#1 – What is the meaning of life? Fischer on meaning in life.

In this episode, I discuss the relationship between meaning in life and goodness, arguing that meaning just is goodness, I discuss variants of Nozick's Experience Machine, and the proper perspective by which to evaluate whether our lives are meaningful.

Transcript

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What is the meaning of life? Today we're talking about the Big question. Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Jernberg. Today I discuss the first chapter of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning in. When we think about how life has meaning or what the meaning of life is, we may come to this question with quite a lot of our own preconceptions or ideas already in place. We may think, for instance, that life has a certain purpose that is created for us by our creator, which is not say merely our parents. Is God and that God has a plan in mind for us. And in virtue of God's plan, that is what furnishes us with the content of our purpose in life, which is also supposed to say, settle the question as to what the meaning of our life in particular is. As opposed to say someone else's life, we may have a different purpose, or God may have a different plan. Right? So that's one way of thinking about how life can have. Fisher does not take that route. He instead favors a secular approach along with following certain philosophers who are existentialists in the early part of the 20th century and certain contemporary philosophers today like Susan Wolf, and tries to see how it is that our lives can have meaning independently of what God has in planned for us. Even if there's a God or if there's not a God, one can still coherently ask the question whether life has meaning and if so, what? That. But I think the first distinction that Fisher uses to try to get at what it means for say, a life to have meaning is we can talk about the meaning of life as opposed to how things in life have meaning, that is to say there's meaning in life and not merely the meaning of life as spoken about in the singular, there's the many things in life which say contribute to life's overall meaning, and these kinds of. Well are meaningful and what are they? So this helps focus the question, see, when I just flatly ask the question, what is the meaning of life? First off, it's the definite article 'the' suggests that there's one and only one meaning in life. Perhaps one for you and maybe a different one for someone else, but. Still, it suggests that there's some single answer to the question, which would be applicable to the entirety of your life, and that itself is disputable and may or may not be the right way of thinking about it. And also when posed as a general question, it can have you, you're like a deer in the headlights. I mean, how do you respond to a question like, . And so one valuable thing can be to narrow the scope of the question to just, okay, on a, let's say on a day-to-day basis, which individual things in my life say that I found meaningful and perhaps were meaningful for me today, I want you to step aside for a second and write a short list. Write like three things that happened to you today that you found meaningful. That say, made your life a bit more meaningful than it would otherwise have been. Okay. Time's up what's on your list. So you might have, for instance, a list which would include you say, got a promotion in your job, or maybe your child won a sports event, or perhaps you had a good conversation with your spouse. These are three things which you may find meaningful, which make your life more meaningful. These would be things that make your life meaningful or in other ways I can call them meaning makers. We'll see in the course of discussing this chapter from John Martin Fisher, how he thinks about meaning, but I want you to kind of set those three examples aside and consider for a moment how that list would differ to making your life good. For instance, a meaningful conversation with your spouse. Not only say, made your life more meaningful, it also made your life better, maybe in virtue of its qualities. And similarly with your child, if your child has an accomplishment that's good for your child. But in some ways, it's also good for you insofar as you have pride, esteem, admiration, other kinds of desirable attitudes and traits that you're manifesting in your attitudes about your son's accomplishments. So I think it might prove somewhat difficult to write a list of things that make your life meaningful without also making your life good and contributing partly to living a good life on the whole for you at least. So definitely keep this idea in your mind. Well, when we talk about meaning, how does this differ from just talking about goodness in general and how it is that, say, a meaningful life may be a bad life, or how is it that a good life may be meaningless? But at the outset, John Martin Fisher tries to distinguish happiness and morality from what he's talking about when he talks about how life is meaningful and the sources of meaning in our lives. He has to do this. The whole first chapter of his book is on what makes life meaningful, the meaning in life, instead of say of. What he means by that distinction is roughly whatever contributes to an overall meaningful life so that the meaning of life is composed of the contributors of meaning in life in a particular, say, day-to-day basis. So, Given that's how he thinks about this notion of meaning. He has to create conceptual space for this. And the number one target on his list is, well, the notion that God's plan is exactly what meaning in life consists in, although he doesn't deny that there's a God, it's rather that he needs to identify what in life that means, like what does that look like on a day-to-day basis. Now, he doesn't ultimately accept that God is what makes life meaningful for us, at least not. But he still has to make some conceptual space for what meaning and life consists in. And the next target on his list to do that is this notion of happiness and morality. Now when you hear the term morality, you might think, well, that's subjective, right? But then you might also think