Journal of Controversial Ideas

Many philosophers who address the problem of the meaning of life recommend hard work toward a valuable, yet likely unattainable, end which extends in some way beyond the individual (or some combination and variation of some of these elements).36 It’s unclear why the work has to be hard but it seems plausible to think that if it’s too easy it may fail to be fully engaging or psychologically fulfilling. Of course, if we’re looking for a point to life, the ends that ground it must be valuable so it’s clear why the end must be of value. But why must it reach beyond the individual? And why must it be unattainable?

I suspect that the “beyond” recommendation is a way of getting closer to addressing the problem of pointlessness: the reason the goal, end, or grounding value has to be somehow “beyond” the individual is that a point is a valued end, and an end is separate from the effort or enterprise. Thus, for something to serve as a point for leading a life, it has to be in some way separate from or external to it. And, since we can’t do, ground by, or aim at anything truly external to our lives because our lives encompass their entirety, the best philosophers can do with this problem is to recommend getting your value as far away from your own little life as possible. Hence, the nearly ubiquitous connection made between meaning and an end beyond yourself: help others, pursue justice, live for god or the afterlife, etc.

Yet, while it’s valuable to alleviate suffering or help the downtrodden, we may still wonder about the point of the entire enterprise of these suffering and ameliorating lives, even as we acknowledge the value of helping others once we’re all busy living and suffering. Within these lives, we can see the point of alleviating suffering. But why do the whole thing? Why lead and live a human life? The suffering and the ameliorating of the suffering—the whole cycle seems pointless. Many projects that seem to extend beyond the self merely postpone the problem or widen the circle of pointlessness.37 Helping others or trying to improve the world for future generations can seem to give us a value outside of our lives, but these are just ways of widening and postponing the problem, as we can see by imagining the world improved enough, then what? What’s the point of the rest of your life? (At some point, things are good enough, no? Otherwise, we can seem like slaves to the unending improvement labor, with each generation similarly, drearily, and pointlessly indentured to the next).38 Less selfish ends still occur within life and cannot provide a point for the enterprise of living it, as we can see by imagining justice achieved—then what? The world is sufficiently improved, then what? But the problem is not as stark or as in your face as it would be if your end was, say, to play solitaire every day, which is directed toward a valued end that is more clearly well within your sole, personal, everyday life.

Positing god or the afterlife as the point of life are common examples of widening and/or postponing the problem of pointlessness. What’s the point of doing god’s will or existing in the afterlife? Say we have a blissful afterlife. That can seem like the point of life: to achieve a blissful afterlife. But it really only postpones the question, as we can see by imagining life extending into some sort of afterlife. Okay, you get there, you’re happy, now what?39 What’s the point of the rest of your life/afterlife? Once again, we will note that our lives include their entirety, including their possible afterlife portion, leaving no valued end to serve as a point for living, or afterliving, it. Adding an afterlife epilogue to a regular life just postpones the question by making your life last a lot longer and have this second supernatural chapter.

But why think that an unattainable end is better than an attainable one?40 That may seem the opposite of what might make life less pointless because what’s the point of aiming at something unreachable? It sounds frustrating, at best, and maddeningly pointless at worst. So why recommend this as a way of living a pointful life? I suggest that the reason for this recommendation comes from noting what happens when an end is achieved: then what? If your end is to eat the five tomatoes on your plate and you eat them, what’s the point of the rest of your life? You’re left to notice that your life encompasses the tomatoes and thus eating those tomatoes cannot save your life from pointlessness. But if eating the tomatoes is a valuable end then walking towards them may feel purposeful and you may not notice that all that walking hasn’t made your life’s entirety any less pointless until you reach the table, sit down, and eat them. Thus, the more unlikely it is that you will ever reach those tomatoes, the more likely it is that you will not be confronted directly with the fact that pursuing the valuable end of getting to them does not make your life any less pointless. But the fact remains. The same applies to loftier, more valuable, and more other-regarding ends. If your end is helping others or achieving justice, think about what would happen if those ends were met. You would feel great for a bit, and then wonder: Now what? You would notice that the valued end of helping others or living in a just society occurs within your life, is encompassed by your life, and therefore cannot serve as a valued end for leading it.41 It seems that the unattainability of the end serves to mask its ultimate failure to provide Ultimate Meaning rather than to actually provide your life with Ultimate Meaning.

