The meaning of life
Life, in and of itself, can have no meaning unless it is given meaning. As ‘the movement of albuminous protoplasm’ – or whatever Engels called it in his materialist Dialects of Nature (today we would say the growth and reproduction of complex molecules) – life develops spontaneously from its inorganic background given the right conditions. But even this description is not definitive enough to distinguish the sparks of life that counter with their increasing complexity the entropy of the vast universe expanding to its dissolution. Since ‘All that lives must die/ Passing through nature to eternity,’ as Hamlet’s mother reminds him, it is sometimes difficult to know when something or someone lives or dies. Simple multiplying life forms are not so different from non-living crystals, for instance, or other self-replicating structures that are the ground of more complex and even conscious beings.
Nor is such description or definition of life the same as life’s meaning. Living systems also have purpose to maintain and reproduce themselves but this is not their meaning either, although it may be their meaning for them. As a famous biologist once said, ‘In the world of sea-urchins there are only sea-urchin things’ and observably sea-urchins, like all other organisms under natural conditions of selection, behave and evolve so as to survive and multiply. They do not mean to do so though; it just happens.
Meaning can only be given to nature by beings capable of making meaning. That is, beings with imagination using symbolic language to communicate their imagined and conscious reflections to one another, including importantly their self-consciousness of being conscious. The sort of signaling languages that other animals use to communicate with each other are too limited for this because they can only mean one thing at a time: a blackbird’s alarm call, for instance, means just one thing to other blackbirds and they react to its warning by sounding their own alarm as they fly off.
Human beings also use signals but we have to first agree amongst ourselves what they will mean. A red traffic light means stop, for instance, and there can be no ambiguity about this; although we could choose to change the signal if we decided to do so, as they did throughout China during the Cultural Revolution when red indicated go and green meant stop.
Human symbolic languages however are different from the unambiguous meaning encoded by the signals of other animals in that symbols, whatever form they take, can be and often are deliberately ambiguous. They can mean more than one thing which we have to agree on if we are to communicate effectively with one another. So, unlike Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through The Looking Glass, we can’t just choose what we want words to mean – at least if we want to be understood by other people.
In the case of ‘life’, scientists or medics can perhaps agree on working definitions, as above, to distinguish living from non-living things but this is not life’s meaning, which can only be its meaning for us as human beings agreeing this amongst ourselves for our common human purposes. Humpty Dumpty may get things upside down but he is not so silly; as he tells Alice, ‘The question is which is to be master – that’s all.’
So, unless we think that the meaning of life comes from somewhere else outside of or beyond the universe and its nature that we experience and the MoL is therefore to be discovered – in an old book, perhaps, or through some revelation which we would then have to interpret to make sense of the alien speaker’s symbolic language – we have to agree on as universal a meaning as possible to give it. This would be our master narrative, explanation and meaning that we would all agree upon.
Amazingly, despite all the twaddle about the sacredness and irrepressible vitality of human life, seven billion and more of us seem so far incapable of doing this. This is not just because there are different claims to ‘the truth’ advanced by various religions for example, or because some groups of people regard themselves as the masters who are entitled to impose their views on others at their expense, but because current global capitalist society is dedicated only to its own reproduction and expansion for profit regardless of the consequences for human and other life on this planet.
Of course, economic growth to manufacture more and more commodities for sale at a profit is presented by the few who gain directly and in the short-term from it, as enhancing life to ensure its best future. Many more buy into this illusory future because they cannot imagine any alternative to it and meaning is thus restricted to the terms of existing society.
But to more and more people, it is increasingly obvious, as climate and the seasons become increasingly erratic, while at the same time we reach and pass various natural limits to growth, that we cannot go on producing more and more stuff without physically destroying humanity and turning our environment into a wilderness. It would be a perversion of our situation as the only species and beings that we know of to have self-conscious awareness of our position as – in this sense – the highest form of life on earth, if we were to abrogate that responsibility.
We would then renege on the long eons of evolution of life on earth and the possibly unique physical conditions preceding them if we reverted to the level of unselfconscious life. Then we would have to ‘Think…’ with the recently deceased and sadly lamented Gore Vidal, ‘of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every 40 years.’ Then, ‘Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.’
To avoid this sui-species-cide we have therefore to inaugurate new shared meaning and value for human life to preserve its future survival on earth.
By Patrick Ainley
The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29
