Final Blog Post

Kieran Setiya’s evaluation of the meaning of life 

The purpose of life is an obscure question however a better question to ask would be how to live a meaningful life and why it matters. According to a source that Setiya quotes to live a meaningful life is to engage in activities whether happily, successfully, or neither. These activities will look different for everyone. However, a common philosophical threat to this idea is the idea of nihilism, the idea that nothing matters. This is viewed as philosophical skepticism because the idea that nothing matters contradicts almost every philosophical idea. You often cannot argue with nihilists because you’ll stall, because they don’t even believe the argument matters. This leads into Setiya’s main point of chapter 6 that how to live a meaningful life is a different question than the meaning of life. He then raises the question, when we ask for the meaning of life, are we asking whether life has meaning? Setiya builds on this by giving philosopher Thomas Nagels version of whether life even has meaning or purpose

Nagel writes, “If we learned we were being raised to provide food for other creatures fond of human flesh, who planned to turn us into cutlets before we got too stringy– even if we learned that the human race had been developed by animal breeders specifically for this purpose — that would still not give our lives meaning.”

This allows the audience to reevaluate the way they think about life. There could be a larger purpose for us on this  planet, in this universe; however, this would not create meaning in our lives, as we would still be living, but always aware of our fate. This is kind of similar to how we live now, we live our whole lives waiting to die, and slowly dying as we age, so how do we make our time worthwhile? Setiya ponders this same question.

Setiya presents the critic's view that often the purpose or meaning of life is to serve a higher being, but he argues that this is different than finding the meaning of life because it is rather something that interests us and something we hope to live for, but it does not function as a meaning of life. It is at this point that Setiya makes readers aware that at this point is when philosophers tend to throw in the towel, because it seemingly gets cyclical, never finding an answer. However, he argues that even with throwing in the towel, the question still lingers in the mind, eventually leading you right back to the beginning. 

Setiya presents the idea that humans have not always pondered the meaning of life, because it was never mentioned by great philosophers such as Plato or aristotle. In turn, they ask what it means to live a good human life. The idea of pondering the meaning of life did not originate until 1834. Personally, this makes me think that at some point humans began to reach for questions they knew could not be answered, but rather just wanted to dig at in order to feel accomplished and satisfied in life. While in reality, you could live a good and meaningful life without ever knowing the meaning of your life. Setiya backs up this thought of mine later in the chapter. He writes that its a question we ask in times of emptiness or anguish, when life feels meaningless or absurd. 

Following this point Setiya dives even deeper into analyzing the question and begins to ask what does the word meaning even mean in the phrase meaning of life? He points out that for different things there is a wide array to interpret meaning, such as in art where different people often take away different meanings than intended and we end up with a wide array of possible meanings. If this occurs in miniscule things that are just part of our life, how can the question possibly be applied to the whole of human life? 

As stated in the latter, many people break the meaning of their life down to a higher being. This is often in the form of some sort of religion whether it is Christianity with the belief in God or Stanism with the belief of a different holy being. Setiya argues that what binds together religion as a whole is binding together a total reaction upon life, meaning that there are principles that have been set forth for them and applied in the ordinary world that must be followed to have both a meaningful life and afterlife. He believes that religion is essentially metaphysical meaning that it is being dictated how we are meant to feel about everything. While some may argue that this is a valid meaning of life, Satiya states that it cannot possibly be the meaning of life because beliefs aside, it does not discover any such truth. He says that rather than seeing our religions as the meaning of our lives we should rather seek the truth about our world and universe, as well as trace the ills of society that are in our power to fix. This is because if we find even one ill of society that can be fixed, and make a step towards it, we will feel as if we lived a life with meaning. 

Setiya quotes William James in his idea that why should we believe that there is any way we ought to feel, that really dictates our total reaction to life, James states, “It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional compliments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person. And there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke,” I believe in William James writing this he was getting at the fact that there cannot possibly be one reality that fits for everyone, or even one person, because everyone has different feelings at different times. This ties into the meaning of life because it alludes to the fact that the meaning of life cannot have one answer, and it might change at different times depending on the person and the stage of life that they are in.