about meaningfulness in life as subjective as well. So that doesn't exactly differentiate morality from meaning if they're both subjective. Now, fishers coming out of. He's a philosopher. He is a professor at the University of California Riverside, and he's coming out of a tradition of ethical philosophy in which the predominant view is that ethics is, or specifically morality is not subjective. I have to say I'm somewhat sympathetic with this view, and we can perhaps talk about why on another occasion, but for now that could be one possible way to differentiate morality from meaning in life. You might think there's something subjective about meaningfulness, which is not the case for morality. However, that's not the approach that Fisher takes. Now while he concedes that if one's life is meaningful, then it's likely you'll be happy. Right. It would be difficult to imagine people who are unhappy, who lived meaningful lives, but he actually imagines such people. He thinks, for instance, that poets or philosophers or artists, those who struggle in their fields can actually live quite meaningful lives, even though where the duration is quite unhappy. Think about like Edgar Allen Poe, he was one of the greatest poets of all time. John Martin Fisher uses a more contemporary example of Anthony Bourdain for. But when I think about Edgar Allen Poe's life and the quality of the work that he was producing with the Raven or the House of Usher or one of these other stories was very - he was the classic example of a tortured artist. And I think one way to think about Edgar Allen Poe is in some ways he was very unhappy and that was quite bad for him to be tortured psychologically in the way that he. But at the same time, it was also very good for him to have accomplished so much. I mean, he innovated the poetic style. He contributed, he helped create the detective novel and he wrote a, a kind of proto detective novel. So he accomplished quite a lot. And you can think of the value of those accomplishments as things that improved the quality of his life. Even if ultimately he was unhappy perhaps on a day-to-day basis. But this notion of happiness is also something that we really need to be careful because these words are very slippery. You know, the meaning of life and meaning in life, and how is it that one can be happy or unhappy? What is happiness consistent? How does it relate to the happiness of others? And so on. All of these terms can be quite slippery. But one way to think about happiness is a kind of moralized conception of happiness in which one is most happy, or at least attains the highest form of happiness by attaining some degree of moral perfection by becoming virtuous as a person as to say to to exhibit a certain excellence as a human being. And if you're sympathetic or partisan to this view of happiness, it's not modern. By no means it's more of an ancient view actually. When we hear the term happiness, we tend to think of it more subjectively. We think of it as a almost like a mood or a state of mind. I mean, are you happy today? I don't know why I was feeling kind of under the weather, so I suppose I was unhappy, and this is the kind of thing we say and think. So if that's not how you think of happiness as like a mood or a state of mind, but rather a condition of life that one can live a happy life to the extent that one lives a good. Then I think a lot of these categories become subsumed under one another, and the distinction that differentiates say what makes your life meaningful and what makes your life good may slip away and collapse that distinction into one in the same concept. So that's what I would argue, and that's what I hope to argue right now. However, there are some possible counter examples that Fisher gives, for instance, what about people whose happiness seems to originate in trivial or superficial activities? People who their lives are devoted to like crossword puzzles, not, this is not to say anything against people who enjoy crossword puzzles, but this is somewhat trivial, there's something trivial about, even a better example would be counting blades of grass. So it's a fictionalized example. I think it originates with John Rawls. Where we are to imagine someone who spends their afternoons all their free time counting blades of grass in their yard, and that's all they're doing, and they're enraptured by it. So this person is not bored at all. Subjectively, the person is totally enraptured in counting blades of grass is the the most interesting, most engaging thing that he can do. This is an extreme example, and it's a fictional example, but hopefully by having a an extreme example, it helps bring out the. But what precisely are we to make of the grass counter the person who counts grass? Well, the thought is that he is happiest when he is counting grass and that his happiness originates and finds its greatest expression in the counting of grass. However, the grass counter is wasting his time in some evaluative sense. The person who merely spends his time enraptured by counting blades of grass. Insofar as that's how he lives, his life is meaningless. So there's something really trivial and hence meaningless about sitting around counting blades of grass. Now you might think, well, of course it's meaningless because no good comes of it in the sense that it's not obvious what benefit he acquires as the result of counting the blades of grass. Now it's, it's clear he does personally attain the benefit of his own idiosyncratic happiness. But this doesn't make the world any better place. It only makes him better and, and this could be a source of meaning. When young people sometimes consider what they want to do with their lives, a frequent answer to that question is, I want to change the world, right? To change the. Perhaps the world shouldn't be changed in such a flippant manner. But, but that's the thought. And why? Because there's something good about dedicating yourself, not for your own, say private and personal satisfaction or happiness, but rather to improvement of the world as such, to leave the world at the end of your life better than you originated, than when you started. And so there might be some thought to this. There's