No Matter How Passionate You Are, Your Life Will Not Have Meaning

In a previous post I made on the meaning of life, we looked at why it was important to conduct this search. Today, we’ll be examining one prevalent idea on the meaning of life.

First, let us make the distinction between the two situations that we search for meaning in. The first of these is having meaningful lives, which attempts to respond to the worry that what we do in our daily lives is trivial and pointless. The second of these situations is about our place in the cosmos, and the meaning of humanity itself. It examines how we could consider anything to matter given the immense size of the universe and our minuscule place in it. This article will take a deep dive into the current leading discussions and perspectives on the first type, and I’ll later take a look at the second one.

A particular philosopher that I’ve studied and will be discussing today is known as Susan Wolf. She’s a quite recent philosopher and is currently a professor at the University of North Carolina. So if you ever thought philosophy was all just discussing dead people and their ideas here’s just one example of a modern philosopher. The theory I’ll be discussing is from her book called “Meaning in Life and Why It Matters”. It’s quite a fascinating read and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

Before diving into Wolf’s main theory, she highlights two other pre-theoretical views and attempts to combine their appeals adequately.

Fulfilment View

The first of these views is akin to something many of us may have heard before, to “find your passion and go for it” as it were. This view tells us that you can do anything you wish to with your life, so long as you love doing it and find fulfilment in it.

You shouldn’t get caught up in people’s expectations or worry about contributing to society, but should rather focus on doing what you love to do, what fulfils you.

Be it taking care of loved ones, studying science and philosophy, or even just sitting around smoking weed all day — if you find fulfilment in it, it is worth doing.

Keep in mind though that fulfilment here is different from enjoyment. the activities we find fulfilling are not always the most enjoyable ones. take exercising for example. Many individuals find fulfilment in running marathons, for example, and I can tell you from experience that getting up to those distances can be downright miserable at times.

It is often a mental struggle as much as a physical one to push through and keep going despite how much you want to give up and stop, so it’s not always enjoyable. And yet, this labour of love is one which is fulfilling, and so this view would tell us that it is worth doing.

However, as Wolf points out, there does exist a major issue with this view. As it stands, the only thing that matters is the positive experience of fulfilment when doing an action.

If this is the case, then only subjective experiences matter and anything could be meaningful as long as it is fulfilling. To see why this is an issue, consider the lives of these people, all of whom find immense fulfilment in what they do.

Say we have one person who smokes pot all day long, and another who does nothing but measure blades of grass outside. Both these people find immense fulfilment in what they do, and yet we would be tempted to call their life meaningless, so it cannot be that the only thing that matters is fulfilment.

Looking closer at why we feel as though these lives are meaningless, many might say that it’s because they don’t contribute to anything outside themselves. Their value is entirely subjective. the second view that Wolf mentions might solve this issue somewhat.

Larger-Than-Oneself View

This second view argues that the best life is one in which you contribute to something that is, essentially, larger than yourself. That is not to say that the thing is physically larger than yourself — a field full of grass would be physically bigger than the person measuring it — but rather these things should be metaphorically larger.

It essentially means that you should be involved with something that is outside of yourself, that derives its value from that which is outside you. Through this view, one’s life has meaning if one can meaningfully contribute to or are involved in things that essentially have objective value.

Objectivity here means that you should be able to look at yourself and what you are doing from the perspective of an outsider, and still consider what you are doing to be useful or have meaning.

This case successfully gets rid of the objections from the first view we discussed, in that lives that are based on things like smoking or measuring grass will not be meaningful, while other ones such as a life dedicated to charity or science will still be considered meaningful.

However, there still exists an issue with this that Wolf raises.

This view is based entirely on objective values, i.e., the things that are outside oneself. It has no regard for your personal attitudes towards your actions.

To see this issue in action, consider someone who gives every bit of disposable income they have to charity, and they are absolutely miserable for it.

According to this view, this person is living a really meaningful life, despite how much they seem to despise it, and many of us may see an issue with this. However, there may be some who would argue that life has meaning regardless of one’s mental state towards it.

Consider a brain surgeon, for example, who has been pushed towards that job by their parents and continue to stay in due to a feeling of moral obligation, but they despise their job. Would anyone then say that their life was meaningless, despite the lives they saved? Wolf certainly seems to think so.

And so we see from these two views and their issues that we require a subjective, as well as objective perspective to determine the meaning of life, which leads us to Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment View.

Fitting Fulfilment View

Wolf’s theory of a meaningful life, dubbed the fitting fulfilment view (FFV), attempts to combine the subjective and objective theories and ensure that they are linked appropriately. It isn’t enough to just have the two elements in the things you do.

Looking back at the person who smokes all day, suppose that their smoking stops rats from infesting the houses nearby. This person has the subjective element — they’re doing what brings them fulfilment — and they now also have the objective part — they’re bringing good to something outside themselves.

But we still would not consider their life meaningful, so we need some way to link the two.

Enter the fitting fulfilment view.

In one sentence, Wolf says that a meaningful life is when you love objects worthy of love and can engage with them in a meaningful way.

This view argues that you need to have the subjective elements, but you also need to be in some sort of relationship with the objective elements; they can’t just be by-products of your actions.

This view seems to cover all the bases, and more, that were discussed. We have the objective value, in that the things we do can be seen from an outsider’s perspective and still be seen as meaningful. We have the subjective value, in that we find personal fulfilment and pride in the things we dedicate our lives doing. And, through communal service and contribution, we also satisfy our social purpose, which Wolf argues we have due to humans being social creatures.

Issues With the FFV

While the fitting fulfilment view does help many of the issues brought about by the two other views, it does have some questions and objections of its own.

Consider, for one, that this view requires the existence of objective values. Well, what even are objective values? Some philosophers may argue that everything is subjective and there can never be any definite objective value. we know that a lot of our societal values are shaped by our environment and over generations, so for all we know, these so-called objective values could have been completely different had our societies progressed differently.

Another prominent issue for this theory is the existence of morally vicious individuals. These would be people who find fulfilment in committing things that are morally atrocious or repulsive, but what if what they are doing has good consequences. In that case, they would find fulfilment and they would be doing objective good in the long term, so who’s to say that their life doesn’t have meaning.

One might also wonder about situations such as those in Huxley’s novel Brave New World. In this world, citizens are genetically modified and bred to work in certain capacities. Farmers are designed to farm and also to love farming and have no interest in books. Coal miners are designed to love mining coal and to hate wide open spaces. The theory put forward by Wolf suggests that, despite how these people have been manipulated, they still lead meaningful lives.

These issues highlight some key issues with Wolf’s fitting fulfilment view, and answering these objections is a continuous effort — and a pretty lively one too considering the recency of this theory.

Keep in mind though that Wolf only attempts to argue the first of the two situations in which we search for meaning. When it comes to our place in the universe, her response is…interesting and dismissive to say the least.

“Many people are upset by the thought that they are mere specks in a vast universe. They are upset, that is, by their smallness, their inability to make a big and lasting splash. Such people will just have to get over it — their desire is unsatisfiable.”

To examine our place in the universe, we will turn to other philosophers in future posts.

If you would like to explore this topic in audio form rather than through these posts, check out the Philosophy Over Tea podcast.

This article was first published on Medium here