Blog 6: Counterargument

My final question: Is life meaningless. My answer: No, we have the pursuit of happiness, our families and friends to give our lives meaning. We each have our own talents even if I may not be able to throw a football like Peyton Manning, I may be able to draw a beautiful sunset. My counter argument will be based directly off of the example of Sisyphus. The rolling of the rock up and down the hill is exactly how some people feel that our lives are. The book The Truth about the World brings up this argument by saying that our lives are going up the hill and then we die. The rock rolls back down and our kids start to push it back up the hill again. The basic argument is that everything that we do will fade over time. You would have to build a temple that lasted for many generations to have any real meaning and even then the book still says there is no meaning. The counter argument says that even with things like the pyramids that are still lasting over time, people marvel over the icon and not the people who made them. People travel to see the pyramid and not King (fill in the blank). I do think this is a reasonable counterargument but it doesn’t change my opinion.

Blog 5: The Question

There is one huge question or counter argument that I am finding in my research of the meaning of life. The question-Is life meaningless? The best example I found came from “The Truth about the World,” by James and Stuart Rachels. The story in the book is that of Sisyphus. The way the myth was told in the book has Sisyphus telling an eternal secret of the gods to mortals. The gods then punished Sisyphus by making him roll a rock up a hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus made it towards the top of the hill, the rock would roll back down and he was forced to start over again. This punishment was to continue on for eternity. The reason for this story was to show how harsh a meaningless life can be. An argument against the story was that it was cruel because of the hard labor of pushing a big rock, but the book says imagine the big rock as the size of a pebble and every time he got towards the top with the pebble it fell back down the hill and he had to start again. Now the theory of the hard labor is gone. The other argument against this story was the he wasn’t doing something that he wanted to do. Now imagine that the gods gave Sisyphus an obsession for rolling stones, so he not only liked rolling the stone, but he felt it was his life work. As the book says “he was never frustrated or concerned.” Nothing has changed from the original scenario other than Sisyphus’ view on rolling the stones. The work itself is just as meaningless. You still feel bad for him because his no meaning. He is not working towards anything and he is never finished. I loved this story because if a person who is suicidal feels there life has no meaning like Sisyphus’, then I could understand why they would want to do it. It also gives good insight into what a meaningless life is and it shows that most of us have a meaningful life. I think that I will end up tying this into the happiness part of my story, because there are other directions that the meaningless life theory can go in as well.

Blog 4: The Big 5

The more I study philosophy, the more I am beginning to learn that I will not be finding a direct answer to all of my questions. The deeper I dig the more questions that I come up with. I really like the way the Problems from Philosophy by James Rachels breaks down the meaning of life into concepts. That’s what this post is going to be about. Some will be from her and others will be from my other sources.
The first concept that I want to discuss is happiness. I am the type of person that likes direct answers and happiness is as far from direct as any other concept in philosophy. What does it mean to be happy? Something that makes me happy may have little or no effect on someone else’s happiness in that same situation. From most of the research I have done it seems like a person’s happiness level really doesn’t increase or decrease dramatically based on the events in their life. If a person is a generally happy person and they get hit by a bus and become paralyzed, then they will be upset or depressed for a little while and end up back at their original level of happiness. Likewise if someone is generally unhappy then even if they hit the lotto he or she will be above the normal level of happiness for a limited time, before coming back down to their normal level of happiness. There is so much more to explore in happiness, but this is only blog post four and I don’t want to write my whole paper out right here.
Concept number two talks about the religious aspect. The book brings up the misconceptions about how religion sometimes is looked at as the meaning of life. One of them is the reason that our lives are meaningful. One example given is that our lives are meaningful because “we are the object of God’s love.” He goes on to give the example that the majority of us having people who love us (family, friends). He says if we feel that our lives are meaningless despite having these people around us, people that love us, how is the addition of someone else’s love for us supposed to help. I found that to be a pretty powerful argument for that particular point, and there were some points that he shows religion having a positive effect on the meaningfulness of life. I can’t wait to get more in depth and learn more about this argument as well.
The next concept is the meaning of particular lives. I have a lot more reading and research to do on this concept, but the main point of this concept states that each of us has a reason for being here. Whether it is to satisfy a personal relationship with family, personal accomplishments, such as graduating from college, or just being contributing to the well being of other people we all have something that we can contribute here on earth. Not everyone is going to be Bill Gates or Kobe Bryant, but you can live a life consistent with the talents that you were given.
Another great meaning of life concept that people hate talking about and always get nervous about is death. I love this concept because it gives more of a direct look at a particular life, and when it is done the meaning that is left behind. One argument says that after we die there will be no pain. We will not be unhappy, upset or otherwise, therefore dying isn’t a bad thing, it is nothing. The other argument says that when we die we have no one that will care for us and we have no one to care after.
Then there is the concept of the significance that our lives carry. Looking at it from a universe point of view our lives are insignificant, but from a humanistic point of view our lives have a lot of meaning. This is basically the “indifferent universe” concept. It isn’t too far from tying in with death so I will probably look at those two concepts as one when my final paper comes around to see where it takes me.
The last concept is the point of view. This really ties into my Youtube.com video that I have showing down below. Everyone has their own outlook on what their own personal meaning of life is. One of my personal favorites was this guy saying that his meaning of life was staying alive and avoiding death. So is that it? Avoiding death is what he feels he is living his life for, does the fact that I believe in God, or internal happiness make him wrong. Can he have a meaningful life if most of his time is spent paranoid that someone is going to break in to his house and kill him? It doesn’t seem like that is a meaningful life to me, but that is another argument that I am going to have to pursue in my final paper. Thanks for checking out my blog today leave some positive feedback or constructive criticism and I will try to do better next time!

Rachels, James. Problems From Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.