The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of life? It is not only a question that many philosophers have asked for so many years, it is also the question we may ask ourselves every time we feel exhausted from a very heavy workload or disappointed when we fail to achieve something that we put quite lots of efforts into them. However, the answer of this question maybe difficult to capture, not only because the ideas of meaningful life are varying from person to person, but also some people think that all the meaning of life seems elusive in the face of death. In my point of view, even if we will die one day, we are still able to live a meaningful life where is the combination of both subjective[1] and objective value[2]. To be concrete, a meaningful life means people should live a life that could arouse a “subjective feeling” of meaningfulness of themselves, then using the achievements they get from their subjective meaningful life to help others properly. “Properly” refers that they doing their jobs are not only aim to help others, but to achieve their intrinsic value. Here I provided with 3 arguments to support my point of view on the meaning of life.

[1] Subjective value means that people to do things they really interested or have a desire to do to achieve values.

[2] In this essay, objective value only means help others and create maximum the happiness of our society or the whole world.

Before I present my arguments on the meaningful life, I would prefer to take an ancient Greek myth as an example to introduce a little background of two famous philosophers’ stands on the meaning of life. In this myth, Sisyphus was condemned by God to roll a stone to a hill and the stone would roll back when he was almost success. The whole life of Sisyphus was used to do such thing again and again. It is treated as a meaningless life by us. However, according to American philosopher Richard Taylor (1967), the life of Sisyphus could turn to meaningful only when the compulsive impulse was instilled into his mind. On the contrary, Peter Singer (1993) thought that if the God allows Sisyphus to roll stones to make some difference on the external world, such as use these stones to build a temple, Sisyphus’s life would be considered meaningful. It is not difficult to figure out that Taylor considered that subjective value was sufficient to give a meaningful life while Singer was on the opposite.

First of all, under such a controversial question of meaning of life in the aspects of objective and subjective value, I deem that a meaningful life should consist of both objective and subjective value. It should be easy to understand why subject value contributes to meaning of life. It is the nature of human beings that we will feel happy and satisfaction when we do what we like. Just like Taylor (1967) claimed that the meaning of life comes from us other than other external things. What he means is that irrational desires and interests to a thing could justify the activity of humans and an emotional satisfaction would occur when we live our life by pursuing our interests. However, even subjective value is so important in our life, we cannot say only subjective value is enough to support a whole meaningful life. In this aspect, I agree with Peter Singer (1993) that focusing on the internal desires would eventually lead to empty and bored. According to Susan Wolf (2007), human beings belong to the social animals, which means we need communicate with others and if we only have subjective value, not only our life seems empty but also we will become egocentric and isolation. I believe most of us would feel sympathy and even regrettable when we saw the news about those poor children who were living in mountains and cannot get enough food not to mention to get education. When we saw this image we are apt to help them and at least we hope they can live a life as good as us. Or as the example taken by Wolf (2007) in The Meaning of Lives that when we found our friend live a worthlessness life, for example he or she was addicted to drugs, we would try to change the direction of his or her life. Obviously, we are willing to help others to live a life as meaningful as us. This will is push by our objective values and that is why we need it to live a meaningful life.

Secondly, even if both of subjective and objective values are necessary elements for a meaningful life, subjective value seems more important than objective value. In the one hand, subjective value gives humans self-esteem. As we all know that basing on deontology, the biggest difference between humans and other animals is that we can act autonomously and rationally. Thus, we have self-esteem. According to this concept, subjective value is a way to show our self-esteem because we are allowed to choose freely to do those things we really interested. Image that if we have no right to do what we want, then what is the difference between us and those cold machines? In the other hand, subjective value always comes before objective value. Peter Singer thinks the wise way to live a meaningful life is “identify ourselves with the grandest cause of all” (Singer, 1993), which means that we should live aiming to achieve something bigger and grateful things. Singer may fail to think about that if we ourselves cannot live a good life or we do not realized what is the meaning of our own life, how can we help others to live a good life? Subjective should be the precondition of objective value as subjective value is the motivation for us to live our own life. The irrational desire mentioned by Taylor encourages us to do better no matter in our study or in our work since things that tally with our desire will provide with satisfaction and happiness. The key point that I want to capture here is that comfortable and happy life exactly equips us with the ability to help us help others, that is, to achieve our objective value.

Furthermore, there exist various problems, if people only have objective values. As what I mentioned before, we have self-esteem because we can choose to what kind of things following our interests. If we only have objective value, we have to treat ourselves as means to help others, which means we are going to lose our own intrinsic value. For example, in the speech “They Why and How of Effective Altruism”, Peter Singer suggested that the perfect job to achieve effective altruism is working in banking of finance because he maintains that those people who are able to earn more money can give away more money. In this case, it seems that if we want to achieve our objective value to help others, we do not have choice on our careers but to get in banking of finance. We are not act autonomously because are only treated as a mean to achieve the effective altruism rather than we do not do it at an end. Therefore, if we only have objective value, we may lose our self-esteem and live like a tool. Besides, people only have objective value are very similar to moral saints. All of us agree that moral saints are grateful since they are willing to devote themselves to develop the welfare of other people or the whole society. However, the question is that why there are only a few people would like to be a moral saint? It is not difficult to find the answer if we look into the life of moral saint. As a moral saint, people have to pay little attention on themselves because they think other people’s happiness is more important than themselves, for instance, in order to donate money as much as possible, they may try to sacrificed their own interest, they cannot to go to theater and enjoy a wonderful movie, reading novels, playing music or even eating a ice-cream, because they have to save their money to help other poor people. Basing on such lifestyle, they may live a very hard life and the worse thing is that this kind of lifestyle makes them have little chance to have a friend. Just image that how many of us would like to make friends with those people who care about poor children in Africa much more than you? Therefore, our live will not be so meaningful and rich if we only live with objective values.

In conclusion, meaning of life should include both subjective value and objective value, we should use the money or ability we acquired from the things we have passions to do to help those who need help or contribute to our society, that is we could defined our life meaningful, when our subjective values could be used to achieved objective values.

References:

Nozick, R. (1989). “Happiness” in Nozick, R. (ed.), The Examined Life, New York:

Simon and Schuster

Singer, P. (1993). “Living to Some Purpose”, in Singer, P. (ed.), How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, NY: Prometheus Books.

Singer, P. (2015) “Earning to Give” in Singer, P. The most good you can do: How

effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Taylor, R. (1967). The “Meaning of Life” in Taylor, R. (ed.), Good and Evil, NY: Prometheus Books (2013).

Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism. Retrieved December 08, 2016, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diuv3XZQXyc

Wolf, S. (2007). The Meaning of Lives.in Wolf, S. R., & Koethe, J. Meaning in life and why it matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.