Does death make life meaningless? (Warning: might contain sophomoric philosophical ruminations)

Perhaps my accomplishments will be useful post-death. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy it while I'm here. Live for the present and you can barely put a foot wrong.

In other words, snap out of it, man!

xxxpost

I'm not expressing myself that well, but it's WAY past my bedtime.

Ah yes, of course.

Gah, some people need to be spoon-fed in the ways of eternal balance.

I think there's no meaning to life if there is life after death.

This would seem to explain the actions of some fundamentalists, whether of Islam or other religions.

It's probably better to do something positive with your life, and hope that you can stay healthy and as happy as possible. A lot of the great things in life don't have a whole lot of meaning behind them anyway, and they are fleeting.

I'm a bit of a hippy it would seem.

As it happens, I once won $25 - the second prize - from a philosophical journal for an essay on this very subject. At the time I was... (wait for it)... a sophomore in college. What is even stranger for me to say is that I am now 49 and I have not essentially changed my mind about what I wrote. My essay incorporated some of the points already made here. The substance of it, I reproduce here:

First, it's important to recognize that 'meaning' is a human construct we create for our own purposes and impose upon our experience. 'Meaning' is not something that is necessarily inherent in life or death.

However, 'meaning' is a legitimate human interest and concern; it is a tool that allows us to think coherently about our experience. Death is part of our experience, therefore, it is useful to our sanity and peace of mind to assign it a meaning. So, we ought to.

While, theoretically, any old meaning would serve this simple purpose, in practise 'useful' meanings must conform to the other patterns in our daily experience that we trust as being 'true'. An ill-conforming meaning doesn't cohere with the rest of our picture of the world. Incoherence creates a painful mental dissonance, so that we eventually reject such meanings as false. Consequently, it is important to give death a meaning that makes sense in the context of what is known and familiar.

The best analogy I can make for giving death a simple, understandable and 'true' meaning is to compare life and death to one of our primary patterns of meaning and coherence: language.

It is difficult even to imagine a sentence that doesn't come to an end. One of the reasons for this is that you could never know what that sentence meant until it came to a full stop - a period. Until then, its meaning is incomplete and could even be inverted at some future point. Such a sentence would appear to have something 'like' a meaning, but its meaning would be ill-formed and doubtful. In a very fundamental way, nothing can have a coherent meaning until it is whole and completed.

Death is not an isolated event, whole and complete in itself. Nothing can die that is not living. Death is, in the simplest possible way, a separate name we give to one small event of life: it's end point - the moment when a particular life no longer extends itself, but comes to a full stop. As such, I view death as the event that finally ensures the meaning of a person's life. I shall explain this further.

In the same way that the words of a sentance and their arrangement into clauses contain the substance and meaning of a sentance, the events of a life also contain its substance and meaning. Death is like the period at the end of a sentance; it doesn't contain any of what we might call the meaning or substance of a life and for that reason it might appear to be a tragically useless end to a lifetime of accumulating meaning. But I would argue that without death the meaning of a life could be anything or everything and therefore it is indistinguishable from nothing.

Herodotus recorded a tradition that Croesus, the stupendously wealthy king of Lydia, asked Solon if he was not the happiest and most fortunate of men. Solon replied that it was too soon to say, as Croesus hadn't died, yet. They also say that Solon was a very wise man.

(BTW, if I had to own up to a religion, it would be Taoism, as I don't have the discipline for Zen Buddhism. Also, the essay that won first prize was crap.)

The One Truth is that the universe is infinite and free and as humans we have a problem with this, we can't deal with freedom, we have to have control. Things can't just "be", we have to be able to explain it to others, we have to pin it down and figure out "what's in it for me".

The source of all mankind's philosophical problems is the existence of philosophy in itself, the asking of questions. Because people have different ideas of what a word means and different connotations can come up. The word "meaningless" generally has a bad connotation, especially when you're talking about reality.

I don't think death makes life meaningless anymore than life makes death meaningless or John Travolta meaningless or the Milky Way Galaxy meaningless. Everything is relative.

So yes and no.

http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Time-Proust-Woolf-Nabokov/dp/0674066324/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360703251&sr=8-1&keywords=dying+for+time

this book employs derrida's logic of the trace to answer the thread question, and i think it is largely successful. hagglund argues that death -- far from rendering life meaningless -- is what gives it meaning in the first place. that's a huge condensation, but if anyone's read this book i'd be interested in discussing it more.

Life makes life meaningless

You know who thinks death makes life meaningful? Live people. Think about it.

I stick by my tl;dr post upthread. Death, doesn't so much give meaning to life as much as it allows the meaning of an individual life to attain its final form.

Aimless, I like your metaphor of life as a sentence and death as the period ("full stop" for you Brits) at the end. I agree that an infinite life could not have a meaning that our finite brains could grasp. However, even the finite lives that we do lead are difficult for us to assign meaning to, in the sense of "meaning" used in speaking of sentences. A sentence has "meaning" by virtue of representing something outside itself. When people speak of life having meaning, there is no representation, no "outside" place to look. We are forced to fall back on the concept of something that is intrinsically meaningful, which is quite different than the sense of "meaning" used in speaking of sentences.

how long would a life have to be before it was meaningless?
(i'd say somewhere between 50,000 and 1M yrs)

Death gives life meaning, no doubt, everyone knows this, but if you were gonna set up a universe in which life proceeded as it does for most of us you'd be laughed out of Godland. The horrors of old age and the mediocrities of middle age and the ephemera of youth - it's just an awful setup and a narrative that deprives us of meaning beyond the perpetuation of the same next time round. It's like Monopoly - rules badly thought out and generally tedious. Philosophy's fundamental business, if it has any, is to work out how, given all this, we ought to be living today and tomorrow. It's fun to think about. I haven't clicked on the Amazon link.

"Death gives life meaning, no doubt, everyone knows this"
I agree with this in practice, just because of the tendency of people to procrastinate without a deadline, but when i look at an unfeasibly old tree, i don't feel like "you know what would give your life meaning, tree? me chopping you down right now. hyaaaa!"