Would our lives be more meaningful if the universe had a purpose

History was once commonly understood to be a tale of progress. The idea received its best known, if not most easily understood, expression in the work of W.F. Hegel, who saw in the course of world events a universal “spirit” striving towards self-realization. Today, philosophers are more inclined to see history as Darwinian, the product of blind forces acting on random mutations. Our field thus tends to have little truck not only with progress narratives of history but with grand historical narratives of any sort, insofar as these invariably attempt to impose some shape or order on the historical process.

Recently, however, it seems the Hegelian view has been making something of a comeback. Thomas Nagel, in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, and now Philip Goff, in his new book Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford 2023), both argue that the standard Darwinian account is inadequate to explain the existence of conscious, rational life forms such as ours. The alternative both leans towards and involves supplementing the laws of physics and biology already discovered by science with a separate set of teleological laws favoring the development of life, consciousness, and reason. On Nagel and Goff’s view, as on Hegel’s, the historical emergence of these phenomena is thus part of an unfolding purpose or plan immanent in the universe—the story, as Nagel says (echoing Hegel), of “the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” 

Whatever you might think about the plausibility of this view (an issue I don’t intend to weigh in on here), it’s not hard to see why one might be drawn to it. For apart from any explanatory advantages it might offer over the Darwinian view, it seems to carry with it the alluring suggestion that our lives are more meaningful than we think.

Goff thinks his view indeed has this implication. In the opening chapter of his book, he argues that if his view is true, our lives would have much greater meaning, specifically in that we would be able to make a bigger difference in the world. “If we were able to contribute, even in some small way, to the good purposes of the whole of reality,” Goff says, “that would be about as big a difference as you can imagine making and would consequently greatly add to the meaning of our lives” (4). 

Goff’s argument here is noteworthy for attempting to derive what theorists call meaning in life, understood to be a property of individual lives, from an account of the meaning of life, a story of it all that explains where we came from, why we’re here, where we’re going, etc. Despite the huge amount of work that’s been done on existential meaning over the last few decades, almost all of it has tended to focus on one or the other (and most of it on meaning in life). For those of us who think these two types of meaning are related, Goff’s effort to connect them, whether or not he takes himself to be doing this, makes his argument all the more interesting. 

Alas, however, I don’t find Goff’s argument very convincing. My dissatisfaction with it stems specifically from the sense(s) in which it assumes individual lives are to be counted as more or less meaningful, i.e. his assumptions about what makes for meaning in life. After raising some problems with these assumptions, I’ll suggest another way of thinking about meaning in life that may help to avoid them. 

One thing we might mean when we say we want our lives to be meaningful is that we want our actions to make a difference in the world, to leave some lasting “mark” or “trace.” In the passage I quoted earlier, Goff seems to have in mind this “impact” sense of meaning. If his view is true, he says, then our lives would be more meaningful in that we would have more power to make a difference in the world.  

But it’s not clear why the meaningfulness of our lives, in this impact sense, would be any greater in a Goffian universe than in a Darwinian one. In the former, we would be able to direct our actions to a cosmic purpose, whereas in the latter, we would be able to direct our actions only to non-cosmic purposes. But why would this make any difference to the causal impact of our individual actions? 

Perhaps Goff’s reasoning is this. If the cosmos has a purpose, then this purpose is larger than any purpose one could have in a non-purposive universe. And the larger the purpose, the larger the causal impact of each individual who contributes to it. 

The first thought makes intuitive sense. The purpose of the universe, if there is one, would be the purpose of “the whole of reality,” as Goff says. So, in a sense, it seems right to say that this purpose is “larger” than any other purpose. In this same sense, one might say that a goal shared by all humans is “larger” than a goal shared only by some. 

But in this sense of “larger,” the second thought seems false. The extent to which I, as an individual, am able to contribute to a cause—say, for example, the election of a reform candidate—doesn’t increase with the number of other people who share my aim. The more people who join the cause, the more likely it may be to succeed. But my individual vote counts the same, whether the candidate wins or loses.

