Permanence and meaning

Consider this strong meaning-permanence thesis:

1. There being a permanent end to all humanly relevant events would render all of our present activities meaningless.

And this weak one:

2. There being a permanent end to all humanly relevant events would render some of our present activities meaningless.

Here is a quick and easy argument that both are false. Let’s imagine that we believe in a narrative N where there are humanly relevant events that are go on forever and that render some of our present activities meaningful. After all, if there is no such narrative, then it is odd to say that a permanent end to humanly relevant events renders some or all of our present activities meaningless, since these activities would necessarily be meaningless even if there were no such end.

Now, let’s imagine that we came to think that the events and experiences in N exponentially speed up with respect to objective time, in such a way that the first “year”, by human reckoning (revolutions of the earth about the sun, say), described by N takes an objective year, but the second “year” takes half a year, the third “year” takes a quarter of a year, and so on. Thus, we come to think that all the events and experineces in N take place objectively in two years. This is then followed by a clean wipe of reality, and a new creation that has no meaningful connection to any humanly relevant events. Call this story N^*. I think it makes little human difference whether reality is described by N or by N^*. In terms of subjective time, the humanly relevant events of N^* take infinitely long. The only difference is that after the humanly relevant events there are other events that are not humanly relevant. Enriching reality with these events surely does not take away meaning.

So, none of our present activities lose meaning on N^*. But on N^* there is a permanent end of humanly relevant events. Thus, (1) and (2) are both false.

Perhaps this was too quick, though. What if your life project is to fill as much of time with humanity as you can? Then on N, if there are humans always, your project is successful, But on N^*, your project is not successful, because there is infinite humanless time after the end of humanity in two objective years, and so humans occupy only an infinitesimal fraction of time.

But I think it’s mistaken to think that it should be our project to fill up time or space with humans or human events. In other words, the filling-up project is meaningless regardless of success. Take the spatial analogue. Suppose somehow we didn’t know about other galaxies (maybe there are dust clouds shielding them from our view) and we have filled up our galaxy with humans. Would we lose any real meaning in our activities if we found out that reality is richer than we thought, and contains other galaxies beyond our reach? I don’t think so.

The above argument is compatible with a modified version of (1):

3. There being a permanent end to all humanly relevant events after a finite number of events would render all of our present activities meaningless.

For we might think that the reason ordinary stories about a permanent end have a tendency to make us think our activities are meaningless does not have to do with time, but with the idea that the narrative structure for humans requires infinity.

Nonoverriding morality

Some philosophers think that sometimes norms other than moral norms—e.g., prudential norms or norms of the meaningfulness of life—take precedence over moral norms and make permissible actions that are morally impermissible. Let F-norms be such norms.

A view where F-norms always override moral norms does not seem plausible. In the case of prudential or meaningfulness, it would point to a fundamental selfishness in the normative constitution of the human being.

So the view has to be that sometimes F-norms take precedence over moral norms, but not always. There must thus be norms which are neither F-norms nor moral norms that decide whether F-norms or moral norms take precedence. We can call these “overall norms of combination”. And it is crucial to the view that the norms of combination themselves be neither F-norms nor moral norms.

But here is an oddity. Morality already combines F-considerations and first order paradigmatically moral considerations. Consider two actions:

1. Sacrifice a slight amount of F-considerations for a great deal of good for one’s children.

2. Sacrifice an enormous amount of F-considerations for a slight good for one’s children.

Morality says that (1) is obligatory but (2) is permitted. Thus, morality already weighs F and paradigmatically moral concerns and provides a combination verdict. In other words, there already are moral norms of combination. So the view would be that there are moral norms of combination and overall norms of combination, both of which take into account exactly the same first order considerations, but sometimes come to different conclusions because they weigh the very same first order considerations differently (e.g., in the case where a moderate amount of F-considerations needs to be sacrificed for a moderate amount of good for one’s children).

This view violates Ockham’s razor: Why would we have moral norms of combination if the overall norms of combination always override them anyway?

