class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide .title[ # The absurd and the meaning of life ] .subtitle[ ## Joel Feinberg ] .date[ ### PHIL 2350 The Meaning of Life - FS23 ] --- # Agenda for this week 1. Video Lecture 1: Richard Taylor: The Meaning of Life 2. Video Lecture 2: Thomas Nagel: The Absurd 3. Video Lecture 3: Joel Feinberg: Absurd Self-fulfillment 4. Quiz --- # Questions for this week 1. What do Taylor, Nagel, and Feinberg agree on regarding the question of the meaning of life? 2. According to Taylor, why (and in what sense) is life meaningless (or absurd)? 3. According to Taylor, why (and in what sense) is life meaningful? 4. According to Taylor, is the difference between Sisyphus and Sisyphus* significant enough to make life meaningful? 5. According to Nagel, why is life meaningless? 6. Why does Nagel say that our life is _inescapably_ absurd? 7. According to Nagel, is the life of a _mouse_ absurd? 8. According to Feinberg, why (and in what sense) is life meaningful? 9. According to Feinberg, is life pointless? Explain 10. According to Feinberg, what is self-fulfillment? --- # Feinberg's "Absurd self-fulfillment" Main thesis: While life is objectively meaningless (absurd), a subjectively meaningful life is a self-fulfilling life. Two main projects: 1. The conclusions of Camus, Taylor, and Nagel regarding the objective meaninglessness (absurdity) of life are mostly correct. 2. What provides subjective meaning to life is _self-fulfillment_. --- # Recalling Taylor's argument Remember Taylor's Sisyphus*: - Sisyphus* differs from Sisyphus (the original) in that he has a strange and irrational impulse to push stones (the gods implanted in him a substance that has this effect). - According to Taylor, what made Sisyphus's life meaningless is that his labor comes to nothing, that it is pointless. - The same happened with Sisyphus*; his desire to push stones doesn’t make his life objectively meaningful. - However, life can be subjectively meaningful due to the fact that engaging in projects the subject desires is valuable for the living subject. --- # Feinberg's argument 1. If life has no subjective meaning, then it is pointless. 2. Life (considered subjectively) is not pointless (the point of life is to attain self-fulfillment). 3. Therefore, life has subjective meaning. --- ### Premise 1: If life has no subjective meaning, then it is pointless. Pointlessness of life: - According to Taylor, what makes Sisyphus life meaningless is that his labor comes to nothing, that it is pointless. Life has no _objective_ meaning because it is pointless. - But what about _subjective_ meaning? Is subjective life (seen from the inside) pointless? If life (seen from the inside) is not pointless (it has an achievable goal), then it can have meaning. Contrast: - Taylor: Life is subjectively meaningful despite the fact that it is pointless (it is the doing that counts). - Feinberg: Life is subjectively meaningful because it is not pointless. The point of life is to attain self-fulfillment. --- class: medium-font ### Premise 2: Life (considered subjectively) is not pointless. > One can criticize Taylor, however, for his apparent confusion of self-fulfillment (doing what it is in one’s nature to do) with compulsion. In Taylor’s revision of the legend, a substance in Sisyphus’s blood forces him to “want” to push stones, just as repeated injections of heroin into the veins of an unwilling prisoner would impose an addiction to heroin on him and make him “want” his subsequent fixes. (…) Let us add a twist to Taylor’s twist then, and have the gods provide Sisyphus with a __new nature__ rather than imposing an addiction on his old one. We can think of a rock-pushing Sisyphus as no more “addicted” to his characteristic activities than we are to walking upright or to speaking a language. Our new Sisyphus’s activities, furthermore, are self-fulfilling, not simply because they satisfy his desires, nor simply because they involve his own willful acquiescence, but rather because they express some basic genetic disposition of his nature. (pp. 147-8) According to Feinberg, the point of life is __to fulfill (satisfy) our human nature__ (_self-fulfillment_). --- ## Self-fulfillment What is self-fulfillment? - Doing what it is in one’s individual nature to do. - Realizing one’s potential skills and talents. - Exercise own abilities and produce achievements. - NOT merely an appetite, compulsion, or general proclivity. How individual nature is constituted? - Partly innate attitudes, temperamental dispositions, physical strength. - Partly developed tastes, habits, interests, and values. How does a self-fulfilled Sisyphus (a _Sisyphus**_) would be like? --- class: medium-font ## Sisyphus** > Suppose, however, that the gods assign to Sisyphus an endless series of rather complex engineering problems and leave it up to him to solve them. Somehow rocks must be moved to mountain tops and there can be no excuses for, failure. “Get it up there somehow,” they say. “The methods are up to you. Feel free to experiment and invent. Keep a record of your intermediate successes and failures and be prepared to give us an accounting of the costs. You may hire your own assistants and within certain well-defined limits you have authority to give them commands, so long as you are prepared to answer for the consequences of their work. Now good luck to you.” If Sisyphus’s subsequent labors are fulfilling, they will be so in a characteristically human way. His individual nature will be fulfilled by a life (endless and pointless though it may be) that fits his native bent and employs his inherited talents and dispositions to the fullest, as well as fitting his more specific individual tendencies, for example, a special fascination (perhaps also a gift of the gods) with rocks. (p. 169) --- # Subjective life is not pointless - As long as we do what we do by exercising our personal abilities and talents, we fulfill our nature. - Since this is a goal (or purpose) achievable in life, it turns out that (subjective) life is not pointless. - We might never fully complete our projects, so in this objective sense, life is pointless. But we might fulfill our nature by engaging in a special way with our projects, so in this subjective sense, life is not pointless.