Position
Fitting Fulfillment
A life is meaningful when a person is actively engaged in projects of independent worth, so meaning requires both that they care and that the object deserves it.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Ethics
Overview
Wolf's account is built to rule out two failures at once. A life spent absorbed in something worthless — her example is counting blades of grass — is not redeemed by how fulfilling the person finds it. A life spent dutifully on something genuinely worthwhile, but with no engagement at all, is not meaningful either.
Meaning therefore needs both halves, which is what separates this from views that make meaning purely a matter of how a life is experienced and from views that make it purely a matter of what is objectively valuable. It also requires no purpose assigned from outside the world, only that some things are worth caring about.
Position on
Incompatible positions
- Existential Nihilism
Question scope: The Meaning of Life
References
- Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010)
- Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010), Lecture 1, where meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness