What Is The Meaning Of Life?

Contributed by Rex Bennett

A philosopher on MySpace recently mused whether all questions have an answer. He gave as an example of unanswerable questions these two:

“What is the meaning of life?” and
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

I responded to him in a comment that all questions have the potential to be answered as long as they are formed correctly and use proper terminology. So to provide an example of this, I propose to answer the two unanswerable questions in successive blogs. First this one and then the next.

The answers to both these questions will probably be far from what you expected. The answer to the second question in the following blog may even shock you. You will find out that you have believed something all your life that is not true and it has affected the way you see the world.

But first things first. What is the meaning of life? In order to get to the answer, we may have to take some detours. So please bear with me as I attempt to pave the way to the correct answer. We first have to lay a foundation for understanding the answer. The objects we will work with will be concepts and feelings, and the tools for getting there will be words and meanings and values. We must first understand our tools in order to use them.

There is a field of knowledge in philosophy called Epistemology. Epistemology is the theory and study of human knowledge. It asks questions such as “What is knowledge?”, “What does it mean to know?”, “What is a belief?”, “When is a belief also knowledge?”

A belief is an assumption. We assume it is real and correct but we may have no evidence of any kind to prove it. We assume many millions of things in our lives, and we accept them as true representations of the real world. A vast number of these beliefs prove to be true and a great many of these beliefs prove to be false. The truth or falsehood of many of our beliefs are never known. During our lives, we accept many beliefs and along the way, we also cast off many. You do not believe the same things now that you did as a child. What you believe shapes the way you see the world. Your beliefs create paradigms. They also shape how you value things.

The word I just used: value – is very important. It involves an area of our human behavior that is driven by emotion. We imagine ourselves as “thinking beings,” but cognition is a very weak second to emotion. We may think of emotion as sadness or joy, or as anger or peacefulness, and it is all these things. But emotion is also the hunger we feel in our stomachs. It is the chill we feel in the air. It is the desire we feel to move or change positions, to stand up, to get to work on time. Emotions and instincts are an integral part our being that direct everything we do. Emotion affects how we think! Emotion shapes our cognition. So cognition does not operate free of emotion. It is controlled, directed, and shaped by our emotion. (This was a detour within a detour.) Now back to belief and knowledge.

Knowledge is a belief that proves to be true. We can either experience it directly or indirectly. A slightly more formal definition of knowledge is “a justified true belief.” That word true is very important. It means we can prove it in some way. A justified true belief is a fact. The most direct way of knowing something is direct apprehension or direct experience. We see a sofa and chairs and a television, and we believe these objects to exist because we can experience them. We can see them, we can touch them. We can sit in the sofa and feel its soft fabric. There is also an indirect way of knowing things that is known as cognition or thinking. But thinking – cognition – depends on direct experience somewhere along the line. Cognition is what you are doing right now as you are in the process of knowing something.

We expect that when we ask a question, we are seeking knowledge. We are seeking to know something. But what may not be so obvious to us is that may not be the case at all. We believe that we want knowledge when we are actually desiring affirmation of our values. We are not looking for a cognitive answer; we are looking for an emotive answer. Sadly, most of us are oblivious to the difference, and this causes problems with our perceptions of the world. Which one we are looking for will determine what we see. Separating our emotion from our cognition is not easy. We have to learn how to do that. It takes practice and willingness.

If we are looking for affirmation of our values, then we may reject cognitive knowledge even when it is right before our eyes. Even scientists can fall prey to this self-deception. We will be unwilling to “see” something if seeing it threatens our emotional needs. We are programmed by genetics to protect ourselves and if something appears to threaten us emotionally or threaten our values, we regard it as threatening us. And we can reject it and refuse to look at it even though it is true and factual. A historical example of this is Galileo and his telescope. The Roman Catholic Church in his time believed the heavens to be “perfection.” The Earth was impure. It had rough features such as mountains and valleys, etc. But celestial objects were “perfect orbs” without any of those imperfections. He trained his telescope on the Moon and to his surprise saw mountains and valleys and all kinds of imperfections. He invited Church officials to see the imperfections of the Moon, but to his amazement, not a single one of the Church officials could see the imperfections he was talking about. What they saw was a perfect orb!