Moreover, the view has the following difficulty: It seems that the best way to define a type of norm (prudential, meaningfulness, moral, etc.) is in terms of the types of consideration that the norm is based on. But if the overall norms of combination take into account the very same types of consideration as the moral norms of combination, then this way of distinguishing the types of norms is no longer available.

Maybe there is a view on which the overall ones take into account not the first-order moral and F-considerations, but only the deliverances of the moral and F-norms of combination, but that seems needlessly complex.

Integration

It sure seems that:

1. A good human life is an integrated human life.

But suppose we have a completely non-religious view. Wouldn't it be plausible to think that there is a plurality of incommensurable human goods and the good life encompasses a variety of them, but they do not integrate into a unified whole? There is friendship, professional achievement, family, knowledge, justice, etc. Each of these constitutively contributes to a good human life. But why would we expect that there be a single narrative that they should all integrally fit into? The historical Aristotle, of course, did have a highest end, the contemplation of the gods, available in his story, and that provides some integration. But that's religion (though natural religion: he had arguments for the gods' existence and nature).

Nathan Cartagena pointed out to me that one might try to give a secular justification for (1) on empirical grounds: people whose lives are fragmented tend not to do well. I guess this might suggest that if there is no narrative that fits the various human goods into a single story, then one should make one, say by expressly centering one's life on a personally chosen pattern of life. But I think this is unsatisfactory. For I think that the norms that are created by our own choices for ourselves do not bear much weight. They are not much beyond hobbies, and hobbies do not bear much of the meaning of human life.

So all in all, I think the intuition behind (1) requires something like a religious view of life.

Meaning

1. Every meaning derives from components to which intelligent beings have assigned a meaning.
2. Some things that have a meaning that does not derive from components to which earthly beings have assigned a meaning.
3. Therefore, there is a non-earthly intelligent being.

I suggest two examples for premise (2).

Life: Life has a meaning. But a meaning of life that derives from our assignments is not a meaning that matters to us. What we have assigned meaning to, we could reassign meaning to. If the meaning of life were merely a matter of human assignment, then humanity's search for meaning would be a mere matter of curiosity, of figuring out how our ancestors have assigned meaning and how those meanings combine. It would be either like searching for the meaning of an ancient inscription (a case where we don't know the meanings of the components) or like parsing a complex sentence in first order logic (a case where we know the meanings of the components but don't know how they go together). There would be no deep existential relevance in such a meaning, since we could just as well assign a meaning ourselves. It would be just a meaning assigned by peers.

This example shows that the meaning of life needs not just to be a meaning assigned by a non-earthly intelligent being, but by a being whose meaning-assignments have deep existential relevance to us. A being with a deep kind of authority. So not just some space alien that seeded life on earth, say.

The sublime: Any case of the sublime—say, the Orion Nebula or Beethoven's 9th—has a meaning that escapes us, all of us. Cases of the sublime can be natural or human-made, but in both cases they have a meaning beyond us. And that meaning-beyond-us isn't just a matter of being better at figuring out how components combine, in the way that the meaning of a sentence of First Order Logic is. In a piece of the sublime we don't know very well, but can only vaguely sense, what the meaningful components are, and we are not responsible for the mysterious meaningfulness of these components. Even in the human-made cases, the creator is a servant to that mysterious meaning of the components.

Moreover, the meaning of the sublime piece is one that we resonate with, one we have a kind of grasp of—or maybe that has a grasp on us—that ever eludes us. We have a resonance to the meaning of the sublime. So whatever story we give about that meaning, we also need to give a story about how it's a meaning we resonate to. There could be aliens that have assigned deep mythological interpretations to various components of the Orion Nebula. But that isn't the meaning we resonate to. So, once again, the argument not only yields a non-earthly intelligence, but one who can make us resonate to his designs.

