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Questions about the Meaning of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

R. W. Hepburn
R. W. Hepburn
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh
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Extract

Claims about ‘the meaning of life’ have tended to be made and discussed in conjunction with bold metaphysical and theological affirmations. For life to have meaning, there must (it is assumed) be a comprehensive divine plan to give it meaning, or there must be an intelligible cosmic process with a ‘telos’ that a man needs to know if his life is to be meaningfully orientated. Or, it is thought to be a condition of the meaningfulness of life, that values should be ultimately ‘conserved’ in some way, that no evil should be unredeemable and irrational. And it may be claimed that if death were to end our experience, meaninglessness would triumph.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , April 1966 , pp. 125 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

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References

Page 125 note 1 I had completed this article before seeing relevant studies by Wisdom, John—Paradox and Discovery (1966)Google Scholar, Ch. IV, and by Dilman, Ilham—Philosophy, 10 1965.Google Scholar

Page 126 note 1 Aiken, H. D., Reason and Conduct (New York, 1962), p. 374.Google Scholar See chapter xvi as a whole.

Page 129 note 1 Obviously relevant autobiographical quarries include The Prelude, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Chesterton's Autobiography and Berdyaev's Dream and Reality. I have discussed some other aspects of these topics in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, Proc. Arist. Soc. Suppl. vol. 1956Google Scholar, reprinted in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Ramsey, I. T. (S.C.M. 1966).Google Scholar The present article is generally complementary to that paper.

Page 130 note 1 Pascal, Roy, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), pp. 191, 181.Google Scholar

Page 134 note 1 In the studies from which this discussion started, Baier and Nielsen, e.g., acknowledge that, on their analysis, particular lives may, in particular extreme situations, be ‘meaningless’.

Page 134 note 2 For instance: ‘Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reënforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is’ (Dewey, , Art as Experience (1934), p. 18).Google Scholar

Page 136 note 1 Dostoevsky's is the classic statement: see The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, chap. 4.

Page 138 note 1 Further arguments on this topic can be found in C. C. J. Webb's criticism of Hartmann, N., Religion and Theism (1934), pp. 69–86, 87, 144 to end.Google Scholar

Page 139 note 1 On these forms of schizophrenia, see May, R., Existence (1958), pp. 66 (quoting Minkowski), 68.Google Scholar

Page 139 note 2 Sodome et Gomorrhe, vol. 1. p. 213Google Scholar (Eng. tr., Cities of the Plain, vol. 1, p. 218).Google Scholar

Page 139 note 3 The Philosophy of Santayana, ed. Edman, I. (1953), pp. 206–11.Google Scholar

Page 140 note 1 Sartre: ‘All existing things are born for no reason, continue through weakness and die by accident. … It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.’

Page 140 note * A version of this study was included in my Stanton Lectures, at the University of Cambridge, Lent Term 1966.