So the title of the talk poses a question, what is the purpose of life? And the subtitle suggests that I'm going to tell you the classical and contemporary answers to the meaning of life question.

This further suggests that classical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were concerned with finding the meaning of life. But I see no convincing

evidence that they were concerned with this question, at least not in the sense that you might

have posed the question about the meaning of life to yourself and that you might be searching

for an answer to it.

Meaning of life talk for better or for worse seems to be a product of secular discourse.

By secular discourse, I mean one that can no longer take for granted that a loving creator God might serve as a principle of explanation in one's thinking about either the world or how to make

sense of oneself and one's life as a whole. Secular discourse does not operate with concepts of what

is ultimately transcendent. And without that ultimate transcendent source of explanation,

the question of the point of it all becomes much more

vexed and troubling. Furthermore, a case can and has been made that the meaning of life query is a

post-industrial phenomenon, that the question took hold right at the moment in the West when we were

making the transition from a largely agrarian and rural form of life to a largely industrial

and urban form of life, in which most people were suddenly forced to sell their labor in a

competitive and largely exploitative market system in order to seek

out any sort of life for themselves. So it might be a question born out of alienation

and anxiety that typifies that kind of life. The question of the meaning of life reaches

a crescendo in early to mid-20th century thought and art just after the Great War,

when, in Europe at least, the murderous and self-destructive tendencies of humanity reached hitherto unknown proportions and hitherto unrealized consequences, including and perhaps most

especially the threat of total nuclear annihilation. So with death and the prospect of death

and the forefront of European consciousness, the question, what's the point of going on to gone a unique salience and urgency?

It was a question born out of a crisis.

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