some consequential good as to say some, some good that is achieved as a result or results from the activity. And that's what makes the activity of counting blades of grass worthwhile. So for instance, if we were to imagine a variation of the hypothetical in which this person who counts the blades of grass is by doing so postponing the destruction of the. So in this variation of the hypothetical, we are to imagine that some malicious force will destroy the world unless this person counts blades of grass every day. And lucky enough for us, this person is enraptured by it and really enjoys counting the blades of grass. So as long as the person is around and kicking and able to do so, we have nothing to fear. In some ways this person would be a hero. I don't know how we ended in the circumstance, but that would be an extreme example of how what appears to be a meaningless activity would result in very good consequences. That it's really important to make sure the alternative of being destroyed doesn't occur. Would that make the counting of the blades of grass any more meaningful? Well, I would argue no because it's insufficient to merely point out the consequences of one's actions in order to confer meaning to that activity. It's necessary I think, to consider not only the destination, but also the journey. The process of the activity that you're engaged in, in itself must be good. There has to be something good about what it is that you're doing in order for it to be meaningful. Because I think ultimately, meaning and goodness are one in the same. But going back to the counter example, so is it really a counter example at all to the thesis that meaning and goodness are one in the same thing? Well, goodness, I consider to be just an element or part of one's happiness all things considered. So when he says that the person counting plates of grass is happy, I deny this. I, I don't think there could be, I suppose, hypothetically strange creatures, but that's not a human life. It's not a characteristic of human excellence to sit around and count plates of grass all the time. The being who enjoys that is, is something inhuman about that. Anyway, so that's one down. There's more counter examples to go. But I would concede, at least for the sake of the argument, that perhaps conceptually there could be beings who do derive their happiness from such trivial activities. But I don't think insofar as they would be characteristically different from humans, they would have a kind of human star nature that otherwise appear to be human, but in some ways derive their happiness from these incredibly trivial things. But such beings might be intelligent and rational, although I'm not sure how rational it is to sit around and count blades of. But then if we're imagining this person's like a Vulcan or some other Star Trek alien species, where it's not the human good that we're considering, it's some human star good that is compatible with trivial activities like counting blades of grass, I don't think that it would be meaningless for those beings insofar it is good for those beings and they derive their happiness from sitting around counting blades of grass. It may appear that they're living a meaningless life, but that's our human prejudice. We're not acknowledging that what's good for those kinds of beings, for the kinds of beings that they are, and we're already conceding for the sake of argument that these kinds of beings are radically unlike us and that what they properly derive their happiness from is something we we would regard as trivial. So let's move on to the next counter example or attempted counter example in which we now consider someone who's incredibly. Like Hitler or Stalin. And so here he argues that happiness and morality are neither necessary nor sufficient to live a meaningful life. And that what makes life meaningful is neither of these things. Well, he has to do this in order to clear conceptual space for the concept of meaning, to have kind of an independent evaluative work in order to assess how our lives are going for us. Are we living a meaningful life? Are we living a good life, or are we living a moral life? And I think all three of those are actually one in the same. So let's think about Stalin. Okay, so here he says on page three, that Stalin seemed to have a meaningful life. He had a circle of associations and friends. Wait a minute, just pause: Stalin had friends? Okay. A family. He left a big mark on history. Well, that's true. He affected many people and so forth. So the, the thought that he concludes here is that Stalin lived a meaningful but morally monstrous. And he doesn't address whether Stalin was happy or not. He just says that Stalin was evil. He was immoral, but he lived a meaningful life. In order to establish that there's a kind of logical independence between meaning and and morality, or at least that meaningfulness is insufficient. You can live a meaningful life and be immoral. Alright, so let's think about Stalin now. If we could imagine the matrix. So the matrix is a scenario in which you're living in a virtual simulation. You're not actually living an ordinary life. So let's imagine a variation of a hypothetical of the matrix because in the Matrix there are other people jacked in, and those people are in some sense, equally real to you. They are human beings, they're jacked into the matrix. They're also running around in this virtual stimulation. Imagine a solipsistic version of the Matrix where you're the only real person and everyone else is controlled by an ai. But the AI is, it's not super sophisticated. It's enough to imitate all of the surface features of persons and exhibit pain behavior when pinched, but is insufficient to be able to actually experience pain. And so any of these AI are phenomenological zombies. They, there's nothing it's like to be them. The lights are dark on the other beings that exist in this variation of the matrix. So if we're in this kind of matrix world and we're the only real person, but we just don't know it because everyone else is a kind of philosophical zombie, then we can imagine a variation of that again, where you load up Stalin's life. So, you're solipsistic Stalin living in