Meaning in Life - The Creation of Value (Irving Singer)
OVERVIEW
“Meaning in Life – The Creation of Value” is the first in a trilogy by philosopher Irving Singer. This first book explores questions about meaning in life, the meaning of death, and if meaning is something created, or discovered.
Meaning of Life
Singer dispenses quickly with attempts to answer meaning of life questions, noting that any transcendental meaning of life would need to cascade from some alternate, supernatural reality. This reality being unverifiable, searching for meaning of life answers is unproductive. Singer does sympathize, however, with our desire to do so. He thinks humans generally crave an authority on how to live properly. But even if there were a cosmic planner we could acquiesce to, whose blueprint we could follow, what would that obligatory submission teach us about meaning? A booming voice from the heavens prescribing how to live may reduce the general agony and uncertainty of our existence, but it wouldn’t teach us much about ultimate meaning, and it wouldn’t be a terminus to our ultimate “why” questions. To wonder about the meaning of life is to wonder if some quasi-human deity intended things to be the way they are, for life to exist as it does. As William James said, the “cash value” of this wondering comes from our primordial need to reassure ourselves that the cosmos is friendly and values what we value (and nevermind that if humans had been created for a purpose, this would make us little more than manufactured tools). Unfortunately (or fortunately) for us, we have no such assurances – the only meaning we have purchase on comes back to human values and judgment.
Nihilism
But in the vacuum created by a lack of cosmic meaning, can nihilism find a foothold? Nihilism is the “belief that human purposiveness has no real significance,” and that our existence is inherently absurd because of this. The “absurd” existence can be traced back to David Hume, extended by Albert Camus (the absurd being our human need for meaning met with the unreasonable silence of the cosmos) and then Thomas Nagel (the absurd being the seriousness with which we take our lives given their relative insignificance). Singer doesn’t think the seriousness with which we take the world contradicts anything and is, rather, entirely compatible with our nature. The absence of universal meaning or universal values doesn’t make life absurd – what would be absurd is to assume that any other species (local or intergalactic) would share the same value system as humans. Singer thinks the absurdists suffer from “a kind of fallacy of abstraction” about the human condition. The philosophers who believe the way we live is absurd suggest there is some other way we should exist, where we don’t pursue meaningful activities and purposive existence, where we don’t value what we do. But there is no such alternative existence. Human striving for meaning is not absurd, it’s biological (which we’ll get to momentarily). The final thumbed nose to the nihilists is that they then turn around and suggest how we can live within our absurdity – Camus with his heroic defiance, Nagel with his irony. But these are still prescriptions for how best to live. It was A.J. Ayer who said that all meaning-related questions collapsed down into “how should I live?”, and while nihilists may claim no meaning exists, their prescriptions for living are suggestions for how to live most meaningfully.
The Creation of Value
So everything (even nihilism) comes back around to how we can live meaningfully – the meaning in life questions. What we’re after here are not factual statements about meaning (no booming voice from the heavens will do), but the valuational definition of meaning.
Members of Homo sapiens have an evolved set of vital interests, as Singer calls them – natural impulses, desires, and drives; inclinations that belong to our natural condition. These inclinations are unique to our organism, reflective of our special struggle to promote our evolved mode of existence. Homo sapiens has an impulse to care and compassion, to love of learning, to curiosity, to adventure and competition, to aesthetic contemplation. We take interest in these things because we were designed by evolution to take interest in them (or their progenitors). It’s our vital interest in these activities and concepts that creates our value system, that defines and directs the measure of what we deem important. That is to say: we bestow value based on our unique and preestablished inclinations. There is nothing transcendental or universal about love, or beauty, or the search for truth – these are human values, human preoccupations; some versions of these values may be shared by other species, but there is nothing supra-species about them, and certainly nothing metaphysical. There is no single pattern of existence that is meaningful for all species, no ultimate values that exist a priori. Further, labels like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” “beautiful” and “ugly,” are valuational terminology, and they ultimately refer back to the impulses and motives of our species’ struggle to exist and promote itself. The genetic and cultural foundations of value are baked into us.
Human values, though, go one step further into the realm of ideals. Birds may have an inner sense of what is a good twig and what is a bad twig, and bees of what is good nectar and what is bad nectar. But does perfection mean anything to them, and do they suffer from feelings of inadequacy when they fail to live up to self-imposed standards of excellence? We have no reason to think they do. Humans, on the other hand, fashion ideals. We set extraordinary standards and then try to satisfy them. We are obsessed with perfection, likely owing to both our keen intelligence and ultra-social biology (we live in a world of imagination but also of extreme social comparison). Our human nature gives us both the vital interests that create value, and the added layer of idealization.
