Philosophy what does it mean to be alive

Unfortunately, modern society seeks meaning to life through materialism, to the detriment of our biological needs, leading to dissatisfaction and a consequent inability to find meaning. The result is an exponential increase in mental ill-health. Sadly, then, many of us will not experience the satisfaction of a meaningful life journey. Life is the eternal and unbroken flow of infinite rippling simultaneous events that by a fortuitous chain has led to this universe of elements we are all suspended in, that has somehow led to this present experience of sentient existence.

Animal life excluding that of humans shows that life is a simple matter of being, by means of a modest routine of eating, sleeping and reproducing. Animals balance their days between these necessities, doing only what their bodies ask of them.

The life of vegetation is not far from that of animals. They eat and sleep and reproduce in their own way, for the same result. So life is a beautiful and naturally harmonious borrowing of energy. Yet we have taken it for granted. We have lost the power to simply be happy eating, sleeping, reproducing, believing we need a reason to be alive, a purpose and a goal to reach, so that on our deathbeds something we have been made to fear we can look back and tell ourselves we have done something with our lives.

Life has lost its purpose because we have tried to give it one. The truth is that we are no more significant than the sand by the sea or the clouds in the sky. No more significant. But as significant. No matter what your race, religion or gender, when you first step outside your door in the morning and feel the fresh air in your lungs and the morning sun on your face, you close your eyes and smile.

In that moment you are feeling life as it should be. No defining, no understanding, no thinking. Just that feeling of pure bliss. For that is what life is. Everyone has a story. Failure can bring crushing disappointment, or you can try and make a new plan. But who wants to waste that much time regretting? Life has happy surprises, small moments to cherish. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The stage metaphor in the second line represents boundaries or limits. Scientific research into the nature of life often focuses on the material, energetic, and temporal limitations within which life can exist. The temporal limit of life is known as death. Now, this refers to the language-based, or code-based, nature of life.

In five concise and poetic lines, Shakespeare defined life as an impermanent, non-self-directed, unsatisfactory, limited, ever-changing, and ultimately insignificant code. Life is the realisation of its own contingency. Life is thus a constant process of becoming, through creating values and meaning. Life is therefore perpetual transcendence, always moving into the future, creating the present. It provides the conceptual resources to account for both M of L and M in L.

The cosmic and the personal, the epistemic and the normative, and the theoretical and the practical are inseparable in our search for meaning. The sense-making framework that we seek links all of this as we pursue meaningful lives in light of our place within the grand scheme of it all. This version of the single-question approach, with its emphasis on sense-making, is closely related to the concept of worldview.

Worldviews provide answers to the existentially weighty set of questions that brings into relief the human condition. As philosopher Milton Munitz notes:. Munitz To offer a worldview, then, is to offer a putative meaning of life—a sense-making framework focused squarely on the set of questions and concerns surrounding origins, purpose, significance, value, suffering, and destiny.

They address both M of L and M in L. The riddle of existence faces all ages of mankind with the same mysterious countenance; we catch sight of its features, but we must guess at the soul behind it.

This riddle is always bound up organically with that of the world itself and with the question what I am supposed to do in this world, why I am in it, and how my life in it will end. Where did I come from? Why do I exist? What will become of me? This is the most general question of all questions and the one that most concerns me Dilthey Beyond important preliminary discussions over the nature of the question itself and its constituent parts, one will find competing theories of meaning in life.

The four most influential views of meaning in life are: 1 Supernaturalism, 2 Objective Naturalism, 3 Subjective Naturalism, and 4 Hybrid Naturalism. Objective, subjective, and hybrid naturalism are all optimistic forms of naturalism. They allow for the possibility of a meaningful existence in a world devoid of finite and infinite spiritual realities.

Lewis, and many contemporary analytic philosophers. Meaningful life, on supernaturalism, consists of claims along metaphysical, epistemological, and relational-axiological axes. It also requires, at some level orthodoxy right belief and orthopraxy right life and practice , though again, much debate exists on the details. What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?

This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself Pascal Augustine It is worth noting that there are versions of supernaturalism that do not view God as necessary for meaningful life, but nonetheless claim that God and relating to God in appropriate ways would significantly enhance meaning in life.