If Goff understands meaning in life as causal impact, then, I don’t think the argument works. The passage I quoted earlier strongly supports this reading, and it contains the clearest statement of the argument I can find. However, in other parts of the chapter, Goff sometimes speaks of lives having meaning or being meaningless in the sense of having or lacking a point or purpose. Some philosophers take this to be the primary sense of meaning as it applies to human life. It is in this sense that Sartre, for example, in his famous essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” claims that human life is meaningless because there is no God who created us to fulfill a specific function, the way a knife-maker creates a knife to do a specific job.  

So maybe Goff’s argument is that our lives would be more meaningful, if his view is true, because in that case our lives would have a purpose, in the Sartrean sense. If so, then his argument might seem to run more smoothly. Supposing the universe really does have a plan, and the reason humans exist and are built the way we are, with the capacity for consciousness and reason, is to play some part in fulfilling that plan, then humans would seem to have the kind of purpose Sartre thought we lacked. Humans would be the knives of the cosmos.

But this reading faces a problem too. That is, having an assigned purpose, just in itself, doesn’t seem to add meaning to our lives. Suppose the purpose of human beings, from a cosmic perspective, is to serve as food for some more rational species that will succeed us. In that case, the mere fact that we have a role to play in the cosmic plan wouldn’t seem to count for much meaning-wise. This isn’t the purpose Goff thinks the cosmos has for us. But no matter what this purpose is, the ultimate ends it serves will always be, on Goff’s view, those of the cosmos. Thus it will always be open to ask why we should care about fulfilling this purpose. Why should we adopt the universe’s goals as our own? 

At one point in his discussion, Goff seems to anticipate this objection: “I’m sure many readers by now are bursting to shout out loud the following question (those, that is, that have not already done so): Who the hell cares about cosmic significance??!!” But the question he goes on to answer is not why we should care about our cosmic significance, but whether our lives could have meaning without it. (His answer is yes.) So in the end Goff leaves it a mystery why the purpose the universe has for us is a purpose worth choosing for ourselves.

Both the impact sense and the purpose sense of meaning lead to problems for Goff’s argument. But perhaps some other conception of life meaning would make the argument go through. 

One promising option is Robert Nozick’s view, as expressed in Philosophical Explanations, that meaning in life is a matter of transcending our individual limits. ”For a life to have meaning,” according to Nozick, “it must connect with other things, with some things or values beyond itself” (594).

The particular things or causes people find make their life feel meaningful all take them beyond their own narrow limits and connect them up with something else. Children, relationships with other persons, helping others, advancing justice, continuing and transmitting a tradition, pursuing truth, beauty, world betterment—these and the rest link you to something wider than yourself. (595)

Empirical research supports Nozick’s view. Connecting to something wider than yourself, referred to in the psychological literature as “self-transcendence,” has been shown to correlate with higher levels of well-being and specifically meaning as distinct from happiness.  

But Nozick thinks the meaning that flows to us through our connections to family, friends, social causes, and all other such things, is always vulnerable to being undercut. For in every such case, Nozick says, “we can imagine drawing a boundary around all that, standing outside looking at the totality of it, and asking ‘but what is the meaning of that, what does that mean?’” (596). And even if we can point to some still wider thing that gives meaning to the first, the question only resurfaces again in regard to that wider thing. This regress will continue, Nozick thinks, as long as the wider things by which we transcend our limits also have limits themselves. Thus, he thinks, “the problem can be avoided or transcended only by something without limits, only by something that cannot be stood outside of, even in imagination” (599). This something would have to be “all-encompassing and all-inclusive,” “the totality of everything there is” (600, 604). Only by connecting in a suitable way with something unlimited in this sense could we secure meaning “all the way down.” (Nozick sidesteps the question of why only “some modes of linkage provide channels for the flow of meaning to us.” However, he remarks that “in the Jewish tradition, obeying God’s commandments, praying, and perhaps scolding him” qualify as examples (606).)

