Meaning in Life is a relatively young topic in philosophy. This is partly because few felt a need to seek answers about purpose in life prior to the 19^th century. Religion could be counted on to address these questions previously. But while science has challenged religious orthodoxy and undermined some of those answers, it hasn’t filled the void with new answers. Nor should we expect science to address meaning in life, since this is a normative issue. Normativity is concerned with how things should be. The job of science is to describe the world, to tell us how it is. Normative issues are the job of philosophy.

We’ve already been introduced to two normative branches of philosophy, ethics, which is concerned with how we should treat each other, and epistemology, which is concerned with how we should think, reason and believe. Meaning in life is a third realm of normativity, one concern with what we should care about and how we should live beyond moral considerations of what we owe each other. In the cases of epistemology and ethics we have things outside ourselves to orient our inquiry. How we should think and what we should believe, the epistemic realm, is oriented towards reaching for a better understanding of the world and ourselves. In Ethics, our inquiry into how we should treat each other is oriented by our nature as persons and the value that attaches to this. But, when it comes to meaning in life, normative issues like who should I be and what is my purpose, we seem to be somewhat adrift. The universe won’t answer these questions for us. Nor can other people.

Ethics won’t answer our questions about meaning and purpose. Given a clear picture of our moral obligations, a life devoted to just meeting these might remain empty, pointless and directionless. Perhaps religion gives can give us a sense of purpose and identity. But even here, we face a potential problem. Suppose, for instance, that God’s plan for you is revealed to you through Devine revelation and it is for you to be a contemptable fool. Perhaps providing a warning to others would serve a larger purpose here. It would be a peculiar sort of believer who could sign on to this as his purpose in life. This seems an absurd situation. But any attempt to locate the source of meaning or purpose outside ourselves will run the risk of this absurdity. A satisfactory account of meaning in life must make our defining purpose something we can own as individuals. In short, meaning in life appears to be subjective in ways that ethics and epistemology aren’t.

Schopenhauer and Buddhism

Schopenhauer was among the earlier figures to realize that a void of meaning and purpose needed to be addressed. He was also among the early Western figures to study Eastern thought, Hinduism and Buddhism in particular. His insight into Eastern thought informs much of his answer concerning meaning in life. His answer is deeply pessimistic. Inspired by Kant, Schopenhauer develops a metaphysical view of the word as will and idea (The World as Will and Idea is the title of his great work). The underlying reality of the world is sheer will. What we think of as objects are just the manifestations or representations of will. Life is just the ongoing struggle of the will to survive. We compete against each other for survival and the result of all this strife is suffering. Life is just will fighting against will. There is no hope here.

However, we can reduce our suffering and perhaps find some measure of joy in the margins of this ongoing travesty by reining in our willfulness. Here Schopenhauer is taking a lesson from ancient Eastern wisdom. We can get at this most readily by considering the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. We can express these in Schopenhauerian terms as follows:

1. There is suffering
2. The cause of suffering is willfulness
3. The way to cease suffering is to cease being willful
4. There is a path to doing so (the 8-fold path of Buddhism)

Now how do we cease being willful. Of course, we eventually cease being willful with death. Does this suggest suicide as a way to cease the suffering the accompanies being willful? Probably not, since that would just be willfully fighting against our own will to survive. Suicide merely internalizes the world-wide struggle of willfulness against willfulness. But there are ways to tone down our willfulness. Many Eastern spiritual traditions like Zen provide examples of how we can tame our willfulness through spiritual discipline. Schopenhauer makes similar recommendations. He remains pessimistic. Life is unending suffering that serves no higher purpose in his view. We just have the option to suffer a little less if we can somehow manage our willfulness and tone it down a bit.

Nietzsche and The Threat of Nihilism

Nietzsche inherits concern about meaning in life from Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche sees Schopenhauer (and Buddhism) as essentially life denying. And so, his philosophical effort is devoted to addressing the threat of nihilism (meaninglessness) in a life affirming way. This leads him to endorse “The Will to Power” (the title of Nietzsche’s last book, edited by his sister after he went insane).

Nihilism may be a familiar term. You might be acquainted with nihilists from “The Big Lebowski”, who proclaim “We believe in nothing!” So, here we have nihilism as a creed or a view. This is not what Nietzsche was worried about. He’s concerned about nihilism as a condition. Nietzsche takes nihilism to be the absence of higher values. The Dude’s nihilists claimed to think nothing matters (though they still seemed to care about getting the money). But nihilism as a condition is simply lacking higher values. Nihilism as a condition is more like cancer, you won’t necessarily know if you have the disease. And the nihilism Nietzsche is worried about is the absence of higher values, we may think of these as things worth caring about. We may care about things that don’t really merit that concern. In a world devoid of things worth caring about a person may still have desires and care about getting these satisfied. Here is how Nietzsche describes the condition of nihilism in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”:

“The Earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink . . . . . Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels differently goes into the madhouse. ‘Formerly all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink . . . . . ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

When Nietzsche says “everybody wants the same” he doesn’t mean everybody wants a Toyota Landcruiser and a three-bedroom townhouse. He means everybody just wants. Of course, people want different specific things. But everyone is the same in the sense of being governed pretty much by their subjective desires, whatever those are. Among the last men, madness is thinking that there is some higher value, something worth caring about beyond what you happen to want.

