Life and Meaning

Life and Meaning* DAVID E. COOPER Abstract This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life’s meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the ‘beyond the human’ which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and ‘intimate’ with life itself. I In this paper, I reflect on a tension between two claims for each of which I have previously argued (Cooper 2002, 2003). To put it less autobiographically, I want to consider the relation between two kinds of claim neither of which is unfamiliar, even if their conjunction may be. There will be some readers, of course, who do not find these claims in the least attractive, in which case they will not be exercised by the issue of whether they can be reconciled. But there will be other readers who find them, if not compelling, then at any rate deserving of serious attention. Neither claim, as I said, is unfamiliar or idiosyncratic, and each has been argued for in important philosophical traditions. Both are claims about meaning: the first concerns the concept of meaning in general, while the second concerns the meaning of human existence. Here are summary statements of the two: (1) Meaning is ‘appropriateness to Life’. (Here, ‘Life’ is not to be taken in a biological sense, but in the one intended in Wilhelm Dilthey’s use of ‘Leben’ – Life as what he and others, including Wittgenstein, refer to as the human ‘lifeworld’ or the human ‘form(s) of life’.) (2) Human existence is meaningful only if it is ‘answerable’ to what is ‘beyond the human’. Even when left in these unpacked, unexplained forms, the two claims certainly look to be at odds with one another. According to the first, Life is, as it were, the terminus of explanations of meaning: it is that which, at the end of the day, enables anything – a word, gesture, picture, natural object or whatever – to have meaning. According to the second, human life itself can only be meaningful in virtue of a relation to what lies beyond the human world. What we seem to have here is a version of a familiar difficulty: how to speak of Life as a whole as meaningful if meaningfulness is a function of the place or role that things have within Life. Before I proceed to ask how, if at all, the two claims might be reconciled, I need to unpack them and briefly indicate the lines of thought behind them. Let’s begin with the notion of meaning as ‘appropriateness to Life’. This phrase summarizes or sloganizes three thoughts. The first is that to explain the meaning of any item is to relate it to something outside of or larger than itself. (‘Explain the meaning’, that is, in the sense of enabling understanding of an item: in a different sense, that of showing how the item comes to have its meaning, one may of course appeal to its components, rather than to what is outside of or larger than itself.) A sentence, for example, is meaningful because it communicates a state of affairs, say, or expresses an attitude; a certain sequence of sounds is significant because it contributes to a larger musical whole; a hammer’s significance owes to its role within activities like carpentry – and so on. Second, the best name I can think of for this relation – which is not a causal or physical one – is ‘appropriateness’. The sentence means what it does because it is an appropriate vehicle for communicating or expressing what it does; the sounds constitute a significant phrase through appropriately contributing to a piece of music; and the hammer owes its significance to its appropriate use in such and such tasks. Whenever we talk of an item being meaningful, I am suggesting, we can – sometimes, admittedly, only at a pinch – render such talk in the vocabulary of appropriateness. The third thought sloganized is that it is always, in the final analysis, a relation of appropriateness to Life that confers meaning on any item. Life, as Dilthey puts it, is the ‘whole’ to which all meaning ‘belongs’ – the ‘permanent subject’ of meaning (1979: 220ff). Of course, as he recognizes, everyday or ‘elementary’ explanations of meaning need not, and typically do not, invoke a whole form of life: it may be enough, say, to point to an object or to mention a ritual to enable someone to grasp what a certain word or gesture signifies. But this is because ‘elementary’ explanations rely upon a massive, implicit, background understanding of the ‘whole scene of our language games’ (Wittgenstein 1969: §179) and practices that constitutes a form of life. A local informant can enlighten the puzzled tourist by simply telling him that, in his country, a gesture unfamiliar to the tourist signifies a greeting: but imagine how much more he would need to tell a visiting Martian unfamiliar with human ways at large. The informant would need to educate the Martian about gesturing, greetings, friendship, community, and so on in order to enlighten him. The third thought, I take it, expresses the wisdom encapsulated in Heidegger’s point that explanations