this variation of the Matrix. And what are you doing? Well, you're reenacting, it's almost like a reincarnation situation where you're reenacting the life of Stalin. Unbeknownst to you, you see yourself as Stalin. You don't remember your old life as a normal human being, and you live all of the years of Stalin's life within, say just a few minutes in the, in the real world. Because it's as a simulated reality, it can operate a much faster. Okay. Is that a desirable life? Is Stalin's life worth living? I think not. I mean, I think there is something defective about Stalin's model of thinking in which his values were twisted in an odd kind of way and ended up living in a quite paranoid mind space. Did Stalin even have friends? I suppose there were people around him who claimed to be his friends, but I think it's rather more appropriate to describe them as sycophant or Flatterers or rivals or spies. He definitely left a big mark on history, but I'm not sure how good that was. In fact, it would be quite better if he didn't leave a mark on history at all. And in that regard, how meaningful was the impact that Stalin had? Well, it certainly was a horrendous impact, and no one disputes that he was evil and was quite immoral A person. The question is whether his life was meaningful. So I think in order to identify what was meaningful about Stalin's life, you're gonna have to identify something good. And that's, it's not an accident that Fisher mentions Stalin, having friends, associates a family, and an impact, because all of these traditionally are good. And I think if you consider those things in someone else's, Those relationships are good for you and live and contribute to living a good and a meaningful life because again, I don't see daylight between the concepts of meaningfulness and the concept of goodness, nor the notion of morality, although that I think is a lot more controversial. So Fisher, once he creates space conceptually for this independent value of meaningfulness, he has to identify, okay, well what's good about this? Well, clearly it's not worth pursuing for the sake of something else, say like money, where it has merely instrumental value. That is to say the reasons to value meaning would not be merely for the sake of some further thing. It would be worth pursuing for its own.. And so in that sense, has a kind of finality to it as a final goal for your actions sometimes called a final good. I mean, that much I think makes most sense on the model, that there's nothing more to meaning than goodness. That ultimately what best characterizes a good life is happiness, and that is worth pursuing for its own sake as a final. I think that also best explains the subsequent tasks that Fisher takes himself to be describing meaning in life. To be doing that meaningfulness is important, that it's deep, that it admits of degrees. Your, your life can be more or less meaningful. Why? Because your life can be more or less happy. Happiness is important to you. Happiness is deep. There's a, there's a certain depth to, I think, true happiness that does not follow in a superficial life, silly values or things that are just too transient. Happiness is a settled disposition, lacking in nothing, that anything that's worth desiring is part of a perfect happiness and part of a complete. So remember the matrix variation that I described earlier? Fisher introduces a very similar concept from philosopher Robert Nozick. It's called the Experience Machine, and it's basically what I already described with the solipsistic version of the Matrix where you plug into a machine and it gives you whatever experiences you want in a very short amount of time. It even wipes your memory of your prior life when you're in the. So Nozick thinks that there are certain objective values that are worth having, independently of the experiences that you have, that there is a value to being in touch with reality that goes beyond how things merely seem. So when you think about the experience machine, what is it that the experience machine cannot give you? Well, in virtue of what it is, it can only give you experiences. And what are experiences? Well, they're various kinds of seemings, either perceptual or or mental or some other kinds of seemings. But the thing is, some things are valuable in life that go beyond merely how things seem, that there's a kind of objective value to them because, well, when it, when it only concerns how things seem, that is a subjective matter. And so, What Nozick takes himself to have established with his own hypothetical is that subjectivist theories of wellbeing such as hedonism are false. Where hedonism is a standard example of individual theory for what makes good things good, and as a theory it would hold that the good ultimately is pleasure. And what makes bad things bad ultimately is pain. And there's variations of hedonism, some of which think that pleasure and pain are felt qualities of your experiences. Others have more attitudinal versions where you can take pleasure in something as a relation between a person and a proposition or a state of affairs. But regardless of which version of hedonism is under discussion, Nozick at least takes himself to have established that hedonism is. I actually think that his experience machine goes beyond that and establishes that pretty much any subjectivist theory of wellbeing is false. I think that's a more controversial step, and that partly depends on whether you buy into Nozick's positive story about there being some objective values that go beyond merely how things seem, that being in touch with reality has a kind of value in. You may disagree with that or think that, that there's no value to that whatsoever. But if Nozick is right and there is some reason to not jack into the machine, if there's something good about being connected with reality, then you might think that it's meaningless. So that's one possible response, and that's the reason I think Fisher brings this up, is that there's something about a mere simulation that is not as meaningful as the real. And certainly I could imagine a variation of an experience machine where say tomorrow instead of in your bed, you wake up having taken off the experience