God, service to neighbor and human flourishing

Suppose that there is no God, that human beings are the highest beings relevant to our moral calculus (i.e., there may be aliens somewhere else that are higher than humans, but they don't morally matter). What, then, should one take as the highest aspect of human flourishing? Surely service to fellow humans. But service to fellow humans aims at an end beyond itself, namely our fellow humans' benefit. Now this benefit to our fellow humans cannot primarily consist in enabling them to serve their neighbor, or else the highest aspect of human flourishing consists in helping others to help others to help others ..., which results in vicious regress or circularity. Rather, in the end, our collective service to one another would have to be aimed at something else than service to one another. But if there is no God, then service to one another is the highest part of our flourishing. So it seems that if there is no God, the highest aspect of our flourishing consists in our promoting other, and hence lower, aspects of the flourishing of others. And that doesn't seem right.

Here's another way to see this problem. There is something paradoxical about pursuing the flourishing of others as our central end: what if we all achieved our end? Then our lives would lose what centrally gives them their meaning.

How does the existence of God change things? Well, our service to others in itself is not the highest human good any longer. Loving union with God is the highest human good, and service to others is valuable as it is partly constitutive of one's own union with God and promotes that union for others.

Virtue and wasted life

The following argument is valid:

1. (Premise) No life lived virtuously can have been wasted.
2. (Premise) If God doesn't exist, a life lived virtuously can have been wasted.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Is it sound? Well, yes, if God exists. For if God exists, then (1) is true, and if God exists, then (2) is trivially true as its antecedent is false (my indicatives in arguments are material unless noted otherwise).

But of course the question is whether the argument is any good, at all useful towards giving someone reason to accept the conclusion. Well, I do find myself with a certain pull towards (1) and (2) independently of theism. Claim (1) just seems right to me. But if God doesn't exist, then it does seem quite possible for someone's central life pursuits to have been unsuccessful, despite these central life pursuits being virtuous.

However, I have the following worry. Maybe no life lived virtuously can have been wasted, because what it is to have wasted a life is to have failed at one's central pursuits or to have centrally pursued only vanities. But a virtuous person always has her own virtue as a central pursuit, and hence a virtuous person's life is never wasted, as one of her central non-vain pursuits—that of her own virtue—has been successful. Thus, even if God doesn't exist, a life lived virtuously couldn't have been wasted.

But I think that if theism were false, then a virtuous person might never centrally pursue her own virtue. For it could be that she is faced with needs more urgent than the pursuit of her own virtue—feeding a starving family, say—and so virtue could require her not to centrally pursue her own virtue. And if this is rigth, then (2) is non-trivially true. If God did not exist, there would be a possibility of a wasted virtuous life. It would be a life where one has virtue but does not pursue it as a central part of one's life, because virtue itself prohibits making the pursuit of virtue central.

If Christian theism is true, however, other duties will not be sufficient to shift the pursuit of virtue into something of secondary importance. For the Christian can have a trust in Providence that we will not go wrong by making our pursuit of union with God (which requires the pursuit of virtue) central to our lives.

This gives a second version of the argument:

4. (Premise) If theism is false, then a virtuous human being can be in circumstances such that she should assign only secondary importance to the pursuit of virtue.
5. (Premise) It is not possible for a human being to be in circumstances in which she should assign only secondary importance to the pursuit of virtue.
6. Therefore, theism is true.

I do not find the two arguments in this post deeply compelling. But I think they at least should somewhat raise the probability of theism for those for whom it is neither zero nor one.

An optimistic B-theoretic way to think of finite lives

Thinking of the ever-decreasing amount of (earthly) life left can be depressing. That's the A-theoretic way. But there is a B-theoretic way: one can think of the span of one's life as a puzzle or painting that one needs to fill in in good ways. At any time t during one's life, one is only obligated to fill in the remaining parts of the puzzle or painting, the parts that are causally dependent on the here-and-now.

There is, in a sense, less stress the less of the puzzle or painting remains, since there is less of a future to make decisions for. Of course, one might have screwed up in the past, and now one has less time to compensate. But, apart from cases of genuine moral dilemmas, one is not obliged to do more than the best one can now do, and God's forgiveness is always available. The A-theorist can say many of the same things, but to me, these things fit better with the B-theory.

