Living with Moslems—Meaning and Maxwell Smart
My nephews just saw the new Get Smart movie. Apparently, there is an entrance form that Maxwell Smart has to fill out at some point, and one question on it has something to do with existentialism. Intrepid Agent Eighty-Six leaves that particular answer space blank, and is later complimented on his answer—the best answer they’ve ever gotten, apparently.
My older nephew M. later asked me about that, while we were at Dairy Queen getting ice cream. He wanted to know why it was funny. And I laughed and then told him that while I got the joke, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. Eventually, I told him a bit about Jean-Paul Sartre’s title Being and Nothingness, and about how some existentialists seem to concern themselves with nothing and nothingness (a mistake, I explained, since nothing or nothingness is not a thing but is simply the lack of anything and the word “nothing” does not denote an object but is simply a word meaning, “not anything”), but it wasn’t until my sister C.—the converted-to-Islam mother of my nephews—mentioned something about nihilism that I realized that the joke probably had to do with the attitude of despair that, in the popular mind, characterizes existentialism—the attitude that life is pointless and worthless and has no meaning. And then I explained to him the following extremely important point: Existentialism says that life has no intrinsic meaning and the universe has no intrinsic purpose, not that an individual person can find no meaning in the living of his life or that an individual person can find no purpose in the world around him. For those who, like me, spent years searching for Ultimate Truth, such a realization—that there is no Meaning of Life or Cosmic Purpose to be found by introspection or by sitting around saying om over and over or in any other way—is initially discouraging. But when one further realizes that meaning is always meaning to someone, and that purpose is always purpose to someone, so that one creates his own meaning and chooses his own purposes in living his life, then the existential realization is liberating—it is freeing.
So, Maxwell Smart’s blank space was appropriate just to the extent that it expressed the realization that there was no intrinsic meaning or purpose to life; but if it was meant to express the popular despair of thinking that there was no meaning or purpose at all in life, then it went too far. But it was funny.
What I didn’t say, though, was that the mistake some religious people make is in thinking that we should all ascribe what they think are God’s purposes to ourselves. (Notice that one might easily think that it isn’t really a mistake for people to adopt religious purposes for themselves; we all choose our own meanings and purposes, and if those are the ones they want to adopt, well, why not? I do wonder if it matters whether our meanings and purposes are chosen on the basis of justified beliefs about reality or not. I’m inclined to think it does, but that might be my high valuation of truth showing, or perhaps my high valuation of reasons.) First, why should someone else’s meanings or purposes be ours, even if that someone else is God? God might find it meaningful to have people worship him, but why should people find it meaningful to worship God? Meaningfulness to God shouldn’t be mistaken for intrinsic meaningfulness. The reply would presumably be that one shouldn’t have God’s purpose, but rather the purpose that God thought best for him—he, being vastly knowing, ought to know better than anyone else what purpose would best suit a person, so one should listen to him when he tells him what that purpose is. But, second—and, I think, rather devastatingly—how can one know what purpose God thinks is best for him? If a holy book is then cited, how can it be known that the holy book is reliably relaying God’s thoughts on the matter? I don’t see how it’s possible to know.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:50 am
It seems to me that when one loses intrinsic meaning, whatever other meanings we come up with are not meaningful–like shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic. Once you know your end is nothing, you just are nothing.
Far from liberating, I find such a view stifling. In fact, when I held to this view, all I did was stay in bed all day. Consciousness angered me. I could not bring myself to simply live as though life is meaningful though in fact it isn’t, which what existentialism amounts to: utter despair or self-delusion.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Whether or not the universe has an intrinsic purpose is irrelevant to how I live my life; whether or not I can find anything important, whether I believe it to be related to an intrinsic purpose or not, is what is relevant to how I live my life. If God existed, he might have a purpose in mind for me, but it would still be up to me to choose which purpose, if any, to make my own. I might choose to make his purpose mine, if I thought I could somehow divine what that was, but that would be every bit as much my choice for myself as my choice of purpose for myself is now, in what I take to be a nontheistic universe. What I find meaningful and what I do not find meaningful might be related to my beliefs (although I’m not sure there’s a necessary connection there), so, to the extent that my beliefs reflect reality, what I find meaningful might be related to reality itself; but it’s always my choice.*
*I am using the word “choice” here, even though one might quite plausibly suggest that my finding X meaningful isn’t always a matter of my choosing to find X meaningful—it might often be that I find X meaningful just because of how I am constructed or because of my personal history. It isn’t entirely clear to me that a personal history that included belief in an intrinsic purpose of the universe would be guaranteed to make me find life more meaningful than otherwise; I will grant, though, that human beings often seem to derive comfort from the feeling that although they may die, they will not have lived in vain. Yet, anyone who helps someone else or who does anything constructive or beneficial to or for anyone will not have lived in vain.