https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=spr8Qzpm3hM
There’s been a lot of discussion about Meeting and Life, but I think the best discussion of it is by Susan Wolf in her book, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. And she boils it down to this very interesting. She goes through lots of things, and she gives a lot of argument how it’s not reducible to morality, how it’s not reducible to sort of material success. I invite you to read those. I don’t have time to go through those right now. And she says it comes down to initially what people say. They want to be connected to something bigger than themselves. But then she says, that’s just a metaphor. It’s not like if I chained you to a mountain, you’re happy. There’s a metaphor here. She says, what it is is we want to be creatively participating in something that has a value independent of our valuing of it. She has a formula for this. She says, we want subjective attraction to meet objective attractiveness. And then she hits a naturalistic roadblock. And the book sort of goes bleh bleh bleh. Because she says, the problem is there’s no such thing. Things don’t intrinsically have a value. Things don’t objectively have a value. So what are we going to do? And she considers one answer that people have. Well, what we do is we value what other people value. And she says, that’s not quite right. You’ve got Bill. He knows that lots of people care about the maple leaves. So he devotes his whole life to thinking and talking about the maple leaves. We’re not convinced Bill’s leading a good life. And that’s where she sort of stops. I want to try and go a little bit farther. I want to try and go a little bit farther and say, what we want is we want to be connected to something that we find profound and that we take very seriously. And that something towards which we can have reverence.