Meaning in Life: The Fitting Fulfillment View
Revision: This article is now effectively part 1 of a series on meaning in life. I now believe that the view described here is wrong. Nevertheless, I would recommend reading this article before the follow up article, since it offers a useful set up.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes life go well. Specifically I’ve been asking:
What can one do to make sure that one is living the best life that one can?
I’m interested in this question for self-interested reasons as much as philosophical ones. I want to live well.
I take it as obvious that a life well lived is also a life we would call meaningful. Meaning in life is perhaps most easily recognized when it is absent. When we feel that our lives lack meaning, we experience boredom, disengagement, apathy, and pointlessness. It seems that — whatever else it is — meaningfulness is very important to individual wellbeing. So, I recently read a book on the subject called Meaning in Life and Why it Matters. In this book a philosopher named Susan Wolf presents what she calls the Fitting Fulfillment view of meaning in life. (The book also includes some commentary from a few other philosophers and a psychologist, as well as Wolf’s response.)
This article is both a kind of review of the book, as well as a tentative endorsement of the view espoused therein. The book is a great example of the kind of philosophy that I think really matters. Not only does it address an important and woefully under-explored topic, it does so clearly and persuasively.
Wolf is clear from the start that her project is not to provide step-by-step instructions for people interested in living a meaningful life. She doesn’t pretend to know exactly how each of us can arrive at that enviable destination. Rather she aims to clarify what that destination will look like, and which direction we should be heading in. This is slightly dissatisfying, of course. I would like very much to know how to get there. But, though there is much to learn on that question, there may be little to teach. We probably have no choice but to discover the answers for ourselves. So, without further ado, here we go.
Wolf’s Fitting Fulfillment theory of meaningfulness combines the appeals of two intuitive, pre-theoretical views that one finds in popular culture. The first view is the one implied by the advice “find your passion and go for it”. The idea here is that a meaningful life is one in which a person engages in projects or activities that she finds gripping or engaging. We can call this experience “fulfillment”. We find fulfillment in doing things that we love, whether that be: taking care of loved ones, doing science or philosophy, or cooking a delicious meal. Fulfilling activities may not always be enjoyable. Taking care of a loved one is not always an activity that makes us happy. It is often very trying. Nevertheless, on this view, such labors of love are what make life meaningful.
The second pre-theoretical view is the one implicit in the advice, “contribute to something larger than yourself”. Wolf interprets this advice as being somewhat metaphorical. To contribute to something “larger than oneself” is to do something which has value independently of one’s interests and desires — something with objective value. So, on this view, a life spent pursuing one’s own personal desires and interests is importantly shallow. A truly meaningful life — a life well lived — will be one in which the person contributes something to the world, as it were.
The first pre-theoretical view, then, emphasizes a subjective criterion: doing something that one finds fulfilling. And the second view emphasizes an objective criterion: doing something that has value independently of one’s own interests and concerns. Of course, we tend to assume that the things people find interesting and engaging will be activities that have (at least some) objective value. Few people would genuinely be fulfilled by staring at goldfish, or building rubberband balls. Similarly, we tend to assume that someone who “contributes to something larger than oneself” will also find his contributions to projects of objective worth fulfilling.
Wolf argues that each of these views is more plausible if it works in conjunction with the other. The subjective experience of fulfillment is surely appealing. But, someone who spends his life staring at a goldfish, or building rubberband balls doesn’t live a meaningful life — even if he finds this activity fulfilling. Similarly, a life spent working on some important project — cancer research, for instance — is missing something very important if the person is completely disengaged and disinterested. Such a person would be doing something morally good. But, she would not be living well. So, Wolf’s suggestion is that we explicitly combine these two views. As she puts it, “On this conception [i.e., the Fitting Fulfillment theory], meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (pg. 26).
“Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some thing or things, only is she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something — as opposed to being bored or alienated from most or all of what she does. Even a person who is so engaged, however, will not live a meaningful life if the objects or activities with which she is so occupied are worthless.” (pg. 9)
Wolf’s account raises a number of important questions. What is objective value? And, in virtue of what does something have objective value? Can one have a meaningful life if one’s projects are of a valuable kind, even if they are actually failures? Consider, for instance, a hack artist, or a scientist who spends her life working on a research program that eventually gets scrapped. Supposing that they both found fulfillment in these projects, were their lives meaningful?
These questions are not, I think, serious objections. They are calls for clarification and elaboration. (In fact, Wolf has some things to say about them in her response to the commentary in the book.) On the whole, I think the Fitting Fulfillment theory is a very appealing view, and more or less correct. Or, at least, it’s on the right track.
So, we haven’t learned exactly what we need to do in order to live a meaningful life. But, we do have a pretty clear idea of where to start looking. We’re looking for labors of love: interesting, engaging, or gripping activities. We are looking also for activities that matter independently of our own interests, that are objectively valuable. Specifically, we want to find the overlap between these two groups. I don’t know about you, but that gives me plenty of ideas for where to start.
Revision: see this follow up article for my current view.