Take an extreme case. Suppose one is down to one minute left. Well, then, the problem is merely how best to live that minute. In a way, that is momentous, since it is a culminating minute. But, then again, it's only a minute, and unless one has a likelihood of deep wisdom, or sins that one hasn't repented of, the problem is not so great: the problem is merely how to live one minute.

At the same time, thinking of life in this way, as a puzzle or a painting to fill in, makes each moment crucial. For while a painter can always paint over a portion, we paint our lives in a way that does not allow for that. This is a way in which eternalist theories of time may lead to a cherishing of each moment, of living it out as best one can, since that moment always stands. A presentist can say similar things, but they seem less compelling then, I think.

The above is not an unattractive picture of life. Notice that there are two views here: one of life as a puzzle and the other as a painting. I think there is a way in which both views are right. Life is like a painting, but we are not the primary painter. The primary painter is God. For us, it is more like a puzzle, in that we should be trying to paint it in not according to our conception of what life is artistic, but according to God's. Moreover, we need not navel-gaze and puzzle-solve all that much, but all we need to do is love, and then God will take care of the painting (think of the life of a St Francis—here, there is a painting, but St Francis surely didn't care nearly as much about the painting, i.e., about his life, as about God, neighbor and the rest of creation). So there is a way in which the analogy isn't so good at all.

More on the meaning of life

Both of the following claims are plausible to me but appear to be in tension:

1. A full finite "Aristotelian" life of seriously attempting to practice the intellectual and ethical virtues could be satisfactory.
2. I rightly find a finite purely natural life unsatisfactory (our hearts are rightly restless until they find rest in God).

When thinking about this, one can put the focus on the finite length of life or on the lack of a supernatural component in the Aristotelian life.

But now observe that (1) and (2) are not logically contradictory. To see that, notice that there are several logically possible stories to be told on which both (1) and (2) are true. The first story is that of grace and fallenness: I am fallen, and without the supernatural component of grace in my life, I couldn't actually lead a life of seriously attempting to practice the virtues—I would, instead, slide into vice unless I happened to die early (in which case the life wouldn't be "full"), and eventually I would abandon the serious attempts to practice the virtues. If that story is true, then (2) is true, because any finite purely natural life would be a life without grace (by definition of "natural") and hence could not be a full "Aristotelian" life.

A second, complementary way to reconcile (1) and (2) is this. I have received the grace of longing for the joy of supernatural union with God. The grace of Christ both makes me long for that joy and directs me to it. As a result of that grace, my heart is restless unless it rests in God. (I don't know if Augustine would allow that the truth of his dictum is dependent on grace.) Given the grace to have the intensively infinite beatitude of union with God, any purely natural life would indeed be objectively unsatisfactory. But, nonetheless, an Aristotelian life could be fully satisfactory—not to me as I am, but to a hypothetical human being who is both unfallen (and hence can live the Aristotelian life) and has not received the grace of that longing.

A generalization of the second way to reconcile (1) and (2) is this. We read (1) in this way: There are possible beings in many ways like us who would be rightly satisfied by a finite Aristotelian life. But these possible beings are not us. Here, "are not us" can be read in two ways. First, as we did in the second way: they are not us who are graced with a longing for God. Second, we could have a completely different reading: they are not human. On this reading, the finite Aristotelian life is not a life for human beings, but for perhaps hypothetical non-humans who do not have the infinite beatitude of union with God as their telos. This gives us a third way to reconcile (1) and (2).

However, a natural human life is indeed sufficient to fulfill the human being's natural needs. It takes grace to long for more than the natural needs. So human beings should, in fact, be able to be satisfied with a natural life, absent grace, at least if they are unfallen. This makes the third way to reconcile (1) and (2) problematic. However we can focus not on the naturalness of the Aristotelian life in (1), but on its finitude. It may be that living forever is actually natural to us. (That we needed the fruit of the tree of life is compatible with this, because there is nothing absurd about needing external goods to live out our nature.) If so, then the beings that would rightly be satisfied with a finite Aristotelian life (note that Aristotle himself was open to the possibility of an afterlife) are not humans.

