Wolf on the Meanings of Lives
Today at Oxford’s Moral Philosophy Seminar, Astor Visiting Lecturer, Susan Wolf (North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Philosophy) presents The Meanings of Lives. Here is a taste of her very nice paper:
- What is it to live a meaningful life, then? What does meaningfulness in life amount to? It may be easier to make progress by focusing on what we want to avoid. In that spirit, let me offer some paradigms, not of meaningful, but of meaningless lives.
For me, the idea of a meaningless life is most clearly and effectively embodied in the image of a person who spends day after day, or night after night, in front of a television set, drinking beer and watching situation comedies. Not that I have anything against television or beer. Still the image, understood as an image of a person whose life is lived in hazy passivity, a life lived at a not unpleasant level of consciousness, but unconnected to anyone or anything, going nowhere, achieving nothing – is, I submit, as strong an image of a meaningless life as there can be. Call this case The Blob.
If any life, any human life, is meaningless, the Blob’s life is. But this doesn’t mean that any meaningless life must be, in all important respects, like the Blob’s. There are other paradigms that highlight by their absences other elements of meaningfulness.
And here is another bit from near the end:
- the difference between a meaningful and a meaningless life is not a difference between a life that does a lot of good, and a life that does a little. (Nor is it a difference between a life that makes a big splash and one that, so to speak, sprays only a few drops.) It is rather a difference between a life that does good or is good or realizes value and a life that is essentially a waste. According to these intuitions, there is as sharp a contrast between the Blob and a life devoted to the care of a single needy individual as there is between the Blob and someone who manages to change the world for the better on a grand scale.
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