RVP Consultation

Meaningfulness of Life:

Transformations of Cultures and Religions

McLean Center for the Study of Culture and Values

Washington, DC                           November 3-4, 2018

Thematics

The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) has selected as its principal research theme for the upcoming five-year period the topic MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE.  This theme succeeds earlier foci on Nation-Building (1980s), The Dialogue of Civilizations (1990s), Globalization at the Turn of the Millennium (2000), Faith in a Secular Age (2009), and Re-Learning to Be Human in Global Times (2015).  In this capacity, MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE is intended to provide a unifying concept that can be adapted to serve as an organizing rubric for a variety of RVP-affiliated conferences and other activities around the world. 

The phrase MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE was proposed by Vincent Shen to mark a constellation of issues associated with the deepest drives and highest purposes of humanity.  He links the term to the manner in which considerations of what is most important or of ultimate concern in life affect individuals and their relations to other human persons and groups, to nature and the universe, and to ultimate reality.  If, as Aristotle held, all human beings desire to know, could it not be the case that all have an even deeper desire to live a meaningful life?  A cardinal concern for RVP’s investigation of this theme is with what might make the pursuit of MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE difficult today, as well as with how such obstacles might be addressed.  The term is intended to resonate with philosophical inquiry, religious thought, and wisdom traditions of all types.

In the designation MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE, LIFE may refer to life in general, or to an individual life, or to the act of living.  For its part, MEANINGFULNESS, in English, conveys two quite distinct, if ultimately related, root meanings which we might describe as axiological  and hermeneutical:  as having to do, that is, with value and sense respectively.  What does it mean to live a meaningful life?  In the first place, this means to live a life that has value, that is worthwhile, that counts for something.  In this existential sense, we might say that life matters, or that it has a point or purpose.  Related to this is the ethical sense in which we speak of living life in a meaningful way: this refers to the aspiration to live well, to fulfill one’s proper end or telos, to contribute to a greater good, or to make a difference.  If, conversely, we speak of the meaninglessness of life in this connection, we entertain the proposition that life in general is worthless or pointless, or that one is living aimlessly or nihilistically.

The second core meaning of MEANINGFULNESS has to do not so much with value as with sense and understanding.  To be meaningful in this sense is to be intelligible, to make sense, to embody and convey a coherent message or set of ideas.  Divining the meaning of life is a hermeneutical task:  for life to have a meaning of this sort, it must evince a cohesion that can be grasped or apprehended by the mind.  To refer to the meaninglessness of life in this respect would be to conclude it is incomprehensible or to confess that its internal coherence and intellectual connections to other things elude us.

A rudimentary characterization of MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE can identify some basic features of this conception and point out how they relate to other areas of human concern.  Through “the exploration and naming of human meanings,” Charles Taylor notes, “normative patterns, ethical virtues, moral rules, the pursuit of truth, and the creation of beauty are established as ends in their own right” (The Language Animal, p. 336).  Identifying human meanings—that is, “metabiological meanings” concerned with distinctively human issues such as the meaning of life (LA, p. 91)—requires us to come to terms with the fundamentally linguistic character of meaning:  meaningfulness is predicated on language.  In addition, meaning depends on the presence of  “form” and “a plurality of components formed” (Robert Neville); on interconnections among “focal centers” and other elements (Michael Polanyi); on part-whole relations; and therefore on context.  Famously, relations of meaning embody in various respects a “hermeneutical circle.” 

In part, MEANINGFULNESS is a function of how meaning structures and informs worlds.  Because the coherence embodied by meaning arises in a temporal setting, MEANINGFULNESS has an inextricable narrative dimension (Paul Ricoeur).  Human meanings are set or enacted in contexts that connect past, present, and future: in a word, in stories.  At the deepest level, these stories are the foundational myths providing the settings for our grasp of the cosmos or the world we live in.  Above that level, we inhabit a Lebenswelt, a world of meanings that orient us in navigating life.  Within this context, ethically, we rely on noetic structures that include valuations of the meanings we encounter around us, and from these we derive, individually and culturally, our worldviews.

