Aviel Ginzburg December 7th Metaphysics An Incoherent Inquiry At first glance, life appears utterly meaningless, giving me no reason to continue my unrelenting joke of an existence. But I won’t take my own life, nor will I even procure the means to set any such action in motion. Instead, I’ll curse cruel fate for making a being capable of coming to such an absurd conclusion. I wake up every morning subjugated by the overbearing scope of the universe, wondering why I continuously renew my insignificant daily routine. No matter where my day leads me, I am doomed by countless mentally and physically draining decisions that, in the end, are nothing more than arbitrary and pointless choices in a fleeting world governed by cold contingency. However, rather than resign myself to these depressing conclusions, I cling tightly to my logic and reason hoping to find a light in all this darkness. But every time I believe I have found life’s meaning, I am forced to analyze my justification behind it, which must then be justified itself, and soon enough I am lost in an infinite regress. But I do find a hope in this, however it does not emerge in the form of an answer. Instead, I am placated by the knowledge that my search for meaning is incoherent, since I am seeking something that cannot exist. But despite this conclusion, I still cannot escape the human mind’s innate desire to search for the meaning of life. However, rather than lament over the absurdity of my predicament and accept my fate, I cut the problem off at the source, and restructure
my desperate search into a cautionary survey that hopes to come up empty handed. Thus, while I cannot conquer the futility of this search for meaning, I can exploit my search by transforming it into a tool that assures an existence that is free of external purposes. This freedom grants me the ability to create personal purposes and meanings that are undaunted by their own ultimate unintelligibility, and in fact reinforced by the fact that they cannot be proven wrong by anything external. In other words, since my meanings cannot be false, though they also cannot be true, there is nothing that prevents me from using them to quench my irrational thirst for discovering the meaning of life by creating meaning in life. The concept of meaningfulness often remains unchallenged because its existence is seemingly obvious, and yet so difficult to defend. This fact alone should make philosophers raise a red flag, because, as is made evident in the Socratic dialogues, mundane concepts or values that require a tedious amount of justification are likely defined in error. In the case of the meaning of life, this becomes painfully obvious even when dealing with the most superficial challenges. For instance, Thomas Nagel writes, “we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute” (177). Nagel’s claims in this statement are undoubtedly true, however irrelevant with respect to meaning. Assume that you are massive; your atoms are the size of an entire galaxy and your height from head to toe equal to 15 billion lightyears in distance. Even
though your physical self makes up half of the known universe, what meaning would your life gain that you did not have before? The answer is absolutely none, and so would it also be if were you immortal rather than fleeting. Nagel writes, “Would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe” (177)? A change in size or endurance does not change the underlying factor that denies or grants life meaning, and any life that was absurd before would be at least as much so if not more so when taken to the extreme. Nagel defines the absurd as “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (178), however, he continues that, “there does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise. Consequently the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision in ourselves” (181). The friction that appears between our objectives and the reality in which we exist cannot be resolved by changing the nature of reality because the impasse lies in our objectives. The sense of meaninglessness that emanates from our insignificant and transient existence is the result of the conflict Nagel observes between our aspirations and reality. In our case, the object of desire we are concerned with is the meaning of life. However, even assuming there exists a world in which the purpose of life is “having as many children as possible”, there still remains the question of “Why?”. The chain cannot
