Hamilton 2016 meaning of life

Question 1

cottingham (2003) a meaningful life must be ‘achievement- orientated’ that is, directed

Answer 1

towards some goal, or requiring, some focus of energy or concentration or rhythm in its execution

Question 2

appealing to the idea that to be fully human is to be able to subject one’s actions to moral evaluation, Cottingham claims that one becomes

Answer 2

less human in pursuing activities that involve ‘deceiving or hurting others, or making use of them as mere instrumental fodder for ones own successes, closing one’s own heart and mind to the voice of ones own fellow creatures’

Question 3

[Cottingham] suggests that someone whose life involves nonetheless need to be open

Answer 3

to others ‘if only in his off-duty hours’ and ‘inevitably create psychic dissonance’, indicating that this life cannot be truly meaningful

Question 4

Cottingham draws the conclusion that, for a life to be meaningful, it must be open to others- morally open to others: it must be one ‘whose

Answer 4

fundamental dispositions are structured in such a way as not to foreclose genuine emotional interaction and genuine dialogue’ with others

Question 5

very many of the most important and meaningful things seem to be so precisely

Answer 5

because they have no purpose or aim (…) art for arts sake’, seems wonderful

Question 6

all the play of life of sharing meals, friendly talk, looking at the natural world

Answer 6

and so on, none of which is achievement orientated or for anything

Question 7

What [Cottingham] means is not that a meaningful life cannot contain activities that have no goal

Answer 7

or are not achievement orientated, but that such activities have to exist alongside, or be somehow ‘nested’ in other activities which are so orientated

Question 8

we know that psychological deformation is often a condition of the production of art

Answer 8

Kafka, for example, was wracked by a sense of inferiority, burdened by feelings of guilt and filled with much disgust, as is well known, he wrote out of these, but one can hardly claim that this made his life less meaningful

Question 9

there is no doubt that the phenomenon to which I am referring and for which I am using Kafka as one example is so widespread as to be commonplace

Answer 9

of human experience, a recurrent feature of the human scene in widely different social and cultural context

Question 10

it is implausible to to suppose that the meaning of the human condition, and it is implausible to suppose that the meaning of the lives of of whole

Answer 10

swathes of human beings is impaired or undermined or, at the limit, negated, because they created out of resentment or anger or the like

Question 11

it might be said, in the lives of the rest of us, non-artists, the common ruck, things do not work this way

Answer 11

and anger or resentment distorts us, diminishes us, and thus impacts negatively on the meaning of our lives, and that, it might be said, is Cottinghams point

Question 12

we might perhaps say that someone totally closed to others is less than fully human in some normative sense

Answer 12

but there are far fewer such people than philosophers often like to imagine: thieves murderers, and so on are open to some of the time. so what counts as being open in the relevant sense

Question 13

some might say that we close our hearts and our minds to fellow creatures all the time, (…) we inevitably do this in order to get

Answer 13

on with things that matter to us. one might reply that this is not what Cottingham has in mind, and thesis no doubt true, but (…) his view cannot be used to justify any claim that such-and -such a life is meaningful or meaningless, since it will simply express such a claim from evaluative perspective

Question 14

Susan Wolf: ‘meaning arises from loving worthy objects of love and engaging with them in

Answer 14

a positive way’

Question 15

wolf: ‘the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares daily deeply about something or things, only if

Answer 15

she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something’

Question 16

Wolf adds that the things in question must be worthy, genuinely worthwhile. hence,

Answer 16

‘meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’

Question 17

van Gogh’s anguished relation to his painting, or Fassbinder’s tourtured attitude towards his filmmaking, or Gerard manly Hopikins love of poetry, which he always thought might be sinful and tried to abandon

Answer 17

and so on, in all of these cases, the attitude that person in question had towards his art was deeply ambivalent and full fo pain

Question 18

wolf:”doing what one loves being involved with things one really cares about, gives one a kind of joy in life that one would otherwise be without (…) so will give ones life a particular type of good feeling” —-

Answer 18

she clearly has in mind a good feeling or joy that is sustained, not merely isolated moments of such she calls this fulfilment

Question 19

The root problem is clearly that Wolf is operating with an extremely simplistic account of human psychology

Answer 19

as if human psychology were not the massively impacted and messy thing it is

Question 20

love of anything whatever is a highly complicated matter, which always involves at least a shade of

Answer 20

rejection or hostility in some way, and often much more than shade

Question 21

love always involves an element of need, and human beings resent in various ways the

Answer 21

vulnerability and weakness that their need exposes

Question 22

Wolf says that meaning in life is not the same as happiness and I agree

Answer 22

she also says rightly, that life replete with meaning, that someone finds fulfilling, makes us ‘vulnerable to pain, disappointment, and stress’

Question 23

but my point is not to say that Kafka and Kleist were unhappy, though they were- deeply so.

