaningfulness, then only God’s life could be meaningful. Accordingly, our lives would after all not be meaningful even if we fulfilled God’s purpose (in either way or both ways). On the other hand, if meaningfulness does not require being unlimited but requires only that we transcend the limits of our lives in some way, then it is not clear why we have to fulfill a divine purpose in order to transcend the limits of our lives. That is, it is not clear why transcending the limits of our lives in the earthly way does not count at all for meaningfulness. Consider a composer who wrote good (but not great) music, influenced and inspired many other composers to write better music of a certain style, and thereby started an important tradition of music. There is a clear sense in which he transcended the limits of his life as a composer, and such transcendence does not have to do with any divine purpose. If transcending the limits of our lives is necessary for meaningfulness while meaningfulness does not require being unlimited, why should we think that the composer’s way of transcending his limits count for nothing with respect to the meaningfulness of his life? Why should we think that in order for his life to be meaningful he must also transcend the limits of human life as such rather than merely the limits of his life?

Does size matter?

There is a kind of reflection that would incite people to look for grand meaningfulness, the kind of meaningfulness that we presumably cannot find in the lives we are living here and now. Bertrand Russell expresses such reflection vividly in the following remarks:

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.

Meaningfulness and happiness

When we are thinking about meaningfulness, we may be inclined to see it as the most important thing we care about, or should care about, in our lives. I certainly think that meaningfulness is an important issue, and that the meaningfulness of my life is very important to me, but I am not sure I would say that meaningfulness should be considered the most important thing in our lives. Many people do not give any thought to meaningfulness. And even for those who do seek meaningfulness, there is at least another thing they seek, and should seek, equally mightily, namely, happiness. It takes reflection to see the need we have for meaningfulness, while happiness is something we naturally, or even blindly, pursue. Is there any relation between meaningfulness and happiness? Of course the answer depends on how we understand happiness, but it is common for people to think that a meaningful life must be in some sense a happy life. In some sense, yes, but there are also other senses of happiness in which a meaningful life is not necessarily a happy one.

As Susan Wolf observes, meaningful lives may “frequently involve stress, danger, exertion, or sorrow” (“Happiness and meaning: two aspects of the good life”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 14, p.209), all of which are incompatible with pleasure. Wolf understands meaningful lives as “lives of active engagement in projects of worth” (ibid.); it is not difficult to see why such engagement does not always give us pleasure --- is not necessarily happy in the hedonistic sense.

As long as happiness is understood phenomenologically, that is, in terms of some of the subject’s positive feelings, states of mind, or experiences, it seems that we can always imagine that a person whose life is meaningful does not have any such feelings, states of mind, or experiences. It is, I think, true that a meaningful life is usually accompanied by a sense of fulfillment. Although fulfillment is not the same as happiness, it, as Wolf rightly maintains, “deserves an important place in an adequate theory of happiness” and should be considered “a major component of happiness” (ibid., p.220). Nevertheless, there is still no guarantee that living a meaningful life will give one a sense of fulfillment. Even for Wolf, who thinks that “the links between meaningfulness and fulfillment are tight” (ibid.), there is no such guarantee, for she can only say that “[n]ine times out of ten, perhaps ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a meaningful life will be happier [through having a sense of fulfillment] than a meaningless one” (ibid., p.222). Ninety or ninety-nine percent is still not one-hundred percent, though it may well be good enough.

It is even clearer that a meaningful life does not imply happiness when happiness is understood as objective well-being rather than in terms of subjective positive experiences. A meaning life is not necessarily a life that prospers or goes well, or a life in which most of one’s important desires are satisfied, or a life in which one enjoys a high quality of life (materialistically construed), or a life full of great achievements. I cannot agree more with the following remarks by Harry Frankfurt:

A life may be full of meaning, then, and yet so gravely deficient in other ways that no reasonable person would choose to live it. It cannot even be assumed that a meaningful life must always be preferable to one that lacks meaning. What fills a certain life with meaning may be some intricate and demanding conflict, or a terribly frustrating but compelling struggle, which involves a great deal of anxiety or pain and which is extremely destructive. Thus the very circumstances that make the life meaningful may be deeply objectionable. It might be better to live an empty life than to generate or to endure so much suffering and disorder. (Necessity, Volition, and Love, CUP, p.85)

Viktor Frankl may be right when he says that “[t]here is nothing in the world […] that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life” (Man's Search for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, p.109), but for a more balanced understanding of the importance of meaningfulness we have to keep in mind that there could be conditions so bad that nothing could help one survive them, not even the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. To think otherwise is to romanticize human nature.

Some may insist that a meaningful life is necessarily better than a meaningless life. Although we do not have to object to this, we should notice that meaningfulness is only one dimension of the evaluation of life. As far as this dimension of evaluation is concerned, it is true that a meaningful life is always better than a meaningless life. Indeed, it is true trivially, for this dimension of evaluation is understood by us in such a way that ‘meaningful’ is on the positive side of it and ‘meaningless’ on the negative side (and a gray area in between). In any case, there are other dimensions of the evaluation of life, such as happiness, with ‘happy’ on the positive side and ‘unhappy’ on the negative side (and a gray area in between). It is possible for the very same life to be placed on the positive side of one dimension of evaluation while being placed on the negative side of another dimension. This is what happens when a life is meaningful but unhappy. It is not always clear which dimension of evaluation should trump which: in some cases it might be better to live a happy life that is not meaningful than live a meaningful life that is unhappy, but vice versa in other cases.

Bookmash

Promises, promises,

Diary of a bad year.

Faking it, self to self,

The seas of language,

The mysterious flame.

Walking the tightrope of reason

Climbing Mount Improbable,

I am a strange loop.