This more moderate form of supernaturalism allows for the possibility of meaningful life, in some measure, on naturalism see Metz for a helpful taxonomy of the conceptual space here. Supernaturalist views, whether stronger or more moderate, connect with questions and concerns about the problem of evil, post-mortem survival, and ultimate justice. Many worry that, on naturalism, life does not make sense or is absurd a kind of sense-making meaning; see Section 2. Subjective naturalism is an optimistic naturalistic view in claiming that life can be robustly meaningful even if there is no God, after-life, or transcendent realm.

In this, it is like objective and hybrid forms of naturalism. According to subjective naturalism, what constitutes a meaningful life varies from person to person, and is a function of one getting what one strongly wants or by achieving self-established goals or through accomplishing what one believes to be really important.

Caring about or loving something deeply has been thought by some to confer meaning in life see Frankfurt Some subjectivist views focus on affective states of a certain psychological profile, like fulfillment or satisfaction for example, as constituting the essence of meaningful life see Taylor Subjectivism is appealing to some in light of perceived failures to ground objective value, either naturally, non-naturally, or supernaturally, and in accounting for the widespread view that meaning and fulfillment are closely connected.

A worry for subjective naturalism, analogous to ethical worries about moral relativism, is that this view is too permissive, allowing for bizarre or even immoral activities to ground meaning in life. Many protest that surely deep care and love, by themselves, are not sufficient to confer meaningfulness in life.

What if someone claims to find meaning by measuring and re-measuring blades of grass or memorizing the entire catalogue of Netflix shows or, worse, torturing people for fun?

Can a life centering on such pursuits be meaningful? A strong, widespread intuition here inclines many towards requiring a condition of objective value or worth on meaning.

Subjectivism still has thoughtful defenders, though, with some proposals moving towards grounding value inter-subjectively—in community and its shared values—as opposed to in the individual exclusively. It is also worth noting that one could be a subjectivist about meaning while being an objectivist about morality.

In this way, a fulfilled torturer might lead a meaningful, though immoral life. Meaning and morality, on this view, are distinct values that can, in principle, come into conflict. Objective naturalism, like subjective naturalism, posits that a meaningful life is possible in a purely physical world devoid of finite and infinite spiritual realities. It differs, though, in what is required for meaning in life. Objective naturalists claim that a meaningful life is a function of appropriately connecting with mind-independent realities of objective worth contra subjectivism , and that are entirely natural contra supernaturalism.

Theories differ on the nature of this connection. Some require mere orientation around objective value, while others require a stronger causal connection with good outcomes see Smuts Again, objective naturalism is distinguished from subjective naturalism by its emphasis on mind-independent, objective value. One way of putting the point is to say that wanting or choosing is insufficient for a meaningful life.

On objective naturalism it is possible to be wrong about what confers meaning on life—something is meaningful, at least partly, in virtue of its intrinsic nature, irrespective of what is believed about it. One worry for objective naturalism is that it may have a harder time accounting for cases of neural atypicality, for example, a person with ASD who is deeply fulfilled by activities that seem to lack intrinsic value or worth.

Does a person who is not a plumber and for whom pipes and interactions with pipes provide salient goals, a kind of coherence to his life, and enjoyable experiences fail to acquire meaning because it all largely revolves around a fascination with pipes?

Might subjectivist views better account for the lives of those among us whose interests and interactions with the world are strikingly different, and for whom such interests are the result of neural atypicality?

Critics of objective naturalism might also press the point that proponents of this view conflate meaning and morality or at least conflate important aspects of these two putatively different kinds of value. One value might be objectively shaped, whereas the other might not. Many researchers think that there is something right about both objectivist and subjectivist views, but that each on its own is incomplete. Susan Wolf has developed what has come to be one of the more influential theories of meaning in life over the last decade or so, the fitting-fulfillment view.

Meaning is not present in a life spent believing in, being fulfilled by, or caring about worthless projects, but neither is it present in a life spent engaging in worthwhile, objectively valuable projects without also believing in, being fulfilled by, or caring about them.

Many think hybridist views capture what is best about objectivism and subjectivism while avoiding the pitfalls of each. In their naturalistic forms, such theories of meaning are inconsistent with supernaturalism. However, one can imagine supernaturalist forms of each of these views. One might be a supernaturalist who thinks that meaning wholly or largely consists in subjective fulfillment in the Divine —a kind of subjectivism, or that meaning consists in orientation around objective value, again grounded in the Divine —a kind of objectivism.

