Teaching a course on the meaning of life

This is a guest post by Samuel C. Rickless, University of California, San Diego, part of our series on unusual teaching ideas. 

I am happy to have been invited to share my experience of teaching a meaning of life course at UC San Diego.  Until 2019, no course at UCSD focused on the meaning of life, although existing courses on existentialism and related topics touched on the subject.  But a few years ago, I was invited by the Veritas Forum to debate a Christian apologist on the topic of whether life can have meaning without God, and 800 students and faculty attended the debate.  Apart from introductory science courses, I had never seen that many students in a single room on campus.  So, I had reason to believe that there would be demand for a course on the meaning of life.  In Summer 2019, I designed the course, and I taught it for the first time in Winter 2020, just before the pandemic forced all university teaching to go online.

I wanted each day to be devoted to a different approach or answer to the question of life’s meaning.  The idea was to expose students to a variety of different answers, some of them hybrids of existing proposals, and test them against counterarguments and hypothetical cases.  We began with pessimistic views: that life has no meaning, that whatever meaning it has is tied up with suffering unto death, or that life is absurd, in a way that might be difficult to overcome.  Then we moved on to consider sunnier views, some of them religious (Buddhism, Christianity), some of them transcendent (e.g., Nozick’s conception of The Unlimited), but most of them rooted in different aspects or elements of human life: freedom, beauty, play, morality, knowledge, and projects.  Toward the end of the course, we spent several meetings discussing the pros and cons of Susan Wolf’s influential proposal, the Fitting Fulfillment View, in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.  We discussed whether a meaningful life must have some sort of narrative structure.  And we examined Samuel Scheffler’s fascinating Tanner Lectures, Death and the Afterlife, which argues that life’s meaning is bound up with the continuation of the human race.

What excited me most about the course was the major assignment, which had two parts.  The first part involved engaging in a Millian “experiment in living”, and the second part involved describing the experiment, considering whether it was meaning-conferring, and testing three theories of life’s meaning to see whether they could make sense of one’s considered judgment about the meaningfulness of the experiment.  Students had to write a proposal for their experiment, and could not engage in it until they received permission from me to do so.  This turned out to be important.  Although I had been careful to ask students not to try anything harmful to them or to others, several students initially suggested engaging in potentially dangerous activities.  Originally, I thought of giving students room to capture their experiment visually, on videotape, but in the end I decided that this might violate privacy rights, on the assumption that most experiments would involve other people.  So, students were invited to capture their experiment on paper, before analyzing it.

At first, many students were at a loss to find a new potentially meaningful experience or activity that they had wanted to try.  But after a few weeks, students started to pick up on some of the themes of the course, and came up with more plausible and interesting experiments.  Many involved physical activity or exercise, others involved changing one’s diet, some focused on meditation or journaling, some proposed creative activities, and others suggested acts of beneficence.  In the end, I think that students found the course more engaging than a typical philosophy course, in large part because the experiment in living assignment helped them to connect the intellectual activity of thinking about life’s meaning with the substance of their own lives.  Philosophy in action, if you will.  My hope is that this course will encourage students to take a more thoughtful approach to their lives, and help them take charge of their future, instead of thinking of the college experience as a hoop to jump through on the way to a job, or as an experience designed primarily to satisfy the expectations of parents and peers.

I should say that I designed to course in an ecumenical spirit.  I wanted to incorporate views from cultures outside of Europe and North America (e.g., Confucianism and Buddhism), and I also wanted to expose students to “continental” as well as “analytic” approaches, so that they would be encouraged to think of philosophy as a big tent, both substantively and methodologically.  For me, it was a great experience, and I look forward to teaching the course again in Winter 2021.  If we are still on Zoom at that time, the course will present challenges that its previous incarnation did not face.  In particular, it will become more difficult for students to find experiments in living that do not increase the risk of catching or passing on the novel coronavirus.  But I still think that there are plenty of new potentially meaningful activities that students can engage in at home (or another safe environment).

Comments

[Tom Cochrane]

Hi Samuel. This sounds interesting! A couple of questions.
1. How did you mark the assignments? Just as regular essays? What are you giving credit for?
2. Presumably, you had to present some options before students could make their choices- but then, what do you lecture on after the first few weeks? How would this tie into what they doing?

[david]

When designing such a course, you might also want to look at this anthology of readings:

E.D. Klemke (ed) The Meaning of Life.

The readings are interesting and generally of high quality; I think there might have been a number of editions over the years.

[Samuel Rickless]

Sorry I didn't catch these questions earlier.

Tom: I marked the assignments as regular essays. Students were asked to consider three theories of life's meaning discussed in the course, consider what those theories would say about their experiment in living, and then make a judgment about whether their experiment spoke in favor or against (or neither) those theories. Students received credit for understanding the theories they discussed, for applying those theories correctly to their experiments as described, and for making the right call about whether their own evaluation of their experiment supported or failed to support those theories.

I'm not sure what you mean by "options". I did not present students with options for their experiments. They had to come up with their experiments on their own. Here were the philosophers discussed: Schopenhauer, Leopardi, Camus, Nagel, Gowans, Rosemont Jr., Kim and Seachris, Sartre, Taylor, Schlick, Feinberg, Mill, Cottingham, Nozick, Thomas, William James, Mintoff, Levy, Brogaard and Smith, Wolf + critics, Galen Strawson, De Bres, and Scheffler + critics.

David: Thanks for the recommendation. I did use a number of essays from Klemke and Cahn (4th Edition), which includes Schopenhauer, Camus, Nagel, Gowans, Rosemont Jr., Taylor, Schlick, and Feinberg.