(Another problem with needing our valued ends to be unattainable in order for our lives to have a point is the contradiction it forces us into: we have to want what we claim not to want, e.g., we have to want injustice or suffering to persist so that we have something unattainable to fix or alleviate but the injustice and the suffering are supposedly the things we are trying to eliminate because we don’t want them).

You might wonder about seemingly inexhaustible values we can aim at, such as, say, love. Perhaps unattainable is just the wrong term to use for the kinds of values that can provide a point to living a life at all. Perhaps inexhaustible values can serve as sources of Ultimate Meaning, without leaving us at a “now what?” point.42 But I am skeptical of the plausibility of inexhaustible values and therefore think it is no accident that philosophers have recommended unattainable goals instead. It seems that, for any value, we can reach a saturation point or an achievement point beyond which more of that value ceases to be valuable to us. Beyond a satisficing point of justice, living for it or continuing to pursue it would seem pointless and counterproductive; nitpicky, annoying, not valuable. Even love, if we had too much of it, might begin to feel smothering or, at some point, irritating, overwhelming, or just too much. (I can imagine ending a relationship for reasons of this sort). There is even a documented phenomenon of seeing something so cute that you can’t stand it and want to obliterate it.43 I therefore think unattainable is no misnomer for the recommendations in the literature on wrestling with a sense of life’s overall pointlessness.44

I will now discuss some solutions to the problem of life’s pointlessness in greater detail.

Several philosophers have noted the importance that the narrative trajectory of a human life plays in leading a meaningful life. Antti Kauppinen argues that meaningfulness is a function of the structure of an agent’s goal-directed activities, which satisfies the human agential pride of being the protagonist in pursuit of a valuable goal.45 He concludes that, “life is ideally meaningful when challenging efforts lead to lasting success,”46 ideally beyond the individual herself. Kauppinen frames his discussion in terms of human good and exemplars of meaningful lives, and he defines meaningfulness as “appropriateness of feelings of fulfillment and admiration.”47 Within the context of his argument, he is certainly correct to note that ends are important components of meaningfulness and that, when thinking about human meaningfulness, the agential unity and narrative trajectory of human lives are crucial factors. They contribute to the meaningfulness of the narrative. But why write the story? What is the valued end for the writing or living of the entire life story, a story which encompasses its own end and cannot really last beyond its last page, so to speak? What Kauppinen makes clear, however, is that, for people, meaningfulness demands a point. We want our projects to be directed toward valued ends, and want the leading of our lives to have a point, a valued end.

Both Levy and Brännmark focus on the fact that people lead lives as central to the pursuit of meaning and they note as well both the importance of having ends, and the difficulty of finding an end that can provide a point for leading or living a life.

Brännmark argues for placing purposefulness at the center of accounts of human good because we don’t merely live, we lead lives and, therefore, he says, a good human life involves purposive narrative meaning, or a point.48 Since the valued end should ideally be of great value, we do better, he argues, when pursuing grand goals, such as love, truth, and justice, which provide worthwhile ends for us, even though he concedes that there’s no answer to the skeptic about “purposive meaning.”49 Even worse, he notes that if you become too absorbed with the singular pursuit of one of those ends of great value, you can lose individuality—your very narrative soul!—and become, “like a cog, losing the rationale for this life being yours to lead.”50^,51

Here too we are getting closer to the problem: to the fact that people lead lives and want that enterprise to being going somewhere, to be directed toward something, to have a point, a valued end. But we still don’t find any solution or facing up to the sadness of the impossibility of a solution. Sure, justice and truth are ends so abstract and difficult to achieve that, like tomatoes situated very far away, we may notice less that our lives encompass our efforts toward those valued ends, but encompass them they do nonetheless.52 Those ends can only provide purposes for projects or efforts within our lives but they cannot provide a point to or for leading our lives at all.

