The following is a summary description of Lecture 36 from the Great Courses lecture titled “Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions,” by Jay L. Garfield, Ph.D.
So, What Is the Meaning of Life?
Lecture 36
Often, one is led to find superficial similarities and to overemphasize
those and, therefore, to lose a lot of the texture and detail that’s
bequeathed to us by the textual traditions that we’ve been examining.
We’ve encountered a great deal of diversity in this course, but we can
still point to certain recurrent themes. For example, almost every
position we've considered has emphasized the importance of a
connection between our own lives and some larger context, of temporality,
of some ideal of human perfection, and of spontaneity. In conjunction with
spontaneity, we’ve seen an emphasis on freedom. We’ve also seen the need
to understand the nature of the world we live in and the nature of our own
lives in order to live an authentic life. In this lecture, we examine each of
these themes to see what general conclusions we might draw.
The larger context required for a meaningful life has sometimes been
conceived as a universal, divine, or cosmic context, as in the Bhagavad Gita,
the book of Job, and the Stoics. For the Daoists, this larger context is
similar but more impersonal; it’s the context of the dao, the way of things.
Sometimes, this context is a bit more narrow—a global context or a natural
one, Lame Deer, for instance, emphasized that the context of our lives that
matters most is that of nature, and the Dalai Lama, along with Aristotle,
Confucius, and others, emphasizes a social context. In each case, the key to
finding meaning in our lives is to first identify the larger context in which
our small lives make sense, then to understand how we can make our lives
meaningful by connecting them to that context.
With regard to temporality, the Stoics emphasized the eternality of the
universe and the fact that the period of our existence is brief and bounded
by infinite gulfs of our absence. Buddhism also emphasizes a constant
awareness of impermanence, the beauty of impermanence, and the urgency
that impermanence gives to our lives. Tolstoy, Lame Deer, and Nietzsche
pick up on the theme of mindfulness of death: At each moment in our lives,
we need to be aware of our own mortality and finitude.
In the texts we’ve examined, we’ve often seen the question of the meaning
of life addressed in terms of an account of human perfection. Aristotle
offered us an ideal of the perfect human life in the concept of eudaimonea,
flourishing, and tells us that this ideal can be achieved through a life of
activity in accordance with virtue, through moral strength — and practical
wisdom, and through friendship. The Daoists and Zen Buddhists give us the
sage as the ideal of perfection, one who pays attention to the empty spaces
and who lives spontaneously, effortlessly. Santideva and the Dalai Lama
extend this account of perfection to encompass the cultivation of a certain
kind of compassion, a commitment to altruistic action on behalf of others. For
Kant and Mill, human life is focused on reason, discourse, and participation in
liberal democratic societies. That ideal was challenged by Nietzsche, who
emphasized that what makes our lives beautiful is our artistry and spontaneity,
our ability to re-evaluate the values we’re taught and lead our lives in harmony
with values we ourselves create.
Many of the philosophers and theologians we’ve examined have urged us
to cultivate spontaneity in our lives. This spontaneity is motivated by the
idea that our actions and values don’t need to be brought together artificially.
For Aristotle and Confucius, the model here is that of the artist, one who
practices endlessly to achieve a second nature. For Daoism and Zen, the
emphasis is on the need to pare away the artificial second nature and return
to naturalness, Ultimately, Lame Deer tells us that we need to understand
that we are fundamentally part of the biological world, a world of circles
rather than squares,
For the thinkers we’ve explored, a meaningful life necessarily entails
freedom. The Gita emphasized the fact that freedom emerges from discipline,
while the Daoists urged us to free ourselves from social standards. Hume and
Kant emphasized the need to attain freedom from authority, an idea that Mill
extended to an insistence on absolute freedom of thought. Nietzsche was
concerned with freedom from philosophical ideas and from an intellectual
tradition that makes creativity impossible. Gandhi emphasized self-
mastery similar to that in the Gita, the kind of discipline that frees us from
consumerism and other external constraints.
The answer to our original question is deeply complex and conflicted;
it requires us to cultivate an awareness of reality in all its complexity and
adversity, to understand that our lives are finite, and to develop a commitment
to achieving individual excellence and to creating meaning in the lives of
others. Perhaps the first step in finding meaning is to ask the question, then
to engage, as we have done in this course, with the wide diversity of answers
that have been given throughout history and around the world.
Study Questions
1. What are the major dimensions along which accounts of the meaning
of life differ from one another? How would one go about choosing one
approach over another?
2. What common insights survive these differences? Why do these
ideas transcend the different approaches? Are they consistent with
one another?