simply end there because “nothing can justify unless it is justified in terms of something outside itself, which is also justified” (177). It would be absurd if a resident of this hypothetical world answered the question “Why do you want to have sex as often as possible?” with “So I can have as many children as possible.” then followed up the question “Why do you want to have as many children as possible.” with “Because spawning countless offspring is the meaning of life”, and simply stopped there. The meaning derived from such a purpose is incomplete in its justification, and is therefore no meaning at all. Even in a world in which God definitively exists, if the purpose of life were to “obey God’s 10 commandments until the moment of our death” (G), this meaning would still be incomplete, though in a slightly different manner. The difference between G and the examples given beforehand are that with God we assume the meaning of life to be an inalienable fact, where as before we treated the meaning of life as part of a sequence of justifications or explanations. However, in the words of A. J. Ayer: It is a matter of brute fact that events succeed one another in the ways that they do and are explicable in the ways that they are. And indeed what is called an explanation is nothing other than a more general description. Thus, an attempt to answer the question why events are as they are must always resolve into saying only how they are. But what is required by those who seek the meaning of life is precisely an answer to their question “Why?” that is something other than an answer to any question “How?” And just because this is so they can never
legitimately be satisfied. (2245) Ayer’s claim is that just as it is logically impossible to assert both P and not P, it is impossible to answer the meaning of life with “Why?”. He concedes that the question of “Why?” is answerable at a given level, however it is only as such if there is a higher level that answers “How?”. Accordingly, locating the final “Why?” behind a meaning without a higher level would be impossible, since there is no additional level to investigate. Furthermore, since the question “What is the meaning of life?” lies at the end of a sequence of meaning, it is unanswerable by anything other than a description. In the case of a God given meaning of life, the meaning given would be no more than a description, and therefore not the meaning of life at all. By this logic, given any world, the meaning of life is an incoherent concept, and any attempt of pursuit is futile. Thus far we have concluded that life is meaningless in the sense that it is incapable of being quantified as either having meaning or not having meaning. However, although meaning cannot be applied to life, it can be within life. In the words of Merleau Ponty, “Life makes no sense, but is ours to make sense of” (162). Despite the romantic nature of Ponty’s statement, the latter half stipulates a requirement rather than a musing. As Camus noted, “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions” (94). Life is simply not livable without a meaning or purpose. Indeed, it would be only rational to commit suicide if it was definitively concluded that life was in fact void of all meaning and nothing more than an aimless struggle. Leo Tolstoy recognized this reality and wrote
in My Confession that, “so long as I did not know why, I could not do anything. I could not live.” (12). But Tolstoy continued to live, Camus continued to live, Ponty continued to live, and I continue to live. This is because given the alternative, anyone would prefer a search for meaning to suicide. And thankfully, the incoherence of the meaning of life, by implication, grants us the ability to ascribe life with meaning of our own. Indeed, since life has no universal meaning, our individual meanings will not have to adhere to any intrinsic values of existence, and therefore can never be proven incorrect. Our failed search thus provides us with a new opportunity for meaning that would not have otherwise been possible. Granted, our meanings will not be correct either, but as long as they satisfy our desires, to each individual, they will be phenomenologically as real as anything else in life. The view I am taking in part here is that of the Existentialists and Jean Paul Sartre who wrote “life has no meaning a priori. Before you live it, life is nothing, but it is for you to give it a meaning.” (162). We are both free and obligated to search out meaning in our lives; to find some grandiose purpose that gives us a reason to continue on. This meaning will be ours alone, but yet in every way possible, a meaning of life, in life. By discrediting the universal meaning of life and replacing it with a subjectively grounded doppelganger, we are able to quench our innate need to discover a satisfying relationship between life and meaning. However, since our meaning in life is self generated instead of justified by a higher level of explanation, we gain an existential
bonus, which is derived from our selfsufficiency. We are in complete control of our being and do not rely upon any external authority to define our meaning or purpose. In a sense, we gain a level of power and freedom that would not have otherwise been available to us. Granted, we are deprived of an assured position of privilege in the Universe, but we have to ask ourselves why that is even something we want. Why are we so vain that we unyieldingly desire a transcendentally important reasoning behind our lives? It is nothing short of laughable to demand that the Universe be a warm and bright place that will cherish our existence for all eternity when we only experience so little of it for ourselves. We should not hold these desires, and instead simply appreciate our small meanings to the fullest of our being. The Universe may remain vast and dark, but that is okay, because the meaning we are able to create in life shines bright enough to illuminate as far as we can see.