SUNY Potsdam

Dr. Galen K. Pletcher, Dean Emeritus of Arts and Sciences/Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

May 19, 2012

Thank you, President Schwaller, and thanks to you and my colleagues for the honor of this invitation to speak today. SUNY Trustee and SUNY Student Assembly President Kaitlyn Beachner, College Council members Chairman Roger Linden, and Pat Regan, my colleagues on the faculty and staff of SUNY Potsdam, family and friends of our graduates, and 2012 graduates of SUNY Potsdam: Congratulations to all of you receiving your diplomas! I hope and trust that your SUNY Potsdam degrees will serve you well throughout your lives.

Although I rarely admit it in public, I’ve been thinking about the problem of the meaning of life for several decades. When I admit that this is what I am working on, people edge slowly away from me at parties. Or they suddenly discover that their drink needs to be refreshed. Or they find that their smartphone needs immediate attention. But the topic of the meaning of life has recently become quite the rage. On a recent search at Amazon.com, I found over 80 books that have “meaning of life” in the title.

Here are three examples:
Meaning in Life and Why it Matters.
The Real Meaning of Life. (Accept no substitutes!)
Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. (I am not making this up. I don’t think I should read that one. I mean at my age and all. I have to be careful.)

Sports are big, as you see in these titles:
The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life.
Tennis and the Meaning of Life.
Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life.
A Look at Life from a Deer Stand: Hunting for the Meaning of Life. (Get it?)
Boston Red Sox and the Meaning of Life, (but don’t be upset; there’s also:)
New York Yankees and the Meaning of Life.

We also have titles for you if you’re in a bit of a hurry and don’t have much time to spend on the issue:
100 Lessons on the Meaning of Life in 100 Words or Less.
The Meaning of Life in 100 Words. (This must be a very short book.)
A Pocket Guide to the Meaning of Life. (Quick answers for the person on the go.)

I was hoping eventually to write a book on this topic, now that I have some time in retirement, but it appears that all the titles have been taken.

I don’t believe that there is a single answer to the question of life’s meaning. People who say this—that there is no one single answer to the question of life’s meaning—often follow up by saying that we make our own meaning in life. I don’t believe that’s quite true, either. It’s not entirely up to us. But there is truth to the claim that how we live our lives can affect our sense of life’s meaning. I’d like to describe some aspects of the meaning of our lives that I think are in fact at least somewhat under our control.

Purpose. For life to have meaning, it is important that we feel that our life is serving one or more purposes. In some religions, life may be thought to have a single purpose, or a very small number of purposes. In other cases, there may be an assortment of purposes. One’s family is a major source of purposes. For a long time, working at an institution of higher learning—in teaching and administration—was another important source of the purposes I was trying to serve. Purposes can be very mundane. Monday I painted the front porch. And I regularly take out the garbage. Mundane purposes do count!

People who retire often feel that they are lacking purpose in their lives. They no longer feel useful, as they might put it. No one is relying on them as they did when they were driving a truck or running the cash register. Our work isn’t the sole source of the purposes we serve, of course, but it is a significant portion and is apt to be sorely missed even if someone, paradoxically, also is enjoying not having to go to work every day.

Commitment. But it’s not enough to be serving purposes. You have to own the purposes in some way; you have to feel that they are purposes you accept. If simply serving purposes were enough, slaves would have meaningful lives, because slaves are extremely useful to those who exploit them. But a life of slavery is not likely to be felt by anyone to be a life with meaning.

Moral Value. If we have purposes that we have chosen to serve, is that enough? Much would seem to depend on what kinds of purposes they are. Adolf Hitler, after all, had a purpose-driven life if ever there was one. It would seem that the purposes must be valuable ones, or at least (as in the case of improving your golf game) purposes that are not harmful to others. There must be a moral dimension to our considerations, as well.

Hope. As the old song says, “You gotta have hope.” I don’t mean that you should be hoping for something. The hope I’m talking about is very general, and it is much like trust. Consider this: When you are on an upper floor of a building, do you worry about whether the floor will support you? We certainly do if we feel an earthquake, but in the vast majority of cases, we simply walk across the floor without thinking about the fact that we are suspended far above the ground. The hope I’m talking about is like that. It underlies everything. It may not even be conscious. It’s the belief that it makes sense to keep trying to do all the things we are trying to do. Not so much that our projects will succeed; we know that many of them will not succeed. But hope tells us that it makes sense to keep on with our lives, including our failures as well as our successes. As Emily Dickinson says:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all . ¹

Autonomy. We must feel that we are somewhat in control of our lives, even if we admit that much of what happens to us is out of our control. Why do people in the US hate to give up their driving privileges as they grow older? Because they know that, given the lack of public transportation, they will lose a great deal of their autonomy. They will become dependent on other people for the basic necessities of life, in ways that are at best inconvenient and, at worst, humiliating. This dependency is debilitating to a sense of meaning.

When we think about threats to our autonomy, by the way, we think first about the abridgment of our freedom by the actions of others: bosses, spouses, children, the law, the IRS, etc. However, we can and do abridge our own freedom of action very frequently, through such things as: addictions, for example, smoking; procrastination; giving up before a task is completed; acting on our passions without thinking of the consequences; refusal to acknowledge our mistakes; and so on. These actions and attitudes of our own do as much to inhibit our freedom of action as would the actions of an external agency.

Connection to others. Finally, it seems to me that connections to other beings— human and animal—are also essential to a life with meaning. Other people sometimes annoy the heck out of us, but I believe that a life without the companionship of others would be lacking much of what makes life worthwhile. Prisoners report that solitary
confinement is nearly impossible to bear. We need to be with others, to exchange greetings with them, to participate in activities with them, to help them and be helped by them. It certainly is what I have missed most since my retirement: The daily interactions, trivial and momentous, with co-workers I respect and whose company I greatly enjoy.

