The Meaning of Life - Richard Taylor

Preface:

Sometimes people ask me why I study Philosophy or how it affects me as a religious person.  I am a Christian and a large part of what I study is secular, and in many writings, there will be some aggressive and blatant anti-religious sentiments.  Richard Taylor’s book Good and Evil contains those thoughts, and in many ways, when I read through them, there are some parts that I feel slightly offended when my views seem misrepresented in his writings but at the same time, there are many views that I misrepresent on many things.  My answer is that studying philosophy has given me a better perspective on why people believe what they believe and has taught me to be more humble in approaching such debates or discussions.  As I encourage those of different beliefs to try and get a better understanding of the worldview based on Christianity, I try my best to get a better understanding of others.

Summary:

Richard Taylor (1919-2003) in a selection from his book Good and Evil talks about a way to address the ever-looming question of whether life has any meaning.  He addresses that the question may itself be an unintelligible question but he says that it is important to contemplate and arrive at a significant answer.  Taylor goes about this task by discussing the ancient myth of Sisyphus.  He talks about what the myth is trying to convey to us and brings up some interesting variations he comes up with to alter our views on the meaningless existence of Sisyphus.

The Thought Experiment Against Hedonism

If you know what film this is from, good for you!

Robert Nozick (1938-2002) in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), attempts to demonstrate that there are more things in life than the pursuit of happiness, as hedonists would have you believe.  He tries to isolate the process of achieving happiness with a thought experiment and in turn, shows that there are other aspects of life that we value aside from happiness.  This is rather difficult to show in a real life situation since many things we do cause happiness and it is easy to reduce all of them down to the pursuit of happiness.  Nozick, instead, uses an aspect of complete virtual reality to make his point.

In his thought experiment, you’re given a choice to enter a machine that would give you any experience you desired.  In this world, the neuropsychologists have invented a machine that could “stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.”  You can choose any experience you wish to have and you won’t know that you’re in an experience machine while you’re in it: it will seem completely real to you.  You can choose the experience that you’ll have for the next 2 years and after the 2 years, you can have a short amount of time to come out and choose the experience you’ll have for the next 2 years, and so on.  Nozick asks the reader if we would plug into such a machine, after all, it is a life of complete bliss except for the few moments you come out to decide the next few years of life.

Hedonism - Epicurus

Epicurus (341-270 BCE) is a hedonist.  For those not familiar with the word, hedonists are those that value happiness above all else.  Hedonism puts pleasure as what we ought to ultimately pursue in life.  This can easily be misunderstood as to think that Epicurus encourages people to go out partying everyday and live a shallow life of shortsighted pleasures.  However, in his writing, Letter to Menoceus, he opposes this view of misrepresented hedonistic ideals and proceeds to explain what he means by pleasure-oriented life.

Epicurus starts his letter by establishing that death is something that the wise should not fear: “death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”  He says that the wise do not degrade the value of life nor does the wise try to foolishly try to elongate it.  With that in mind, this wise man would seek to enjoy the time he has on this earth rather than to try and “live well” when young and “die well” when old.  This, he says, is foolish.

Ethics

Ethics is a study of right and wrong.  Studying this subject is the reason why I entered the field of Philosophy and although studying all the different branches of Philosophy has been quite a pleasure, I do want to turn my attention to Ethics for a while.  Now, whether it's been a pleasure for everyone around me whenever I divert the conversation into a philosophical debate is questionable but we shall all persevere.  Ethics is broadly divided into 4 sub-topics, at least according to the text I'm studying but it'll have to do as the book provides us a good starting point to spark discussions: value theory, normative ethics, metaethics and moral problems.  These all just roll off your tongue and sound very exciting, but just bear with me.

Value theory has to do with determining what is good.  Before we can start to discuss what is morally good and evil, we must first lay out the foundational stones and figure out what we ought to pursue in life for its own good.  For example, is happiness good in itself?  Should we live our lives with the pursuit of happiness in mind?  We all do try to be happy (most of us) in our own way but is that ultimately what we should pursue in this life?  The most amount of happiness?  Epicurus (341-270 BCE) certainly thought so as he says, "we must exercise ourselves in things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it."  There are many who disagree with this stance and work to establish other things as good in their own rights.