If the meaning of life happens to be a logical separate category, as maintained by Baier, then one may like some explanation on what it actually concerns. Baier is the one who takes the challenge of explaining this. Baier notes that when individuals tend to ask what makes life meaningful they may be asking what would make the human life to be meaningful in general. On the one hand, or they would be asking about what can make a specific human life to be meaningful. Baier accurately points out that it happens to be reliable considering one meaningful and not consider the other. Besides, thinkers usually uphold that the meaning of life where one has substantive effects for the meaning of the other. Baier normally addresses them both simultaneously, but he tends to answer the question regarding what makes a person’s life meaningful. According to Baier, a lot of people care whether if the human species is significant. Baier has several key arguments for believing that death, the lack of immortal souls, would not weaken the meaning of life. His arguments can equally necessitate that the absence of God would not weaken the meaning of life (Baier, 1957).
Kurt Baier tends to present a fascinating argument against the perception that the meaning of life could come from satisfying the purpose God has allocated to us. Baier happens to contend that God would not avoid humiliating. However, He allocates us a reason, which could mean that God who happens to be a morally perfect being by description, would not do such a thing. Defenders of the God centered accounts regarding the meaning of life, and even several of its detractors have by and large affirmed to argue that Baier is incorrect on this particular point.
Richard Taylor begins by trying to understand this question by bearing in mind the opposite with questions like what is the meaningless existence. He goes ahead and turns to the Sisyphus Myth. Sisyphus was destined to roll a huge boulder up the hill, only to get that boulder roll all the way down the hill, compelling Sisyphus to replicate the task without the end. In spite of all of Taylor’s toiling, his presence amounted to nothing as it was more than endlessly replicating similar tasks, which itself added to no greater purpose or goal. This, Taylor asserts, is the specific image of meaninglessness. He is careful to recognize exactly which aspects of Sisyphus scrape account for the shortage of meaning, and that happen to be irrelevant. Taylor claims that the facts in which Sisyphus task happens to be both endless and difficult are unrelated to its meaninglessness. Taylor claims that if something happened to come of his challenges; if, for instance, the stones that he happened to roll were utilized in creating something. A distinct way in which the meaning may be made is obvious in one’s life if Sisyphus happened to enjoy rolling the stones up the hill. What Taylor happened to point out, is that even when given this last alteration, Sisyphus life happens to not have acquired the meaning of the initial kind.
Taylor claims that life as we comprehend is significantly like the Sisyphus life. Whether viewed from an extremely broad range, or at the degree of a single person, life is nothing but the mere succession of attempts and challenges, which ultimately end up in nothing. The sole thing that is maintained is the replication of the cycle. There happens is no single endpoint towards, which the challenges are directed that would confer meaning. Taylor believes that our lives happen to be meaningless. However, he asserts that this is not the most significant way wherein in our lives can have meaning.
- Baier, K. (1957). The meaning of life. Canberra: Canberra University College.