The rootedness of MEANINGFULNESS in narrative opens up an aesthetic dimension in which literary genres and other media and art forms become engaged in explorations of life’s purpose and how to live meaningfully.  This perspective highlights the role of creativity, the play of meaning, and the unpredictable discovery of dialogue in expanding possibilities for MEANINGFULNESS.   William Desmond, in speaking of “the centrality of the aesthetic in considerations of the meaningfulness of life,” notes that “our sense of the meaning of life is very much bound up with our being as incarnate.”  Indeed, humans, as embodied knowers, rely on a carnal substrate in the operations through which they perceive or formulate meanings.  For some—notably, Daoists in the tradition of Laozi—the instability and limits of language prompt us to seek other corporeal or intuitive means of grasping the essential character of life and discerning how best to live.

In characterizing different perspectives on LIFE’S MEANINGFULNESS, we do well to bear a few points in mind.  Accounts of MEANINGFULNESS evince certain epistemological characteristics:  they are filtered through experience, they are in some measure constructed or formed through templates or gestalts, they become “sedimented” over time.  The full range of hermeneutical tools, including some sort of process of Verstehen, is required to gain entrée to the internalized meanings of others regarding life.  And inasmuch as the language in which meanings are cast occupies a social location and mediates power (Pierre Bourdieu)—especially when it is ultimate meanings that are at stake—it thus invites political and sociological critique.

Subthemes

In accordance with Vincent Shen’s proposal, the topic MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE may be divided into five interconnected subthemes that might organize successive inquiries, dealing respectively with (1) the moral life and self-cultivation of persons, (2) the ethical character of communication and community/social life, (3) human relations with nature, (4) human relations with Ultimate Reality and the foundation of all meaningfulness, and (5) commonalities and dialogue among different civilizations and religions.

1. MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE for the person, the moral life, and self-cultivation

What makes life meaningful for individual people?  One familiar set of responses has to do with the human capacity for agency and creativity; another addresses qualities of intellect, personhood, and dignity embodied in human beings.  The dual senses of MEANINGFULNESS connected with value and sense come into play here.  From the former standpoint, a meaningful life might imply self-actualization and ethical transformation, or living purposefully and productively:  it is the vita activa.  In the latter perspective, that of the vita contemplativa, the qualities of living the examined life and finding one’s place in a larger whole enter the foreground. 

If MEANINGFULNESS denotes the quality of having a plenitude of meaning, then it can be related to the human aspiration to fully realize one’s potential.  Charles Taylor speaks of this as the quest “to be more fully human,” while Robert Neville describes the quest as for “wholeness of self.”  And if, as Bernard Lonergan maintains, being is the core of meaning, then the quest becomes to, as it were, “be all that one can be.”  Just as its character can be formulated in these different ways, the quest for human flourishing can be associated with varying objectives:  authenticity, freedom, liberation, enlightenment, or mystical union, to name a few.  The pursuit of MEANINGFULNESS can be aided, furthermore, by a variety of disciplines or ways of self-cultivation emphasizing, for example, love, charity, devotionalism, compassion, and lovingkindness; or ahimsa and nonviolence; or selfless service and right action; or submission to the truth or a higher power; or responsibility and ritual propriety.

For human beings, LIFE’S MEANINGFULNESS is inextricable from their fleshly, material existence.  For this reason, work is a principal theater of meaning, as Simone Weil and John Paul II richly illustrated.  Sexuality and family life are likewise loci for MEANINGFULNESS.  The same can be said of the creation of beauty through the arts and performance.  And it could be argued that the human body itself can be vested with meaning, as in the case of the “aufrechte Gang” (Ernst Bloch).  The sense of living a meaningful life is a source of resilience that can provide an antidote to both physical decrepitude and moral injury.  It remains an open question, meanwhile, whether humans are endowed with and well-served by an inborn desire to attain meaning—or whether desire itself obstructs them from living meaningfully, as some Buddhists might suggest.

2.  MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE in relation to social existence, communicative action, and the common good

Because meaning in general is essentially intersubjective and temporal in character, questions of MEANINGFULNESS are embedded in communicative practices, communal histories, and traditions of inquiry.  Thus, in its social context, MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE becomes linked ethically with values of communion, solidarity and social justice. 

