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.
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?
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?