of signification eventually refer us to the ‘for-the-sake of-which’ which is nothing short of ‘the Being of Dasein’ (1980: §18), of the, or at any rate a, human form of life. Let me now turn to the second claim: human existence is meaningful only if it is ‘answerable’ to something ‘beyond the human’. Those last four words will later be taken as indicating what is beyond conceptualization and articulation: the ineffable or mysterious, in effect. For the moment, however, I intend them to be heard less provocatively, as referring to what, if anything, lies beyond human practices, purposes, perspectives, evaluations and whatever else constitutes our distinctively human existence. The claim, then, is that human existence is meaningful only if answerable to what lies beyond such practices etc., beyond in effect the form or forms of human life. How might this second claim be defended? As I see it, the question of the meaning of life presses in when people critically reflect on their purposive activities – writing philosophy books, say, or making cars, or raising families – struck, as they sometimes are, by the possibility that these are pointless, a waste of a life. One thinks, for example, of how the Buddha and Tolstoy were struck by this possibility, or certainty, with regard to their respectively princely and literary activities.) What they then seek is something to which such activities might be answerable, some ‘measure’ that might show them to be ones that, after all, do matter. The idea – a surprisingly popular one (see, e.g., Taylor 1988) – that our activities and purposes are meaningful provided only that we invest meaning in them through our commitment to them strikes me as incoherent. (As, for similar reasons, it strikes John Cottingham (2003: 12), who rejects what he calls the ‘endogenous’ conception – ‘the idea of Man as the creator and generator of the meaning of his own life’.) No one concerned whether his or her purposes mattered could be persuaded by being told ‘See how much you’ve invested in them!’, since the person’s problem is precisely whether all that investment was worth anything. Once this reflective concern is underway, it cannot stop short of asking whether life as a whole is meaningful, answerable to something: for, as Robert Nozick put it, when it comes to looking for meaning in how we live our days, ‘we want meaning all the way down. Nothing less will do’ (1981: 599). An activity whose point is to contribute to something that itself turns out to be pointless retrospectively inherits this pointlessness. Writing philosophy books may serve to spread philosophical knowledge: but if doing that is a waste of time, so is writing the books. Ultimately, we need assurance that human existence answers to something in order for any of the activities and purposes that belong to human life to be meaningful in a manner which is relevant to allaying the reflective suspicion that these may all be pointless. If human life is not answerable, then it wouldn’t matter if it – and our actual practices and purposes – had gone very differently. And if that wouldn’t matter, how can it matter that we engage in the practices and purposes we in fact do? That, very briefly, is how I would defend the second claim. Clearly this defence involves a number of contentious moves, but in this paper my aim is not to defend these, rather to reflect on the apparent tension between this second claim and the notion of meaning as appropriateness to Life. We’re now in a better position to be more precise about that tension. Life, according to claim (1), is the totality to which, ultimately, anything must relate in order to be a meaningful item. But it doesn’t seem total enough to serve as the terminus of the reflective questioning that generates the issue of the meaning of human existence itself. Such questioning leads to the requirement that human life as a whole is meaningful, something which it can only be if it is answerable to what lies beyond the human – beyond Life itself, therefore. Something, it seems, has got to give: either the insistence that meaning, quite generally, is appropriateness to Life, or the conviction that, to be meaningful, human existence must be answerable to what is ‘beyond the human’. II In this section, I consider two proposals as to how one might attempt to relieve the tension just identified, and argue that these should be rejected. On the first proposal, one could and should, quite cheerfully, build an exception into the general claim that meaning is appropriateness to Life. There is no need, it’ll be said, to give up the idea of meaning as appropriateness, nor indeed that of meaning as appropriateness to Life except, of course, in the one case where Life itself is the item whose meaning is to be explained. And since that is such a very special case, making an exception for it is nothing that it is worth going to the wall for in order to resist, for making the exception would not impugn