Philosophers make a distinction between the possibility of there being a meaning of life and there being a possibility of a meaning in life. If there really was a meaning of life that would indicate that there is a purpose to humanity which would apply to each of us and could dictate how we ought to live. Finding a meaning in life would mean something that an individual could do to have a “significant” or “valuable” life even if there was no meaning of life.
As our reviewer at the Notre Dame Philosophical Review, Thaddeus Metz, writes, the book, “more or less supposes from the outset that there is no meaning of life, i.e., that there is neither a God who created human life for a purpose nor some other property such that the universe makes sense or gives us a reason to live one way rather than another or even to live at all.” That’s the sense in which the universe is silent, as the title has it. The universe doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t have plans for us nor are we in any way ontological primary in the universe. We are just more random, meaningless stuff as far as that goes.
But Todd May, the author of “A Significant Life: Meaning in a Silent Universe,” wants to argue that even in that meaningless silence there can still be meaning in life.
Broadly speaking, May’s view of what can make a life significant is naturalist, maintaining that meaning in a life is possible in a purely physical world, i.e., a spatio-temporal universe that is made up of sub-atomic particles and best known through empirical means. More than that, though, May also maintains that a life can be significant even if normativity is not ‘built into the fabric’ of the universe as per an Aristotelian, teleological construal of it.
According to Metz, May’s basic position will be that a life has meaning in it if the life has the virtue of “narrativity”:
… a desirable theme characterizing a life trajectory that can be constituted by the moral or the aesthetic but need not be. Key examples of narrative values for May are steadfastness, intensity, integrity, adventurousness, courage, and creativity.
As Metz points out an immoral life could have a narrativity to it. As Metz says of May’s theory:
The glaring problem with it, as I have construed it so far, is that it is utterly non-moral and so entails that resolute and clever mass murder would be meaning-conferring.
Professor May wants to avoid this conclusion. But doing so is not so easy. One thing he’ll say is this:
… one must be engaged in or love what one is doing at the time in order for it to be meaningful. Of course, being subjectively attracted to one’s project is not sufficient for meaning, however; one must, for May, also be exemplifying a narrative value, the relevant sort of objectively attractive project.
Here we get a sentiment that lots of philosophers will be ready to agree with. But lots of regular folks (or let me just say non-academic, non-philosophers) would have a problem with. If it’s one thing I hear from my undergraduate students, it’s that if X is significant for you, then X is significant in any way that matters.
Think, for example, about the steadfast counter of blades of grass or detector of non-causal correlations. Or think about someone with impeccable integrity who strives to make his surroundings as ugly and more generally aesthetically bad as he can.
Can those lives really have meaning in them? It’s given that the individuals living those lives are subjectively enthralled with the value of what they are doing. But is what they are doing really valuable and significant?