One could also formulate distinctly supernaturalist hybrid views. In opposition to all optimistic views about the possibility of meaningful life, is pessimistic naturalism , more commonly called nihilism.

Roughly, nihilism is the view that denies that a meaningful life is possible because, literally, nothing has any value. Nihilism may be understood as a combination of theses and assumptions drawn from both supernaturalism and naturalism: i God or some supernatural realm is likely necessary for value and a meaningful life, but ii no such entity or realm exists, and therefore 3 nothing is ultimately of value and there is, therefore, no meaning.

Other forms of nihilism focus on states like boredom or dissatisfaction, arguing that boredom sufficiently characterizes life so as to make it meaningless, or that human lives lack the requisite amount of satisfaction to confer meaning upon them. If meaning is a distinct kind of value that a life can have, and if the three senses of meaning above see Section 2. Sense-making: An intelligible life; one that makes sense broad sense-making , that fits. Significance: A life that matters and has positive value —intrinsically in virtue of the kind of life that it is and extrinsically in virtue of its implications and impacts, especially within the narrow e.

Though one can view these as largely different ways of thinking about what a meaningful life is, one might think that there is a more organic relationship between them. Here is one strategy through which all three senses of meaning might coalesce and bring into relief the full structural contours of meaningful life in a unified way:.

Philosophers may want to follow social scientists here in thinking more about this tripartite conception of meaning. Psychologists, for example, are increasingly using similar accounts in experimental design and testing. One prominent psychologist working in the area of meaning proposes a definition of meaning in life that incorporates a similar triad that prioritizes sense-making:.

Meaning is the web of connections, understandings, and interpretations that help us comprehend our experience and formulate plans directing our energies to the achievement of our desired future.

Meaning provides us with the sense that our lives matter, that they make sense, and that they are more than the sum of our seconds, days, and years Steger These are important themes in the literature on meaning, and are found in a wide array of sources ranging from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes to Tolstoy to Camus to contemporary analytic writing on the topic. Worries that death, as conceived on naturalism, threatens meaning lead into discussions about futility.

It is a commonly held view that life is futile if all we are and do eventually comes to nothing. If naturalism is true and death is the end. Left undeveloped, it is not entirely clear what people mean by this, though the sentiment behind the idea is intense and prevalent. In order to explore the worry further, it is important to get clearer on what is meant by futility. In ordinary cases, something is futile when the accomplishment or fulfillment of what is aimed at or desired is impossible.

Examples of futility include:. It is futile for a human being to try to both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense.

It is futile to try and write an entire, page novel, from start to finish, in one hour. On the preceding account of futility, the existential angst that accompanies some instance of futility is proportional to how one feels about what it is that is futile. Imagine that a person has a curiosity to experience flying as a falcon flies. It would be futile to attempt to fly as a falcon flies.

Though this person might be minimally distressed as a result of not being able to experience this, it is doubtful he would experience soul-crushing angst. Contrast this with a situation where one has trained for years to run an ironman triathlon, but one week prior to the event, she is paralyzed from the neck down in a tragic automobile accident.

To now try and compete in the triathlon without mechanical assistance would be futile. Years of training would be unrewarded. Deep hopes would be dashed. A central life goal is now forever unfulfilled. What might people have in mind when they say that life itself is futile if naturalism is true and death is the last word of our lives and the universe? The discrepancy here from which a sense of futility emerges is between central longings of the human heart and a world devoid of God and an afterlife, which is a world incapable of fulfilling such longings.

There is a stark incongruity between what we really want even what we might say we need and a completely and utterly silent universe that does not care. There is also a discrepancy between the final state of affairs where quite literally nothing matters, and the current state of affairs where many things seem to matter e. It seems hard to fathom that things with such existential gravitas are but a vapor in the grand scheme of things.

We might also call this absurd , since absurdity and futility are connected, both of which are partly encapsulated in the idea of a profound incongruity or lack of fit.

Futility, in this way, connects to hope and expectations about fulfillment and longevity. In some circumstances, we are inclined to think that something is characterized by futility if it does not last as long as we think it should last given the kind of thing that it is. If you spend half a day building a snow fort and your children destroy it in five minutes, you will be inclined to think that your efforts were futile even though you accomplished your goal of building the fort.