If we think of happiness just in terms of the satisfaction that comes from getting what you want, the last man might be happy, even perfectly satisfied. But this is not the same as leading a meaningful life. The kind of value or purpose that is integral to leading a meaningful life is not mere desire satisfaction. Further, the kind of happiness the last man seeks is not stable or durable. Schopenhauer recognized this and would have touted the Hindu/Buddhist wisdom about desire satisfaction. The hollowness of the last man’s way of life can be understood in terms of the hedonic treadmill. No sooner than one desire is satisfied than another desire arises in its place. When desires are easily satisfied, they tend to become more and more refined and harder to satisfy. Craving begets craving. Willfulness becomes a habit. In Buddhist thought, this is known as the wheel of karma. In Nietzsche, this is the creeping spiritual death of nihilism

Meaning in life is not about happiness as the last man sees it. That is, it is not about mere pleasure seeking and satisfaction. Higher values place demands on us. They override our impulses and wants and orient us towards things that are larger than ourselves. But what is larger than ourselves and capable of orienting our lives purposefully? Nietzsche, a pastor’s son, would have granted that religion used to play this role for people. But he thinks we have outgrown this as a result of scientific advances and cultural changes. Thus, his famous quote, “God is dead. And we have killed him.” Nietzsche, an atheist himself, had powerfully mixed feeling about this. He is very anxious about the void left by humanity outgrowing God. Science may replace the need for God as an explanation for the world’s existence and our place in it, but science can’t replace the higher values that give us a sense of purpose and meaning. Nietzsche anticipates the threat of nihilism as a sort of spiritual cancer. He thinks we ultimately need people to fill the shoes formerly occupied by God. And this brings us to his idea of the will to power embodied in his vision of an Übermensch, an over-man or super-man (yes, the Superman is partly based on Nietzsche’s idea, though the superhero is a good deal more altruistic than Nietzsche’s Übermensch).

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is a creator of higher value. Schopenhauer drew pessimistic views about life from willfulness conceived of as mere will to survive. Nietzsche takes a more ambitious, life-affirming view of will as the will to power. The will to power isn’t aiming at mere survival but at self-actualization and the creation of value. A common but misguided view of this takes Nietzsche to be advocating domination over others. His thought (badly edited in “The Will to Power” by his antisemitic sister after he went insane) was distorted and later coopted by the Nazis. This in spite of the fact that Nietzsche himself was a sharp critic of German nationalism (Totalitarian movements, mind you, are not overly concerned with truth or logical consistency).

Nietzsche was also a sharp critic of the Christian ethic of altruism. He thought of Christian compassion for the meek and the weak as a slave morality, where concern for the weak and meek constrain the creative potential of the excellent person. But his ideal of the will to power is mainly concerned with self-overcoming in the cause of creating value, not domination over others. What Nietzsche objects to in Christian charity and altruism is its tendence to suppress excellence on the grounds of moral equality and compassion. This is not the same thing as endorsing oppression. To the contrary, Niezsche’s objection to Christian morality as a slave morality is exactly that it is oppressive, towards the best among us. That said, as an admirer or human excellence, Nietzsche would probably not be so concerned about the excellent dominating the mediocre.

In thinking about meaning in life, it is worth focusing on the difference between will in Schopenhauer, the will to survive, and the will to power in Nietzsche. Will, in Schopenhauer, is conceived of as an inexorable force of nature. We have appetites and cravings. Will drives us towards their satisfaction. And Buddhism helps us see that this is the source of strife and suffering. Willfulness is not a good thing here. Nietzsche does not exactly flip the script and proclaim willfulness to be a great thing. He is no fan of the willful suppression of human excellence he sees embodied in the slave morality of Christianity, for instance. But Nietzsche does elevate a kind of creative willfuness, a kind he sees as bringing forth higher value.

The will to power begins with self-overcoming for the sake of the creation of value. Perhaps a better way to understand Nietzsche’s will to power is in terms of resolve. Here’s how we might understand the difference. Willfulness is insisting on having your way, such that you will suffer greatly if things don’t go your way. Here you are driven by your will, and failure hurts. Resolve is sticking to the task at hand, regardless of whether you feel like it or even of the eventual outcome. Resolve requires mastering your will (which might otherwise lead you to give up easily or get distracted). The picture of willfulness here, is the spoiled child who throws a fit when he doesn’t get candy. The picture of resolve is the concert pianist who works at the piano for months on end in order to master a technically demanding concerto and bring it to life with feeling. Resolve involves a kind of commitment and sublimation of desire that might involve real suffering, but results is worthy achievement.

