In
his 1978 paper “Death and the Meaning of Life”[1]
Kai Nielsen argues that our lives can be meaningful even if a) death really is
the end of us (i.e. total annihilation with no after-life or eventual resurrection)
and b) there is no God, and that they can be just as meaningful as if there were a God or our death were not
final. In other words, neither death nor the non-existence of God does in any
way undermine or diminish our ability to live a meaningful life.
Nielsen
admits that he finds it regrettable that he has to die because he would rather
go on living forever. However, our having to die is, in his book, not
particularly dreadful either. Regretting
the fact that we have to die is one thing, but dreading it quite another. Regret is a reasonable reaction to our
mortality, while dread and despair are not. The inevitability of our death does,
after all, not devalue anything we do now. So instead of uselessly lamenting our
mortality and needlessly letting our future death overshadow and effectively ruin
our life, we had better face death stoically when it comes and in the meantime make
the most of the life we have got. “Death should only be dreadful if one’s life
has been a waste.” (154)
Nielsen
objects to the (especially among Christians) common view that if we do not in
some way survive our body’s death and if there is no God to make sure that “such
a life will have a certain character”, “life will be pointless and morality
without significance.” (155) Morality, he argues, is real even if there is no
God or eternal life. Some things are wrong, plain and simple, we know them to be wrong, and they will be
equally wrong in a godless world. “Torturing human beings is vile; exploiting
and degrading human beings is through-and-through evil; cruelty to human beings
and animals is, morally speaking, unacceptable; and treating one’s promises
lightly or being careless about the truth is wrong.” (155) We do not,
therefore, need God or immortality “to make sense of our lives as moral beings”
(157). Nor do we need God or immortality to have a purpose in life. Without God
there may not be a purpose to life or of
life, but that does not mean that we cannot have any purpose or purposes in life. Perhaps there is “no plan for
the universe or providential ordering of things in accordance with which we
must live our lives”, but there will still be things that matter to us: “things
worth achieving, doing or having, (…) things that bring joy, understanding,
exhilaration or contentment to ourselves or to others” (157). That we cannot
have those things forever does not in any way diminish their worth.
God,
of course, promises a final redemption and salvation that we all crave but this
world hardly ever grants us. The existence of God justifies our hope in the
possibility of a better world, and it may well be thought that without God
there is no such hope. Nielsen, however, asks us (not give up such hopes but) to
pin them instead on our ability to make rational decisions that will eventually
benefit the whole of humanity by bringing forth “a truly human society without
exploitation and degradation in which all human beings will flourish” (158).
Commentary:
I
have no beef with Nielsen’s overall position. Like him, I happen to believe
that death (i.e. the death of the individual) is real and final and that there
is no God to save us. I am, however, slightly confused by the details of his
argument.
First
of all, Nielsen seems to be combining a subjectivist account of meaning with an
objectivist account of morality. Life is not pointless, he argues, because
there are a lot of things we enjoy and value, even though there is no “providential
ordering of things according to which we must live our lives”. I take this to
mean that life is valuable to us insofar as there are things in it that we
value. Life is valuable because there are things we value, but not because the
things that we value are objectively
valuable. Because if they were
objectively valuable, then clearly there would
exist some sort of “providential ordering of things according to which we must
live our lives”, which Nielsen expressly denies. What he seems to be saying is,
therefore, that it is of no consequence that the things we value are not objectively valuable. On the other
hand, however, he does seem to endorse an objectivist account of morality when he insists that certain
actions are wrong no matter what God (or anyone else for that matter) thinks
about them. According to Nielsen, we do not simply believe they are wrong: we know they are, and while we can believe
something that is not true, we cannot know something that is not true.
It
seems strange, if not downright contradictory, to claim that meaning is
(entirely) subjective, but morality objective, especially since Nielsen fails to distinguish clearly between morality
and meaning. He seems to assume that a pointless life is a life in which certain
things are not really morally wrong, so he insists that even in a godless world
those things would continue to be really morally wrong. But can we not admit
that certain things are really morally wrong and still feel that life is, all
things considered, pretty pointless? Can we not, without contradicting
ourselves, hold that certain things are indeed wrong and still think that there
is, ultimately, no point in not doing what is really wrong (or anything else,
for that matter)? Can we not concede the (experiential?) reality of morality,
but still wonder if there is any point in living a moral life?
And
what about the connection between the absence of God and death that for Nielsen
is apparently so obvious that he does not even bother to explain how exactly
they are connected? Nielsen starts his reflections with the presumed evil of
death and denies that death is bad enough to justify despair. In his account,
death is rather a minor inconvenience, unpleasant perhaps, but of no great
consequence. We can just acknowledge its existence and then get on with our
lives. Fair enough, I can accept that. What I don’t quite understand is what
God has got to do with that. Despite the paper’s opening section and title, the
bulk of it is concerned with God’s existence and how we don’t need God for
morality or to find purpose in life. Yet we can imagine a world that is both
free of God and of death (or at least
a pre-programmed necessity to die), as well as a world where God (or some kind
of God) exists and we still have to
die. There is no logical connection between God and immortality, or death and
godlessness, and it would seem wise to treat these as two separate issues. It
seems clear to me that showing that we do not need God to live a meaningful
life is different from showing that we can live a meaningful life even though
we have to die (just as showing that we don’t need God for morality to be real
is different from showing that we don’t need God to live a meaningful life).
Finally,
religious hope is very different from the secular hope that Nielsen suggests we
replace it with. Nielsen assumes that the hope that our belief in God’s
existence allows us to entertain has the same object as the hope that is based on trust in humanity’s ability to
get their act together and build a better world in this life rather than the
next. However, there is a significant difference between those two scenarios. Part
of the hope raised by our belief in God’s existence is that we ourselves will experience that future
better world. We will be there to
enjoy it. In contrast, when we hope that humanity will one day be able to build
a perfect world for themselves, we know we will not have any part in it. Instead,
we will still be dead.
[1] Republished in: The Meaning of Life, ed. E.D. Klemke,
New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 153-159.