Thoughts on Meaning – A Naturalistic Perspective

Reference Material:
The Reasons of Love by Harry Frankfurt
Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World by Iddo Landau
Meaning in Life and Why it Matters by Susan Wolf

        Some of the most fundamental questions of human existence involve the concept of meaning. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose in life? What is the point of it all? Is this really all there is to it? Obviously one blog post is not going to in any way adequately address these deep, sweeping questions. But I do want to try to clarify what kind of thing is being asked, frame the questions from a naturalistic perspective, and offer some preliminary thoughts.
        As a starting point, I found Iddo Landau’s introductory discussion to be valuable and persuasive. His basic point is that discussions of meaning in the end cash out in terms of value or worth:

People who take their lives to have no meaning, or to have insufficient meaning, are saying that they do not take their lives, or central aspects of their lives, to be of sufficient worth. People who wonder what would make their lives meaningful, or more meaningful, are wondering what would insert more value, or worth, into their lives. People who think that their lives are meaningful are people who think that a sufficient number of aspects of their lives are of sufficient value.

If that sounds about right to you, that was my reaction as well. For the skeptical, Landau argues by example – take any case of meaning talk, and I’ll show you how that discussion can be translated into value or worth talk. A particularly poignant case for me (a relatively new dad) – grieving parents of a deceased child now see their lives as basically meaningless. And they see their lives as meaningless because something valuable, indeed perhaps the most valuable thing, in their life is now gone.
        Landau also argues that other ways of framing questions about meaning in life, ways that don’t explicitly use the word meaning, are interpretable in terms of value and worth as well. If meaning is construed as self-realization, meaning is achieved only if something of value is produced through such self-realization. If meaning is connected to life’s purpose, only a worthy purpose will do. And finding something larger than yourself is only meaningful if that something is valuable. I won’t belabor the point here. I take Landau’s conception to distill what most people are driving at when they talk about meaning.
        So meaning (in life, of life, etc.) ultimately boils down to value and worth. If we’re going to wrap our heads even part way around meaning, then, we’d better engage with value and worth in a bit more detail. At this point I want to interject a naturalistic perspective to help guide the discussion. In particular, I want to ask – where in a naturalistic framework or worldview would you find value or worth? My blunt answer is – I don’t think you would. Naturalism (physicalism, materialism – I use these interchangeably), in concert with rejections of certain conceptions of emergence, basically claims that everything that exists and everything that happens can be described, ultimately, in physical terms (i.e. with the laws of physics). I struggle to see how normative concepts like value and worth could be grounded in such a framework. I realize this is in some sense an argument from lack of imagination, but it (vaguely) resembles Mackie’s “argument from queerness” for moral error theory. If value and worth were “part of the fabric of the world”, as Mackie puts it, they would be utterly unlike anything else that we take to inhabit the universe (quarks, radiation, amoebas, kangaroos, Saturn, etc.). I understand that this argument will likely not attract the unconverted. It’s not a knock-down argument. I just don’t see room for value or worth in naturalism’s relatively austere description of the universe.
        But perhaps this is going too far. After all, I can ask “what do people value?” perfectly well within a naturalistic framework. I can travel the world, interview people, and collate their responses. I’ll likely find that people generally value loving relationships, welcoming communities, engaging intellectual pursuits, and humorous leisure activities (among others). Does this not place value and worth within a naturalistic worldview? It does, but only subjectively. By this I mean, we cannot discover what is valuable the same way we have discovered how gravity operates, for example. The only way we can ground value naturalistically is through what people in fact value. The only thing meaning can mean, the only thing it can pick out in the world, is meaning to someone. Or, as Harry Frankfurt argues, it is loving something that imbues it with value, and not the other way around, as many presume.
        This is where the objective versus subjective debate enters. In agreeing with Frankfurt, I’m aligning myself with the subjectivists. I do believe this to be, from within naturalism, the more defensible view, but I won’t explore the dialectic in detail here. Instead, I’ll express some sympathy for Landau’s view, which is that the outcome of this debate might matter less than many presume. His basic point is that both objectivists and subjectivists can still discuss and argue over the relative meaning of various activities or lives. The only difference between the two camps, as I interpret him, is that the subjectivists realize that deep down, there is no fundamental grounding to the meaning being discussed. I take this as analogous to Mackie’s point in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong – the error theorist can still try to shape society’s moral system to be more in line with their personal preference, while acknowledging that there are no moral truths woven into the fabric of the universe to justify such a system.
        So we’ve described meaning as being about value or worth (something is meaningful if it’s valuable) and as being inherently subjective (it’s valuable if it’s valuable to someone). That’s great, as far as it goes, but what does meaning do? What role does it play in our lives? I want to pick up on two ideas that I find useful. One is from Susan Wolf (and echoed by Frankfurt). At some point she describes meaning as that aspect or property of our lives that is instantiated by being moved by reasons of love. These reasons are justified neither by self-interest nor by moral concerns. I find this point an incredibly important one to attend to. Meaning in our lives is associated with acting according to reasons that are neither selfish nor selfless. These so-called reasons of love are reasons that take the beloved (a person, an activity, a physical product) as an end in itself, a reason for action unto itself. And because of the inherent subjectivity of value (a view that Wolf herself does not share), I take it that these reasons are less subject to the critiques of practical rationality or morality than people often consider them. If I find woodworking valuable and therefore meaningful in my life (I don’t), I pursue it for its own sake. And the fact that woodworking might not be the most practically rational pursuit for me to take up (it’s expensive, or dangerous, or frustrating, say) does not mean I shouldn’t do it. Those concerns must be weighed against its value to me. Likewise, potential moral objections to my woodworking (it takes up time and resources that could be used to help the less fortunate, for example) also must be compared to the meaning it brings me. But because meaning and value are deeply subjective, it seems to me that the only person who can, in the end, adjudicate those comparisons is me. I’m not entirely sure where this train of thought leads, but the general message remains an important one – meaning in our lives is associated with reasons for action that are in some sense outside the bounds of practical rationality and morality.
        The second pragmatic point has to do with finding meaning. Typically, when people talk about meaning, they are saying things like “what is the meaning of life?”, “I’m searching for meaning in life”, or “what is the point of it all?”. So the pragmatic questions that arise are: do we have to actively search for and find meaning in our lives? Do we have to make it? Or does it just happen, in some sense, and we’re left to make do with what we’ve got? On one level, the ultimate level (on which free will is a nonsensical concept), meaning is something that just happens to, or within, people (because ultimately, the world as naturalism sees it is just a bunch of things just happening). On this level, meaning is just a descriptive statement about what a certain person cares about (or loves, in Frankfurt’s language). But there is a forward-looking sense (making use of the temporal asymmetry inherent in human freedom) in which you can find meaning or make meaning (in the end there might be no distinction). That is by honestly and deeply reflecting on what you care about and why, and engaging as much as possible in those pursuits that survive such reflection. For the naturalist, this way lies a meaningful life.