Meaning is a value generated by persons, and only by persons, using various ethics. Life is not a person, it has no language and uses no ethics. The word 'life' is an abstract noun naming a feature individually exhibited by living beings. The word does not and cannot name any sort of 'sum' of lives. Nor does it name some kind of force or essence in which living things share. Each living being simply lives its own life, and we can no more add those lives into any sort of singular 'life' than we can heap up the pains or pleasure of different folk into 'the world's pain' or 'the world's pleasure'. So there is no 'Meaning of Life' as such; there is only the meaning of individual lives. It is the meaning of individual lives that concerns me in this page.

Talking about the meaning of a person's life can intend 'meaning' in two main senses.

1. The simple sense seeks meaning by wondering whether or not being a person does, in fact, 'point at' any value or set of values. Am I significant? Does what I do matter? For all persons the answer to this question is 'Yes' simply because all persons can, do and must signify [point the fact of their lives at] values in the process of being persons.
2. The extended sense goes further than this by asking whether the values realised, by a person's life, justify that person's existence, make living worthwhile, redeem the suffering that is involved in being a person. Answering this question depends of what values the person imposes on the world and how well she or he imposes them.

An Anology: Living the life of a person can be usefully compared with baking a cake in the sense that how good the finished cake is will depend on (a) what we want from it, (b) what ingredients we have, (c) what actual or implicit recipe we follow, (d) how well we follow the recipe, (e) luck, and (f) whether or not the finished product satisfies the aimed-at value which motivated us to bake a cake in the first place.
        On this analogy the 'cake' is our life, 'what we want' from the cake defines a general value, and the 'recipe' we follow is the personal morality or politics by which we live in pursuit or realisation of this value. We may follow an existing recipe, modify one, write our own, make one up as we go along or, as is most common, just let the ingredients fall where they may and hope for the best. But, whatever the case, it is not what we read or say that is our recipe but what we actually do with our ingredients. The 'ingredients' we have to work with will be partly a product of our own efforts and partly a product of luck and circumstances (i.e., contingency¹).But, whatever our ingredients, our chances of baking a good cake, depend very much on how well we each evolve our ingredients into an integrity - that is (a) how good our recipe is for the ingredients we have, (b) how well we follow it and (c) whether the finished product pleases us as we had hoped. And, in the end, the process and product of making the cake is the meaning of the activity which produces it.

Using this analogy, the realisation of values, in and from our circumstances, is the meaning of what we do with our various 'life ingredients' just as surely as the production of a cake is the meaning of the activity which produces it. A meaningful life, in the extended sense, similarly depends very much on (a*) which values the life is being pointed at (b*) how well, how fully and skilfully, those values are or are not realised in the face of circumstance and (c*) how satisfying the 'pointed at' values turn out to be once they are realised.
        Satisfying the first and third measures (a* and c*) is a function of the value-set by which a person lives his or her life (i.e., our personal morality or politics). Satisfying the second (b*) is again partly a function of contingency but partly, and significantly, a function of the rule-set by which the person tries to realise her or his value-set.

So say, for example, that I value pleasure and decide to point my live at enjoying myself.
        If I point my life at pleasure, and achieve pleasure, then my life can be considered meaningful in the extended sense just so long as pleasure is a worthwhile value on which to have spent my life. This would be analogous with not worrying about how my cake turns out just so long as I enjoy making it. If I do enjoy making it then the effort I put in is worthwhile even if the cake turns out badly; if the cake turns out well then that is a bonus.
        If I point my life at pleasure, and fail to achieve pleasure, then my life is still meaningful in the simple sense because the life of a person can never be meaningless. But I may consider it to have been meaningless in the extended sense because it failed to realise the meaning I 'pointed' it at. This would be analogous with setting out to enjoy making and eating a cake but then finding that, for some reason, the making wasn't as pleasurable as I had hoped and the eating didn't satisfy. In this case, making the cake was meaningful only in the simple sense but all a bit pointless in the extended sense. Failing to realise the pleasure that I aim for may be a function of an illogical value-set (choosing a recipe/pleasures that don't satisfy me in fact), an unreasonable rule-set (pursuing the recipe/pleasure in a clumsy or misguided way) and/or of contingency (bad luck, ill health, or whatever).
        If I successfully point my life at pleasure, and then come to believe that pleasure was not after all a value worthy of my life, I may still evaluate my life to have been meaningless in the extended sense. Failure, in this case, would be a function of having lived a value-set that turned out to be less valuable than the life that I gambled on it - a bit like setting out to bake a tasty cake, succeeding, and then finding that my cake makes me ill or that I would have been better off aiming at something a bit more nourishing. If I point my life at a different value, and fail to achieve it, then I may still consider my life less meaningful than it would have been had I succeeded. But I may also consider it to have been more meaningful than a life wasted on values that I consider unworthy of a life - in the way that failing to make a really wonderful cake can still be more satisfying than succeeding in making something bland and unchallenging.