You will not, however, think your efforts were futile if the fort lasts a few days and provides you and your children with several fun adventures and a classic snowball fight. It needs to last long enough to serve its purpose.

Some say that an average human lifetime with average human experiences is sufficient to satiate core human longings and for us to accomplish central purposes see Trisel Others, however, think that only eternity is long enough to do justice to those aspects of the human condition of superlative value, primarily and especially, happiness and love, the latter understood roughly as commitment to the true good or well-being of another.

Some things are of such sublime character that for them to be extinguished, even after eons upon eons, is truly tragic, so the thinking goes. Anything less than forever is less than enough time, and leads to a sense of futility. We want the most important things in life—especially happiness, love and relationships— to last indefinitely.

But if naturalism is true, all will be dissolved in the death of ourselves and the universe; it will be as if none of this ever happened.

If the important stuff of life that we are so invested in lasts only a short while, many worry that life itself is deeply and ultimately futile. Futility, then, is sometimes linked with how something ends. Such worries have been articulated in what some call Final Outcome Arguments see Wielenberg Why think that endings have such power? Many have argued that giving them this power arbitrarily privileges the future over the past.

Why should we think the future is more important than, or relevant at all to the past and the present? But perhaps Nagel is mistaken. There may, in fact, be good reasons to think that how life ends is relevant for evaluating its meaning see Seachris Within value theory, an under-investigated area is how meaning fits within the overall normative landscape. How is it connected, if at all, with ethical, aesthetic, and eudaimonistic value, for example?

What sorts of relationships, conceptual, causal or otherwise, exist between the various values? Do some reduce to others? Can profoundly unethical lives still count as meaningful? What about profoundly unhappy lives? These and other questions are on the table as a growing number of researchers investigate them.

Another area in need of increased attention is the relationship between meaning and suffering. Suffering intersects with our attempts to make sense of our lives in this universe, motivates our questions about why we are here, and gives rise to our concerns about whether or not we ultimately matter.

We wonder if there is an intelligible, existentially satisfying narrative in which to locate—make sense of—our visceral experience of suffering, and to give us solace and hope. A reaction has set in to what is perceived as an over-emphasis on nucleic acid replication see for example Keller , ; Moss Prominent among early students of such nonequilibrium thermodynamics was Ilya Prigogine Prigogine influenced J.

Bernal in his lectures on the physical basis of life to start to understand both how organisms produced their internal order while affected their environment by not only their activities but through created disorder in it Bernal Harold Morowitz explicitly addressed the issue of energy flow and the production of biological organization, subsequently generalized in various ways Morowitz ; Peacocke ; Brooks and Wiley Wicken ; Schneider ; Swenson ; Morowitz The emergent, self-organizing spatio-temporal patterns observed in the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction are also seen in biological systems such as in slime mold aggregation or electrical patterns in heart activity Tyson ; Sole and Goodwin Indeed, related self-organizational phenomena pervade biology Camazine et al.

Such phenomena are seen not only in cells and organisms, but in ecosystems, which reinforces the notion that a broader systems perspective is needed as part of the new physics Ulanowicz Important to such phenomena are the dynamics of non-linear interactions where responses of a system can be much larger than the stimulus and autocatalytic cycles reaction sequences that are closed on themselves and in which a larger quantity of one or more starting materials is made through the processes.

Such an approach non-reductively connects the phenomena of living systems with basic laws of physics and chemistry Harold Whether the existing sciences of complexity are sufficient or a newer conceptual framework is needed remains to be seen Harold Living beings exhibit complex, functional organization and an ability to become more adapted to their environments over generational time, which phenomena represent the challenge to physically-based explanations based upon mechanistic reductionistic assumptions.

One of the biggest and most important of emergent phenomena is that of the origin or emergence of life. Franklin Harold ranks the mystery of life's origin as the most consequential facing science today Harold , Michael Ruse claims that it is essential to incorporate origin of life resarch into Darwinism since it is a necessary condition for a scientifically and philosophically adequate definition of life Ruse , To answer this why question we need to understand how life might have arisen.

While not attracting the attention nor levels of funding of molecular biology, there was a continuous research program during much of the twentieth century on the origin of life for historical summaries see Fry ; Lahav During the s Alexander Oparin and J. In effect this type of approach can be termed a metabolism-first view. This protein-first view suggested that the chemistry that lead to life could have occurred in a sequestered environment globs of proteins that might also have some weak catalytic activity that would have facilitated the production of the other molecular components needed Fox With the understanding of the structure of DNA focus shifted to the abiotic routes to nucleic acids, which could serve then serve as templates for their own replication.

