Nozick and the Meaning of Life
Our author squirms and struggles and gurgles and guggles more than usual as Philosophical Explanations culminates in the chapter entitled “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life.” Despite his enormous ingenuity, in the final analysis Nozick does not seem to take philosophy seriously. What is the meaning of life for human beings, anyway? It lies in their last end. The last end is willed first in the order of the final causes and reached last in the order of efficient causes. There is a common last end for all humans beings, and there is only one such end, because achieving it satisfies all desires, such that there is nothing left to want, and if there was a multitude of last ends, then achieving none of them separately would bring final peace to a person. The last end is like the genus of all ends, and the proximate ends which are means the last end are species within it. But they are ordered to the single last end.
The last end for human beings is called happiness. Happiness is conditional on three things: perfection of the person himself; perfection of the external environment in which he lives, and perfection of God whom he contemplates, happiness being an operation, an activity, a process of seeing (knowing, understanding, and judging) the fullness of truth: “the essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect: but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will.” (ST, II-I, 3, 4) In other words, every man wants, even if he is not aware of it, everything. And only God has that and the fullness of His infinite perfection to satisfy every human desire. Aquinas writes that “the contemplation of whatever has participated truth, does not perfect the intellect with its final perfection,” (7) the idea being that the contemplation of no creature can bring complete satisfaction. Hence “for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause.” (8)
What is required for happiness? Righteousness, comprehension, virtues, success, justified pride in one’s achievements in life, heavenly glory, clarity and identity, power, knowledge, love, friends in this life and the communion of saints for accidental joy in the next.
Our author writes: “For anything we prize, it seems we always can conceive a context wide enough so that the thing appears insignificant. Perhaps this can occur for all of actuality: if we take up the standpoint of all possibilities, actuality becomes insignificant, merely one of the multitude. For the unlimited and all-inclusive Ein Sof ['without end of limit'], however, there is no wider standpoint that dwarfs it, none that includes it and reduces it to insignificance.” (604) I think that’s as good a reason as any to tie your destiny to God. And that’s the meaning of life. To use Nozick’s terminology, meaning involves transcending the limits of your non-ultimate ends into the last end.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Ah! I’ve been waiting for this post!
I largely agree with how you characterize happiness as being the meaning of life, but do you think the word “happiness” is misleading in this case? Happiness, after all, seems largely contingent upon our happenings. Once our happenings cease being enjoying, it would be natural to say so has our happiness. I am tempted to draw a distinction here between happiness and joy, the former being contingent upon external happenings and the latter, an internal state. For we can have joy without happiness and vice versa. Indeed, of the philosophy I’ve read on the issue of happiness and the meaning of life, this implicit distinction is almost always drawn (see especially Rescher’s “Rationality and Happiness” (1990) and the collection of essays in Klemke (2000)).
Nonetheless, I’ve always thought this approach will never give us a strong theistic answer to what the meaning of life is, no matter how we characterize the mode of our being. A stronger theistic argument can be offered by considering the means by which we obtain/sustain the mode rather than the mode itself. The mean is relationships. The meaningfulness of our mode will be determined by the meaningfulness of the relationship which sustains it. Consider our mode as determined via our relationship with a volleyball (Hanks) versus a dog. Further, a dog versus a person. Ultimately, of course, the most meaningful mode can only be achieved via the most meaningful means—a relationship with God.
As I’m sure you know, philosophers have to be overly-conscious of the words they use because of what connotations come attached, no matter how they define them in-text. This is why I stay away from saying happiness is the meaning of life, even if we agree on an (more than likely) uncommon characterization of it.
February 8th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
By “our happenings” do you mean “fortune” or even “luck”? I wrote that the perfection of the external environment is essential to happiness. For humans. (For God there is no external environment; He is fully self-sufficient and content with His own essence and with Himself.) Many people who underwent near-death experiences describe heaven as extremely beautiful. Aquinas considers a number of goods which have been proposed as resulting in perfect happiness, such as wealth, health, honor, etc. and rejects them all, locating happiness in the contemplation of the essence of God. But still, I think that heavenly existence is something more than hanging in the air staring at God.
I define joy as the the satisfaction of the intellectual appetite, viz., the will (as opposed to delight which is the satisfaction of the senses). Sure, you can have joy without perfect happiness. But you can’t have perfect happiness without joy. And, moreover, imperfect happiness and joy require each other.
One may have many different relationships with God. I think the one that brings happiness is the relationship in which God regards you as His beloved child in whom He is well-pleased.