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Often when I have philosophical conversations with friends I run into this intuition that I think is very obviously wrong but that a lot of people seem to share.
People tend to believe that the meaning of life is something that is either perfectly secured by the axioms of a religion, or is completely nonexistent. Either you convince yourself that there is a God who hands down the moral value of everything, who dictates what is right or wrong and imbues the universe with purpose, or it’s all a total wash and we just have to distract ourselves with empty pleasures until we die.
David Chapman has made this argument much better than me, but I am here to make it again: nihilism and dogmatism are not the only two options. You don’t have to “trick” yourself into believing a specific religion, else be swallowed up by the void. I think this false dichotomy is based on two errors: a misunderstanding of what meaning is, and a misunderstanding of human psychology.
misunderstandings of meaning
What is “meaning”? People often expect that a meaning can either be subjective (made up, in a person’s head, not real) or objective (independent of any observer, eternally true). These are not the only two possibilities. Consider the example of the parable of the pebbles, adapted from Chapman’s piece:
An ancient shepherd, in an era before numbers were invented, is sick of his job. In the morning, he lets his sheep out of the pen to graze, and they scatter across a rugged pasturage. In the evening, he wants to be certain they have all returned to the fold, where they are guarded by sheepdogs against wolves. That takes a long walk, searching the hills and valleys in case a straggler has gotten stuck in a rocky crevice.
He discovers a way to divine whether some sheep are still out grazing, without searching. In the morning, as each sheep leaves one-by-one, he drops a pebble into a bucket by the gate. In the evening, as each returning sheep enters, he takes a pebble out of the bucket. When there are no pebbles left in the bucket, he can close the gate and turn in for the night.
What is the meaning of the pebbles in the bucket? What does the bucket of pebbles represent? In this parable, the pebbles represent the number of sheep that have left the pen. That is the meaning of the pebbles. But what makes the pebbles have that meaning? What happens if the shepherd moves away and leaves the bucket of pebbles untouched? Or if he sells the pebbles and they’re shipped off to northern Ireland? Do the pebbles still represent the number of sheep that have left the pen?
The point is that the pebbles, when viewed as a symbolic system, carry meaning contingent upon the shepherd’s ongoing activity. The meaning is not entirely in the shepherd’s head—as long as he maintains his practice of counting the sheep, the pebbles literally do refer to the sheep. But it’s also not totally objective—if someone else randomly stumbled into the bucket of pebbles, they would not know that it corresponds to the number of sheep, and as mentioned, if the shepherd moves, the pebbles lose their correspondence to the sheep altogether.
Meaning, as Wittgenstein pointed out, is emergent based on activity, or use. It is not inherent.
Now, the significance of this parable is that it basically extends to all the other kinds of meaning we care about—language, thinking, stories, and the emotional meanings we ascribe to life events and existence. Rather than being subjective or objective, all of these meanings are interactive. People often lament that in the absence of some omniscient creator who assigns meaning to things, all meanings are destroyed. But this is not how the most basic kinds of meaning work. Meanings are created interactively, on the fly, without recourse to some eternal all-knowing power.
misunderstandings of human psychology
That sums up the first misconception in the nihilist/dogmatist dichotomy. The second misconception is about human psychology.
People think the decline of organized religion has left us struggling psychologically. I think this is true, but not for the reasons people sometimes claim it is. What I often hear is that with the decline of religion, we’ve lost our “ultimate answer” to why anything matters. My view is that we’ve never had, and don’t really need, an “ultimate” answer.
All of our concepts and justifications are tenuous. Words are an inherently limited way of describing reality. If you pay close attention to your own experience, you realize that trying to accurately convey it with something like “I feel fine” is futile. And more words don’t help. Even an entire book could not capture all the subtleties of the conscious experience you are currently having.
Likewise, no system of concepts or statements could ever give us the kind of “ultimate” meaning that some people strive for. Any written system of values, or story of why the universe is the way it is, will forever remain an incomplete picture of reality.
What religion actually provided, in my view, is not an “ultimate” answer, but just a more salient and vivid answer than we have today. In the past, there was a shared story that gave a small community a shared sense of purpose, along with a set of rituals and customs that brought that story to life. The psychological value of religion was not in providing an ultimate justification to endless philosophical inquiry of the form “but why does that matter”. The human mind does not need such a justification to feel whole: it just needs community, shared rituals, and emotionally resonant stories.