machine. Imagine it's something like Neo. You wake up in this vat with all of these things plugged into you and you rip the thing out of your mouth and you realize that your whole life was so far was a lie. I mean, that would be quite a shocker, and it would perhaps in retrospect, render everything that you lived for previously meaningless, or at least substantially diminish. Its. So that would be one good reason to believe that simulations do not confirm. However, I'm not sure that's a fair comparison because I think what you rather should imagine is the best case scenario in favor of a subjectivist view of not only goodness, but of meaningfulness. So this, in this variation of the experience machine, consider two lives otherwise identical, except for one being a simulated version and the other being an unsimulated version and from beginning to end their exact duplicates of one another. Now, I think in this scenario it's a little bit less clear. If this sounds like, well, the value of both of these lives as a whole is identical, then I think you're gonna be more persuaded or at least more sympathetic to more of a subjectivist view of value. And if you also think that each of these lives is equally meaningful for the one living it, then you're going to be more sympathetic with a more subjective view of meaningfulness. If you think all else being equal, live the real deal, not the simulation, then you'll probably be more sympathetic to a more objectivist view. Okay. Fisher takes the more objective path where he thinks that a merely simulated life is not as meaningful for the one living It as an unsimulated one and further, the experience machine furnishes him with a kind of epistemic condition where being systematically deluded about what's going on in your life, as is the case in an experienced machine or any kind of skeptical scenario. Also undermines meaningfulness. So for instance, We when we're systematically mistaken about the way our lives are going, say, if we're in an experienced machine, we, we believe we're not in the experienced machine when we're in there. We also believe that like Neo, for instance, believed he had hair. Well, he doesn't have hair. Just one example. He believed it was 1990 something, whereas it was hundreds of years in the future, and even worse still in the simulated world that I'm imagining. And this is solipsistic version of the Matrix, which is basically what the experience machine is. Everyone you ever knew or loved isn't. So you're not only systematically mistaken about simple things like whether you have hair, you're also systematically mistaken about the existence of everyone you care about, and that strikes a huge blow against how meaningful your life is. These by my lights, and I think also by fishers. However, there's a third kind of moral to the story here with the experience. One is, is that there's something missing from a life that's already determined, right? So this is the thought that if everything in your life has already been scripted into the experience machine, then you're just playing out that story ahead of time. You're more or less like a passive receptacle of the experiences as they come in. It's like getting on a roller coaster ride. No matter how exciting the ride is, you're not really doing any of it. It's just happening to you. And the thought is that's, that's too passive, an attitude or a role in your life in order for that life to be meaningful, that your life would be more meaningful if you had an active role in bringing it about. So you might think that free will is necessary then to live a meaningful. And that's exactly what Fisher thinks. He thinks that not only is it necessary to have a will that is free, but that what your free will does is it basically, it's the pen that writes out the story that is your life. And the meaning of your life consists exactly in your life's story, which you, I guess literally compose or it's not even a metaphor with your agency, your free agency. That ties into Fisher's other work on free will, where he argues that having a free will is compatible with causal determinism. Where the thesis of causal determinism is the thesis that facts about the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of nature determine necessarily everything else about that world. One logical entailment of this is that there's only one possible. So if you have a conception of free will, in which in order to your will to be free, you must have viable alternatives between different possible futures. Causal determinism would be incompatible with that conception of free will, sometimes called a libertarian conception of free will, which admits that it's incompatible, but thinks about our freedom is choosing between metaphysically possible alternatives. Okay? So that is not Fisher's view. Fisher is a compatibilist. He thinks that free will is compatible with determinism, and as a result, the way he thinks about people's freedom is as being responsive to certain kinds of reasons in which one is not unduly manipulated or constrained in a way which would restrict you. So what compatible typically do is they think about how being free contrast with being unfree. To consider how, for instance, if you're tied down, you're not able to do something, but you can also have like a mental version of being tied down where some mad neuroscientist has abducted you in your sleep, unbeknownst to you and inserted a chip in your brain, which. Also unbeknownst to you, sends you minor suggestions, which are sufficient to make it the case that any time you consider an alternative against the will of the mad neuroscientist, the chip buyers, it detects any alternative intentions you may have and supplants them erases and replaces those intentions with whatever the mad scientist would want of you. Intuitively, this is more or less a, a neural way of controlling someone that is no less a form of control than, say, physically restraining someone or moving their arms around like a puppet on strings. The only difference is the strings are impulses say electrical impulses being sent through your brain instead of being direct control of one's limbs or something like. So Fisher thinks that the reason why