All this suggests an explanation for why our lives would have greater meaning in a Goffian universe than in a Darwinian one. In outline, the explanation might go like this. If meaning is a matter of transcending the limits of our individual selves, and if we can achieve the ultimate form of transcendence only by connecting up in the right way with the unlimited, then a universe in which this sort of connection is possible will allow for greater meaning than a universe in which it is impossible. In a Goffian universe, the unlimited has a purpose to which human beings are important. (Goff would say the “cosmos” rather than the “unlimited,” but he seems to have the same idea in mind. In the passage I quoted earlier, he glosses the cosmos as “the whole of reality.”) This makes it possible for humans to relate to the unlimited in the kind of way that Nozick thinks necessary for channeling meaning. Thus, in a Goffian universe, it would be possible to achieve the ultimate form of transcendence. In a Darwinian universe, by contrast, where the cosmos is indifferent to the existence and fate of human beings, it is hard to imagine how humans could connect up with the unlimited in the sort of way that would allow for ultimate transcendence.

This Nozickian explanation strikes me as more compelling than either of the two earlier ones. My barebones version of it admittedly leaves out some important details. Besides the issue Nozick himself ignores of which “modes of linkage” are conducive to meaning and why, there is also the question of what makes these modes of linkage possible in a Goffian universe but not in a Darwinian one. This second question calls for some account of the notion of possibility being invoked here. I think the general idea is clear enough. A Goffian universe would be one in which the actual relationship between humans and the cosmos would make it appropriate for humans to feel the kind of connection to the unlimited that produces transcendence meaning, whereas it makes no sense for humans to feel this kind of connection to the cosmos in a Darwinian universe. But it would be fair to ask how, exactly, appropriate and makes no sense are to be cashed out here. 

It would also be fair to ask whether a Goffian universe makes it possible, in the sense just roughly explained, for humans to connect to the cosmos individually or only collectively. Even if the human species is part of the cosmic plan, that doesn’t mean that I am part of the cosmic plan. And if not, one might wonder whether it makes sense for me personally to feel connected to the cosmos in a way that yields transcendence meaning. 

This problem points to the need for some prior connection between the individual and the species. Since it is our species as a whole, not each one of us individually, that has a role in the cosmic plan, it seems that each of us must identify first with the larger group in order for that role to get a grip on us personally. Thus, it seems, some other story will be needed to explain what makes this connection appropriate. 

Christine Korsgaard offers one such story in her recent book Fellow Creatures (Oxford 2018). According to Korsgaard, one of the features that distinguishes humans from other animals is that we have what she calls (borrowing a term from Marx) “species being.” For Korsgaard, this means, in part, that “[w]e think of the members of our species as being members of a common community and, importantly, we think of our own lives as being, in various ways, contributions to the life of that larger community” (49). But, more than that, it also means that we see our own good as tied to the life of that larger group, in that “we think of our lives as meaningful or not depending on what sort of contribution to the life of the community they are” (49, my emphasis). Our understanding of what sort of contribution counts as meaningful depends, in turn, says Korsgaard, on our understanding of the “story of humanity,” the grand narrative of the history of our species. 

Korsgaard’s account of our “species being” is just one example of the kind of story needed to fill the second gap in my Nozickian argument. I don’t claim it’s the best candidate for the job, and I won’t try to defend it here against alternatives. My point in offering it is simply to show that there are plausible ways to fill this gap.

A purposive universe would not make our individual lives more meaningful by enlarging our personal impact on the world or by giving us an assigned purpose in life. It might give our lives more meaning by making it possible to connect to the unlimited, whose meaning would provide the ultimate backstop for the meaning of every other connection in our lives. Although there are admittedly challenges for this Nozickian explanation, I believe these challenges are not only capable of being met, but to some extent shared by every other attempt to explain how meaning of life connects to meaning in life.

Charles Repp

Associate Professor, Philosophy at Longwood University | Website

I am currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Longwood University. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. I also hold graduate degrees from St. John's College (M.A. Liberal Arts) and Virginia Tech (M.A. Philosophy). My main research interests are in ethics and aesthetics.