So we must first be aware that when we ask a question, we may not be seeking knowledge at all. We may be seeking affirmation of our values which support us emotionally. Unless we are aware of which we are doing, we may never be able to “see” the answer.

Now that we are past that long detour, and we have many of our synapses firing, we can return to the question of the meaning of life.

In the question “What is the meaning of life?” we can separate the word meaning into two very different words: purpose and value.

The word purpose has an external meaning; and the word value has an internal meaning. To use the word purpose is to reflect a use for something. What is the use/purpose of a pocket knife? What is the use/purpose of an automobile? To have a use for something is to have an external user. The very act of asking “What is the purpose of life?” is to assume an external being or external force that has an external use that is separate from the being of life itself. This metaphysical view (assumption) is known as teleology. Almost all religions of the world have teleological mythologies. Religions are not knowledge-based systems. They are belief-based systems that are driven by emotion. People get very emotional over religion, even to the point of having religious wars. Belief-based systems (the people who make up such systems) are not looking for knowledge. They are looking for affirmation of their beliefs which support their emotional needs and values. So a factual knowledge-based answer would be rejected by those who seek affirmation of their values unless the answer affirmed their values. The teleologist in not seeking knowledge but emotional affirmation. To answer a teleological question, you must accept and affirm an existing belief. There is no knowledge-based answer to a teleological question other than to reject the question as “meaningless.” “Meaningless” in the philosophical sense means “nonsensical.” Nonsensical is a state of affairs that does not exist in the real world.

That brings us to the other meaning of “meaning” in this context which is “value.” So now the question becomes “internal.” What is the value of life? Does life have meaning/value? And more specifically, does our life have value? The answer to that is a rousing “Yes!”

What are values? Values are what give us motivation to live. The driving factor for all life-forms is to live. Our genetic circuitry provides universal mechanisms for creating desires and motivational achievement of satisfactions. These mechanisms are what direct our lives every minute of the day. The field of axiology (the theory and study of values) recognizes twelve kinds of values, that are listed in complementary pairs. They are 1.) good and bad; 2.) ends and means; 3.) subjective and objective values; 4.) apparent and real values; 5. actual and potential values; 6.) pure and mixed values. These 12 kinds do not exclude each other. ^[1]

Axiology is far too complex to go into in a very brief essay, so I am going to generalize. Let’s take good and bad. These are not contradictory opposites, these are value states that an organism reacts to. An organism will react one way to a stimulus that it registers as good and in a different way to one that is bad. The organism will behave according to its value states. It will attempt to seek what it registers as good and avoid what it registers as bad. This is a survival mechanism. By achieving good states it assures its survival and increases its enjoyment. Both good and bad values are important as controlling mechanisms.

We are constantly reacting to our environments. You shift your leg because you brain is sending a signal of its discomfort because circulation is restricted. Things that are good for us often smell good while things that are bad smell bad. Rotting meat is dangerous and this registers as bad smelling. These are values or value states. Their complexity is truly amazing.

Values that we are looking for when we ask the question “Does life have value?” are those value states that produce in us the emotions that satisfy our needs. This would be a very long and complicated list. I will list some as a simplified example: feelings (value states) of being wanted; feelings (value states) of love; feelings (value states) of security; physical satisfaction of needs. We as humans attempt to achieve a balance of our needs that leads to overall feelings (value states) of satisfaction and well-being. If we can achieve this state, we will feel that our lives have “meaning.” The less we achieve it, the less “meaning” our lives will have. If we examine this picture, we will see that life has meaning incorporated into its structure. Life has its own meaning, and we are capable of understanding it.

^[1] Axiology: The Science Of Values, by Archie J. Bahm