The problem we face when we achieve an end only to notice that our lives encompass it and have themselves no valued end may be what motivates Levy to argue that meaningful lives are attained through hard work that we cannot imagine completing.53 Because the pursuit of a meaningful end can seem to be rendered meaningless in its achievement (e.g., Sisyphus’s rock stays on top of the mountain—then what?, Levy asks), in our pursuit of a valued end for life, “nothing will fail here like success.”54 Thus, Levy recommends the pursuit of valued ends such as justice, art, or truth, toward which we can make incremental progress but never achieve or even be able to fully imagine achieving:

Since we cannot know what the final goal might be like, we cannot imagine completing our project, and therefore we cannot be shaken by the image of its completion.55

This may work to help us not realize that our lives are pointless but only by placing the tomatoes so far away that they are even out of the reach of our imagination, so to speak. This seems less like a satisfying solution and more like a method for being less compelled to face the problem. Our failure of imagination does not save our lives from pointlessness, it can only save us from effectively imagining or realizing that our lives are pointless. Yet pointless they remain.

As argued, the externality of a valued end is often the implicit factor motivating discussions of meaning as connecting to something beyond the individual. Cooper argues that for x to be meaningful, it has to relate to meaningful y, which gets it meaning from meaningful p, etc. Therefore, living a human life itself must get its meaning from something beyond it: “human existence is meaningful only if it is ‘answerable’ to what is ‘beyond human’.”56 Otherwise, says Cooper, we are struck by the possibility that our efforts are pointless. But what is the beyond human to which human existence is answerable to? Here Cooper argues that the best we can do is to accept that the answer must be “mysterious, ineffable,” the noumena that we can’t see.57

Robert Nozick also articulates the problem of meaning as a problem of moving goal-posts, or a regress that we find ourselves in when seeking a point to life. Even when pursuing valued ends, he argues that we can still ask what our lives amount to and whether the ends have any significance or meaning.58 I have argued that when we ask what are lives amount to, we aren’t necessarily being value skeptics—we aren’t necessarily questioning whether, say, it is valuable to appreciate art or love our children. Instead, we may be noticing that these valued ends occur within our lives and don’t provide us with a valued end to the enterprise of living and leading our lives at all. But Nozick sees a regress indicating a problem of limits. Whatever we do toward value within our lives, he says:

…we can still ask what it all amounts to…. We can distance ourselves from the life, see it as the particular things it was, notice its limits, and wonder whether really it has any meaning.59

Thus, Nozick concludes:

The problem of meaning is created by limits, by being just this, by being merely this… However widely we connect and link, however far our web of meaningfulness extends, we can imagine drawing a boundary around all that, standing outside looking at the totality of it, and asking, ‘But what is that meaning of that, what does that mean?’…To see something’s limits, to see it as that limited particular thing or enterprise, is to question its meaning…In imagination, we stand outside the thing and ask for the meaning of the totality.60

Since Nozick puts the problem of meaning in terms of limits, it follows that he sees the solution as somehow limitless. When seeking a point to our lives, Nozick recognizes that, “Once you come to feel your existence lacks purpose, there is little you can do.”61 That is correct! He should have stopped there, and let the tragic reality sink in. Instead, he invokes the Kabbalistic concept of Ein Sof, literally meaning “there is no end,” or limitless, and metaphorically meaning pure god, the infinite, boundless,62 to gesture toward Ultimate Meaning as perhaps somehow being Ein Sof, as that which needs no connection to anything else to have meaning. Because it’s limitless, there is no place to stand separate from it and question its meaning, and it can therefore “stand as its own meaning.”63 This idea is reminiscent of some Kabbalistic64 and Buddhist65 views of life as ultimately aiming to merge into one infinity.66 And from within that infinity, there is no external standpoint from which to ask for justification, purpose, or point. (Nagel also sometimes seems to wonder whether, if there were a solution to the problem of Ultimate Meaning, it would have to work that way, as does Benatar, at times).67