the general approach to meaning encapsulated in claim (1). I am less sanguine about making this exception to the general idea of meaning than when, in an earlier work, I spoke of not losing any sleep over doing this (Cooper 2003: 141). Two worries now keep me awake. First, the suggestion comes uncomfortably close, it seems to me, to wanting to be rid of all talk about the meaning of life. For where would the real, substantial difference lie between saying, on the one hand, ‘In the exceptional case of Life itself, meaning cannot be a matter of appropriateness to Life’ and saying, on the other, ‘It makes no sense to speak of Life itself having meaning’? After all, according to my first claim, our very understanding of the notion of meaning is given in terms of the appropriateness of items – words, art works, rituals or whatever – to Life. What can remain of that understanding when, all of a sudden, we are presented with an item, Life itself, whose meaning, we are told, cannot be given in such terms? How, if at all, can we deploy our understanding of how, for example, words and gestures are meaningful, so as to grasp what is being said when meaning is ascribed to this exceptional item? Since I do not think we can be rid of the idea of the meaning of life, I cannot therefore endorse a proposal that appears tantamount to urging that we should be. I have a second worry about the proposal, although quite why it is a worry won’t emerge until later. It is a proposal which is liable to encourage metaphysical pictures that, to me at least, are unwelcome. To identify an item’s meaning, I held, is to relate the item to something larger than or outside of itself – to something, therefore, distinguishable from itself. Now suppose we try to apply that formula to Life itself. In that case, the meaning of Life will need to be something, beyond the human, that either ‘contains’ it (the cosmos or whatever) or is something transcendent to it (God, say). But I don’t like either of those options. I don’t think that there is anything which ‘contains’ Life, or that there is anything transcendent to it. The reasons why I don’t think either of these things will come out in due course: my present point is simply that, if I do reject these options, I must also reject any proposal which encourages us to entertain them. There is another proposal that might be made for relieving the tension between my two claims, this time focussing on the second of them. Someone will suggest that the real force of the argument behind claim (2) is the contention that human life must be answerable to something beyond the human – in which case there’s just no real need to express the claim in the vocabulary of meaning. To speak of human existence as meaningful in virtue of a relation to what is beyond the human is a dispensable, and perhaps misleading, way of saying that it is answerable to – has its measure in – something beyond itself. If so, claim (2), now stripped of its superfluous semantic terminology, does not conflict with claim (1), since it isn’t really one about meaning at all. This proposal is in line with familiar attempts, not exactly to dismiss talk of the meaning of life altogether, but to treat it as a dispensable and rather unhappy way of talking about something different – about, say, how we ought to live. John Cottingham is, of course, correct to remark that ‘talk of “meaning” in life is inescapably evaluative talk’ (2003: 20). Nothing would get counted, surely, as ‘the meaning of life’ – the number 42, for example – which didn’t bear on the worth of life. But it does not follow from this that the issue of the meaning of life can be reduced to that of how people ought to live. Even if Cottingham is right to hold that a meaningful life must be ‘commendable’ and cannot be ‘radically immoral’ (21), it does not follow, as he himself makes clear, that moral commendability is sufficient for meaningfulness. I am not myself sure whether it is even necessary, for, as I remarked earlier, the meaning of life issue looms, in my view, less when people worry as to whether they are living well or badly than when they worry as to whether everything they might do is pointless, a waste of time. To risk an analogy, their worry is less like the worry of a person working in some respectable craft, such as carpentry, whether he’s doing things properly than that of, say, an avant-garde installation artist as to whether, in that area, anything could count as doing things properly or otherwise. The angstridden figures who stalk existentialist novels, after all, are not concerned, primarily or perhaps at all, with whether they’re living immorally or uncommendably, but with whether they, and everyone else, are living absurdly. But in that case, the demand for answerability and measure is inseparable from the search for point and significance. There is no need, it is true, to employ the specific word ‘meaning’ in order to express my second claim: but by leaving