On the Meaning of Life (Will Durant)
OVERVIEW
On a fall day in 1930, philosopher Will Durant was outside raking the leaves of his New York home when he was approached by a stranger. The stranger told Durant that he was planning on killing himself unless the philosopher could give him a reason not to. Durant offered many arguments, but the stranger seemed unmoved and left. Durant never found out what happened to the man, and the encounter haunted him. The following year, he penned a letter to 100 luminaries that began:
Will you interrupt your work for a moment and play the game of philosophy with me? I am attempting to face a question which our generation, perhaps more than any, seems always ready to ask and never able to answer – What is the meaning or worth of human life?
Durant received responses from Ivy league presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists, and athletes – famous thinkers like Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, and Sinclair Lewis. “On The Meaning of Life” is a compilation of those responses, the final chapter dedicated to Durant’s attempt to answer the question for himself.
The Letters
I think what surprised me about the responses is how few people engaged the question seriously (though maybe “to my satisfaction” is a better qualifier). Many said they were too busy to give it much thought. George Bernard Shaw responded “How the devil do I know? Has the question itself any meaning?” H.G. Wells lazily pointed to his own publications as reference.
There was a lot to like though. I enjoyed the response from H.L. Mencken on his career as a writer, which included:
You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs… I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.
What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts.
I do not believe in immortality and have no desire for it…. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.
André Maurois, a French author, penned a story for Durant. In it, one of his characters queries “Why search for the meaning of life outside of life itself?” I rather like that. When we question the meaning of life we are usually searching for something outside of living that might lend it a grander significance, but perhaps the question is necessarily self-contained.
C.V. Raman, a Nobel prize winner in physics said simply:
The desire to labor, to achieve and to help others to do likewise, these are the motive powers which have kept me going. I find self-control and not self-indulgence to be the real source of happiness. In the last resort, to win a victory over oneself is a greater thing than conquering the whole world.
But Durant and I are aligned that the most surprising response came from someone for whom he never intended the letter. Durant’s publishers thought it might be interesting to send the question on meaning to Owen C. Middleton, a New York man who had recently been sentenced to life in prison. Convict 79206 responded, in part:
An eminent author and philosopher seeks an answer to that age-old question: What is the meaning or worth of human life? An equally eminent publisher asked me how I manage to bear it in my present position… I – a man serving a life term behind prison walls – answer that the meaning life has for me depends upon, and is only limited by, my ability to recognize its great truths and to learn and profit by the lessons they teach me. In short, life is worth just what I am willing to strive to make it worth.
There are some who would have us believe that thought, discovery and invention have revealed life as a rather hopeless venture, and mankind a helpless pawn doomed to go down to defeat and oblivion, and from this gloomy prospect man turns and exclaims “What’s the use?” …That life was accidental is a theory I am willing to accept, but it doesn’t follow that it need be meaningless.
I do not know to what great end Destiny leads us, nor do I care very much. Long before that end, I shall have played my part, spoken my lines, and passed on. How I play that part is all that concerns me. In the knowledge that I am an inalienable part of this great, wonderful, upward movement called life, and that nothing, neither pestilence, nor physical affliction, nor depression – nor prison – can take away from me my part, lies my consolation, my inspiration, and my treasure.
Finally, Durant turns the question on himself. He admits it’s entirely possible (even likely) life has no meaning outside of itself (like Maurois posited) – he certainly does not believe in immortality or any form of genuine legacy. Durant pens:
The meaning of life… must lie within itself; it must be independent of individual death, even of national decay; it must be sought in life’s own instinctive cravings and natural fulfillments.
The simplest meaning of life, then, is joy – the exhilaration of experience itself, of physical well-being; sheer satisfaction of muscle and sense, of palate and ear and eye… Even if life had no meaning except for its moments of beauty (and we are not sure that it has more), that would be enough.
Let death come; meanwhile I have seen the purple hills of South Dakota, and one point of a star taking its place quietly in the evening sky. Nature will destroy me, but she has a right to – she made me, and burned my senses with a thousand delights; she gave me all that she will take away. How shall I ever thank her sufficiently?
Durant then offers that a thing only has value in relation to something else. The question of significance is a value-based judgement, an appeal to something bigger. To that end, for a human life to feel significant, it needs to feel itself in relation to something larger than itself, some bigger whole (for believers, this vaster scheme is supernatural, for non-believers it is entirely natural).
This, then, I should say, is the road to significance and content: join a whole, and work for it with all your body and mind. The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce, or to contribute to, something greater than ourselves.
What this larger whole should be is personal. Family and friends, a cause you care about, a movement, any endeavour to make life better for others. All of these “lift the individual out of himself… make him a cooperating part of a vaster scheme.” While life may be absurd and have no inherent meaning, that doesn’t mean any individual life is meaningless. If thoughts on the futility of existence make you question whether it’s worth going on living, Durant implores “whatever you do, don’t die of philosophy.”
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Join a whole
Lots of folks think that without a God-given meaning, some universally-ratified purpose, life is meaningless. When believers look up at the sky and ask “what is the meaning of life?” they’re searching for an answer beyond life itself. They’re searching for the nature of the ubermind that created them, trying to understand what that ubermind had in mind (by the way, we evolved to do this). Searching for religious meaning is searching for an answer to the question: “what did God intend for us to do with our lives?”
For non-believers, this question has no purchase. Our question is rather “what should I intend to do with my life?” Durant has offered us one answer: join a whole, some group or cause or movement that feels significant, and then contribute to that whole. “Meaning” – the value of living – then, is relational. By placing ourselves against the backdrop of some greater whole, something bigger than ourselves, we create the conditions for meaning. Meaning becomes realized through belonging.
Emily Esfahani Smith posited that there were four pillars of meaning, two of those pillars being belonging and transcendence. Belonging is feeling connected, transcendence is feeling part of something vast, something bigger. Rolling the two pillars together, as Durant has done here, is to say that belonging to something much bigger than yourself creates meaning and enriches our living.
I suspect we atheists like reading Carl Sagan or Sean Carroll (in part) because they highlight our belonging to the whole universe. They’ve dropped the religious appeal to some omnipotent God and put poetically why the natural world, the observable universe, is plenty big enough. Belonging to the universe gives us our satisfying backdrop, it keeps the grandeur and the mystery and the focus on life, on the reality of our living and the preciousness of that living.
All that to say, even if you can’t find people or projects to join, you’ll always belong to the cosmos.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Many great luminaries of the 1930s respond to the question “What is the meaning or worth of human life?”
Who should read this book? People intrigued by the goal of Durant’s endeavour (but also people prepared to be ever so slightly underwhelmed by the final product).