So I think some ingredients of a meaningful life that each of us can help bring about in our own lives are these: purposes that have moral value (or at least that are not harmful), freely chosen by you, an outlook of hope, at least some control over your life, and the company of other humans and animals. I realize that you will no doubt have thought of many of these factors. One of the features of my discipline is that, unlike neurobiologists and Civil War historians, philosophers spend most of our time thinking about things that everyone else is already thinking about, at least from time to time. We try to do it systematically and thoroughly, but our procedure is very much the same as anyone’s: We try to make sense of what happens to us.

Happiness. What about happiness? The correlation between meaning in life and happiness is not as strong as you might think. Abraham Lincoln, whose life was meaningful if anyone’s ever was, struggled with melancholy and even depression all of his life. Mother Theresa suffered from great doubts about her work and even her Catholic faith. Still, the ideal is that a life would be both meaningful and happy. I shall close with a few observations about happiness.

Happiness comes from inside. Most of us think that happiness comes from stuff that happens to us. If I could just get that promotion, I’d be happy. Or if I could just move to a warmer climate, I’d be happy. The trouble is that achieving a goal does not automatically make us happy. Buyer’s remorse is very real. In general, happiness doesn’t usually come from outside. We’ve all known people who seem to have it all but who are very unhappy. And we’ve known people who’ve had very challenging and difficult lives but who are happy anyway. This is a real puzzle, because it is certainly not true that happiness has nothing to do with one’s financial and physical and social conditions. It’s just that it’s not a very simple relationship.

When I got my first tenure-track job in 1970, I told one of my professors at the University of Michigan (where I was completing graduate studies) that I was glad that I would now, finally, have enough money. I was going to be paid $9,100 per year for teaching nine courses of philosophy, and the salary would increase to $10,000—five figures—when I finished my Ph.D., which I did during the first year. I’d hardly ever heard of so much money! In response to my comment, he said (with no trace of sarcasm or irony) "Oh, you never have enough money." I asked him what he meant. He explained that whenever you get a little more money, you begin to notice things you hadn't noticed before: the worn carpet, the rickety desk, the gasping car. And, since you're now making enough money to do something about these things, you replace the carpet, get a new desk, buy a new(er) car. Soon you end up with "not enough" money again. So, he maintained, it's a mistake to believe that any amount of increase in salary would ever give anyone "enough money."

I was at first very discouraged by this, but over the years, I have come to see the wisdom in what he said. What gives one "enough money" is not a change in one's external circumstances, but a change in one's outlook. People who have "enough money" have decided that the money they have is enough. It’s like that with happiness as well. People who are happy are concentrating on what they have, not on what they would like to have.

We often bring unhappiness on ourselves. The next time you’re waiting for the clothes to dry in the laundromat, or are waiting for a doctor, or are otherwise unoccupied for awhile, take careful note of what thoughts come percolating up unbidden. In my case, at least, it’s often worries, unpleasant memories, self-condemnation, and the like. But our mental life is under our control. Here’s an analogy: when you go to a cafeteria, do you select all the things you don’t like to eat? Ah, rutabaga! What a treat. And oh look, calves’ liver! And fruit cake for dessert!! No, I imagine you pick things you like to eat. But when people remember things, it’s remarkable how often they willingly bring into their consciousness precisely those things that correspond to the rutabaga, fruit cake, and calves’ liver of their lives. Imagine if someone were somehow in control of your mind and insisted that whenever you had an idle moment, you had to think about unpleasant things. You’d scream bloody murder; you’d think yourself ill-used. And you would be right. Don’t do to yourself what you would complain about if someone else did it to you. We’ll call this this Nickel Rule, Gold and Silver being already taken: Don’t do to yourself what you would complain about if someone else did it to you.

I once read one of those slogans that newspapers put in when they need to fill up a column. It was attributed to one of my favorite philosophers, William James, who is alleged to have said: “I don’t whistle because I’m happy. I’m happy because I whistle.” In a different newspaper a few weeks later, James was quoted as saying “I don’t sing because I’m happy. I’m happy because I sing.” Well, I know James’s work pretty well, and I can’t find either of these passages. But in his great two-volume work, The Principles of Psychology, he notes that you can influence the way you feel by how you behave. It’s a mistake, according to this theory, to wait for something good to happen, thinking that then you will be happy. Instead, you should do things associated with feeling happy—whistling, singing, smiling, acting cheerfully toward others—and the happy feelings come about as a result. It seems strange—perhaps even a little dishonest—that you can make yourself happy by acting happy, but it works, and I recommend it.

Finally, learn to enjoy the happiness of others. One of the reasons I enjoyed being Dean so much was that when someone had a good class, published some research, or was awarded a grant, I was genuinely happy for that person. It made me happy, too. There is a little demon in each of us who feels jealous of and threatened by
the success of others. Tell that demon to go away. The demon will get smaller and weaker if you keep sending it away. Be happy when other people are successful. For one thing, you’ll then be happy much more frequently than if you’re happy only when you are successful.

I have to stop. President Schwaller has a hook and he knows how to use it. Here’s my point: A large number of the elements necessary to achieve a life with meaning are at least partially within your control. Always be alert for the ways that you yourself can make your life more meaningful. Do not wait—do not wait—for external
circumstances to give you meaning and make you happy. Do it yourself. The autonomy you gain by owning your own feelings and purposes will do much to enhance the meaning in your life.

Congratulations again on your graduation, and best wishes for a wonderful future!

References

¹ Emily Dickinson, “Hope,” http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/hope.html.