Future and the meaning

of life
Lecture 16
 Does Life Have Meaning?
• Camus claimed that the most urgent and “the one truly serious question in
philosophy” is the question whether life has meaning and so is worth
living, because people are willing to die for this question.
• Tolstoy, an accomplished and wealthy writer with a loving family, came to
feel that life had no meaning, as if someone had played a mean trick on
him; he felt that life was meaningless for his family and everyone.
• With no meaning to express in his art, Tolstoy stopped writing and became
depressed.
• Ayer, Carnap, and the other logical positivists claim that the question is
meaningless because it is not a factual question that can be resolved
through sense perception. Critics reply that many important questions
can’t be answered through sense perception.
 The Theistic Response to Meaning
• Tolstoy and others take the question to be asking whether life has a larger
or more important purpose than merely living.
• Aquinas’s theistic response to the question is that the meaning of human
life is related to the purpose that humans have in a larger plan or cosmic
order devised by God, and this purpose is to know and be united with
God. Tolstoy accepted this as a reason for living.
• Each religion offers its own view of the cosmic whole in terms of which
human life has meaning, but all theistic views give meaning to life by
relating the individual to a divine reality that is larger and more important
than the individual is. Critics argue that the theistic response is irrelevant
to the nonbeliever. Baier claims that to say humans have a purpose
assigned to them by God reduces humans to tools that God is using.
Nielsen says from the fact that someone else (e.g., God) has a purpose for
me, it does not follow that my life has meaning because values are not
established by facts.