Variants of this approach represent the dominant mode of thinking about the early phases of the emergence of life Maynard Smith and Szathmary Given that some type of metabolism would be needed to sustain RNA replication, a number of approaches blend replication-first with metabolism-first Dyson , ; de Duve ; Eigen An alternative view, congenial to a thermodynamic and systems approach to the emergence of life, takes the above move a step further and emphasizes the need the presence of the main factors that distinguish cells from non-cells: metabolism via autocatalytic cycles of catalytic polymers, replication, and a physical enclosure within a chemical barrier like that provided by the cell membrane.

Chemical constraints and the self-organizing tendencies of complex chemical systems in such a view would have been critical in determining the properties of the first living beings. With the emergence of the first entities that could be termed living would come the emergence of biological selection or natural selection in which contingency plays a much greater part.

Darwin famously bracketed the question of the origin of life from questions of descent with modification through natural selection. Indeed, Darwinian theories of evolution can take living systems as a given and then explore how novelties arise through a combination of chance and necessity. However, an understanding of how life might have emerged would provide a bridge between our view of the properties of living systems and the evolutionary phenomena they exhibit.

Such an understanding ultimately is needed to anchor living systems in matter and the laws of nature Harold , This remains a challenge to be met in order for science to provide a more full answer to Shelley's question. There goal is to place life as it is known on earth in a larger conceptual context of any possible forms of life Langton , Work in A-Life shifts our focus on the processes in living things rather than the material constituents of their structures per se Emmeche In some ways this is a revival of the process thinking of the Cambridge biochemists of the s, but involves a level of abstraction about the material structures that instantiate these processes that they would not have shared.

A-Life studies can help us to sharpen our ideas about what distinguishes living from non-living and contribute to our definition of life.

Such work can help delineate the degree of importance of the typical list of attributes of living entities, such as reproduction, metabolism, functional organization, growth, responsiveness to the environment, movement, and short- and long-term adaptations. A-Life work can also allow exploration about which features of life are due to the constraints of being enmattered in a particular manner and subject to physical and chemical laws, as well as exploring a variety of factors that might affect evolutionary scenarios Etxeberria For example, the relative potential roles of selection and self-organization in the emergence of novel traits in evolutionary time might be evaluated by A-Life research.

It is too soon yet to know how important the contribution of the A-Life program will be, but it is likely to become more prominent in the discourse on the origin and nature of life. Our increased understanding of the physical-chemical basis of living systems has increased enormously over the past century and it is possible to give a plausible definition of life in these terms. Much remains to be elucidated about the relationships among the complex molecular systems of living entities, how they are constrained by the system as a whole as well as by physical laws.

Indeed, it is still an open question for some as to whether we have yet a sufficiently rich understanding of the laws of nature or whether we need to seek deep laws that lead to order and organization Kauffman Significant challenges remain, such as fully integrating our new view of organisms and their action with evolutionary theory, and to understand plausible routes for the emergence of life. The fulfillment of such a program will give us a good sense of what life is on earth.

Work in A-Life and empirical work seeking evidence of extra-terrestrial life may help the formulation of a more universal concept of life. The Biochemical Conception of Life 3.

Origin Emergence of Life 6. Artificial Life 7. The Biochemical Conception of Life Perhaps the venue where the issue of the nature of life was most urgently addressed was the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge.

Origin Emergence of Life One of the biggest and most important of emergent phenomena is that of the origin or emergence of life. Conclusions Our increased understanding of the physical-chemical basis of living systems has increased enormously over the past century and it is possible to give a plausible definition of life in these terms. Bibliography Abir-Am, P. Benner, S. To an onlooker, perhaps his appearance carries their connotations of life.

To the soccer player with no legs, though? If his life was soccer, what remains? To paraphrase my answer: To be alive is to give your own meaning to life. To make judgements - to think.

Only a thinking being is able to do that. A living being is one capable of giving its own meaning to the universe, its own interpretation of alive and dead. All else is dead. Get Full Access Now. Want to read the rest? Sign up to view the whole essay and download the PDF for anytime access on your computer, tablet or smartphone. Get Full Access Now or Learn more.

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