This is an intriguing conception of the problem of meaning or pointlessness but I think it gets things exactly backward. The problem of pointlessness is not that we can stand outside the project and question its point—that’s fine as long as we have an answer to that question, as we often do (as discussed): e.g., the point of eating is to eliminate the suffering of hunger, and enjoy the taste of food. We can stand outside these efforts and question the value of their ends by asking, “Who cares if you’re hungry?” “Why care about suffering?” but we find answers fairly readily available: we value ourselves because we are rational, moral agents and/or because we have interests, and since others are similar in relevant ways, we value them and their feelings. If we don’t care about anything, we are committed to extreme value skepticism, contradicted by the nearly universal values of avoiding suffering, and valuing many positive feelings. The problem of life’s pointlessness is not that we’re able to ask the question about valued ends. It’s that we can’t find an answer, because nothing lies separate from it to serve as its valued end. We may value avoiding suffering but the point of leading a life can’t be to avoid suffering because why then bother with the whole thing? (And if we manage to avoid suffering, then what?) What is the point of bothering to lead a human life? What is the valued end to the project, enterprise, and very hard work of leading a human life? If we extend ourselves or connect ourselves to something limitless, infinite, or boundless, all we do is extend the space from which we cannot draw an answer (because our enterprise now occupies that space, indeed all space, and seeks a valued end to that whole, now hugely infinite, situation). But we do not make it impossible or nonsensical or beyond our imagination to ask the question. The question comes from inside the enterprise, no matter how expansive it is. The question of a point arises from the fact that we are engaging in an enterprise, regardless of how limited or unlimited it may be. And our lives, be they limited or limitless, still include their entirety, leaving us no answer to the question about their valued end. If our lives or we ourselves were less limited, we would restrict the space from which we might be able to draw an answer to the question of the valued end of life’s enterprise, but we would not thereby eliminate or answer the question.

Our lives remain pointless. That fact remains sad.

I will now address some objections.

Some might think that Ultimate Meaning lies in providing us with the opportunity to achieve Everyday Meaning. After all, if we did not lead our lives, we could not engage with Everyday Meaning. In this way, our overall effort at leading a life can be seen as a necessary condition for Everyday Meaning and, therefore, the point of leading and living our lives would be that this is necessary for attaining Everyday Meaning. However, while serving as a necessary condition for Everyday Meaning might give our lives Everyday Meaning, it won’t give leading our lives at all a point, because the values we aim at in our meaningful everyday pursuits cannot serve as points for leading our lives at all, and, therefore, serving as necessary conditions for those same values can’t either.

Recall: if I work as a lawyer fighting for civil rights, for example, the point of my efforts is justice, which is part of my Everyday Meaning. But justice cannot serve as the point of leading my life, even if we think of our overall efforts as necessary conditions for my Everyday Meaningful fight for justice, as I will notice by imagining justice achieved,—then what? What is the point of the rest of my life? (Sisyphus’s rock doesn’t roll back down. And then? We are faced with the fact that getting it up isn’t the point of Sisyphus’s life since his life goes on, it contains the rock, wherever he gets it to stay, etc.). My life contains the justice in it and that’s why justice cannot serve as a point for the all-encompassing effort of leading or running the enterprise of life; it cannot provide Ultimate Meaning.

Aha, you might say, but without the life you are working so hard to lead, you would have no container, so to speak, for the justice you value. Perhaps the point of life is to serve as a container for the points or valued ends of our everyday pursuits. I turn now to this possibility.

Instead of seeing the project of leading a life as a pointless container, as I alluded to earlier, one can argue that the point of the project of leading a life is to provide a container for all the valuable ends within a life, just as the point of any container is to hold the stuff in it.68 Containers aren’t pointless—their point is to contain things. So why not be happy to realize that your life is a container for all the valuable things in it?

Because the point of a container is not simply to contain things because what is the point of containing things? The point of containers is to contain things in service of the point of other pursuits or projects. The point of a cup is to hold the coffee so that you can drink it. Without a container, the coffee is all over the place and very hard to drink. So the cup operates in service to your valued end of enjoying the taste and stimulating effects of coffee. Your sock drawer is similar: it contains your socks, thereby making it easier for you to find them and have a less chaotic life. The value of the sock drawer lies outside the drawer and its sock contents—it lies in you, the person outside the drawer whose life is improved by having a container for their socks. When we apply this container logic to life itself we run into the same problem we had in the first place—that there’s nothing outside of it or external to it to serve as an end of value. The purposeful ends are not within; not in the cup or the drawer or the life-container.

