The Meaning of Life

There has been much philosophical debate about ‘The Meaning of Life’, a phrase which analytic philosophy tends to regard as meaningless, or at least not worth considering. But there also seems to be some confusion between the idea that ‘Life’ has a meaning and what it is to lead a meaningful life. The former seems to refer to life in general (‘why are we here?’, ‘why do living things exist’, do they have a purpose’) that is, to refer to Life as an object rather than asking what it is for an individual subject to feel that life is meaningful. Seen in that way, the transition between asking a question about an external fact and asking a question about personal experience seems absolute. They are surely different types of question. But once we pluralise the sense of the subjective experience of meaning in our lives and extrapolate from our own experience to the apparent, and asserted, experiences of others, the two fields of factual identification and personal perception begin to overlap like the areas of convergence of circles in a Venn diagram. If life is only meaningful to me because this or that project which I am engaged in makes it so, that says nothing about ‘The Meaning of Life’ in general terms, even if the projects concerned can themselves be shown to have significance beyond the fact of my interest in them. But if these projects are shared with others, and those others also can be observed to be engaged in meaningful activity in engaging with them, and if we can collectively assert this sense of meaningful activity, then the sense of ‘meaningful’ is not limited to subjective experience but can be seen to apply to collective experience. This, it might be argued, does not extend the sense of ‘meaningful’ to Life in general, but merely expands the subjective domain into the cultural sphere: a collective subject does not become an object.

From where, then, does the shared sense of meaning as something beyond us arise? Can it encompass Life beyond particular projects which may be seen as part of human cultural activity? If a person is interested in horse-riding to the extent that it shapes important parts of that person’s life-activity, and if this is shared with others in a horse-riding club, and other related activities, and so gives meaning to the lives of those people, could it also be said to be meaningful for the horses? The answer to such a question in this context doesn’t depend upon being able to know what is meaningful for a horse, but upon being able to extend the human sense of ‘meaningful’ to life in general. Nor does it depend upon particular meanings being transmissible across human cultures and beyond them to other life forms. But it does depend upon being able to talk meaningfully about the way all life interacts to give significance to the things we do and the experiences we gain from doing them. The sense of an individual having a soul, which is the mirror of meaning, and of human cultures having souls mirrored in cultural customs and artefacts, is the same sense in which meaning is inherent in life for the human species. The commonality of story themes across different cultures which take on specific cultural forms while retaining an archetypal integrity, suggests the universality of meaningful discourse at a deep structural level for human beings. That many of these stories contain animals who interact with humans, and often involve other than human persons, also extends meaningfulness in ways that do not limit it to one species.

So we can say that the ‘meaning’ of Life is contained in meaningful activity that potentially includes all life-forms which together express the collective soul out of which individual souls are composed. Meaning, then, inheres in cultural values, not only in the sense of ‘high’ cultural artefacts of human society, but in the activities of all living things as they go about their everyday enactments of ways of being. What Wittgenstein called the ‘release into life’ is what makes it meaningful, and defines the meaning of life and naturalises it so the quotes around the word are no longer necessary. Meaning emerges from the subject-object relationship at every level and so where the gods are reflected in our practices that acknowledge them -consciously or not - and this is why they are both subject and object for us, both with us in our world and beyond us in a world of their own, in the interplay between Thisness and Otherness where meaning is generated.

Is All Physical Matter Conscious?

The psychologist C G Jung reported an experience he had as a child:

“Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”

This might be taken as a case of confused identity, but for the adult psychologist the remembered experience provided an example of how the imagination can animate the world, and how consciousness can create the Creation. That the young boy could consider himself to be the stone at the same time as having the experience of sitting on it brings the stone into the realm of consciousness – not as an inert object but as a living subject.

To regard the world in this way, as a multiplicity of subjects each with their experience of me to match my experience of them is to set the living landscape not in a frame – out there – but at an intersection with a mindscape, which itself is not to be regarded as wholly within a limited consciousness.

There is a balance to be achieved in assessing such experiences. There are some who would say that Jung’s experience was delusional, or that of a child who had not yet sorted out the difference between himself and objects in the world around him, as if the important point is that of his separateness from that world. There are others who would want to privilege the child’s experience as untainted by corrupting ideas, an innocent perception of pure being. Neither of these positions seems to hit the right note. One prioritises scientifically verifiable fact, the other prioritises experience. From the materialist standpoint stones are not usually regarded as having consciousness or any ability to react to other objects.  Trees and plants are also not regarded as conscious, though in this case there are clearly identifiable response mechanisms. Animals have consciousness, but not in the way that humans do. That’s it. All cut and dried. So the experience that a stone is responding to a human is delusional. Is it? If the experience is one of relationship, that is if I report that I have a relationship with a stone or a tree, it is difficult to see how anyone could deny my feeling of relationship. But they could, of course, deny that the stone or the tree is reciprocating.

