The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time

Isaiah Berlin explained his move from philosophy to the history of ideas through the desire to know more at the end of his career than at the beginning. He was mistaken: philosophy often makes demonstrable progress. Focusing on our context, this is also the Golden Age of analytic exploration of the issue of the meaning of, or in, life. Without depreciating the value of the insights of the ages on this topic from Ecclesiastes onward, a great deal of progress has been made on it in the last generation. Rivka Weinberg’s splendid new book, The Meaning of It All, takes this progress considerably further in a number of important ways. Anyone reading Weinberg’s book will know and understand more about the meaning of life at the end of this book than they did at the beginning. Moreover, readers are doubly fortunate, because she accomplishes this in a relatively short, fast-moving, well-written, irreverent, personal, and entertaining book.

The book has an introduction and five chapters. The introduction does its introductory work, but also presents a significant conceptual contribution, a typology of meaning-related concepts. The kinds of meaning Weinberg suggests are Ultimate Meaning (UM), Everyday Meaning (EM), and Cosmic Meaning (CM), and we shall get to know them below. The characteristics of meaning are value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point (xii). These distinctions are genuine innovations which significantly advance the discussion. Even those who doubt her further suggestions on life and its meaning will need to speak from now on more or less in these terms, at least as to what she calls the characteristics of meaning. This should help to make the whole debate more accurate, subtle, and sophisticated.

Beyond this conceptual contribution the book includes two ambitious moves, the “narrowing of focus” on meaning, in Chapters 1-3, and the depreciation of death and emphasis on time instead, in Chapters 4-5. In the first, Weinberg decisively argues that there is no Ultimate Meaning. Further, Cosmic Meaning is rather dubious and questionable, probably not even worth fussing about, so that even if we can make sense of some views within it, CM will not add much life to the meaning of life. This then leaves us with Everyday Meaning, which becomes, she claims, the proper locus of our endeavor for meaning. Many interesting philosophical and practical questions remain to be debated even then, but Weinberg’s discussion takes the Meaning of It All away from the majestic aspirations of ultimacy, the grand scheme of things, the view from nowhere, God, or the cosmos, to the mundane issues of taking care of our children and deciding whether to take up painting.

Unlike the Everyday and Cosmic varieties, where conceptual awareness of the plurality of the potential characteristics, and clarity as to their contextual relevance and interconnections, are crucial, Ultimate Meaning raises, according to Weinberg, only one question: does living have a point? Within our lives, our endeavors can have a point, but what is the point of living itself? This she says, is “metaphysically impossible” (68). Here I was not convinced, and inclined to try and keep UM alive. One way would be to modify the UM question. But even sticking to Weinberg’s conceptual use of the term, it wasn’t clear to me why UM is impossible. Is it that one cannot have UM of one’s life because one necessarily lives within life, and there is no way of being as it were both in and out? I was reminded here of Zeno’s movement-denying Arrow, which cannot move because clearly it can move neither within the space it occupies (no room for movement!) nor out of it (it’s never there!). But this isn’t correct (I just went to the fridge to get a drink).

Meaning seems mostly to be about value. Why cannot the UM be to partake in value? Luckily, we can do so, and that’s the point. What’s the point of that point, i.e., of doing so? Well, it has value. It’s valuable. One engages with, experiences, is enhanced by, contributes to, reacts to, and gains value. That seems to me an excellent point to life. Berlin would often approvingly quote Herzen, who said that the purpose of life is to live it. The ultimate point of life is to live, because (in addition to other benefits) this allows one to engage with value, and this has value, and makes one’s life valuable. What more could one want? Indeed, if we could miraculously bring ourselves to be conceived, it would make sense to do this both because we would thereby live, hopefully enjoy life, and gain Everyday Meaning, and because being such a being would have a value-based point, we would also gain Ultimate Meaning. The ability to engage with value provides the point of what Weinberg calls the meta-project of leading or running a life.

For example, in Chapter 10 of my recent book Paradoxical Ethics, I explain why opting, in one’s job or position, for making irreplaceable contributions can add value and thereby meaning to and in one’s life. One does this either by making the sort of contribution that would otherwise not be made, or by making the given contribution better than one’s likely replacement would. Such a consideration would of course fall under Weinberg’s Everyday Meaning, but why does it not generate Ultimate Meaning as well? After all, in irreplaceable contributions, one’s role in the world includes a gap that would not be filled except for oneself. Value provides the point of living, and one’s contribution adds unique value to the world. Weinberg, for example, has gained Ultimate Value by adding to the world a valuable book that would otherwise not have existed.

