With the title of this essay, I have already begun to mislead the reader about the nature of the following discussion. To be clear, my intention is not to answer this question in the sense that the answer will be the only thing that is equivalent to the meaning of life; rather, I aim to ascribe the idea of a “meaning of life” to natural, biological phenomena, particularly evolution. Evolution can be described as the continuous changes that occur in a particular species’ genome. Any new trait can trace its origin to the coincidence of an arbitrary genetic mutation’s creation of a phenotype that increases the probability that the host organism will reproduce. Essentially, new phenotypes emerge through dumb luck and either dominate other phenotypes or fade into insignificance. The fact that evolution arises through probability implies that nature will generally provide the simplest or most efficient solution to a given problem.
After all, one favorable mutation is more likely to occur than two. I believe that the elusive illusion of a “meaning of life” is a necessary adaptation to the problem presented by consciousness. The problem to which I refer is the realization that all things must end. Heidegger called this realization “being toward death.” Given that Heidegger was deeply involved with Hannah Arendt and that they inevitably shared some exchange of ideas, I thought it would be useful to compare my idea to Arendt’s message about the meaning of life in her prologue to The Human Condition. In this passage, she discusses the effects that the technological advances of that time might have had on morality and the discernment of meaningfulness, but the message I found most interesting was her statement that “[Humans] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.”
She places emphasis on the idea that meaning is a quality that only inhabits things that can be communicated to and interpreted by others. My initial reaction to her work was apathy; another philosopher making infallible and unprovable claims about the meaning of life was no skin off my back. The idea stewed in my head, however, and through disagreement with it I began to piece together my own views on the subject. If anything, meaning is exclusively personal. The thing that has meaning is whatever thing that gives a person the motivation to delay suicide, to continue living, to ignore the condition of “being toward death,” and ultimately to reproduce. All that said, the corollary to this idea is that meaning cannot exist without humans. Arendt was not completely wrong in saying that meaning requires communication, because communication implies interpretation.
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While I disagree that meaning necessitates the involvement of more than one person, I believe that personal meanings still require interpretation of sensory input. In Annie Dillard’s short story “Total Eclipse,” she explores this idea while describing the mystifying and yet real experience of a solar eclipse. The most powerful part of her narrative is her description of the scream-inducing spontaneous darkness imposed by the umbra: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt.” The dichotomy of reality and perception could not be better demonstrated. As seen in this case, perception, or interpretation, is occasionally powerful enough to override our concrete knowledge about the universe. Drawing an analogy from the experience of the eclipse to the observation of a mushroom cloud accompanying an explosion, Dillard concludes that, as meaning involves perception, there can be no meaning without people. While somewhat tautological, I have secured for my own system of beliefs that the meaning of life is simply that which gives a person the will to survive despite the knowledge that continuing to live will involve some degree of pain and that their end cannot be altered.
It is my belief that consciousness results from higher intellect and that a hypothetical organism that develops consciousness without an inherent compulsion to seek meaning in life would realize the futility of life and immediately terminate its own existence. In other words, despite the advantages to survivability imparted by higher intellect, the presence of higher intellect and the absence of the illusion of meaning are an evolutionarily unfavorable combination of phenotypes. What I have not explained for myself is how that motivational thing that constitutes the illusion of meaning is assigned. The question for me then becomes: do we have the freedom to choose the thing that motivates us to live?