What evidence might there be that non-animal objects could have consciousness, could, that is, be subjects capable of reciprocating a relationship? The philosopher Galen Strawson has advanced an argument which he claims emerges logically from materialist premises. He presents a carefully argued case that physicalism (the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical) entails panpsychism (the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being). His view is set out – together with the views of both detractors and those who are sympathetic to the argument – in THIS BOOK

The basis of Strawson’s argument is the premise that the facility of experience is a quality possessed by all physical matter. To those who think this is nonsense he counters that the idea of consciousness emerging from unconscious matter is even more nonsensical. On this basis he asserts that it makes better sense to suppose that all matter is conscious as a condition of its existence. He acknowledges that there are problems with this view. How conscious elements combine to produce super-consciousness is by no means clear, especially if they retain their ‘elementary’ consciousness at the same time (am I composed of multiple centres of consciousness that are simultaneously ‘me’ and ‘not me’?) But Strawson insists that these problems are far less serious than the problems associated with the idea that consciousness just evolved out of unconsciousness.

A survey of the arguments for and against Strawson’s view appears in a thorough review of the book available HERE . For those who do not choose to follow such specialised philosophical debate, it might be enough to consider the implications of  Strawson’s ‘panpsychism’ for the nature of experience, and, perhaps, Jung’s stone experience. He says that “pure panpsychism has only one kind of thing in its fundamental ontology: subjects of experience … each of which is at the same time an experience, and experiencing”. The implication of this is that the experience and whatever is having the experience are [is?] literally identical. So the ‘monist’ view that matter is all there is paradoxically incorporates the ‘dualist’ view that there is also spirit. But the two are not separate. The author of the review cited above suggests that, as a result of Strawson’s demonstration of the implications of materialism, dualism might begin to look more coherent. Does this dissolve the ‘materialist -v -idealist’ dichotomy or reinforce it? I would opt for the former. But only because my experiences tend to point me in that direction.

The Philosopher and the Wolf

In his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands presents a mixture of popular philosophy and personal memoir from a time when he shared his life with a wolf. This leads him to speculate on the different ways that simians and lupines experience time. He concludes that while humans and, he asserts, other apes think in a linear way and experience time as something passing, so that they live as much in the past and in the future as they do in the present, his wolf, and he suggests other dogs, look at rather than through the moment.

 He concludes that we have much to learn from the wolf in this respect, that our superiority in being able to think about the past and plan for the future is bought at the cost of our inferiority in not being able to fully inhabit significant moments of the present. The moment of the present, as he points out in one of his philosophical asides, is an abstract concept that can never be captured as it is always passing. We may follow Husserl and see the present as an experience composed of the immediate past and the anticipated future (if I raise a glass of wine to my lips, I remember what was poured into the glass and anticipate the taste before beginning to drink). Even a wolf must experience the present in this way, but the wolf is better equipped than humans to take such moments for what they are rather than looking past them and so never seeing them clearly.

 It struck me that what Rowlands defines as a quality that makes wolves superior to humans is pretty much what religious thinkers and poets such as R.S. Thomas and Waldo Williams have defined as the supreme transcendent experience of humans, though he does not mention these writers. R.S Thomas’ “we have no business here but to disprove certainties the clock knows” is a major theme in his work:

…..  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, not hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to the brightness
that seemed as transistory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

'The Bright Field'

 This theme recurs again and again in his poems as well as his occasional prose. But of course he has to worry about it (or at it) as the wolf never would. And Rowland’s point is that, for the wolf, ‘eternity’ is now. It is also Thomas’s point in some expressions of the idea, but framing it in the context of the Christian expectation of eternal life rather takes it into the realm of what Rowlands calls the human tendency to live on hope rather than immediate experience.

 What might come nearer to Rowlands’ living in, and looking at, the moment is Waldo Williams’ poem in Welsh ‘Yr Eiliad’:

Gwyddom gan ddyfod yr Eiliad
Ein geni i’r Awr

We know when the moment comes
We are born to the hour

If the book is a vehicle for such musings on the meaning of life for different species, its main attraction has undoubtedly been the account of a relationship between a man and a wolf. This is interesting in itself and at times quite moving, though I didn’t always share the total identification with Rowlands’ narrative that it has elicited from some reviewers. Clearly, developing a relationship with a wolf takes some commitment (he used to take it into the lecture room with him when on the staff of the Philosophy departments of Alabama and Cork universities) and he claims that it was the intensity of his relationship with his ‘brother’ that led him to various philosophical conclusions about animals and humans (he also wrote Animal Rights : A Philosophical Defence). Could he have come to the same conclusions by owning an ordinary dog or even a cat? Probably. But he wouldn’t have sold so many books.