In Life is Hard, I distinguished “a meaningful life”—in which one engages, more or less successfully, with things that matter—from “the meaning of life.” The first is a personal possession; the second is not. Some lives are more meaningful than others, but if life as a whole has meaning, it belongs to all of us, or none.
To my surprise, “the meaning of life” was a recent coinage, not a perennial concern. I traced it back, historically, to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, published in 1833-4. The “meaning” in “the meaning of life” is like the meaning of a work of art: an interpretation that explains “what it’s all about” and how it should make us feel: how to our orient ourselves towards it.
Human life would have a meaning we can live with—so I argued in a chapter on absurdity—if, and only if, we bend the arc of human history towards justice.
It’s the chapter of the book that leaves the most unsettled and unsaid. Reviewers sometimes took me to be saying that a life is meaningful only if it is committed to justice—thereby missing the distinction I began with. A meaningful life might be devoted to close relationships, to art or science, creativity or work; it’s the meaning of life, as such, that depends on a more just future.
More subtle critics asked why the sorts of things that make individual lives meaningful would not be enough to sustain life’s meaning. My answer, briefly sketched, was vaguely Kantian: there is nothing so good in human life that it should reconcile us to injustice without end; and progress towards justice brings the other goods in train. That is why justice, in particular, gives life meaning.
If I wrote the chapter again, I’d make these points more vividly; and I’d extend the historical narrative. As it stands, that narrative opens with an argument from etymology: “the meaning of life” did not occur in English until Carlyle, so the meaning of life was not a topic in philosophy. It’s a form of argument we should mistrust. But in the case of life’s meaning, the etymology coheres with circumstantial evidence, and the narrative is confirmed—if complicated—by two books that were published after I had written Life is Hard.
In What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy finds nothing like the modern use of “meaning” in Jewish scripture or in ancient Greece. When the prophet of Ecclesiastes warns that “all is vanity”—or, more literally, that worldly success is a “mirage”—he doesn’t talk about meaning, let alone the meaning of life, which runs together meaning as significance or intent with meaning as purpose or value.
The archeology of this conflation goes back to early Christian thought, in which the world can be read as the word of God. A pivotal figure here is St. Augustine (354-430):
In that book [the Bible], no one reads except those who know the alphabet; [but] in the world as a whole even the uneducated may read.
The illiterate can direct their interpretive powers at the work of art that is God’s creation.
As the Protestant Reformation recoiled from metaphorical readings of the Bible, the idea of reading God in the world fell out fashion. It was revived by Johan Georg Hamann (1730-88), an eccentric German intellectual, who took the world as an object of figurative meaning, and by thinkers influenced by him, including Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801), who published as “Novalis.”
It is to Novalis that we owe the German phrase, “Der Sinn des Lebens”—the meaning of life—and its English translation in Carlyle. For Novalis, the meaning of life had become inscrutable:
Everything we experience is a communication. Thus is the world in fact a communication, revelation of the spirit. The time is no longer when God’s spirit was intelligible. The [Sinn] of the world has gone missing. We’re stuck at the letters [of the alphabet]. … Only an artist can guess the meaning of life.
Carlyle read Novalis in the 1820s, introducing him to English readers in an 1829 essay, four years before Sartor Resartus. Echoing Novalis, Carlyle’s novel invokes “the book of the world” along with “the meaning of life”:
We speak of the Volume of Nature and truly a Volume it is,—whose Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, dost man, so much as well know the Alphabet thereof?
In The Shadow of God, Michael Rosen narrates the shift in which God’s role in theodicy is replaced by human history: instead of relying on God to reconcile us to the world, we must reshape the world in ways that justify our reconciliation. For Marx and Hegel, the path of human history is laid out in advance. But that was a mistake: there is no guarantee that we will bend the arc of history in one direction or another. As I wrote in Life is Hard: “The question of life’s meaning is intelligible and the answer is up to us.”
What Rosen adds to the history is, among other things, a richer account of the role of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). For Kant, the “highest good” is the proportioning of happiness to desert: a kind of cosmic justice.
In fact, there is harsh asymmetry in Kant’s view: while the happiness of the wicked is unjust, the misery of the virtuous, while unfortunate and undesirable, is not. (This is Kant’s retributivism.) Still, the goal to which we should aspire, and for which we strive together, is a world in which people are as happy as they deserve to be. This is not something we can hope for without God’s assistance: hence a moral argument for faith in God.
The truth, I believe, is roughly what you get if you start with Kant and subtract both the asymmetry and faith in God. We cannot hope to achieve the highest good without God’s assistance—which we do not have. All we can hope for is progress towards justice, ever imperfect, but sufficient to give meaning to human life. As Orwell wrote, in a passage quoted at the end of Rosen’s book: “‘The truth is great and will prevail’ is a prayer rather than an axiom.”
For atheists such as you and me, isn't the intellectual heritage of 'the meaning of life' you describe here more than enough reason to be suspicious of the notion? When the theological scaffolding is pulled away, what's left is unstable: As far I can tell, nobody has given a single good reason to think that there is some deep and important message written in the very fabric of the world, if only we could decipher it. There is plenty of wisdom to be found in every nook and corner of human history, of course--but it's the kind you get from reading historical biography, not the kind that needs to be translated by a soothsayer or divined by an oracle.
Maybe that's flatfooted, but I must admit that I simply don't know what people are yearning for when they say they are looking for the meaning of life if not meaningfulness or purposefulness. As Rosen's book shows, the only grip people have on life's 'meaning' is its connection to immortality of some sort. If so, the significance of immortality is premised on the extremely poor inference that moves from 'My life is impermanent' to 'My life is meaningless'. But the inference from impermanence to Nihilism is laughably bad.
Life is both meaningful and temporary, contingent and suffused with value. There's nothing puzzling about how something can be both temporary and meaningful or valuable. So what would historical or actual immortality give our lives which they presently lack?