There are numerous modes of participating in social life that can validate our existence.  The way of altruism or self-sacrifice for others is one well-established avenue to MEANINGFULNESS.  Martyrdom, as, in its essence, an act of witness to others, is a paradigmatic form of locating one’s life in an overarching pattern of meaning and value.  There are other ways, too, in which people can give a point to their existence by consecrating their lives to larger groups or collective projects:  the nation, social movements, religions.  Political communities are a distinctive case:  embracing the identity of citizen lifts us out of a “bare life” deprived of meaning and connects us to a structure that embodies large-scale common goods.  Political violence exists in precarious relation to meaning in this context.  It may be, as Chris Hedges puts it, that “war is a force that gives us meaning,” but the function of torture, terrorism, and concentration camps is precisely to unmake the meanings that give life its point.

The collective pursuit of knowledge and learning is a central communicative arena in which meaningful ways of life are sought today.  Far from being value-free, scientific investigation is both grounded in trust in an intelligible cosmos and ordered to the higher purpose of understanding persons and their worlds; in this sense, it both presumes and produces MEANINGFULNESS.  The structure of the unconscious, according to Jacques Lacan, also predisposes us to find meaning through seeking encounter with others.  In attending to these relations, psychology joins philosophy, phenomenology, theology, ethnography, literary studies, and other disciplines in a multi-perspectival approach to investigating LIFE’S MEANINGFULNESS.

Meanwhile, the historicity of meaning places us before the thorny problem of trying to come to terms with shifting historical conceptions of what is meaningful even as we recognize that the concept of MEANINGFULNESS itself shifts over times and cultures.  To what extent is a concern with MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE a problematic informed by the specific conditions of late modern societies?  What are the cultural conditions—e.g. emergent pluralism, a hard-won spirit of ecumenicism, or the rise of heterological consciousness (Michel de Certeau)—that give rise to a language and discourse of MEANINGFULNESS?  A socio-historical perspective pulls into focus two additional questions regarding life’s meaning.  What are the most significant inner characteristics of our secular age—the signs of the times—with respect to what we take to be meaningful?  And inasmuch as the meaningful life can be identified with the good life, can the case be made that humanity is making moral progress?

3. MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE with respect to human relations with nature

One feature of our times is a rapidly changing relationship to the natural world, and this raises instructive questions about aesthetics, sources of moral value, technology, and ecological ethics.  In regard to questions of human meaning and purpose, shifting relations to nature in Romantic and post-Romantic poetics mark evolving perceptions of feeling and the sublime, of introspection and transcendence, and of other categories relating MEANINGFULNESS to our encounters with the empirical realm.  The relation of reason, too, to nature has been called into question with the post-modern challenge to natural law.  Is it still feasible to locate a ground for MEANINGFULNESS in a cosmogonic natural moral order, or must we recognize that it is primarily a human construct, a cultural artifact?

Another aspect of the human relation to nature involves the use of technologies to control and refashion our surroundings.  If, as Charles Taylor remarks, language is not simply a technology itself, but “is rather fundamental to all our technologies” (LA, p. 86), then we might further conclude that technologies embody operations of meaning.  This would imply that the technological mode of interacting with and exploiting nature might be answerable to, and open to transformation through, the critique of human MEANINGFULNESS.  Similarly, William Desmond argues that care for the environment is an existential issue concerning the nexus of aesthetic, ethical, and religious considerations surrounding the MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE.  Today, the progress of the environmental ethics (Pope Francis) and animal rights movements is advancing the notion that natural entities possess intrinsic value, and hence, MEANINGFULNESS.  One narrative context in which this attribution makes sense is a story highlighting the createdness of the cosmos.  That is one possibility; but there are others.   

4. MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE as founded in the human relation to Ultimate Reality

Concern with the fulsomeness of meaning in life directs us eventually to the matter of ultimacy, confronting us with questions about the basic sources and foundations of MEANINGFULNESS.  Ultimate sources of MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE might be powers such as God or Allah or Shiva or Tian or Pacha Mama, or realities such as emptiness or Brahman or Dharmakaya; or, alternatively, it might be held that humans alone are taken to be the ultimate arbiters of meaning and value.  Ultimate meaning might be grounded, further, in principles or axioms such as the Dao, the Dharma, the Absolute Idea, or the lex aeterna or divine will; or—in the immanent frame of secularity—it might be rooted in existential freedom; or it might emanate, confoundingly, from nothingness.