we shouldn't want to be hooked up to the experience machine is that we actually want to live our own lives. I don't know. I mean, the experience machine sounds pretty awesome to me, but if only because it allows in, in certain variations, it would allow you to live a much longer life, cuz you can have a lifetime of experiences in the course of five minutes and just plug into that experience machine multiple times every day. But there's quite a difference I think between plugging into an experience machine periodically versus just doing it permanently. I think there's quite a difference there. And so you wouldn't, intuitively it wouldn't make sense to plug into it permanently because you're giving up your connection to the real world. So that's a, that's a kind of a devastating loss, and that would render your life less meaningful to you. So that's the idea, but the question is why, and the answer that Fisher gives is that we actually want to live our own lives. That we want to act freely, and this is by hooking into the experience machine, we would no longer be the authors of our own lives with our free will. Why? Because we would be like on rails. We we're like the passive consumers jumping on a rollercoaster. So Fisher here says, quote page seven. We express our active powers by writing our stories through our free will. So this point is further drawn out from a quote, Fisher Gibbs from Susan Wolf on page seven, quote. For me, the idea of a meaningless life is more clearly and effectively embodied in the image of a person who spends day after day or night after night in front of a television set, drinking beer and watching situation, comedies, sitcoms, not that I have anything against television or beer. Still the image understood as an image of a person whose life is lived in hazy passivity, a life lived at a not unpleasant level of consciousness, but unconnected to anyone or anything going nowhere. Achieving nothing is I submit as strong an image of a meaningless life as there can be. Call this case the blob and quote. So this further draws out the point in a less fantastical way where you have the kind of couch potato who does not really accomplishing anything with their, with his. There's a truth in this kind of in all of us, where we do these kinds of self-indulgent but pleasant activities, which are not really extremely pleasant, but they're not really painful. They're just kind of above average. And insofar as we have these episodes in our life, our life becomes a bit less meaningless and this kind of thing. So the hypothetical for Fisher draws out his two constraints on living a meaningful life, that the life may not be significantly diluted and one must be exercising one's free will that you shouldn't just be a puppet or take a sort of passive attitude about your life as a whole, or even in particular thing. And this is a good example of someone who is relatively isolated and passive, the couch potato, the blob, and as such a life consisting of nothing but such things is going nowhere and achieves a, a low score on the meaningfulness metric if there is such a thing. But why is it that the couch potato life is not desirable or what, you know, what good reason is there to prefer it? Now, you might have a concern that perhaps we're being too elitist, that you can imagine a similar meaningless life of instead of drinking beer, drinking chardonnay, and instead of watching television's sitcoms like Seinfeld. Instead the person is watching PBS or something like, Well, that variation doesn't change the right kinds of things going on in the case. Because what makes his activity less meaningful or at least meaningless is, is the passivity of his lack of engagement. So in particular, the visual medium of television is a very passive medium where you basically absorb the information that's being given to you. Well, it's not so much a problem of television. The problem is a lack of kind of, I think probably a better way. I mean, I think moments like this are, are not bad to have in one's life. The question is, would a life composed of nothing but that be problematic? And of course it would because it would be extreme. One is not balancing the idle moments with active moments. I think this emphasis on activity is a bit too excessive in both Wolf and Fisher, and that there's something to be said for moments of the in-between moments of idleness that go on in our lives. I know as an American we have this kind of drive of productivity and we feel sometimes guilty if we're not doing more with our lives, but I think this is making the perfect, the enemy of the good. I mean, we need these idle moments and we should be able to enjoy our lives as our own to be able to kind of inhabit our lives and not have this kind of drivenness, this is demandingness in order to live the most meaningful life we can, or something like this, right? Although Fisher never argues that meaning is something we must maximize as a value. I think it is open to the same kinds of worries of Demandingness that other kinds of values philosophers have been classically somewhat concerned with. Why must I live the most meaningful? Can I settle with a suboptimally meaningful life? Or is that, you know, too much? But I think the standard response to that would be something of a self effacing paradox. Sometimes the best way to maximize value is to not try to maximize value. So that may be a more effective method of producing more value in the world, presuming that we're possible than intentionally setting out to go about doing that. So just as with value, you could probably say with meaning and living the most meaningful life you can, may require you to not think about pursuing a meaningful life. And it'll take you, get you in your head and take you out of the head space necessary to actually live a meaningful life. All right, so in addition to these two constraints on living a meaningful life, that one must not be, say, systematically diluted or at least radically diluted about what one's life consistent, as well as one must have free will and, and take an active role in authoring one's own life. At this point, Fisher follows up on the work of Susan Wolf, who argues that, you know, meaning