On Cosmic Meaning, Weinberg’s discussion often reminded me of Hume’s writing, when, for example, he makes fun of religious claims about miracles, or of the pursuit of the “monkish virtues”. CM, she shows, is much overrated. We repeatedly see how her diverse distinctions (significance, impact, explanation, purpose, etc.) are helpful. She is particularly effective when employing them while exploring the suggested “happy endings” of life; for example, exploring the idea of partaking in divine bliss or in a life of contemplation, in terms of purpose and value.

Relating usually involves actions, sentiments, and attitudes. So if our cosmic purpose is communion [with God], what happens when we achieve it? Do we just bask in its glow, sizzle in its warmth? As with happiness, that emotional state of feeling closeness does not, by itself, seem very meaningful. (76)

As she shows, “It’s not easy to imagine an end that provides a significantly meaningful, positive, and sensible explanation of the universe, no matter how much magic sauce we allow into the mix” (104).

The action largely lies, then, according to Weinberg, in Everyday Meaning. There is a sharp discussion of the objective-subjective question concerning meaning in life, and Weinberg rejects both subjectivism and Susan Wolf’s hybridism. Weinberg plausibly argues that objective meaning suffices in order to have a meaningful life, since we can mistakenly underestimate the actual, objective meaning of our own lives, but it would still be there. I particularly liked the discussions about the potential for meaning (both of humans as such and that of individual persons), about the risks of missing it, and about the great inequality in the Everyday Meaning of people’s lives. Weinberg is always on the lookout for cant and is excellent in not allowing the typical (perhaps especially common in the US) attempts to put a redeeming, positive gloss on the bad aspects of life (e.g., failure; see 62).

A large and venerable list of people, including Heidegger, Nussbaum, Sartre, Scheffler, Tolstoy, and Williams have sung the praises of death as enabling us to have meaning in life. Weinberg goes over the diverse arguments and convincingly finds them lacking. Eternal life could be just fine. Life under these conditions could still involve great risks of suffering or loss, and allow for achievement and purpose, even if never ending. Boredom need not ensue. Death is unnecessary.

What mostly matters for Everyday Meaning is not death, but time. There is too much of interest here to discuss, but just by way of illustration, Weinberg brings out the weakness and dangers of the “focus on the present”, a favorite of much popular psychology, as well as of the Stoics, and of followers of the Buddha. As she writes, “If you are interested in meaning this is extremely terrible advice” (154). Rather, her advice is: “Fully appreciating the past, experiencing the present, and anticipating the future” (161). She shows how value requires taking time, for example with love (155). Once again, the wealth of salient concepts—such as impact, significance, purpose, coherence, explanation—helps the reader to see this. They all require that we go beyond the present. Yet, now looking in the negative direction, it is again time, and not so much death, that threatens meaning, by wearing away the things we worked to achieve, thereby diminishing their impact, significance, and value.

The Meaning of It All is a magnificent book and an important contribution to our understanding both of the meaning of life and of the possibilities for living meaningful lives. The book will provide the conceptual Gold Standard for the distinct questions which need to be asked concerning the kinds of meaning (Ultimate, Cosmic, and Everyday) and, in particular, what Weinberg calls the characteristics of meaning. The book challenges other philosophers to try to make sense of Ultimate Meaning—for, Weinberg argues, this is simply impossible. The book also redraws the terrain of the debate concerning Cosmic Meaning, taking up the various religious and cosmological offers for CM, and finding them vague and unappetizing, when not completely senseless. Weinberg has many fascinating and wise things to say about Everyday Meaning, both philosophically and pragmatically. Her discussion here connects to her strategic depreciation of death and her emphasis on the crucial importance of time in seeking meaning in our lives. Throughout, she strikes a good balance between the critical puncturing of claims in an area that seems to invite pretentious nonsense, and awareness of the importance and value of thinking constructively and thereby assisting people’s efforts to make something meaningful of their lives in a tragic world. Anyone who wishes to see what the best kind of subtle, sensible, and courageous philosophical work has to say about The Meaning of It All must read this outstanding book. But take care to do so while you still have plenty of time left.