Humans engage ultimate meanings, then, in specific venues and contexts.  Insofar as these are religious, MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE is characteristically mediated through the language of myth and the symbolic practice of ritual.  Mediations of ultimacy are especially relevant to the fact of natural death and the questions that surround it regarding the afterlife:  it is at the terminus of life that the question of MEANINGFULNESS comes into its sharpest focus.  Something similar can be said about the problem of theodicy when it is cast as the quest, across cultures and traditions, to incorporate the realities of evil and suffering into an explanatory and rationalizing nexus of ultimate meaning.  Indeed, theodicy is perhaps the quintessential challenge to that aspect of MEANINGFULNESS concerned with “making sense” of life.  For the dimension of MEANINGFULNESS that deals with value and living a life that counts or is worthy, meanwhile, the challenge of redemption in the face of failure is a paradigmatic issue.

5. MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE in cross-cultural and interreligious perspective

Ongoing processes of pluralization among, and within, cultures complicate efforts to arrive at cross-cultural insights and understandings regarding the MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE.  But there remain grounds for thinking of the plurality of cultures as complementary rather than conflictual in nature with regard to the quest for meaning.  The emergence of separate but roughly contemporary “Axial-Age” cultures advancing new conceptions of ultimate meaning supports this proposition.  Today, discussions of “integral ecology” likewise give credence to the notion that we can speak meaningfully of an ecology of cultures.  If that is indeed the case, then there is much to be gained from exploring other cultures’ approaches to MEANINGFULNESS, building upon areas of commonality, and learning from differences.

This undertaking involves several stages related to different techniques of MEANINGFULNESS.  An initial phase revolves around the challenge of translation, the skillful rendering of meaning across linguistic divides.  A next phase builds on this process through the application of cultural hermeneutics geared toward building up deep understandings of the lifeways and worldviews of other peoples.  This can lead, eventually, to a process of intercultural reasoning through which shared meanings and commitments are identified or developed with respect to the MEANINGFULNESS OF LIFE.

Charles Taylor remarks that the “light of faith” or a concern with ultimacy augments this process by casting it as an “exchange in friendship.”  For from that perspective, “the human being has a telos towards understanding, and particularly towards understanding the other, other people, other cultures.  This involves seeing the good, the value, in the other; and leads eventually to the formation of friendships, solidarities.  Seen from another angle, we can’t see the full richness of other cultures if we spurn spiritual search.”

Exploring the richness of what diverse cultures have to say about LIFE’S MEANINGFULNESS is an enterprise reflecting the core concerns of RVP.  As George McLean put it in his book Tradition, Harmony, and Transcendence (1994):

"In the pressing needs of our times, only an intensification of cooperation between peoples can make available the essential and immense stores of human experience and creativity….  [T]hat other cultures are quintessentially products of self-cultivation by other spirits as free and creative implies the need to open one’s horizons beyond one’s own self-concerns to the ambit of the freedom of others.  This involves promoting the development of other free and creative centers and cultures which, precisely as such, are not in one’s own possession or under one’s control.  One lives, then, no longer in terms merely of oneself or of things that one can make or manage, but in terms of an interchange between free persons and peoples of different cultures."

Participants

William Barbieri (Catholic University of America, USA)

José Casanova (Georgetown University, USA)

Fu Youde (Shandong University, China)

Tomas Halik (Charles University, Czech)

Huang Huizhen (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China)

Peter Jonkers (Tilburg University, Netherlands)

John Kromkowski (Catholic University of America, USA)

S.H. Nasr (George Washington University, USA/Iran)

Robert Neville (Boston University, USA)

Micheal Suh Niba (Catholic University in Bamenda, Cameroon)

Gail Presbey (University of Detroit Mercy, USA)

Philip Rossi (Marquette Univeristy, USA)

Charles Taylor (McGill University, Canada)

João Vila-Chã (Gregorian University, Italy/Portugal)