Chapter 13

MEANINGLESSNESS

“We desire the object because it seems good to us, rather than the objects seeming good to us because we desire it.”

            - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), Metaphysics, 1072a29.

            Meaninglessness confronts us both as a general sceptical claim, and as a particular problem with each of our lives. Sceptical meaninglessness denies that meaning is even possible. It claims that our lives lack meaning, not because we are living them badly, but because nothing at all can truly matter. Particular meaninglessness allows the general possibility of a meaningful life, but threatens each life in particular. If we fail to understand what is involved in living meaningfully, or if we lack the wisdom to live well, then our lives may fail. Once we overcome the sceptical threat, we can turn to the particular question of how we can earn meaning in our lives.

            Scepticism about meaning may be based on either of two views. One sceptical view holds that emotional judgments are not beliefs. So emotional judgments can be neither true nor false. It holds instead that the expression of an emotional judgment is just the expression of an emotion or of another psychological state other than belief. The other sceptical view allows that emotional judgments are beliefs and so could be true. Unfortunately, the view holds, all such beliefs are false because no normative reality exists to which they can correspond.

            Life seems to matter. For something to matter is just for it to engage our emotions. Things matter to us as human beings, beings with a certain cognitive and emotional makeup. To people deeply depressed or with severe brain injury, nothing at all may matter. Yet overall, human beings are emotional beings, beings to whom things matter. If we understand our purposes as guided by value, and value as guided by emotion, then we can see how life can matter. The real question is whether it truly matters.

Psychological Projection

            The first sceptical view holds that the expression of an emotional judgment is the expression of the cognate emotion or of another non-cognitive psychological state. We have seen reason to reject this view in earlier chapters. On this view, the way that things apparently matter is merely an artifact of psychological projection. In psychoanalytic terms, projection is the attribution of our own feelings, emotions, and beliefs to other people, typically in an attempt to avoid guilt and anxiety. Someone might, for example, deny to himself that he hates person X. He projects this hatred onto Y, and believes, instead, that person Y hates person X. By analogy, some philosophers have argued that our emotional judgments are not properly true of the world, but, instead, are analogous to projections of our emotions onto the world. (Blackburn 1984) In the eighteenth century, David Hume put the position eloquently when he discussed the difference between reason and taste:

Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects, as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed form internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation. Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. (Hume 1998:163)

If emotional judgments are analogous to the projection of emotions onto the world, then meaning becomes something we create or invent, not something we can discover. Meaning is a matter of taste, not of truth.

            This might be what Joseph Campbell meant when he wrote, “Life is without meaning. /You bring the meaning to it. /The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. /Being alive is the meaning.” (Campbell 1991:16) We “ascribe” meaningfulness to our activities and our relationships, and to the persons and things on whom we act and to whom we are related. Contrary to Aristotle’s view in the chapter motto, we make them loveable by loving them, awesome by being in awe of them, and admirable by admiring them. Of course, we could just as easily ascribe meaninglessness to our lives by resenting, hating, despising, and fearing the persons, things, and activities in your world. Which is right? There has to be some way in which we can reflect on our ascriptions, and correct them as required.

            On the projection view, something’s being admirable-to-someone, for example, consists in nothing more than her admiring it. Yet she can be mistaken in her admiration. So, her attitudes must allow for correction. On the projection view, correcting her attitudes is purely a matter of her becoming more sensitive, a matter of refining her emotional sensibilities. It is not a matter of how the world is, since she projects her judgments onto the world. Consequently the world does not make her judgments true.

            Recall that earlier we distinguished eight ways that emotional judgments could go wrong. Emotions are very complex psychological phenomena and they can go wrong in direction, causation, feeling, physiology, attention, motivation, belief, and evaluation. Someone’s admiration might be directed on the wrong person, caused by an extraneous factor, disproportionate in intensity, due to her hard wiring, stopping her from seeing mitigating factors, and motivating her to do something that she later regrets. She can correct these first six ways that emotions can go wrong through knowing herself and refining her emotional sensibilities.

            However, the last two forms of emotional mistake are not just matters of her knowing herself. In the seventh type of mistake, her emotions presuppose false beliefs. Her beliefs can be beliefs about herself, but they can also be beliefs about other people, beliefs about events and things in the world, and beliefs about the future. In the eighth type of mistake, her emotions presuppose false evaluations. Evaluations are other emotional judgments that she holds, beliefs that her emotional responses would be a certain way under distortion-free circumstances.

