Mortality and Meaning of Life

Mortality and Meaning of Life

Life from Individuals Perspective

Individuals find their lives meaningful if they are committed to the achievement of ideals they value and if their conduct forms a cohesive pattern directed toward the achievement of their ideals. The meaning of human lives, then, depends on the capacity of individuals to pursue ideals and on the extent to which they succeed in realizing them. Lives having meaning does not, of course, mean that they must also have ethical merit, since ideals and the attempts to realize them may be pernicious (Arendt, 1958).

Hence, questions about the meaning of lives may be raised from the point of view of individual agents or from the point of view of witnesses. The best case is one in which there is agreement in the answers arrived at in these two ways. One obstacle to such agreement is the tendency not to judge our own lives as realistically as other people do. But there is also another obstacle raised by there being deep disagreements within a culture about the nature of the universe and humanity's place in it. In homogeneous cultures, such disagreements rarely occur because the questions are thought to have obvious answers.

On the other hand, where individuals are concerned with the meaning of their lives, this indicates that their culture is moving from consensus to disagreement about basic presuppositions. That we feel the force of these questions and find it hard to answer them indicate what we may call, optimistically, the pluralism, or pessimistically, the disintegration of Western culture.

Possible Reasons for Life

To understand what would give lives meaning, we may consider several reasons for finding it lacking. One possibility is that our activities seem worthless. We see ourselves as engaged in endless drudgery. We do what we do, not to attain some ideal, but to avoid a condition even worse than what prevails. Yet, some intrinsically worthless activities have a place even in meaningful lives, if they have instrumental value. All lives include some unpleasant tasks, but such tasks may be given a point by the ideals to which they lead. However, if activities lacking in both intrinsic and instrumental value dominate in lives, then we can rightly judge them to be meaningless, because they are pointless (Beyer, 1977).

It should not be supposed, however, that if lives avoid these pitfalls, then we are entitled to judge that they possess meaning. For there is a deeper consideration than any of the above that may incline us to regard lives as lacking meaning: the supposed absurdity, not of this life or that, but of all human lives (Carwardine, 2006). The gods sentenced the mythical Sisyphus to rolling a rock uphill; it then rolls down; he must roll it up again; and so on and on forever for Sisyphus. The sense that our lives are absurd comes from regarding Sisyphus's plight as emblematic of the human condition. Reflective people are supposed to realize that their ideals are no more than ...