in life has both a subjective and an objective component, and it lies at the intersection of the. As she puts it, it's where subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. So the thought is it's not enough to love what you do. You have to love what is worthy of love. And as with things you do so too with yourself, it's necessary to not only be loved, but lovely to use Adam Smith's phrase. And love is one attitude that we can consider, but you can also consider other attitudes that one can have about one's life as a whole, such as one can find meaning in what is praiseworthy in life and to have it praised and, and that could be an object of pursuit. This idea, I think, is perhaps most powerfully brought forward when we consider what our passions are in. So some bit of advice you might hear is find your passion. And frequently this is a mentality among students that, for instance, you might think that first you have to find your passion and then you pursue it. But in the course of life, this way of proceeding seems to put the cart before the horse. Frequently when our passions resonate most truly with us, what we end up doing is finding our passion in the midst of doing the work. It's not something that comes about beforehand. It's something that we find in the activity that we're passionate about. But what does it even mean to have a passion such that one could find it? Well, on one way of thinking about it, you could simply list all your desires and rank them, grade them on the basis of your intensity. Some desires you might have, you might hold more intensely than others. They seem more pressing or urgent. And the ones that are of greatest intensity are the ones that point to one's passion. This is one way of, of thinking about it that Fisher describes. I think one problem with that is you might find that the most urgent desire you might have might be going to run to use the restroom. I'm not sure that that's the kind of passion that these authors have in. So I think the problem with using the language of passion is that people can have passion about the wrong things, things that are ultimately bad for them, or things that can yield quite disastrous lives. And I think the problem is that we presume that there's something worthy of pursuit in the passion and that the passion is resonating to that which is worthy of pursuit. And that may not be the case in people who are, are not really that good. They don't quite desire the right things, things that are good for them and perhaps also for others. But you might think that that much is irrelevant insofar as it comes to finding meaning in your life, that the point of the project here is to live a meaningful life, not a good life. And one guide to do that is to find what your passions are. But how can you be passionate about something without seeing the goodness in it? What is it about the thing that you're so passionate about? So Fisher gives a variety of examples. So for instance, a scientist may be passionate about finding a cure to a terrible disease. Well, that much is obvious what good that brings about. Of course, that's something worthy of pursuit because it helps people. It cures a terrible disease. An individual. He says, quoting page 11 may be passionate about pursuing social justice, helping to save our beautiful planet, running marathons, developing her chess game, deepening a relationship, and so on and quote again, this sounds like a list of good projects, good thing things that if achieved properly in the right way, this individual would become a better person by that accomplishment. A more virtuous. Again, we're looking for sources of meaning in life, and what we're discovering is what makes life good. And again, I do not think these are different concepts. So the thought is people can be passionate about social justice, about saving our planet, about running marathons, and insofar as they pursue these passions, even if they don't fully achieve them, maybe that's the thought, that there's value to the pursuit and to the journey. If not the destination. But again, what is the character of that value? Sounds like there's virtue in the pursuit because it ennobles you, as a person, it strengthens your character, especially if you're valuing the right thing. So you might need to think about cases of the bad case, like the Stalin who's passionate about oppressing his enemies and stifling dissent, and it's really important for him. And he's passionate about purging the government of any dissidents to execute his enemies or something like. I think that's to confuse passion with paranoia. But you might have imagine a variation of Stalin who would have a similar zeal for destruction. And again, there's something self annihilating about this kind of viciousness where a person becomes a murderer, a person degenerates, and they're evil. So what we're imagining is not someone who's living a desirable life who improves his own happiness, but someone who's quite wicked and tyrannical and worsens in his, in himself. And, and then you think, well, okay, but you know, perhaps this person is not a characteristic exemplar of what it means to live a good human life. He's just a characteristic exemplar of what it means to live a, a meaningful life. And I'm not so sure about that, but I think I'll. Fisher imagines someone who becomes a doctor because that's what her parents wanted for her. And as such, the job becomes more of a chore and less of a fulfilling career that doesn't resonate with her. She's lost her passion for it, and even if the quality of the work she's doing is actually really good for other people, it is no longer meaningful for her. Well, my response to that is to think, well, it's no longer good for her. She's doing good for others as in her work as a doctor, but she's not living her best life, so to speak. That could be a selfish thing. Perhaps she was poorly motivated and going to medicine to begin with, but it also might mean that she's not well suited for it. Not everyone should be doctors. No matter how much good doctors do, even if they have the talent for it, they may not have the right disposition or the right suitability for the day-to-day work. The key idea here is