Fourth, there must a social afterlife. Consider a conscious afterlife in which a person is completely isolated from anyone else, like being in eternal solitary confinement. Such a fate seems unimaginably horrible. If that were my destiny right now, then I’d say that my life has no meaning in the specified sense. But what if I’m solitary but situated in an infinitely expansive edenic paradise, with ever new wonders beyond the horizon? That doesn’t seem so bad. And perhaps it wouldn’t be, although it would be missing one very valuable thing: Love. With no other persons to interact with, there would be no one to share paradise with, and no possibility of personal loving relationships.
Fourth,
So a truly meaningful fate must be a social afterlife.and
, then how is my life now any more significant than a shade’s life? Depending on the capacities of my shade my life now may have some significance, especially if there’s a range of possible shade-like afterlifes and my life now makes a real difference whether I wind up as a happy shade or a sad one. So it seems that an enduring, fully conscious afterlife is not necessary for my life to have any meaning at all, but for it objectively to have anything like the kind of meaning I subjectively think and hope that it has, shade-like afterlives may not be sufficient.
As for (1), consider first a fully conscious afterlife in which I am completely isolated from everyone else, like being in eternal solitary confinement. If that were my destiny right now, then I’d say that my life has no objective meaning. Indeed, such a fate strikes me as unimaginably horrible. In a word, hellish. So a truly meaningful fate must be a social afterlife. But not just any social afterlife. Imagine being stuck in a room for all eternity with the same people having nothing but the same old conversations again and again. Wouldn’t that become unbearably tedious? Without some source of new stimulation, even a social afterlife would eventually become hellish. But an eternal afterlife requires an infinite reservoir of new stimulation. What could that be?
Consider the ultimacy issue again. I can’t give my own life an objective meaning because I in myself am incomplete. I need others, a society, the possibility of loving relationships, to complete me. As Donne said, “no man is an island.” But a society of individually incomplete beings is not enough either. Without input from something outside the society, it becomes wholly codependent, a bunch of people trying to prop each other up. If this source of input from outside the society is itself something incomplete, something that cannot stand on its own as a buck-stopping source of meaning and value, then introducing it just pushes things back a step. Eventually it will exhaust itself, and run out of new input. Objective meaning, therefore, requires the existence of an infinite, noncontingent source of meaning and value, a summum bonum. Aquinas called that being God, and it seems a fitting title. If love is the highest good, then the source of all meaning and love must be a transcendent Lover. Such a being could
is needed to themselves to
An infinite being of maximal intrinsic value (i.e., God) could supply that. It’s hard to see what else could.
then there must be something about that person that is of ultimate value, and of ultimate value for that very person.