If running your life is containment service, like a coffee cup or a sock drawer, what’s the point of it? What’s the point of containing coffee, socks, or truth? If we think that your life as a container of value has a point because the justice or truth in it are valuable and you couldn’t have that without having a life to put it in, we can wonder, just as we did before, whether justice or truth can be the point of life. And we can then note, just as noted earlier, that they can’t be, as we see when we imagine justice achieved or truth attained—then what? We are left, once again, to realize that since justice or truth occur within a life, are values within a life, they cannot serve as ends of value for the arduous enterprise or effort of running a life. We return to the fact that ends of value do not lie within. The container solution doesn’t work.

It can seem like the answer because it can seem to take our point outside our life activities, such that the point isn’t, say, justice itself, which occurs within a life and so can’t serve as the point of leading a life, but the containment of justice, which seems more like the enterprise of leading a life itself. But we then have to ask about the point of containing things and we are back to where we started from—to the coffee, the socks, and the justice, which are all valuable but still don’t serve as the valued end, or the point, of containing them. The problem with thinking that life’s point is being a container of value is that when we question which values make that containment pointful, we find that none are external to the enterprise of running a life so none can serve as a valued end for that containment.69

We might consider asking for the point of life, or being sad that there isn’t one, to be a category mistake, akin to asking, “When is a potato?” or being sad that your baby has a name but not a number, or that your nose is neither odd nor even (even if it’s both unusual and symmetrical). Potatoes don’t have times, and noses aren’t even or odd. What sense would it make to be sad about that? Seeking the “when” of a potato or the oddness or evenness of a nose is incoherent; potatoes and noses are not the kinds of things that have times or oddness/evenness. It is incoherent to demand that of them and nonsensical to bemoan the fact that your nonsensical demands cannot be met. When we ask what the point of life is and are sad to discover that life can’t have a point, are we making a category mistake? Are we nonsensically bemoaning an incoherence?

I don’t think so. Leading a human life is an effort or enterprise we all engage in, just as we engage in many other projects within our human lives. It can then come as a disappointing surprise to note that, unlike many other of our purposeful enterprises, leading life itself cannot have a point. Asking whether life is pointless is not incoherent—we understand the question and are capable of sensibly answering it; we just may not like the answer. It’s more similar to a ninety-nine-year-old man being sad that he can no longer run a marathon in under two and a half hours than it is to a numberless baby. The fact that ninety-nine-year-old men are not the kinds of things that can run marathons in less than two and half hours (at least not yet) doesn’t make asking whether they can a nonsensical category mistake nor does it make it a category mistake to bemoan the fact that they can’t.

One might object that seeking a point to living at all is an instance of the fallacy of composition, i.e., of attributing to the whole what is true of the parts.70 But, as argued, life is an effort or enterprise that we engage in both in parts and as an effort or enterprise of its own. It therefore makes sense for us to want that effort to have a point because it is the valued ends toward which our efforts are directed that serve to help us justify or makes sense of those efforts.

When we speak of living a life—the effort or enterprise of running or leading our lives—one might wonder whether we may be referring to the act or effort of being an agent, which might aim at the end value of agency or autonomy. Could the value of agency be the point of leading a life? I don’t think so because the value of agency doesn’t make just any exercise of it valuable or purposeful. The value of autonomy or agency doesn’t confer value or a point to just anything you do autonomously or as an agent. Agency may be valued but it won’t provide us with a valued end for living because it doesn’t answer the question: As an agent, why do this? Why lead and live a life?

Who cares if life is pointless? It’s delightful! Well, maybe for you, and even maybe-er for you your whole life. Some people suffer nearly all the time and nearly all people suffer some of the time. I suppose some may find life so enjoyable that they don’t care whether it’s pointless. However, given how much people suffer in life, I find that view staggeringly insufficient. But, even if life were more similar to a pleasure trip, it would still be sad that it was a pointless pleasure trip because, as leaders of lives, it makes sense for us to want our work to be going somewhere, or directed toward something, rather than pointless, even if pleasurably so.

What about people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jonas Salk, or Beethoven? It seems ludicrous to say that their lives were pointless. The point of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life was to advance civil rights, the point of Jonas Salk’s life was to prevent polio, the point of Beethoven’s life was to create music so sublime that it still makes our hearts burst hundreds of years later. No? No.