In all of these cases, the meaning of a person's life is wholly a function of that self's personal morality because all meaning is an output value and, as is recognised by the Law of Conservation, the values-output [meaning] of a life is a function of the values-input of the life [the lived personal morality] as modified by contingency. And one test of a personal morality is how well it fulfills the function of making a self's life, which is significant in the simple sense, meaningful by either or both measures in the extended sense (see personal morality).

It makes no sense to ask what the meaning of life is for a non-person. The life and integrity of a tree, for instance, is valuable to the tree, even though a tree is not the kind of integrate to understand that its integrity is valuable, because a fact need not be recognised as valuable to be valuable in fact. But meaning depends on evaluation which, in turn, depends on language. A tree has no language, it tells no stories, it doesn't use its power according to any narratives. So the life of a tree is not meaningful to the tree, despite meaning being a function of value.

The same rule applies to all non-personal integrities. The universe, for example, cannot be meaningful in itself unless it is a person or the product of a person. Only if life or the universe were the purposeful artifacts of a personal Creator or creators would it be meaningful to talk of either having meaning in any pre-ordained sense - and, even then, all that changes is the addition of another person (the Creator) inputting value. Of course, if the universe is meaningful in this sense then our lives are meaningless because what we do is merely a means to someone else's ends.

I do not know whether there is or is not any kind of person or persons behind the universe, underwriting its meaning and/or inputting a set of values. But none of the reasoning I have heard, nor any of the supposed evidence I have been shown, justifies the common superstition that we are 'put' on earth for a 'reason', that life is a lesson to be learned and/or that the world conceals any kind of moral or spiritual sub-text. There is, however, ample evidence that the human fondness for talking as if there was some kind of plan or purpose, behind the existence of our selves and the world, both flows from and serves the irresponsibility which is symptomatic of our addiction; we don't have to take responsibility for what is going on if God, aliens, karma, evolution or whatever is working out some design that will take care of it all in the end. And that alone is probably reason enough to reject the notion of there being any kind of pre-ordained meaning of life.

By each participating in the 'larger integrity' of a shared personhood culture, human persons create, encode and input all the value that our world has and can have. The life of each person has the values-out meaning that emerges from how that person lives her or his life as a values-inputting self in the world. And, to the extent that we share a world, the value of that world is just the sum of those several inputs as parts. Any other worlds are none of our business.

The values that persons input to a world are made part of that world, and made real, just by being input - much in the way that a house, built to a plan, is made a real part of the world once it has been built.

For a person, being able to realise values in an otherwise valueless universe, and being able to impose those values on an otherwise valueless world, is the nearest there is to there being a point to being a person. And being able to realise value is what makes the life of a person worth living. This does not smuggle a transcendent 'meaning of life' in by the back door; we were not put on earth for the purpose of realising value, and there is no ultimate 'cake' which we are meant to be making. It is just that if we ask whether or not the life of a person has any meaning then the answer has to be 'Yes' just because it is a person - a rule-following evaluator - living that life. And, by the law of conservation of value, the meaning of that person's life cannot be more or less than the values realised in the process of living - just as the meaning of making a cake can only be whatever values are realised by making it.

Some folk believe that it life can be or is meaningless. But that cannot be true because living the life of a person is an unavoidably ethical activity; all our choices input values that are conserved by the integrity of the world and output as meaning. So our lives are and must be meaningful whether we want them to be or not. Moreover, the meaning of our lives must be a function of our input values [our personal morality or politics], so all that is 'up to us' is what meaning our lives will have (i.e., what meaning we are giving them by the values that we input and realise through our choices).