it out, one won’t have dispensed thereby with the notion of meaningfulness if, as I’m suggesting, it is thinly concealed within, and in effect serving to drive, the notions of answerability and measure. So I don’t want to relieve the tension between the two claims in the ways that some might propose – by fiddling around with them, in effect, either by adding something (an exception clause) to claim (1), or by subtracting something (the terminology of meaning) from claim (2). Indeed, perhaps I don’t exactly want to eliminate the tension at all, but rather to invite you to hear the two claims as gesturing at different aspects of a delicate metaphysical position situated at the limit of what is sayable. Before I issue this invitation, however, I need to distinguish this ‘delicate’ position from a kind with which it might be confused. III Let us return to claim (1). I resisted the proposal, recall, to build into this claim an exception clause for Life itself as a bearer of meaning, since this could encourage the attempt to identify something transcendent to, or containing, Life which might serve as its meaning – God, perhaps, or the cosmos. This attempt is not one to encourage, I asserted, since there is nothing that ‘contains’ or is transcendent to Life. Or, to be more circumspect, there is nothing identifiable – conceptualisable or, to borrow Kant’s useful expression, discursable – beyond Life. Put differently, any world – physical and/or divine – that we could articulate and conceptualize is a ‘human world’: one that is the way it is only in relation to human perspective, purpose and preference, and not one, therefore, which is that way ‘in itself’ or ‘anyway’, independently of such human factors. This ‘humanist’ or ‘anti-realist’ assertion is not one I have the leisure to defend here (for a defence, see Cooper 2002: Ch. 8 especially). Rather, I want first to emphasize that my reluctance to abandon or amend claim (1) is intended to reflect my commitment to that assertion. The claim is to be heard both as a positive one – about the meaning of words, gestures, rituals, art works or whatever – but also as a negative one, to the effect that there is no discursable reality beyond Life to serve as Life’s meaning. Meaning is appropriateness to Life – period!, as it were. And I want to point out, second, an implication which my ‘humanist’ assertion has for claim (2). Whatever it is, if anything, that human existence is answerable to, this must be ‘mysterious’, ineffable. A discursable cosmos or a discursable God cannot provide the measure for human existence since, precisely because it is discursable, it is already invested with the perspectives – reflective of purposes and values – that are constitutive of what we are seeking measure for, human existence. Given the inseparability of our conceptions of things from our form of life, then those conceptions are part and parcel of what should be in question when we ask what, if anything, human existence answers to. One fails properly to call these into question by appealing to a discursable cosmos or God that merely reflects back to us those very conceptions. One could not, for example, regard a life devoted to scientific enquiry as answering to the nature of reality – not, at any rate, if one holds that reality does not have the nature science depicts it as having independently of the practices of scientific enquiry itself. The conjunction of a ‘humanist’ or ‘anti-realist’ view of the discursable world with the idea of an ineffable realm ‘beyond the world’ is not an unfamiliar one. It is to be found, inter alia, in Kant, Schopenhauer, Bergson and Shankara, at least on some interpretations of their positions. With all these philosophers, one finds the thought of an ‘absolute’ or ‘in itself’ reality that is to be distinguished from a ‘phenomenal’ or empirical world that crucially owes to what William James called ‘the human contribution’. And with all of them, I think, one also finds the thought that, undiscursable as the former is, it can nevertheless provide some sort of measure for this human contribution. The person who enjoys an ineffable vision of Brahman will see that much of what once mattered to him in the everyday world should not have done. The person who recognizes that there is an indescribable noumenal self or will, mysteriously related to the empirical ego, will also recognize that much of what ordinarily passes for the moral life is nothing of the sort. And so on. (Certainly it would be wrong simply to assume that what is ineffable can provide no measure: at the very least one could maintain that life which is led in the absence of any sense of the ineffable is, for that reason, failing to answer to reality.) So, is my position the same as the ‘two levels’ approach, as we might call it, of the philosophers just mentioned? If it were, my position would not, after all, be the ‘delicate’ one I announced that it would be. More important, it would render