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Will’s question to Dawkins about the meaning of life elicited the reply that the life is what one chooses to make of it.

It seems Dawkins falls into category #9 below.

Regards,
Michael

In the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 43 No. 1, Winter 2003 entitled ‘What Eminent People have said about the Meaning of Life’ the authors identified 10 common themes:

1. To enjoy or experience life. 17% of the sample including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Malcolm Forbes, Cary Grant, Janis Joplin, Thomas Jefferson, Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sinclair Lewis wrote: “If I go to a play I do not enjoy it less because I do not believe that it is divinely created or divinely conducted, that it will last forever instead of stopping at eleven, that many details of it will remain in my memory after a few months, or that it will have any particular moral effect on me. And I enjoy life as I enjoy that play.”

2. To love, help, or serve others. 13% of the sample, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Clarence Darrow, Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, Theodore Hesburg, the Dalai Lama, Albert Schweitzer, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. For example, Einstein stated that “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile”.

3. Life is a mystery. 13% of the sample, including Albert Camus, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan, S”ren Kierkegaard, Napoleon, Stephen Hawking, and Martin Buber. Camus said, “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me to know.”

4. Life is meaningless. 11% of the sample, including Joseph Conrad, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, H. L. Mencken, Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, and George Bernard Shaw. The pessimism implied by this theme was captured by Clarence Darrow when he compared life to a ship that is “tossed by every wave and by every wind; a ship headed to no port and no harbor, with no rudder, no compass, no pilot, simply floating for a time, then lost in the waves.”

5. To serve or worship God and/or prepare for the next (or after-) life. 11% of the sample endorsed by spiritual leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama and more secular people such as Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Paine, and General William Westmoreland. Muhammad Ali referred to life as “only a preparation for the eternal home, which is far more important than the short pleasures that seduce us here”.

6. Life is a struggle. 8% of the sample, including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Bernard Shaw, and Jonathan Swift. In his book Nicholas Nickelby, Charles Dickens referred to life as “one damned horrid grind”. Jonathan Swift described life as “a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for awhile and then act our part in it”.

7. To contribute to something that is greater than ourselves. 6% of the sample, including Will Durant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Mann, Margaret Mead, Richard Nixon, and Mohandas Gandhi. For example, the philosopher Will Durant believed that the meaning of life “lies in the chance it gives us to produce or contribute to something greater than ourselves.”

8. To become self-actualized. 6% of the sample, including Marie Curie, Erich Fromm, Frederick Nietzsche, Plato, Elizabeth KĂŒbler-Ross, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry David Thoreau. To develop or “evolve” as a person or as a species. To pursue truth(s), wisdom, or a higher level of being. Robert Louis Stevenson argued that “to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life”.

9. To create your own meaning. 5% of the sample, including Sidney Hook, Grandma Moses, Carl Sagan, Simone deBeauvoir, John Dewey, Viktor Frankl, and Carl Jung. For example, Grandma Moses stated “Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be”.

10. Life is absurd or a joke. 4% of the sample, including Albert Camus, Charlie Chaplin, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Oscar Wilde. Charlie Chaplin once described life as “a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in the long shot”.

I hope the article pointed out that some of these categories are not mutually exclusive or incompatable with each other and that unless an individual used the very words in the description, which category they fall into is a matter of interpreting what they said in a way which most closely fits one of them. For instance, #4 and #10 are closest to my own beliefs and I could agree with either of them. #6 is also consistant with many of them. This thought is voiced in the popular expression "life's a bitch...and then you die." Or put more succintly by the late night talk show host Art Bell who suggested that when you die, it's "lights out." How fortunate I feel not to have been burdened with religion by not having been fully indoctrinated by my parents in collusion with some clergy. Whatever their shortcomings, it's a gift for which I will be grateful to them all of my life. When I look around at those who weren't so fortunate, it occurs to me that I could have turned out to be just as mentally screwed up as they are by it.

Wow! You guys are way cool. I'd love to visit someday too. Keep up the great work!