Nothingness and the Meaning of Life: Philosophical Approaches to Ultimate Meaning Through Nothing and Reflexivity

313 Pages·2014·1.24 MB·English

by  Nicholas Waghorn

Nothingness and the Meaning of Life
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Nothingness and the
Meaning of Life
Philosophical Approaches to Ultimate
Meaning Through Nothing and Reflexivity
Nicholas Waghorn
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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First published 2014
© Nicholas Waghorn, 2014
Nicholas Waghorn has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-47253-181-0
ePDF: 978-1-47253-456-9
ePub: 978-1-47252-985-5
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: A Crisis in Meaning 1
Part 1 Getting Us Nowhere – The Geography of Nothingness
1 Heidegger and the Evolution of das Nichts 9
2 Strange Bedfellows: Carnap and Derrida’s Critiques
of the Heideggerian Nothing 29
Part 2 Think Nothing Of It – The Conceptuality of Nothingness
3 Nothing Under the Microscope 49
4 To Be AND Not to Be – Is that the Answer? 85
5 Feeling Nothing: Is the Affective Effective? 102
6 Arguing – Avoid! 125
Part 3 Nothing To Do With Me – The Application of Nothingness
7 The Quest for Meaning 161
8 Divine Inspiration? On Religion as a Source of Meaning 193
Concluding Speculations 228
Notes 233
Bibliography 287
Index 297
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people whose help led to the completion
of this book. I thank first Dudley Carr, Fiona Barker, Roger Kendall and Dave
Leal, all of whom, in various ways, set me on the path of studying philosophy.
For help in my early career and a great deal of support, first as tutors and then
as colleagues, my heartfelt thanks go to Pamela Sue Anderson, Jordan Bell and
Joseph Shaw. For substantial discussion of the issues written about here I am
grateful to Max de Gaynesford, Simon Glendinning and Stephen Mulhall. John
Cottingham deserves special thanks for his generosity with his time and his
patience in talking with me about these matters. For their gracious responses
to my queries regarding their work I thank Stanley Rosen, Michael Slote and
William F. Vallicella, and for thought-provoking interactions I thank Mike
Buick, Paul Fiddes, Jo Lovesey, Stephen Priest, Mark Salib and Tim Stanley.
Liza Thompson has done a wonderful job of overseeing the production of
this book for Bloomsbury, and has been encouraging and helpful every step of
the way; I could not have asked for a better editor. I am also indebted to Rachel
Norman, Jenna Steventon, Rachel Eisenhauer, Kim Muranyi, and Arun Mohan
for their hard work and for making the process of production such a relaxed and
pleasant one.
Finally I would like to thank my friends and students, who have often been
kind enough to show interest in my work, and my family, who have been a source
of unending material, moral, emotional and spiritual support, and to whom this
book is dedicated: Amy, Mum, Dad, Grandmother.
Introduction: A Crisis in Meaning
Death has always filled me with a peculiar horror. The idea that there will be
a future filled with the beauty that life affords me now, but which I will not
participate in, causes me great distress. And the idea that I will eventually die
seems to rob my life of at least some of its meaning, namely those meaningful
activities I could have engaged in had I lived longer. But this book is not primarily
about death. For, in the face of death, I thought to myself: ‘Suppose you were
immortal; would your life be meaningful then?’ And it seemed to me that the
thought of an everlasting life of the kind I have now held a horror of its own. The
horror of a tireless, restless, eternally striving existence, from which there was
no respite.
The revelation of this paradox was something of a surprise to me. I had been
so obsessed with my fear of dying, that I had never considered the terrors of the
alternative. It made me ask myself what I really wanted out of life. Was there
any state of affairs that I might find myself in with which I could rest contented?
It struck me that if I could find such a state of affairs, then I would have found
the meaning of life. Not just a way to make my life more meaningful, for that
might still leave me discontented with the amount of meaning in my life, but
the meaning of life. Consequently, I set out to think through what state of affairs
might make my life ultimately meaningful, disregarding any pragmatic concerns.
This book is the account of what happened.
I do not think my case is unique, or even uncommon. While I have perhaps
spent more time developing my thoughts on this issue, which is one of the
luxuries of pursuing a career in philosophy, the intuitions underlying my
disquiet are, I hypothesize, frequently to be found in many people, explicitly or
implicitly. Moreover, some social phenomena can be viewed as responding to
these intuitions. It is notable, for example, that a sense of life’s meaninglessness,
and the depression that often accompanies it, appears far more prevalent in
parts of the world that are materially wealthy. It may be that the satisfaction of
our most basic needs allows us the time and leisure to reflect on other needs
2 Nothingness and the Meaning of Life
and desires, to move beyond the here and now. As Brecht says: ‘Grub first, then
ethics’1 – and the wealthy are fortunate in having eaten their fill.
Some take this to mean that worries about the meaning of life are in some
way indicative of decadence, worries that result from having too much time on
