Is Meaning in Life Based on Value or Intelligibility?

Most modern philosophical discussions of meaning in life take value to constitute meaningfulness. The intuition behind these discussions is that if we want to make a life meaningful, we should enhance value in it. Consider, for example, people who, after having lost a job or a loved one, say that they feel that their lives are meaningless. A plausible way to analyze what has happened is this: They had something valuable in their lives, but it is now gone. This is why they now feel that their lives are meaningless. Such people often indeed say that they will return to see their lives as meaningful if they can find something else that would be sufficiently valuable in their life, such as another job, another loved one, philanthropic work, artistic activity, or religious faith.

However, several scholars (e.g., Repp 2019; Thomas 2019; Seachris 2019) have recently suggested that what constitutes life's meaningfulness isn’t primarily value but, rather, aspects of intelligibility such as the richness and quality of people’s cognitive experiences or the degree to which their lives are explainable and make sense.

Such suggestions rely, to an extent, of the fact that many of our uses of “meaning” in common speech have to do with intelligibility (e.g., “the meaning of a green light is ‘go’”; or, “the meaning of ‘pomme’ in French is ‘apple.’”). But more importantly, these suggestions rely on the fact that, in many cases, people who sense life as meaningless also report a sense of disorientation, perplexity, alienation, or even plain misunderstanding. They ask questions such as, “But why did this happen?” “How could this be?” “How could this be justified?” "What is it all about?" and "What's the point of it all?" In many cases, then, they feel that something doesn't make sense; something seems not intelligible.

Supporters of the intelligibility view (that is, the view that what constitutes meaningfulness is intelligibility) also point out that some of the people whose lives we take to be paradigmatically meaningful excelled in issues related to intelligibility, such as Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie. Many other people whose lives we take to be paradigmatically meaningful excelled also in other things, but still showed a high degree of cognitive abilities, including George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt. They could not have achieved what they did without a high degree of intelligence (besides other qualities).

However, in a recent paper Thaddeus Metz (2019) argues against the intelligibility view, supporting the value view. One argument Metz presents is that mystical experiences are often taken to be meaningful and make life meaningful, but also to be ineffable and, thus, non-intelligible. Thus, we have high meaningfulness with low intelligibility. This incongruence between intelligibility and meaningfulness suggests that basing meaningfulness on intelligibility is problematic.

Another interesting example Metz presents is of a person who happens to walk by a house on fire and hears a child calling for help inside. Immediately, without considering the matter, he runs into the house and rescues the child. Most would hold that this is a meaningful deed that makes life meaningful. But the person didn't think about what he did before or while doing it: He just rushed in. Moreover, it may be that later, when asked about it, he even says that he doesn't understand his behavior in view of the great danger for himself, and that his behavior even seems to him to be irrational. Again, we have a case of low intelligibility and high meaningfulness. This example, too, suggests that the intelligibility view is problematic.

But how, then, could all the cases in which intelligibility does seem to make life meaningful be explained? I think that the reply is that we often take intelligibility to be valuable. For example, we think that Einstein's life is meaningful because we think that great intellectual achievement is valuable. But it is value that constitutes meaningfulness; intelligibility enhances meaningfulness only when we deem it valuable. And even if we have low intelligibility but high value (as in the case of the mystic, or of the person who unthinkingly ran into the burning house), we also have meaningfulness. What primarily and directly constitutes life's meaningfulness is value, not intelligibility.