The meaning of life
...e, but you’re just taking in each other’s washing, so to speak. Given that any person exists, he has needs and concerns, which make particular things and people with in his life matter to him. But the whole thing doesn’t matter. But does it matter that it doesn’t matter? “So what?” you might say. “It’s enough that it matters whether I get to the station before my train leaves, or whether I’ve remembered to feed the cat. I don’t need more than that to keep going.” This is a perfectly good reply. But it only works if you really can avoid setting your sights higher, and asking what the point of the whole thing is. For once you do that, you open yourself to the possibility that your life is meaningless. The thought that you’ll be dead in two hundred years is just a way of seeing your life embedded in a larger context, so that the point of smaller things inside it seems not to be enough—seems to leave a larger question unanswered. But what if your life as a whole did a have appoint in relation to something larger? Would that mean that it wasn’t meaningless after all? There are various ways your life could have a larger meaning. You might be a part of a political or social movement which changed the world for the better, to the benefit of future generations. Or you might just help provide a good life for your own children and their descendants. Or your life might be thought to have meaning in a religious context, so that your time on Earth was just a preparation for an eternity in direct contact with God. About the types of meaning that depend on relations to other people, even people in the distant future, I’ve already indicated what the problem is. If one’s life has a point as a part of something larger, it is still possible to ask about that larger thing, what is the point of it? Either there’s an answer in terms of something still larger or there isn’t. If there is, we simply repeat the question. If there isn’t, then our search for a point has come to an end with something which has no point. But if that pointlessness is acceptable for the larger thing of which our life is a part, why shouldn’t it be acceptable already for our life taken as a whole? Why isn’t it all acceptable there, why should it be acceptable when we get to the larger context? Why don’t we have to go on to ask, “But what is the point of all that?” (human history, the succession of the generations, or whatever). The appeal to a religious meaning to life is a bit different. If you believe that the meaning of your life comes from fulfilling the purpose of God, who loves you, and seeing Him in eternity, then it doesn’t seem appropriate to ask, “And what is the point of that?” It’s supposed to be something which is its own point, and can’t have a purpose outside itself. But for this very reason it has its own problems. The idea of God seems to be the idea of something that can explain everything else, without having to be explained itself. But it’s very hard to understand how there could be such a thing. If we ask the question, “Why is the world like this?” and are offered a religious answer, how can we be prevented from asking again, “And why is that true?” What kind of answer would bring all of our “Why?” questions to a stop, once and for all? And if they can stop there, why couldn’t they have stopped earlier? The same problem seems to arise if God and His purposes are offered as the ultimate explanation of the value and meaning of our lives. The idea that our lives fulfill God’s purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn’t require or admit of any further point. One isn’t supposed to ask “What is the point of God?” any more then one is supposed to ask, “What is the explanation of God?” But my problem here, as with the role of God as ultimate explanation, is that I’m not sure I understand the idea. Can there really be something which give point to everything else by encompassing it, but which couldn’t have, or need, any point itself? Something whose point can’t be questioned from outside because there is no outside? If God is supposed to give our lives a meaning that we can’t understand, it’s not much of a consolat...