Assume you agree (a) my life is not ultimately meaningful. Can you nevertheless still say (b) my life is meaningful to me?
(NB I’m leaving aside the division of ultimate happiness into an absolutely ultimate and a ultimate possible, a la Thomas’s distinction into supernatural and natural happiness. The question is given any account of ultimate meaning, whether this can be renounced and leave some sense of te meaningful.)h
On the one hand, meaningful quickly fades off into obscurity, and modifying it by ultimately or to me doesn’t make it any more clear. This vagery, however, doesn’t totally erase the sense of the question. Arguendo, you’ve conceded (a) as opposed to protesting it makes no sense.
Obviously, if (b) requires (a) the two are inseparable, so how separable are they? Meaning is a good, and ultimate is something final. So taken, the question is whether something is good to me that isn’t good in the end, and this makes no sense. If the good I want is a sandwich, it makes no sense to say that I can’t eat a sandwich but I can eat what is a sandwich to me. Under this assumption, all that to me means is that I’m mistaken about what I’m eating.
So if they are compatible, ultimate meaning can’t be a good one wills. If so, it has to be in some way undesirable, and since it’s nonsensical to say that it is undesirable simply or absolutely speaking (who wouldn’t want it, all other things being equal?) it must be undesirable with some qualification: either because it doesn’t exist, or it is unattainable, or conflicts with some greater good. But there can’t be any good greater than an ultimate one, so it must be undesirable as unattainable or non-existent.
Presumably we’d judge it non-existent for the same reason we’d judge it unattainable: ultimate goods are above spacetime, and either there is nothing above this or we have no access to it. As Qoheleth puts it, temporal existence as such is meaningless since we see by induction that all its goods dissipate and vanish into oblivion. Having made an exhaustive inventory of spacetime goods, we see that all of them are lost, though this is guaranteed above all by the death of the one who possesses them. At the same time, any attainment of a higher order good requires an exit from spacetime. Death is therefore either the guarantee of ultimate meaninglessness or the necessary condition for the possibility of ultimate meaning, which vindicates a variant sense of Heidegger’s claim that authentic existence is lived toward death, while at the same time being a criticism of this variant sense, as meaninglessness is in the last analysis inimical to authenticity, and death seen as an exit to a higher good is not a life lived toward death.
Just Thomism 