The meaning of life

(Also known as the "secret of happiness")...

A student in CoPhi yesterday posted the lyrics of a vulgar song by the old punk band The Dictators, purporting to express the meaning of life. I found it a bit reductive. Here's a more expansive view, from the conclusion of Bertrand Russell's 1930 Conquest of Happiness:

The happy man or woman is

a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

The "secret" is this: 

Let your interests be as wide as possible , and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Maybe. But maybe those other Brits were onto something too:

Well, it’s nothing special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Fundamentally that's all the same advice, isn’t it? Someone should put it in a song.

meaning (2)

You can google "meaning of life"...
Or, you could just ask Tooley:


I taught a course called "The Meaning of Life" several years ago, and this was our exit note - on an old VHS tape ripped from the original telecast. Then as now I don't insist on this being THE meaning. It's one of the good ones though, no?

meaning

Because there's more than one...

There goes Roy Hobbs

"Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game."

"Isn't there something over and above earthly things— some more glorious meaning to one's life and activities?"

"In baseball?"

"Yes."

He racked his brain... (Bernard Malamud, The Natural)

As did Ted Williams, as did John Updike, as also (without bat in hand) do I. Racking our brains, tracking ever-elusive, "ever-not-quite" (William James liked to say) transcendence on Earth. It's oh-so-close, sometimes, glimmering and twinkling at us before it darts back into the dark. But while we're here in the visible world we've got to keep on tracking. And drink a toast before we go.

"What Makes Us Happy?"

A nice Atlantic piece in the June edition asks the perennial question (thanks for the link, Amanda) and reports the results of Harvard psychological researcher George Vaillant's lifetime case-study attempts to answer it. Vaillant is the grandfather of Positive Psychology:

"Driven by a savvy, brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the movement to create a scientific study of the good life has spread wildly through academia and popular culture (dozens of books, a cover story in Time, attention from Oprah, etc.)."

And it's spread to me. I'll be teaching "The Philosophy of Happiness" this Fall. If I find the secret I promise to share it. In the meantime, I'll continue to operate on the assumption that happiness - perhaps occasionally punctuated by transcendence - is best pursued in ordinary ways. Bertrand Russell is a very good source on this, as is Monty Python. They were talking about the meaning of life, but it's really the same question and I like the answer: try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

It works for me.

"The Meaning of Life"

I once taught a course called "The Meaning of Life" -- lots of fun, if ultimately inconclusive. But on the last day of class we looked at a clip from my all-time-favorite TV show "Northern Exposure" which implied that the M.o.L. is "that old-time rock-&-roll" (music and lyrics by Bob Seger). The point was less literal, of course: we all need to find the particular music of our lives and "dance" to it. Anyway, Terry Eagleton has a new book on the subject. Here's a review excerpt.

Eagleton finally plumps for happiness, currently enjoying a revival among economists, philosophers and even politicians. But he points out with Aristotle that happiness comes in many and devious forms. . . Happiness disengaged from selfishness and allied to the Greek love for humanity (agape) passes muster, at times almost lyrically so.
The meaning of life is thus not "what you make of it". It is not a passing pleasure, which humans share with animals. Indeed it is not even an answer to a question, but rather "a matter of living life in a certain way". It is an ethical construct and involves treating others as you want them to treat you, caring for those close to you, helping strangers, thinking long term.
The meaning of life to Eagleton is like a jazz band, individuals engaged on a collective endeavour in pursuit of happiness through the mutuality of love.
--Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian -- http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2030253,00.html

NOTE to the invisible (hypothetical?) readers of this blog: With the end of Spring Break and my return to reality (and a very large stack of ungraded essays), Delight Springs shifts to a slower pace of publication. New posts will now appear on Tuesdays and Saturdays. But as always, feel free to comment on any of these bottled messages whenever they find you.