            We can conclude, then, that correcting mistakes in our emotional judgments is not just a matter of being more sensitive about ourselves and of refining our emotional sensibility. It is also a matter of having true beliefs about the world and of having true beliefs about value. The projection view requires, wrongly, that our emotional sensibility has priority in explaining mistakes in our emotional judgments. (McDowell 1997:218-221) Emotions are complex. Looking at all the ways in which they can be inappropriate, shows that facts about our emotional sensibility have no such priority. Because emotions are cognitive and evaluative as well as psychological, more than the internal aspect of emotion is involved in judgment. Emotional judgments are not mere projections, “gilding and staining all natural objects.” The truth of emotional judgments depends, not only on how we are, but also on how the world is. Truth depends on whether we correctly evaluate ourselves, others, and the world.

Global Error

            The projectivist or emotivist view just discussed regards assessing emotional judgments as true or false to be meaningless. (‘Meaningless’ in the sense of being linguistic nonsense, not in the sense of not mattering.) On that view, emotional judgments are not beliefs, so it is nonsense to think of them as true or false. A second type of scepticism about meaningfulness allows that emotional judgments are beliefs, and so are assessable as true or false. Nevertheless, on this view such beliefs are globally false. J. L. Mackie writes, “The assertion that there are objective values or intrinsically prescriptive entities or features of some kind, which ordinary moral judgements presuppose, is, I hold, not meaningless but false.” (Mackie 1977:40)

            Mackie thinks all our evaluative beliefs are false, including our emotional judgments, because he holds that truth consists in correspondence to reality. On the correspondence theory, for evaluative judgments to be true, an evaluative adjective, like “despicable,” must correspond to a real property of “despicableness.”. Mattering, or “to-be-pursuedness,” would somehow need to be incorporated into these real properties. Given what we know about the psychologically inert properties that scientists attribute to objects, this view is very strange and implausible. Properties with such normative force would be incompatible with a scientific world view.

            As the last chapter showed, the correspondence theory is implausible in a variety of other cases – mathematics, color, possibilities, the future. As well, the correspondence theory requires the existence of a standpoint outside both the human mind and reality from which to investigate the correspondence relationship. We should replace the correspondence theory of truth with an account where truth explains nothing but has only a minimal, summarizing role to play.

            This minimalist view of truth poses no objection, in principle, to our evaluative judgments being true. Consider, for example, someone’s judgment that the ocean’s tides are awesome. If he knew all he needed to know about his own feelings and psychological health, the nature of the ocean’s tides, and other evaluative judgments about the tides, then he would likely still be in awe of the power of the tides. His judgment would then be true.

            Conceivably, under distortion-free circumstances, we would never feel the cognate emotion to any of our emotional judgments. Then, all of our evaluative beliefs would be false. Nevertheless, we have no principled reason, ahead of any investigation, to believe that all our emotional judgments are in error. We must examine each of our judgments, case-by-case. We cannot rule them all false without doing such inquiries.

Relativism, Particularism, and Divergence

            Relativism is another threat to meaningfulness. If truth could be no more than relative truth – truth-for-me, and truth-for-you – then we could make things truly meaningful just by thinking them so. Meaning would then be something that we invented, not something we discovered or earned. This is too easy.

            We have seen good reasons, in the last chapter, to reject relativism about truth. We must, however, distinguish between relativism about truth and the particularity of emotional judgments. When we are searching for what is meaningful, we search always for what is meaningful to each of us. Our interest, in this search, is not in universal emotional judgments such as so-and-so is admirable-to-all-of-us, or deserving of the admiration of all people, or admirable simpliciter. Instead, our interest is in particular emotional judgments such as so-and-so is admirable-to-me or deserving of my admiration. These particular judgments determine whether we find meaning in our individual lives. Universal emotional judgments are important to issues of interpersonal ethics, but our issue here is that of a personal ethic.

            To see the difference between the particular and the relative, consider the following example. He enjoys beer but not wine. She enjoys wine but not beer. He believes that beer is enjoyable while she believes that it is not. We have four cases regarding his belief:

(1) His belief that beer is enjoyable-to-all is true.