Answer 23

my point is that it makes no sense to think in their or any other cases of love as being something wholly positive or, to put it another way, it makes no sense to think that they loved what they did if we think that love is wholly positive

Question 24

Kleist and Kafka found their passion and gave them anything but joy or a particular kind of good feeling.

Answer 24

they did not at all feel fulfilled in what they did in any sense that Wolf has in mind.

Question 25

[Kliest and Kafka] or say, if you like, that they were fulfilled, as long as you recognise that this kind of fulfilment has nothing to do

Answer 25

with a good feeling or joy

Question 26

someone might object: did not Kafka and Kleist experience moments of joy, moments in which they were ecstatic over their achievements?

Answer 26

certainly they did, moments in which all the pain, torment and agony of their lives fell away as they contemplated things finished, a piece of writing that they knew to be of the highest quality to be complete

Question 27

Kleist also certainly experienced such joy in the days leading up to that

Answer 27

on which he blew his brains out

Question 28

This can hardly be what wolf had in mind: such is not sustained, and it contains within itself a

Answer 28

kind of agony that is part of what made it the joy it was, something desperate and lacerating

Question 29

Nietzsche would call it the ‘Dionysia’ a kind of euphoric self- fracturing or self-fragmentation, utterly distant from anything

Answer 29

that one would appropriately call ‘a good feeling’

Question 30

be as it may, even though wolf wants to distance the notion of fulfilment in question from happiness- meaningfulness, she says, is a particular kind of value,

Answer 30

‘neither subsumable under nor reducible to either happiness or morality’ - she cannot resist building into it something like happiness, seeing fulfilment as involving joy or a good feeling, as we have noted

Question 31

she seems to overlook the kind of person Nietzsche calls a

Answer 31

‘squandering spirit’ someone who finds meaning in a passion so intense that he almost wills his own destruction in it

Question 32

Cottingham thinks that those activities must be

Answer 32

morally good and genuinely or intrinsically worthwhile. his life be in fact, meaningless say if he is devoted to activities that he might find meaningful but which are not so because they are not genuinely worthwhile

Question 33

[cottingham’s view] some philosophers object to this on the grounds that, if a person find his life meaningful,

Answer 33

then it is regardless of whatever anyone else thinks

Question 34

the subjectivists think a life is meaningful if the individual whose life it is finds it to be so

Answer 34

and the objectivists disagree, claiming that the activities to which a life is to be so, irrespective of what the individual in question supposes

Question 35

what must strike us here is the fact that they philosophical material seems to work with the general idea that finding meaning in

Answer 35

life enables one to live, makes sense of things, whereas the material from literature and film points in the opposite direction, giving rather, a sense of the emptiness of human experience

Question 36

Arendt has a distinctly sceptical view of agency; she invites us to think of human beings as acting in a world in which they are exposed to many

Answer 36

and various forces they do not control and cannot fully understand, and which shape deeply the purposes and goals of any given individual

Question 37

we are caught up in a web of pre existent human relations that we did not choose, will outlast us

Answer 37

are largely contingent, and which we are very far from being able to understand fully, our identity is always to a greater or lesser extent a hostage to their telling of our story

Question 38

Arendt wants to say that one acts, but is

Answer 38

not the author of ones life

Question 39

further, the story I tell of my life is doubly exposed to the web of

Answer 39

interactions with others

Question 40

Arendt: ‘the meaning of a committed act is revealed only when the action itself has come to an

Answer 40

end and become a story susceptible to narration’

Question 41

the struggle to find and tell the meaning of a life is deeply anoretic: every human being wishes to be the author of his own life, make or discover a meaning of his own

Answer 41

and in his life, but no human being can do this

Question 42

what I take to be the meaning of my life is not only itself largely out of my control because it depends on my insertion in a web of interactions with others, it is also the case that

Answer 42

any stability I might achieve here, some consensus, let us say is only temporary and might be changed or overturned by what others say.