But where is the value realized by the Übermensch? What exactly is created and how is it realized? What is the seat of this higher value that Nietzsche seeks? Nietzsche himself isn’t clear enough about this. The question here is not about what higher value is good for. That question would conflate higher value with mere usefulness, instrumental value. I’m rather concerned with how the higher intrinsic value created by the Übermensch can be realized. Suppose the higher value is realized through a work of art. Does it matter as the artist’s expression of himself? What does the continued existence of this higher value depend on? Imagine the Übermensch as a painter lost in space. Does his masterpiece realize higher value if no on ever witnesses it? It’s hard to see how this might be so. Perhaps it has a kind of value while the Übermensch is still around to appreciate it. But after that, the remains of the Übermensch and his masterpiece are just dust in the void. His self-realization through his will to power, whatever value it might have had, is now past and gone. Imagine, now, a world devoid of any sentient life form. It’s hard to see how anything matters at all in such a world. This brings us to Sartre’s way of understanding nihilism.

Existentialism: Sartre and Camus

Many things matter to us. But the things that matter to us are nothing to the larger reality of the universe we find ourselves in. In our own experience, we each have a sense for how things should be, what would be reasonable, at least according to our own standards. But the world seldom cooperate with this. Our attempts to make sense of others and the world is constantly frustrated. Things keep happening that we don’t understand. There is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between what seems reasonable to us and reality.  What matters to us is nothing to the larger reality. Everything seems contingent and this feels absurd.

Our sense of freedom may be an illusion if the determinist is right, but it is an inescapable illusion. In my own experience I am free to do one thing or another, become one sort of person or another. And so is everyone else. Because of this, my need to feel secure and in control of my life is constantly frustrated by other’s attempt to achieve the same for themselves. “Hell is other people” quips Sartre. The unpredictability of others and the world combined with my own sense of freedom carries a further burden of anxiety for us. My own freedom makes me responsible for what I make of myself. Seeing ourselves as free makes this responsibility inescapable and this brings with it existential angst. This is not just anxiety over what will become of us, but anxiety over our own responsibility for who we are and what we do.

A central theme of Sartre’s existentialism is the notion that existence precedes essence. Some things are made for a purpose. The purpose of a car is fixed and imposed on it by its designers. But we create ourselves. That means there is no pre-ordained meaning or purpose of you. You exist first, then create your essence through the free choices you make and actions you perform.

In consumer society we often celebrate this freedom to be who we want to be. But only in carefully proscribed ways where the differences we choose for ourselves are utterly benign. Perhaps this is one way to try to tame the anxiety that attaches to taking responsibility for ourselves. But it is ultimately a form of inauthenticity, where we hide from the responsibility of finding purpose and creating ourselves by getting lost in an artificial theme park or video game of inconsequential choices concerning mere styles based on personal taste. As well-off members of consumer society, we can distract ourselves well enough. But this doesn’t solve Sartre’s challenge. It is merely what Albert Camus, Sartre’s contemporary and friend (until they had a falling out over communism), would call philosophical suicide. Camus begins his philosophical work The Myth of Sisyphus, with the problem of suicide. Why live? He asks. It quickly becomes apparent that he is not really contemplating biological suicide. He is rather confronting the idea of leading a pointless life, one that amounts to philosophical suicide. This is what most of us do by simply ignoring questions about the purpose of life.

Both Camus and Sartre lived through the world wars of the early 20^th century. They witnessed Europe descend into nihilistic chaos. Totalitarian movements rose in the wake of the misery and absurdity of social decay. It was madness all around. It is easy for us to ignore how pointlessly cruel and absurd things can be. But Sartre, Camus, and other existentialist thinkers of the early 20^th century could not turn their attention away from the arbitrary cruelty and injustices of life in their time. “What is the point of it all?” becomes a pressing question in such circumstances. It’s not as if we have answered this question. Most of us just find ourselves in circumstances where it is easy enough to ignore such questions. Sartre and Camus found themselves confronted with absurdity. Their existentialist thought doesn’t deny it, but proposes ways of coping. Both thinkers are ultimately life affirming, but their answers to how to live in the face of absurdity are quite demanding.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus had angered the gods and was handed a cruel punishment. He was sentenced to pushing a large boulder up the side of a mountain only for it to roll back to the base of the mountain at the end of his long day of labor. And then again, and the next day, and the next, and so on for eternity. It is hard to imagine a life more pointless and absurd than Sisyphus’. And yet this is a metaphor for the lives we all lead. Whatever goal you pursue for the day, the decade, or the course of your lifetime, will ultimately come undone. Whatever seems significant enough to devote our energy to will soon enough fade to utter insignificance in the larger world. Camus’ answer is to acknowledge the absurdity of life and rebel against the despair it suggests. As Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

