Q&A: The Meaning of Life Outside the Religious World
The Meaning of Life Outside the Religious World
Question
I read in your book The First Existent a short passage you devoted to Viktor Frankl’s theory of logotherapy. As I understood him (and that’s also how you explain it there, if I’m not mistaken), the very fact of a person’s longing for meaning, and the human need for meaning in one’s actions in the world (including the fact that it gives vitality, even to the point of helping a person recover from serious illnesses and the like), serves to prove the significance of meaning in our lives… This is after we have inferred the validity of morality based on that same principle of a revealing argument, which shows that the principles according to which we live reveal our stance toward the world and toward life. (I would add that after we have assumed the validity of morality, we presumably also assume that God is good and His intentions are good, and it is not likely that He would create in us a desperate longing to search for meaning without any answer to it.)
But here you disagreed with Frankl and argued that there is no such thing as subjective meaning. That without a binding external religious system, there is no validity to this concept of “meaning,” since there is no parameter by which we could judge whether our actions are in fact meaningful, and if so then such a view also has no way to survive without a religious and binding Torah—which in your opinion is of course the Jewish Torah.
So I wonder: if that is the case, why did God “torment” 99.8 percent of the world’s population and not grant them an answer to this longing? Is the only way for the average non-Jew to attain meaning in life through conversion, which the Torah does not encourage at all? Or perhaps the fact that the Torah was given to such a small and limited people stands in contradiction to the idea that there is really any validity behind the human need to search for meaning?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. He did not torment anyone. A non-Jew’s life has meaning בדיוק like a Jew’s. A Jew also has commandments and Jewish law, while a non-Jew does not. So what?
I don’t think the need proves anything. That is the anthropological proof, and I am very skeptical of it. Only if you hold that your life has meaning does it carry evidentiary weight. The need says nothing. This is the fallacy of confusing the desirable with the actual.
Discussion on Answer
Not to command, but to give validity. Morality is binding even without a command, because we know that the Holy One, blessed be He, expects us to uphold it. That exists for a non-Jew too. The same is true regarding developing the world, scientific knowledge, art, and so on. Each person according to his talents. The value these things receive is only by virtue of God, even though He did not command them. Without Him, nothing has objective value (there is of course subjective value according to a person’s own feeling).
Searching for meaning in the sense that there is meaning, or that one wants there to be meaning—that is the whole difference.
Forgive me, but I didn’t understand the bottom line—does real meaning in life, in your view, depend on belief in God, or specifically on religious commitment? In the book it sounded like you took the second side, and here more like the first.
Meaning depends on belief. God is needed in order to legislate the laws. Commitment is about ensuring their fulfillment, living in accordance with the meaning.
Your claim was that meaning in life depends on belief in an external system with the authority to obligate us with laws and norms. So how exactly does a non-Jew have meaning if he is obligated in nothing besides the seven Noahide commandments?
The need can prove something after we’ve gone through all the stages (we finished Notebook 4 successfully…). We assume there is a God, who created the world and also planned it and implanted in us binding feelings and norms. Consequently, it is only natural that the basic feeling of searching for meaning, and the human dependence on it, should also serve to prove the significance of meaning.