puzzling my reluctance to abandon claim (1) in its unadulterated form. For why should I then be unwilling to say ‘Life itself has meaning through its relation to the “absolute” or “in itself ”’? Why, that is, should the fact that what is beyond the human turns out to mysterious – rather than a perfectly effable cosmos or God – constitute a reason to stick with the claim that meaning is appropriateness to Life, period? So, my position must be different from the ‘two levels’ doctrine. But why, quite, do I want to distance myself from that doctrine? It is indicative that many ‘two levels’ theorists are tempted to refer to the empirical world as one of ‘appearance’, and perhaps as ‘illusion’ or ‘maya’, even if they then hurriedly reassure us that it is not mere appearance or illusion. What this indicates is their conviction that so decisive is the human contribution to the constitution of that world that, as Deleuze puts it when elucidating Kant’s metaphysics, it is we – and not objects independent of us – that are ‘giving the orders’ for how the world is experienced (1984: 14). How, exactly, those orders are given varies among the many different versions of the ‘two levels’ approach. On some versions, the human mind has an a priori structure through which, as if through a sausage-machine, anything must pass in order to be shaped into objects of experience and thought. On other more Promethean versions, it is purposive human activity through which a world is ‘projected’ or ‘constructed’. We ‘carve’ objects out of a shapeless whole, on one metaphor, or, as in Roland Barthes’ image, we transform raw material in the way a chef transforms the dumpy potato into pommes frites (1989: 355) – and we do so in a way, of course, that is a function of our needs, goals and tastes. Whatever the version, however, the ‘two levels’ approach is, in my judgement, incoherent. Notice that, on this approach, a very major exception is made to the general claim that the discursable world depends for what it is on human beings – on the a priori structures of mind, on ‘constructive’ activity, or whatever. That exception, of course, is human existence itself. As Jonathan Lowe observes, confronted with the claim that the empirical world is the result of our ‘filtering’ or ‘projective’ activity, ‘we must ask: what place can we ourselves have in such a world, seemingly so much of our own making? For we can hardly be supposed to make ourselves, in the objects of which we speak’ (Lowe 2002: 113f). On the pictures being offered by ‘two levels’ proponents, we, so to speak, are already there, up and running, as the filters, sieves or chefs responsible for the world taking on the contours it does. But this makes no sense. Our existence is ‘being-in-the-world’: it is the existence of creatures, that is, whose being – whose practices, moods, structures of thought, ‘form of life’ – cannot be even notionally separated from the world in which we are engaged. How the world ‘discloses’ itself to us, to speak with Heidegger, cannot be ‘our handiwork’ (1977: 18), for apart from such a disclosure – apart from a world in which we ‘always already’ find ourselves – there is no We to work, whether with our hands or with anything else. IV In this final section, I want to pursue some consequences of the shipwreck of the ‘two levels’ approach and, in the light of these, try to clarify how I want to understand claim (2)’s talk of what is beyond the human and how, finally, that claim relates to claim (1). The first consequence, close on the heels of the point about ‘our handiwork’, is that if one is to speak – as ‘two levels’ philosophers sometimes do – of a world ‘arising’ or ‘presencing’, then what should be intended by the word ‘world’ is the-world-and-us, an inseparable unity, not the world as something which arises or presences for creatures already in place, already up and running. This, I take it, is the point made by the Kyoto philosopher, Nishida Kitaro , when he speaks of ‘self and other’ as ‘co-originating’. If there is a sense in which the world is an ‘expression’ of ourselves, we are no less an ‘expression’ of it: the relation is one of ‘mutual interexpression’, as Kitaro puts it (1993: 60). A second, and related, consequence is that one should eschew a picture that is inevitably encouraged by ‘two levels’ talk of the ‘absolute’ or ‘in itself’ as something which, in conjunction with ‘the human contribution’, ‘causes’ a world to be for us. This is the picture of the beyond the human as a sort of stuff or force that might have been, and might have continued on its own ineffable course, irrespective of whether we were around to transform it into a world, to make pommes frites out of it, as it were. Once we ourselves are recognized as inextricably belonging to the world that arises, the image of that world as a joint product – the outcome of a sort of causal interaction between us and what is beyond us – collapses. It is, therefore, a poor and misleading