(2) His belief that beer is enjoyable-to-all is true-to-him.

(3) His belief that beer is enjoyable-to-him is true-to-him.

(4) His belief that beer is enjoyable-to-him is true.

Here, we must be careful to distinguish the particular from the universal and the relative from the non-relative. The first claim is universal and non-relative. It is also false. She has no reason to agree with him and she does not believe that beer is enjoyable to her or to everyone. We have no reason to think her wrong. The second and third claims are both relative. Rejecting relativism about truth, we reject the predicate, ‘true-to-him’, and we should see both claims as uninteresting. Importantly, though, we must distinguish these two relative claims from the particular claim in (4). The fourth claim is true. Though they can usefully discuss or even argue about the fourth claim, he and she can probably agree about it. She has no reason to think that beer is not enjoyable-to-him. She does not believe that beer is enjoyable-to-her, but the fourth claim depends on his circumstances, not hers. She can quite happily agree that if she had had his history and experiences, then she would also find beer enjoyable-to-her.

            People often diverge in their judgments about, for example, who is admirable and what is worth cherishing. Some people point to this divergence as evidence that emotional judgments cannot be true or false. Against this view, we should remember the considerable amount of convergence that exists when we emphasize the particularity of emotional judgments. (Smith 1994:188-189)

Existential Absurdity

            Existential absurdity is a final threat to meaningfulness. Camus thought that if we followed reason to its end, we would come to find ourselves absurd. (Camus 1955) If we came to understand aright the vast, value-free universe, we would come to see our pretensions as silly and ridiculous. The discoveries of reason reveal our meaninglessness.

            Meaninglessness, however, is just one pattern of emotions among others. In The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Robert Solomon writes:

And so we begin to suspect, as Camus never did, that the source of absurdity is not meaninglessness at all, but a certain kind of meaning. The object of absurdity is not a “confrontation,” with an “indifferent universe” or a man talking soundlessly in a telephone booth. The object of absurdity is our Self. Absurdity is a self-demeaning view of ourselves. It never appears in love; it almost always appears in depression and resentment. All are equally “meaningful”; in fact, depressions and resentments are often far more absorbing than the calm of love and friendship. The difference is within the meanings, and the meaninglessness of life is in fact a projection of our own sense of worthlessness onto the world. Camus’s Absurd, projected onto the universe as a whole, is a refusal to accept himself, an attempt to compensate for his own sense of inferiority with a sham nobility and defiance against forces that can only be blamed and safely despised at a distance. (Solomon 1993:51)

A person does not enjoy the special love of any God. He is born into a huge cosmos of which he is a minuscule, and short-lived part. His response is resentment, depression, feelings of inferiority, or loss of self-esteem. He is unable to live comfortably with these self-despising, self-hating, demeaning emotions. So, instead of directing them toward herself, he projects them onto the universe, in a sense of “project”close to the psychoanalytic usage. Instead of taking responsibility, he externalizes the problem. Instead of taking on the task of earning self-worth, he sees meaninglessness as inherent in his situation, and beyond his control.

            Self-esteem and its close relatives like self-respect and self-worth are the emotions essential to feeling one’s life meaningful. The feeling of meaningfulness comes with a certain esteem for one’s own character, a pride in one’s accomplishments, a satisfaction with one’s personal relationships, a hopefulness regarding one’s future, and a sense of the importance of one’s own life.

            Nevertheless, self-esteem can be false. If our self-esteem depends on false value judgments, the meaningfulness of our lives is in question. If our self-esteem depends on the money that we make, on the admiration of false friends, on our continued ignorance of our lover’s infidelity, or on any other false judgments, then it risks being a false emotion.

            It is not having self-esteem that makes life meaningful. It is being worthy of one’s own esteem. Whether or not we are self-estimable, or worthy of our own esteem, is a judgment that we make on our lives. Self-esteem is something about which we can fool ourselves. Being self-estimable is something we must earn.

            We earn self-estimableness not just by paying attention to ourselves. A person worthy of a pattern of life-enhancing emotions is a person who makes the right emotional judgments about more than just himself. Such a person then incorporates these value judgments into himself by his commitment to them.

            We have shown, so far, that meaning is possible in life. Our task, now, is to earn it. This is a task that we all share. We must discern how to be better persons, and we must discover how to lead better lives. Then we must become those persons and live those lives.