We Are the Meaning Makers

Perhaps the Existentialists had unrealistically grandiose expectations for meaning in life. Why should the universe care, so long as we do. The idea that higher value has to be enduring, eternal, universal is part of the Western, Judeo-Christian cultural inheritance. We saw the roots of this in Plato’s theory of forms. Plato, at least in the Western tradition, is the originator of the idea that the best and most perfect things, the things of highest value, Goodness itself, must be eternal, universal and incorruptible. But perhaps we should examine the matter through another cultural lens. The Japanese famously celebrate the brief occurrence of cherry blossoms in the spring. The significance of this is the recognition of the value and beauty in something that is fleeting, ephemeral even. This suggests a recalibration of our expectations. Perhaps Nietzsche remained unduly under the influence of Plato and the almighty God of Christianity in thinking that we needed an Übermensch to fill the void. Perhaps the existentialists despaired hastily on account of the universe at large not caring about us. We don’t live in the universe at large. We live in communities of beings like ourselves who care as we do. Perhaps we should seek a human scale conception of meaning in life.

This is the approach taken by Irving Singer, who holds that for something to matter is for it to matter to some being. Getting fed and petted matters to my cat, in fact it matters a great deal to him. There is meaning in his life. Of course, things matter in different ways to complicated beings like ourselves. This affords us the opportunity to lead lives that are meaningful on a different scale. The kind of meaningful life my cat gets to lead only includes meaning on the scale of Nietzsche’s Last Man. This is the life driven by appetites. No bad for a cat. But this much doesn’t get us to Nietzsche’s higher values. Can we be the source of higher values as well? And how? This brings us back to the questions we left hanging at the end of our discussion of Nietzsche.

Something matters in a rudimentary way when we (or my cat for that matter) desire it. But caring is different. We care about things in ways that can’t be understood simply in terms of desire. When we care about something, we are invested in it in an enduring way. My wants can shift at no real cost to myself. I may want a slice of apple pie, until I find that peach pie is on the menu. And even then, I will stop wanting peach pie after I’ve enjoyed a slice. Caring, on the other hand, sticks with us. We don’t stop caring about a pet when we discover it is ill. Indeed, we can think of grieving our lost pet as the continuance of caring in the absence of its object.

When we care about something we self-identify with it in a certain way. We count ourselves as better or worse off depending on whether things are going well or poorly for that which we care about. Our choices and actions, indeed our lives, are guided by the things and people we care about. Caring, in short, is a source of meaning in life. To lead a meaningful life is to care about things. This view presents a ready answer to the despondent complaint “Why should I care?” You should care because then you will care about something. Then you have a purpose, you will be a meaning maker, a creator of value.

Caring is something we do, and yet it binds us. When we care about something we are subject to what Frankfurt calls “volitional necessity” (in “The Importance of What we care About.” Much of my discussion of caring here is indebted to Frankfurt’s insights in this article). We find that we must act in some ways and refrain from acting in others on account of our own will. A loving parent, for instance, can not simply decide to ignore his child’s birthday. Should he fail to act on his love for his child, he will suffer pangs of regret regardless of any impacts on the child. Unlike mere desire, choice or impulse, caring operates as an enduring motivational force in our psyche, one that gives us direction and purpose.

What we shall care about is not imposed by the outside world. But neither is it simply chosen arbitrarily. I can no more simply choose to start caring about football than I can simply choose to get in shape. More than choice is involved. Something of a personal investment is required. I may come to care about something by first making a choice and then following through on whatever investment it takes. But the role of choice in coming to care about something is perhaps similar to planting a seed. We only grow a plant if we then water the seed and tend to the needs of the seedling. Caring is the product of cultivation, not mere choice. And sometimes, just as gardens are often enhanced by volunteer plants, no choice is called for. We may come to care for our friends not so much by choosing them, but simply by spending time with them and enjoying their company.

Singer’s first volume on meaning in life is titled “The Creation of Value.” This book is an extended meditation on how we are the seat of value in the universe, the sorts of beings that make things matter in a way that makes them worth caring about. You might recognize this as an application of Singer’s view that to love another is to bestow value on them. If Singer is on the right track, then Sartre commits a category error in worrying that nothing matters because the universe doesn’t care. The universe isn’t the sort of thing that cares. But we are, and we are part of the universe. And so, there is value in the universe after all. From this perspective, it is a special privilege, worthy of our concern and care, to be fully human makers of meaning, the cultivators of value.