that passion is the subjective element of meaningfulness, that there's something more to it than that. And a good way to see why there's something more to it is think about the person counting the blades of grass. Again, this person is deeply passionate about what they're doing, counting blades of grass, but this person is still living a kind of meaningless existence in every episode of grass counting he engages in is devoid of meaning for him, not just in general. So there has to be some objective component that it has to be something worth doing. And again, this is where we get back to this notion that there's nothing over and above meaningfulness than just goodness. That the reason why counting blades of grass is not worth doing is because it's bad for him. Right. It's, it's not making himself a better person by engaging in counting blades of grass, but rather than go with my goodness, first view, which I might call the axiological conception of meaning or Axios, just, Greek for one word of Greek for goodness. Though there are others. Instead, he goes with Wolf and thinks that, well, this is more evidence for Susan Wolf's view. That meaning arises when the subjective element they have passion meets subjective attractiveness, that there's something attractive about the activity that you're passionate about that makes it meaningful for you. And that's where meaning arises in the world. It arises at that intersection. The only real difference that Fisher gives to Wolf's view is he just adds in these additional constraints of knowledge and freedom that one must not be systematically diluted about the meaningful activities one engages in. And that one take an active role in one's life by authoring one's life with one's free will. So that's the, that's the idea. But otherwise, Fisher more or less adopts Susan Wolf's view wholesale plus those two additions. And finally begins this chapter with a discussion of what he calls zoom out argument, where we consider in the grand scheme of things, everything we've ever accomplished in life, everyone we know and loved will eventually die. And so nihilist response to that to say, well then, because nothing lasts on this kind of global perspective, there is no meaning in life. No meaning to be. Fisher's response to this is he considers that, well, meaningfulness is something that really, you need a medium scale to understand, right? So just as from a far away distance, you wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference between a Rolex and a Timex watch. The value of the Rolex that is far greater than the Timex is something that doesn't emerge and is not perceptible until you're kind of at a close distance or a medium distance away. So too with life where the meaningfulness in our life is not something that is detectable and is something that presumably gets eradicated at large scale, but exists in this medium scale of how we live kind of day to day and over the duration of our lives. However short. And I think that's right, but I think the axiologist has a better response to the zoom out arguments where it's less clear to me why we should privilege a medium perspective on our lives in order to detect the meaningfulness that exists there. It more or less begs the question against the nihilist to say, no, no, no. The wide, universal, large perspective is the inappropriate standard and the inappropriate perspective to adopt when evaluating the meaningfulness in our lives. That we have to, in some sense, adopt our own perspective, or at least a medium perspective if an external one on our lives where we don't consider the cosmic scale we consider just over the next decade or you know, a hundred years or something like that. But what reason is there to favor one scale over another? I think there's a different possible response to the nihilist here, where instead of talking about the various perspectives, one, it can adopt from an external point of view. We think about the perspective we have on our cell own life, from a first personal perspective. The reason that matters is because it turns out that meaning is nothing over and above goodness in one's life. Then it's altogether obvious how goodness arises. So it arises on the scale of our individual actions. And yes, the causal consequences of my actions are like throwing pebbles into a giant ocean. They have some ripple, but it's only on a local scale, and that when you zoom out to the large scale of the ocean as a whole, you will never be able to detect whatever ripples my tiny little pebble made in the ocean. However, when I adopt a participant attitude in my life, if I consider. My life from my own point of view, it altogether becomes obvious how a, a meaningful conversation with my spouse contributes to making it a good day as opposed to, you know, a, a bland day or something like this. And how by practicing kindness and becoming a better person, this improves the value of my life as a whole, rather than sitting around watching sitcoms on television, right? I'm not improving myself as a human. Now of course, self-improvement needn't have a demanding element to it where one must go about in every decision, improving oneself at all times. But on the hold that's extreme and that kind of extremeness doesn't yield a well-lived life. A well-lived life has a kind of moderation, but there's a kind of excellence in the moderation, and it's altogether obvious how the goodness would exist on that medium. And it doesn't require, or is even threatened by any of these global considerations because to live a meaningful life just is to live a good life, and meaning is to be found in the virtue that we characteristically habituate in our own activities. That's where it is. And so far as we exemplify that in our attitudes, in our practices, that is where we can find meaningfulness, and that's where I think we can settle that question of what the meaning of life is. It's being a good. All right, so that was my critical review of the first chapter of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning in Life. I hope you'll join me and continue listening to this series as I work my way through this. And please don't forget to correct all mistakes in the comments.