On the Meaning of Life

John Cottingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415248006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134537846
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The question 'What is the meaning of life?' is one of the most fascinating, oldest and most difficult questions human beings have ever posed themselves. In an increasingly secularized culture, it remains a question to which we are ineluctably and powerfully drawn.
Drawing skillfully on a wealth of thinkers, writers and scientists from Augustine, Descartes, Freud and Camus, to Spinoza, Pascal, Darwin, and Wittgenstein, On the Meaning of Life breathes new vitality into one of the very biggest questions.

Notes

1 THE QUESTION

1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979), pp. 135–6.

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus [1922] (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.521.

3 Aristotle, Metaphysics [c. 330BC], Book I, Ch. 2; cf. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning [1605], I, i. 3.

4 For being as an issue, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [Sein und Zeit, 1927] trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §9; for the ‘marvel of marvels’, see Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics’ [‘Was ist Metaphysic?’], inaugural lecture of 1929.

5 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology [1714], §69.

6 A. E. Housman, ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’, from Last Poems [1922], XL.

7 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.52.

8 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press, 1988), p. 193.

9 Aristotle, Physics [c. 325bc], Book II, Ch. 8. The terms ‘material’, ‘formal’, ‘efficient’ and ‘final’ are not in fact Aristotle’s own labels, but are derived from the Latin translations of his works.

10 René Descartes, Meditations [Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641], Fifth Replies, in J. Cottingham et al. (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Vol. II, p. 258.

11 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], Section IV, part 1; in L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) Hume’s Enquiries, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 30.

12 Hume, loc. Cit.

13 Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pp. 192–3.

14 Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.4312.

15 For metaphor as a privileged mode of disclosure, see D. Cooper, Metaphor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 256.

16 For ‘nausea’, see Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée [1936], passim, and L’Être et le Néant [1943], trans. as Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 338. For ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit), see Heidegger, Being and Time, §29, §38.

17 Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild (Amsterdam: Querido, 1934), trans. S. Bargmann, Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, (New York: Crown), p. 11 (emphasis supplied).

18 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 1930], Ch. 2; in J. Strachey (ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, l953–74), XXI, p. 76.

19 Letter to Marie Bonaparte of 13 August 1937; in Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. T. and J. Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960).

20 Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, Ch. 1.

21 Though of course it so far remains an open question whether a religious stance does constitute an ‘appropriate’ way of coming to terms with our vulnerability.

22 St Bonaventure, Commentarii Sententiarum Petri Lombardi [1248–55], Book I, 1 iii 2, in Opera Omnia (Collegium S. Bonaventurae: Quarachhi, 1891) I, 40. The theme appears earlier, for example in Augustine, Confessions [Confessiones, 400], Book I.

23 Ivan, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [1880].

24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power [Der Wille zur Macht, 1888], trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 327.

25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Science [Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882], §125; trans. in W. Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), pp. 93ff.

26 Nietzsche, The Joyful Science, §108.

27 See Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

28 The Joyful Science, §125.

29 The Joyful Science, §341. For the existential (rather than literal) construal of the eternal recurrence, see B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins, ‘Nietzsche’s works and their themes’, in their edited collection The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 37ff.

30 The Joyful Science, §341.

31 Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams;
The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.

(W. B. Yeats, ‘Two Songs from a Play’, The Tower [1928])

The final couplet is connected with the Nietzschean vision by Richard Rorty in the Times Literary Supplement no. 5044 (December 3, 1999), p. 11.

32 Plato, Theaetetus [c.370bc], 160D.

33 Psalm 100.

34 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xlii.

35 The Joyful Science, §283.

36 Isaiah Berlin, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

37 It should be added that even when we use ‘thin’ concepts (‘this object is good’, ‘that action is right’), our evaluations are still typically grounded in objectively assessable features of the objects or actions in virtue of which they are held to be good or right.

38 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1916–17], Lecture XVII.

39 John Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 97.

40 Simon Raven, The Feathers of Death (London: Anthony Blond, 1959), Ch. 1.

41 For the ‘Gauguin problem’, see Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. 2.

42 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [1751], Section V, part 2.

43 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785], Ch. 2.

44 See John Cottingham, ‘The ethics of self-concern’, Ethics no. 101 (July 1991), pp. 798–817.

45 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [c. 330bc], Book VI, Ch. 13.

46 This is not to suggest that meaningfulness always requires explicit reflection on how this integration is achieved, merely that such an integrative story is in principle available.

2 THE BARRIER TO MEANING

1 ‘Je vois ces effroyables espaces de l’univers qui m’enferment, et je
me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans que je
sache pourquoi je suis plutôt placé en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni
pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à
ce point plutôt qu’à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et
de toute celle qui me suit. Je ne vois que des infinités de toutes
parts, qui m’enferment comme un atome, et comme une ombre
qu ne dure qu’un instant sans retour. Tout ce que je connais est que
je dois bientôt mourir, mais ce que j’ignore le plus est cette mort
même que je ne saurais éviter.’

(Blaise Pascal, Pensées [c. 1660], ed. L. Lafuma
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), no. 427)

2 It has become fashionable to say that such intelligibility depends on our ability to construct a narrative account of our lives; yet since not just any narrative can command our allegiance as providing a meaningful story, the power of narrative seems dependent on prior notions of value and meaning, rather than being itself generative of those notions. See John D. Arras, ‘Narrative Ethics’, in L. and C. Becker (eds), Encyclopedia of Ethics (2nd edn, New York: Routledge, 2001).

3 To avoid misunderstanding, objectivity need not imply a rigid inflexibility. Objectivist accounts of value can perfectly well allow that different cultural, social and economic circumstances may call for different customs and arrangements (for example for differing sexual mores or differing systems for the raising of children). For this point, see P. Bloomfield, Mor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• One: The Question
• Two: The Barrier to Meaning
• Three: Meaning, Vulnerability and Hope
• Notes