Nagel - The Meaning of Life Flashcards
It’s not clear why the fact that we’ll be dead in 200 years should imply that nothing we do now really matters.
Is it because we want our achievements to be permanent? They will not be.
No explanation explains the point of your life as a whole.
Looking at it from the outside, it wouldn’t matter if you had never existed. After you have gone out of existence, it won’t matter than you did exist.
Your existence matters to other people and vice versa, but their lives have no point either, so it ultimately doesn’t matter that you matter to them.
Does it matter that it doesn’t matter?
“I don’t need more than that to keep going.” This reply only works if you really can avoid setting your sights higher. Once you do that, you open yourself to the possibility that your life is meaningless.
If your life as a whole did have a point in relation to something larger (a political or social movement), would that mean it wasn’t meaningless?
Why isn’t it ok for your life to be pointless? And if it isn’t acceptable, why should it be acceptable when we get to the larger context?
The idea of God seems to be the idea of something that can explain everything else, without having to be explained itself.
My problem here, with the role of God as ultimate explanation, is that I’m not sure I understand the idea.
Can there really be something which gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but which couldn’t have, or need, any point itself?
If God is supposed to give our lives a meaning that we can’t understand, it’s not much of a consolation.
Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
Part of the problem is that some of us have an incurable tendency to take ourselves seriously. We want to matter to ourselves “from the outside”.
If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously. Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