A significant part of the meaning of a life can endure beyond that life as a product - just as the finished cake can be the meaning of the cake-making process even if the baker dies before tasting it. But, for the person actually living a life, the process of living the life is what matters most because the only 'end' that life finally arrives at is death - and death is an end of meaning.² Living the life of a person can be and is meaningful because persons can, do and must, point their lives at value. But death is an end of pointing. Once you are dead, meaning no longer applies to you because there is no longer any you to point at any value - good or bad (although what you have done with your life can, of course, still have some lingering significance for others), So the meaning of life, like life itself, is an ongoing activity; something you do, more-or-less badly or well, every waking minute of your life. And, as it happens, you already and always do in fact 'point' your life at various values, while you live your daily life, just because you must. And the values you actually point at, as you live your daily life in the always-present now, simply are the whole and only meaning of your life. These values may be vested in a product - your children, a business, a victory, narrative, artifact or whatever. But if you are being honest today then, today, you are inputting the value of honesty, truth and understanding, is the meaning and purpose of life; you are also making it so that being honest - inputting that value to the otherwise valueless world - is the meaning and purpose of your life. If you are being dishonest then you are inputting that the value of dishonesty, falsehood and misunderstanding, is the meaning and purpose of life; you are also making it so that being dishonest - inputting that value - is the meaning and purpose of your life. It is as simple, and as scary, as that just by the logic of being a person.

Once input by what we do, the values we live by are conserved by the integrity of the world and output as the meaning of our lives. But this does not entail that, because we cannot get out of a system more than we put in, there must be some kind of 'pool of value' already in the world, waiting like a natural resource for us to tap and use. That idea confuses values with facts such as matter and energy in a closed physical system. The 'raw material' of value is endlessly at hand in the contingent facts of the world. But values are not facts and morality is not a closed system. Persons create the value that is input to the world, just as persons create science, knowledge, literature or music from the same contingent facts of the same world. Only once the value is input does the integrity of the world conserve it in a way that allows for a meaningful output.

It is an irony of the human addiction to violence that humans have mutually conditioned each other to believe that we must overcome [violate] in order to attain significance when, in fact, we already are significant and our violence actually undermines our significance. As persons, what we do always signifies or 'points at' values whether we intend it or not and whether we like it or not. Only persons can point their lives and selves at values, and all persons, necessarily, do point their lives and selves at values. So the life of a self just is significant. As addicts, however, we dislike the significance that we have as persons because personal significance entails personal responsibility. Thus we seek a kind of privilege; a false significance with only false responsibilities such as 'playing god' over the lives of others. It is only because our responsibility as persons cannot be avoided in fact (the conservation of value see to that), that others must bear the cost of our privilege.
        The tragedy of this is that we not only neglect the significance we have, by searching for a counterfeit significance through superstition and violence, but we also thereby actually poison the only significance we do and can have. We are like a people who trample an abundance of good food into the mud in their desperate pursuit of thin and sour fare that makes them sick even as it barely keeps body and personhood together. Our personhood compels us to be significant. But we let our addiction to violence lead us into violating the significance we have, by violating the integrities on which we rely for our realisation as selves, and then send us off on desperate quests for various kinds of pseudo-significance based on even greater violence; like a compulsive gambler whose hunger for a win is increasingly fed by the losses she must eat in her vain attempts to satisfy an unsatisfiable appetite. Because this is so, we need to recognise that realising the meaning of our lives is not a matter of finding or earning some elusive significance in the world but of taking responsibility for the significance that we already have and already violate.

Despite the confidence of so many folk, that they do know what is right and wrong, or what matters or not, no one really knows what, if anything, is morally good. But that is not the same as knowing for certain that nothing is bad. All that follows from uncertainty is uncertainty.
        Nor does it follow from the absence of any objective standards, pre-ordained meaning of life or external enforcement of values, that 'anything goes'. Most of us equate any absence of objective values with freedom from responsibility only because we are conditioned to equate the constraints of responsibility with having a parent of some kind 'over' us. Thus, under dichotomy, we equate the absence of a parento or parent-like law enforcement with a licence to behave badly.⁴ But that is just normal addictive behaviour. The addicted are not free - the compulsive nature of addictive behaviour sees to that - so real freedom cannot lie that way and any promise of such freedom from responsibility must be a lie. Because meaning is a function of integrity, and lies violate integrity, it makes no sense that we could realise a worthwhile meaning for our lives through living a known lie just because we cannot know the truth with any certainty.