These three answers appear compatible with one another, and all appear plausible, so the full story is that an infinite Aristotelian life would be satisfactory to us, if we were unfallen and ungraced, but fallen as we all are, and by and large graced as we are (I think grace is offered to all at some point, but for some that point may not yet have come), we rightly find the thought of such a life insufficient. And a finite Aristotelian life would be satisfactory only to humanoids who are not human. The story also explains why some people might find an infinite Aristotelian life satisfactory—for they have not received grace—and why some might feel satisfied by the thought of a finite Aristotelian life—for their aspirations are lowered by the fall.

The meaning of life and the afterlife

Consider this intuition:

1. If this earthly life is all there is, our lives are insufficiently meaningful.

I think this is an intuition a lot of ordinary people have. But now let's turn this fact—the fact that people have the intuition in (1)—into a puzzle. It doesn't seem at all easy to find an argument for (1). After all, it seems like our earthly lives are meaningful on their own: they provide opportunities for the practice of the intellectual and moral virtues, and such practice seems to be "sufficiently" meaningful. (Sufficiently for what? I guess sufficiently for us to say that our lives "have real meaning". This is vague.) Maybe there is some easy-to-fall-for unsound argument (compare the case of the common intuition that there is a problem between omniscience and free will; there, it is easy to attribute that intuition to the existence of a modally fallacious argument together with the mistaken idea that backwards causation is impossible, which mistaken idea may rest on some fallacious arguments as well), but I don't actually know of one. Rather, the intuition about (1) seems quite direct.

Maybe there is a non-cognitive explanation, tied to the selective advantages of our believing (1). As a general methodological principle, however, I want to avoid such non-cognitive evolutionary explanations of beliefs absent particular evidence, because that path leads to scepticism, besides being strewn with unevidenced just-so tales.

Let me suggest one cognitive explanation: People intuit (1) because they have a more basic perception that:

2. The main meaning of our earthly lives comes from or is largely shaped by the meaning that these lives have in the light of our lives after death.

Now, there is an argument from (2) to one interpretation of (1). If (2) holds, the main kind of meaning that our lives have is in fact dependent on an afterlife. Thus, there is a true counterfactual that says that:

3. If there were no afterlife, then our lives would be insufficiently meaningful, where "insufficiently" is measured relative to the kind of meaning that they in fact have.

And then people report the counterfactual fact in (3) as (1).

Now let me add one further twist. After all, there are people who don't believe in an afterlife but who still find (1) very plausible—and their belief in (1) then makes them feel terrible. (Cf. Mickey in the middle portion of Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters.) They cannot justify (1) by means of (3). Nonetheless, (1) appears well-entrenched.

Here I want to use a really clever idea that Dan Johnson gives in a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy to examine our justification for the possibility premise in the ontological argument. Johnson thinks that the premise that possibly God exists is a premise that we derive from the claim that God exists, and the latter claim is one we have prior knowledge of by means of the sensus divinitatis. An atheist may then lose the justified belief that God exists, while keeping the derived belief that possibly God exists, with this derived being still justified by its past justification. The S5 ontological argument can then be used to leverage this derived belief into a full-blown belief that God exists. This is circular—and yet perfectly justified, as long as the atheist did not have good reason to cease believing in God. Johnson makes a similar move with regard to the cosmological argument, but I am less willing to go there with him.

Anyway, applying Johnson's idea to the case at hand is a cinch. We have a prior intuition that (2). From this, we derive (3) and then (1), right sense of "sufficiently". Even if we lose a belief in an afterlife, we can hold on to (1), which is a kind of shadow of the deep intuition that (2). We can even give an argument from (1) to (2), which is in a sense circular, but not viciously so:

4. Given the fact that a finite life of intellectual and moral virtue could be meaningful, (1) only has a reasonable interpretation on which it is true if (3) and (2) are true.
5. The intuition in (1) does have a reasonable interpretation on which it is true.
6. Therefore, (2) is true.

I think we do, in fact, have a very resilient (but perhaps not indestructible) pull towards (5).