The Creation of Meaning
The groundwork laid, we can return to meaning in life. Meaning is this creation of values and subsequent assessments of perfection. The values we naturally strive for are the values we create (because values don’t exist a priori), and ideals make these values meaningful by placing them in a larger imagined context. A meaningful life isn’t discovered, it’s created through our purposeful efforts to satisfy ideals tied to the values we have a natural interest in. How meaningful our lives are, becomes how successful we deem our attempts toward these worthwhile modes of living – not just if we spent our time doing the things we thought were important and worthwhile, but how well we did them. I agree with Singer that for most people “there is virtually no experience – not even a highly pleasurable one – that will seem meaningful unless it can be justified in terms of an ideal one has chosen.” We construct our ideals based on the values we take natural interest in, and this gives our lives a feeling of urgency and direction. It’s probably not a lie to say that “human beings would die of boredom if they somehow lost the capacity to create new standards of achievement.”
“In general, meaning will always depend on the value-laden behavior that living creatures manifest. Meaning in life is the creating of values in accordance with the needs and inclinations that belong to one’s natural condition. Valuation is the making of choices by individuals striving for a meaningful life in nature. The values and meanings that emerge are, in this sense, facts of nature.”
To circle back to the meaning of life, it’s perhaps clear now why our proclivity to religious belief in some ultimate being or some highest good “[issues] from our human attempt to magnify and idealize what is merely natural. Far from transcending nature, we glorify the aspects that matter to us. In this process we both aggrandize our imagination and inflate our own experience.” I agree, what we hope might be the ultimate meaning of the universe is just a supersized version of human values: love, goodness, truth, etc. It’s not at all absurd to value the things we do – our values belong to us as natural entities – but it is absurd to blow them up to cosmic proportions and then despair when we don’t find them reflected back to us by the universe.
But wait, DEATH!
Like every good book about meaning, mortality makes an appearance. After all, doesn’t death threaten meaning in life by threatening to end it? Putting a stop to all the projects and aspirations that create meaning? Singer, like many other philosophers, sees death as a necessary curtailment, an essential element that makes meaning possible. Death from this perspective is functional. Death is not the meaning of life, but it is a requisite ingredient. Without finitude, nothing would matter – with a thousand tomorrows there would be no weight to our choices, no reason to keep faith with any of our projects, no impetus to cherish our relationships (or to cherish anything, really). Finitude and fragility, as the philosopher Martin Hägglund best described, are what give life its mattering. And if we want maximum meaningfulness, we must accept death as a natural condition, even as a coordinate. Our projects derive their meaning from the freedom we exercise in choosing them, but also in our knowledge that they won’t last forever. Only with awareness of your mortality, of your time-boundedness, can you act resolutely. In all these ways, death as the boundary of our being has a meaningful place in our natural lives. Death can only appear to deprive life of all meaning if your projects are undertaken ignoring the fact that, even at their best, they can’t last forever. And, in the end, we fear death only because we love life so much.
And that’s what we’re really after, what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive.” We give meaning to our existence through creative acts of meaning-making, which are heightened when we really savour our being in time, and when our devotion to the pursuit of significant goals comes from a place of authenticity. Singer’s ultimate advice is that we “find ways to delight in the process of living for ideals.” Troubling over the meaning of life is unproductive, but there is still plenty of meaning in life to be created through the creation of value. The nihilists of the world are hypocrites, and even the spectre of death is more ally than enemy.
The world is your oyster!
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Not just happy, not just meaningful, but significant
For Singer, happiness and meaning are personal assessments (who can tell you your life wasn’t happy, or that it wasn’t meaningful to you?), but the significance of a life is open to external assessment. Leading a significant life lends an extra-glittery kind of super-meaning – and what makes a life significant is the dedication to ends that exceed the goal of personal well-being. “Throughout the varied pursuits that make a life significant, what remains constant is the growth of meaning when this involves creation of values in the service of transpersonal ideals.” And how? “By manifesting the idealist and perfectionist aspects of human nature which link a particular life with goals that matter to many others.” The significance of any life is its ability to affect positively the lives of others, and the degree to which it succeeds at this goal. The types of activities and pursuits that many other people value are the ones that make life more significant. For ultrasocial creatures such as we, this makes complete sense, that seeking to preserve and improve lives beyond our own would increase both the significance and meaningfulness of our lives. So, bestowing value is something that you will do naturally, but know that the pursuit of transpersonal ideals linked to those values that matter to many others (and positively affect many others) will supersize your meaningfulness and give your life significance.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes (but a heavy hand on the religious comparisons).
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? We create meaning by creating value.
Who should read this book? Those interested in bridging axiology, biology, mortality, and meaning.