When thinking about people of extraordinary achievement and heroism, I think we become star struck and somewhat confused. These historical heroes are such superstars in other aspects of non-Ultimate Meaning, such as significance, impact, and values within a life (e.g., justice, knowledge, art, and benevolence) that we may be so overwhelmed by how meaningful their lives are in so many aspects of Everyday Meaning that we are reluctant to deny them any aspect of meaning, even Ultimate Meaning. But even for the superstars, we can ask about the valued end of them conducting the enterprise of their lives. We may find it less pressing to have an answer to that question when they shine so brightly in other dimensions of meaning. But they still lack this one. Imagine if Jonas Salk, or Nelson Mandela lived for hundreds or even thousands of years past their heroic accomplishments: we might then also imagine them wondering what is the point of leading and living their lives, overall. If we imagine our meaning heroes living centuries past their accomplishments, we can then see the question of Ultimate Meaning emerge more clearly, when not overshadowed by an exceptionally meaningful accomplishment within a life.

If leading your life can’t have an overall point for yourself, maybe it can serve as a part of someone else’s purpose, thereby allowing you a derivative purpose for your life. Living as a footstool for a great artist or living as an expression of god’s creativity are examples of these kinds of derivate purposes or points one might think one’s life can have. Maybe god is intrinsically good and so are god’s purposes, maybe the great artist’s valuable art will be of higher quality because she had a great footstool to support her.

These do seem to be potential ways of your life serving a purpose. The problem is it wouldn’t be your purpose; it would be god’s or the artist’s. A shame for you to live as a mere means to other people’s purposes. I don’t think that counts as a point for you leading and living your life. You might as well be living someone else’s life.

Moreover, note that these sorts of solutions are just variations on the “living beyond yourself” recommendation for meaningfulness I noted earlier, when I noted that positing god or the afterlife as the point of life are common examples of widening and/or postponing the problem of pointlessness. What’s the point of doing god’s will or existing in the afterlife? Less selfish ends still occur within life and cannot provide a point for the enterprise of living it, as we can see by imagining the great artist’s masterpiece achieved—then what, my dear footstool? (We’re just moving the tomatoes).

I have argued that life’s pointlessness is sad for us. Not all agree. Nagel, for example, takes his conclusions about life’s absurdity in stride. He notes that ironic resignation is an appropriate response to life’s absurdity and argues that no great angst is merited because if nothing matters then it doesn’t matter that nothing matters.71 That is a confused conclusion. The view that if nothing matters then it doesn’t matter that nothing matters is as facile as it sounds and is based on nothing more than an equivocation about the term, “meaning”: When we are sad to notice that nothing matters, we are sad that life doesn’t have a point. Telling us that this tragic fact doesn’t “matter” is telling us that this tragic fact is of no significance. But, of course it is significant. How could finding out that life is pointless be considered insignificant? It devalues our striving, our agency, and the lives we work so hard to lead. If we don’t equivocate between the “pointless” and “insignificant” senses of the word “meaning,” we don’t find ourselves in the Nagelian wonder-world where life is pointless but we have no reason to mind.

Why be sad about life’s pointlessness? Is that not also pointless? You might think that lamenting life’s pointlessness is futile, and itself pointless, like crying for the moon. If you can’t do anything about it, why bemoan it? Uh, because it’s sad. We may value truth regardless of its prudential or instrumental value in a particular instance. There is dignity in facing the facts, and humanity in responding with appropriate sadness to sad facts. Sometimes, wishing for or lamenting the impossible is silly, like crying for the moon, or being sad that you’re not a number. But, when the impossible would be great for us, and when its absence leaves us lacking something it makes sense for us to want, then it is fitting for us to be sad and disappointed.

John Shand argues that, “if life is pointless and everything we do without value, then there can be no more value in a life that faces up to that truth than in one that doesn’t,”72 and to argue otherwise is to insist that although nothing has value, facing that truth does have value. But accepting that leading a life is pointless does not commit one to the view that nothing has value; it only commits one to the view that life is not directed toward a valued end. That doesn’t mean that nothing in life or anywhere else in the vast universe has no kind of value at all. It doesn’t entail that truth has no value, or that discovering and acknowledging truth has no value.