metaphor which depicts objects of experience as pommes frites that appear on our plates after potato-stuff has interacted with the chef’s knife and frying pan. What I am urging that we attempt to get away from is a vision or rhetoric of the human world – of the-world-and-us – as disjoined from what is beyond the human, and to encourage instead one of their entire intimacy. The point is not that there is just the one term – the human world – and nothing else. We really do need, or so I hold, to invoke the idea of what is beyond the human. The challenge to the philosopher, or the poet, cannot of course be to describe this mystery, for then it would not, in the relevant sense, be a mystery. Rather, the challenge is, in part, to devise a vocabulary that might attune one to the vision of intimacy. This is a challenge to which thinkers from various traditions – Daoism and Zen Buddhism, for example – have risen: whatever the Dao or ‘emptiness’ is, it is not a ‘cause’ of the world, not anything transcendent to it. Instead, it is spoken of by thinkers from these traditions, and by those indebted to them, like Heidegger, as ‘presencing’, ‘epiphanizing’, ‘advancing’ or ‘emptying itself’ as the world, and as ‘giving’ or ‘sending’ the world. Some people get impatient with such rhetoric. But its self-conscious strangeness is at least an antidote to the pictures conjured by the less strange, but in consequence misleading, vocabulary of cause, interaction and joint production. And we need to remember that the point of the rhetoric is not to lend dramatic or poetic expression to what, here at the limits of language, could be articulated in literal terms, but to attune to a way of experiencing the-world-and-us as – to invoke a bit of that rhetoric – a mysterious ‘gift’. The challenge to the philosopher or poet is also, in part, to provide helpful analogies with the intimate relationship between the-world-and-us and what is beyond the human. These might be sought, perhaps, in certain experiences of nature – less those of ‘wild’ nature, arguably, than of the nature with which we engage in activities like gardening (see Cooper 2005). This is what Heidegger is trying to do in his poem ‘Cézanne’, where he writes of the gardener, Vallier, who figures in several of the painter’s works: The thoughtfully serene [Gelassene], the urgent [inständig] Stillness of the form of the old gardener Vallier, who tends the inconspicuous on the Chemin des Louves (in Young 2002: 108) Julian Young offers the following, helpful gloss on these lines: ‘The old gardener’s “tending” is his passive caring-for the earth. And his “urgent stillness” is . . . an action-ready listening for and to “the request made by the earth” (ibid.). What the lines invite us to do, I think, is to regard the gardener’s response, at once passive and active, to the earth’s ‘request’ – a response in and through which the earth, otherwise dark and inert, comes to presence as the earth, in the form of plants, say – as emblematic of the presencing or coming to expression of mystery in the human world. We need the idea of the ‘beyond the human’ – at least those of us do for whom the issue of the meaning of life won’t go away. For life’s meaning is not to be found either in a world that is ‘our handiwork’ or in a discursable world that is the way it is independently of ‘our handiwork’, for there is no such way. If human existence is answerable, and has a measure, it is because it and the world from which it is inseparable owe to mystery. Only a life led in recognition of this could be taken by its owner to be answerable. So, I do not want to relent from claim (2), from invoking a ‘beyond the human’ that allows for human existence to be meaningful. But nor do I want to relent from claim (1): for this claim, by making Life the terminus of explanations of meaning, serves to militate against the temptation, evident in ‘two levels’ approaches, to countenance the idea of there being something disjoined from or transcendent to Life. Perhaps my resolve to hang on to both claims, and thereby conserve rather than eliminate a tension, reflects the need for what D. T. Suzuki has called a feat of ‘double exposure’ (1934: 256). Life may be indeed viewed as the encompassing framework – the human world, in effect – to which finally, if only implicitly, we refer words, gestures, practices or whatever in explaining their meanings. There is no structured order of things outside of that framework to which there could be conceptual, discursable access and which could serve, in the same style as Life itself, as the terminus of explanations of meaning, as Dilthey’s ‘permanent subject’ of meaning. At the same time, Life needs to be viewed – if our existence is to be seen as meaningful, answerable, measurable – as a ‘gift’, as the coming to presence of what is mysterious. The delicacy of performing this feat of ‘double exposure’ should not be in question. 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