The Meaning of Life: An Examination of Purpose

By Magnus Vinding

“What is the meaning of life?”

This is perhaps one of the biggest and most important questions to ask and answer, not least because the life we live inevitably reflects our answer to it, or lack thereof. But can we answer such a monumental question with the limited knowledge we have, and does the question even have an answer in the first place?

The answer to both questions is "yes". There are certain and universal answers to the question, and we can provide these answers based on what we know about the world. Not only can we live meaningful lives pursuing a deeper purpose without lying to ourselves; we urgently should. These are some of the central claims of this book, the goal of which is to answer this fundamental question, what is the meaning of life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Magnus Vinding
• Release date: Dec 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507039281

Magnus Vinding

Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), and Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022).He is blogging at magnusvinding.com

Book preview

Introduction

––––––––

"What is the meaning of life?"

This is perhaps one of the biggest and most important questions to ask and answer, not least because the life we live inevitably reflects our answer to it, or lack thereof. But can we answer such a monumental question with the limited knowledge we have, and does the question even have an answer in the first place? The answer to both questions is yes. There are certain and universal answers to the question, and we can provide these answers based on what we know about the world. This is my claim in this book, the goal of which is to answer this fundamental question, what is the meaning of life?

What is the Meaning of the Question?

In order to answer the question, the first thing we must do is to make clear what is being asked by it, as its meaning is anything but unequivocal. It may be claimed that this is a hopeless endeavor, as the question is meaningless in the first place, yet this is clearly untrue. Because even though the question is a confused one that lacks a single definite meaning, people nonetheless do ask something – perhaps for something – with this question, and this something is evidently of fundamental importance, which makes it worth uncovering this something, or rather somethings. For what we commonly ask by the meaning-of-life question is not a single, clear question, but, I would argue, rather two completely different questions that are mixed, confused and stirred into this one catchy question. Fortunately, these two separate questions are both clear and unambiguous, and by splitting the question into these two questions and answering them separately, we will, I submit, have answered what people ask for when they ask the meaning-of-life question.

In order to find out what the question means, one could make a thorough analysis of the relevant terms of the question. For instance, just the word 'meaning' itself has many different meanings, such as meaning in the semantic sense, meaning as intention or will, meaning as value, etc. The same is true of the word 'life'. For instance, life in the biological sense, life as existence, life as a period, etc. While these different meanings are worth keeping in mind, a detailed analysis of the individual words that compose the question will not be helpful for the purpose of finding out what people usually are asking for when they ask what the meaning of life is. Such an analysis would instead just reveal a multitude of meanings of the question that have nothing to do with what people commonly mean by it. For example, one could interpret the question to ask for how we should define life in the biological sense of the word, but this is obviously not what people commonly mean by the question. The goal of this book is to answer what most people ask for when they ask what the meaning of life is – not to answer avant-garde interpretations of it.

What is it we want to know when we ask this question, then?

As mentioned, I think there are two different questions that together exhaustively cover what we commonly ask with this question. The first question can be expressed in the following way: what is the place of purpose in the universe? Expressed in greater detail: does purpose exist in the universe, and if so, in what way? Is there a purpose behind the existence of the universe and our being here? Does purpose exist at the fundamental level of the universe, or is it something non-fundamental, a higher-order phenomenon?

The second question can be expressed in the following way: what is ultimately worth living and striving for – what has value ultimately?

To relate these two questions back to the different meanings of the word 'meaning', the first question relates to what is true about meaning in the sense of purpose, or intention, while the second question is about what is true about meaning in the sense of value. In fact, both questions relate to purpose, but in different ways: the first question is about what the place of purpose is in the universe, while the second question asks for what is worth having as our ultimate purpose. In this way, one could also say that the goal of this book is to answer what is true about purpose in this world. Since the two questions posed above are of so distinct character, they will be addressed in two separate parts in this book; the first part is dedicated to the first question, the second part to the other.

Unfortunately, the meaning-of-life question has largely been put outside of rational inquiry. The reason for this seems to be the widespread belief that there are no truths to be known about purpose and value, and the belief that it is completely impossible to find such truths based on the little we know about the world today. As I hope to show in this book, these are false beliefs. We can provide the most basic of truths concerning meaning in the universe with the greatest of certainty, and this can be done simply by coupling reason with our experience of the world. And it is indeed long overdue that we do so.

Part I: What is the Place of Purpose in the Universe?

––––––––

In this first part we shall examine, and try to provide certain answers to, whether purpose exists in the universe, and, if it does, at what level it exists. Some would say that we cannot give certain answers to questions like these based on our present knowledge; here is for instance astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

"Does the universe have a purpose? I'm not sure, but anyone who expresses a more definitive response to the question is claiming access to knowledge not based [on] empirical foundations."[1]

As we shall see, this is not true. We can, exactly based on empirical foundations and simple logical reasoning, give a far more definitive response to this question than I'm not sure. We simply know far too much to be agnostic with regard to what is true about purpose in the universe.

––––––––

What Do We Understand by Purpose?

In order to be able to answer what the place of purpose is in the universe, we should first clarify what we mean by purpose. The term 'purpose' is synonymous with the words 'will', 'intention', 'goal', 'want' and 'desire'. While we often use these different words to refer to different kinds of intentions, different kinds of purposes, we shall not make such distinctions here, though there surely are different kinds of intentions. Instead, these words will here refer to purposes in general – any kind of conscious intention, will, want or desire[2] – as this examination aims to look for the most general truths concerning purpose, or conscious intention, which the concept of purpose cannot meaningfully be separated from.

Generally, one can distinguish between two different kinds of purpose. The first kind is what someone who acts according to her or his own intended goal has, while the other kind is the purpose that something has when it is created or used with an intended goal. One could call these different kinds of purposes internal purposes and instrumental purposes respectively. For instance, all intentional beings have internal purposes, while all things created with a purpose – for example, trains created and used for the purpose of transporting people – merely have an instrumental purpose. The difference between these two kinds of purpose is worth keeping in mind, but it should be noted that the second kind of purpose ultimately depends on purpose in the