our hands, from having no real problems. While I believe (along with everyone
else I am sure) that we should strive to meet the dire needs of the poor, I do
not think we should dismiss the problems that arise once material needs are
satisfied. After all, the more we are able to free the world from the pain of
unfulfilled basic needs, the more these problems will reveal themselves, for they
are part of the human condition. And the lack of meaning in one’s life, even
though it may require some degree of leisure to see, is a serious problem for
anyone – so serious as to prompt suicide in some. Furthermore, meaning may
even help some of us to deal with our suffering. As Nietzsche notes: ‘If we have
our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.’2 Of course, this
armchair sociology of mine is wholly speculative – just thoughts that happened
to strike me.
Let me return to safer ground, namely the theme of this book. I am engaged
in a search for the meaning of life. Of course, I am not alone in this – especially
in recent years. Not so long ago the question of life’s meaning was, in the
academy of analytic philosophy, largely ignored or disparaged. True, there had
been a constant undercurrent of work in issues surrounding the meaning of
life, often resulting in an impact far beyond the amount of work produced
(famous treatments by celebrated philosophers like Thomas Nagel, Robert
Nozick and David Wiggins are all examples of this), but it is only within the
last decade or so that the area has begun to burst into vibrant bloom. The rate
at which essays on the topic are published is steadily increasing, awareness and
interest in the philosophical community at large is keeping pace, and books,
a few technical and many popular, are being published to bring findings to the
general public.
Within Continental philosophy, the issue of life’s meaning has tended to be
addressed more often, but a lot of this attention is oblique and wedded to a mass
of complex literature. Often the reader will need to make sense of lengthy and
involved discussions of ‘being’, ‘transcendence’, ‘the other’ and similar notions in
order to extract what Continental philosophers have to say on the issue. I will
be dealing with both analytic and Continental literature in this book, seeking to
delineate relations and disagreements between these strands. This will involve
some of the technical argumentation and use of linguistic resonance that are
hallmarks of analytic and Continental philosophy, respectively; nevertheless,
Introduction: A Crisis in Meaning 3
I have striven (perhaps not always successfully) to be as clear as possible in
taking the reader through the arguments.
Earlier, I noted that my interest was not in finding ways of making my life
more meaningful, but in finding the meaning of life. I address these former issues
of partial meaning implicitly, but my central focus is on whether it is possible
to conceive or achieve an existence the meaningfulness of which cannot be
improved upon – what I call ‘ultimate’ meaning. This notion seems to have been
largely overlooked in the contemporary literature. It is my intuition that people
worry far more about whether their lives have ultimate meaning than whether
they have any meaning at all. The endeavour to achieve ultimate meaning can
be rephrased to parallel epistemological discussions of our desire to eliminate
doubt in order to arrive at knowledge claims that are certain. For, just as we have
a tendency to ask how a claim drafted in to provide epistemological justification
for a prior claim is itself justified, we have a tendency to ask by what further
criteria a goal or purpose that is meant to bestow meaning is itself meaningful.
For any end point or limit we reach, there seems the possibility of moving past
it, which puts it into question.
The meaning of life, then, is approached here not from a perspective of applied
ethics, but rather from that of questions concerning conceptual limits. It is my
hypothesis that the capacity to reiterate a request for justification for each new
candidate that presents itself calls for a candidate to be presented which disrupts
our ability to carry out such reiteration. My route into this search for such a
candidate is by examination of the notion of ‘nothing’. To this end, an analysis of
that notion is employed, useful insofar as it is the one of a breed of very general
notions in philosophy (including ‘Being’ and ‘the absolute’), the examination of
which tends to make issues concerning conceptual limits most manifest. The
radicalness of the search for an understanding of ‘nothing’ also requires attention
to the methodology of such an endeavour, and indeed to whether philosophy can
adequately proceed without acknowledging the possibility of its other, faith.
The argumentative strategy of the book can thus be expressed in this way:
for anything that we might put forward as the ultimate meaning of our lives,
as that which could not be more meaningful, we can always take its meaning-
giving characteristics and wish that they be extended in some way. Given that
we can do this, its meaningfulness can be improved upon, and it turns out
not to have been the ultimate meaning of our lives. But the idea of nothing,
which, taken seriously, cannot be defined (for to define something is always to
predicate something of it), will not be susceptible to this problem, as it has no
characteristics that might be further extended. So nothing, as long as it is not