Introduction: conditions for meaningfulness

The question why there is something rather than nothing is one of those grand metaphysical questions that often exercise the popular imagination. Another such question concerns the meaning of life, and Nozick devotes the last chapter of Philosophical Explanations largely to this topic.

What are those who search for the meaning of life really looking for? “Meaning” has many senses, and after a bit of fun with mystic gurus in the Himalayas Nozick lists eight of them, promising to use these distinctions in his discussion of our title question, a promise he starts out to fulfil, although it rather fades into the background as the discussion proceeds. Perhaps the main distinction we need is between meaning as something subjective, as when something means a lot to us, or we mean to do something or to make something of our lives, and meaning as objective meaningfulness or importance, a sense suggested by the phrase “the meaning of Life”. (In The Examined Life, Chapters 16 and 17, Nozick distinguishes meaning from importance and various other notions, but most of those distinctions (60 of them altogether) we can ignore here.)

Objective meaningfulness, when not just causal significance (“Those clouds mean rain”), one of Nozick's eight senses, is a problematic notion. What would count as life's having such a meaning? Some look to God's purpose in creating us. But would we be satisfied, Nozick asks, by playing some quite trivial role in God's plan, equivalent to “fixing a mildly annoying leaky faucet” (PE: 586), or providing “needed food for passing intergalactic travellers who were important”? (ibid.).