Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

15. Value, Meaning and Purpose

’The meaning of life is about what makes life worth living — it is about life seen in a certain way.’

Terry Eagleton — The Meaning of Life

In the last chapter I have used the terms ‘value’ and ‘quality’ more or less interchangeably. It is worth stopping here to pick out the difference between them, to assist in the discussions going forward. But again we face a distinction that was alluded to in the previous chapter. One view of value is the thing that could be innate to the universe, the thing that we might apprehend intuitively. But there is a counter-argument, to say that there is no innate value — that value is something we infer from our experience of the world. This is to see value as a rationalisation of whatever we actually prefer — whatever we instinctively decide has quality. So, on the one hand, quality is the direct perception of value. Or, on the other hand, value is what we derive from our experiences of quality.

The step from value to meaning includes therefore the same alternative interpretations, plus extra complications! On the one hand — if value is innate — then it might be argued that meaning is likewise innate — that the universe contains its own meaning, or has a meaning bestowed on it by God. On the other hand,

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