Many folk try to shirk the responsibility of owning the values they input to the world by trivialising the differences between good and evil as an illusion that wisdom will dispel. It takes a fairly extreme addiction to violence not to notice the difference in value between, say, kindness and cruelty or love and fear. And it seems clear that the differences between more and less valuable facts are real even if the languages of good and evil are just cultural devices for talking about the differences. Convincing ourselves that we can be 'above' or 'beyond' good and evil is not a triumph of spiritual evolution but merely a failure of moral evaluation (a failure to notice and/or adequately account for, real differences); it is the final irresponsibility towards which our addiction to violence has always been pointing us.
        Some folk even go as far as postulating that 'the (moral) light needs the darkness'. It is true that the presence of disvalues, such as need or danger, allows the achievement of virtues such as generosity or courage. But, in the final analysis, goodness [value] is simply incompatible with violence, bigotry, carelessness and injustice, so those who deceive themselves that they can accommodate both serve the politics of violence rather than the integrity of good. I also note that, both literally and metaphorically, light needs only itself to be light, and darkness is merely an absence of light. The value of good parents is not validated by the child abuse of violent parents, and the ordinary goodness of ordinary folk generally is not invalidated unless there is at least one tyrant and/or one torturer active in the world. Our violence is not doing us any favours. We do not need wars to make us brave, and we do not need evil to make us good.

If I seek meaning for life by 'pointing' my self at a supposedly valuable fact (such as Allah or nirvana or a supposed historical or evolutionary purpose or whatever) then the supposed fact would have to exist independently of me before my alignment with it could be real or reasonable.³ But a value need not be 'there' before it is valuable. Values are about what ought to be. And if I can 'point my life' where it justifiably ought to be pointed then my moral compass has a reasonable alignment even though there is no fact 'out there' for it to be aligned with. This matters because there is not and cannot be any objective meaning of life as such; no innate point or purpose to living. Meaning is a value generated by persons and only by persons. So the only meaning that any life can have will be that generated by living a value-set. I am a person. Choosing to 'stand on' my life and 'point' my own moral compass, where I am justified in believing that value ought to be, creates the possibility of realising a value where there otherwise is none and, thereby, creating what persons seek from a 'meaning of life'. Instead of merely being my own destroyer, and/or a victim of life, I am become my own creator of meaning and value. And that is significant.

Parentological conditioning relentlessly tempts us to confuse the 'knowledge-how' skills of realising our own meaning for life with possessing a kind of hidden 'knowledge-that' which would give us a power-over the power that life has to hurt us. Huge service industries and whole religions have been and are based on the false belief that there is some kind of natural, political, religious or other 'key' to understanding the human condition and/or to living a worthwhile life, that this key is somehow secreted within or behind ordinary reality, that some clever parentos have ferreted this secret out and know what it is, and that if the moral plebeians like myself could somehow possess this knowledge then all would be well. These kinds of belief are deceptions because there is no secret. There is no magic formula (spiritual, chemical, numerological, artistic, genetic, economic or political), no trick, no key, no divination and no scientific or spiritual knowledge, no sub-text that does, can or will, discover a meaning of human life or tell us how to live well. The meaning of life is ours to create and realise - a values output that we are realising right now - and that is all that it can be. Fact-saying narratives, even if true, can only tell us what the facts are if the values-input on which they rely are both valid and conserved; they cannot validate even their own values let alone reveal some pre-existing values supposedly hidden in the facts.
        As is typical for addicts, our difficulty in realising the meaning of life is not that we don't have enough of the right kind of information but that we don't want to take responsibility for the information that we already have - and have had for a long, long time. Pointing that out will not stop thousands of knaves from continuing to mislead millions of fools. But, however distasteful it may be to knave and fool alike, if you could uncover every secret and every mystery of every kind of reality then you would still have only facts and facts would still be only a context. Heaping up and/or arranging facts, however cleverly, will not change that. Meaning is not to be found among any facts of any reality because meaning is a value generated only by persons processing facts through an evaluation. That is why any meaning of life, any realised significance, is and can only be a function of the ordinary rule-governed [story-like] values by which we live our lives as selves. There is no mystery, you need no occult training; the only significant question you face is what meaning you are realising for your life by the way you are actually living it.
 

Steven Foulds (last modified August 10, 2006)

Feedback is welcome

Feedback

1. See Out of the Caves (available from Hinau Press) Chapter 9.1

2. Besides which, all products - of both culture and nature - decay, are corrupted over time, and will one day cease to exist.

3. There is a popular piece of addictive sophistry to the effect that a god exists if he/she/it exists 'for me'. A subjectively real god, however, cannot do what an objectively real God would have to do, just to be God, any more than an imaginary house can keep out the rain in the manner of a real house. And it makes no sense that a real God would come into or go out of any kind of real existence, just on the basis of what I believe or not, given that no other objective facts do so.

4. See Out of the Caves 6.22