Why Animals and People have Different Meanings in Life

The problem with John Vervaeke’s answer to the big philosophical question

The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke distinguishes between meaning in life and the meaning of life. The former can be answered by looking at the function of our ways of thinking and behaving, but the latter is metaphysical or theological, and it’s scientifically unanswerable.

We can’t know that life emerged from nonlife for a reason worth pursuing, but we can find purpose within life by ensuring that we’re working in optimal ways. Our ways of thinking evolved, Vervaeke says, to recognize what’s relevant, to ignore many possibilities, and to motivate choices by focussing on what seems important. Our thinking is thus guided by what we care about.

According to Vervaeke, that concern we have for what occupies our attention binds us to the world as we experience it. We evolved not to be detached and objective, but to immerse ourselves in certain projects, to find “meaning” in them by understanding how they cohere together, how they’re lawful and intelligible, and how the environment sets standards for us to improve our ways of relating to it. The smoother our integration with the environment, in so far as we’re embodied, immersed beings, the more we’re liable to enter a flow state which amounts to happiness rather than alienation.

Thus, Vervaeke’s solution to what he calls the “modern meaning crisis” is that we should seek wisdom by thinking and feeling more in the practical, environmentally submissive ways to which we’re adapted. Alienation is a sign of mental dysfunctionality, in that the alienated person leaves out the practical side of cognition, focussing too much on abstract, subversive issues that have no relevance to the good life or that are even antithetical to it. Happy folks immerse themselves in their environment, feeling at home and productive there, whereas alienated individuals feel adrift because they don’t know how to excel, or they lack concern for something apart from themselves.

This is all plausible at the cognitive scientific level, but it’s still a dodge. The question that Vervaeke doesn’t consider is whether there are multiple pictures of human nature at stake.

If we assume the legitimacy or the merit of our evolved purpose — to occupy and to flourish in a niche, like all the other animals — then Vervaeke’s theory makes sense and may reduce modern alienation.

But what if we’re not animals because we’re people? What if animals are supposed to bond with their environments in the ways Vervaeke lays out, whereas people evolved to transcend animality, to leap beyond natural selection, which would call for tragic heroism in that we’d have to learn to live with alienation?

As the philosopher Leo Strauss implied, what’s special about the modern meaning crisis is just that, on liberal grounds, the elites revealed too many esoteric secrets of the temple to the lower classes, such as the secrets that the gods never existed, that meaning in life is subjective, that justice is political, that our existence is largely accidental, that the cosmic environment is inhuman in scale.

Some individuals have been alienated and marginalized since the advent of prehistoric shamanism. Monks, gurus, priests, philosophers, and artists later took on neo-shamanic roles in sedentary societies, and these underclasses endorsed countercultures because they saw beyond the delusions of mainstream society.

In Vervaeke’s terms, intellectual elites deemed the prosaic jobs and folklores of the hoi palloi to be “irrelevant” or prosaic, when compared with an enlightening overview of our existential condition. The Scientific Revolution, modern art, and democratic norms just popularized that overview, so it was no longer reserved for the higher-educated, esoteric circles.

It’s fine to emphasize, as Vervaeke does, that our knowledge should be applied, and that we find our lives to be meaningful when we’re of some use in pursuing a worthwhile project.

But what are the worthwhile projects at the summit of naturalistic knowledge of how life itself is likely irrelevant to the wider universe? What can we find to be relevant to us when we’ve finally learned that our families, nations, histories, and species are all irrelevant to the flow of the cosmic wilderness? We can enter a flow state when we ignore that big picture, but nature amounts to an inhuman flow state, an evolution of star systems that has nothing to do with us.

The source of alienation for people, then, as opposed to unknowing animals, is that we suspect there’s a mismatch between what we evolved to do, and what we discovered by anomalous historical exploits. We evolved to live like animals, but some tens of thousands of years ago, we became people by acting in the behaviourally modern way, by focussing not on our narrow life cycle but on symbols and cultures which took us far beyond our adapted functions. We developed artificial institutions that are at odds with nature, a mismatch that’s finally coming to a head with the environmental crisis, after several thousand years of the imperial expansion of our civilizations.

Philosophy, science, religion, and art are countercultural institutions that came to emphasize alienation as a downside of personhood. Dysfunctionality, then, is relative to the stipulation of some function. Given animality, we ought to immerse ourselves in the natural or social environment, as Vervaeke says. But given personhood, that logic no longer applies since our cognitive role may instead be to live on the edge of appreciating that the universe is no fit place for life, that the feeling of being at home is always an illusion.

People don’t think or behave like animals. Animals are content with establishing homeostasis by limiting their freedom in an environment. They find a niche in which they can excel, and they adapt to that set of tasks.

By contrast, people excel at the meta-task of mastering all possible niches. Apparently, that’s our chief trait, the modelling of environments with language, reason, imagination, autonomy, and ambition. We use those models to reshape the natural environment, to adapt it to us, rather than the other way around. We turn the wilderness into an artificial refuge.

If there’s a task that’s fit for people in so far as people are distinct from animals, it’s that godlike one of transforming nature into an artificial wonderland. But that task is premised on alienation and horror for the wilderness. We’re driven to reshape the world because we see further than animals — too far, in fact, to be content with any project. We’re always looking for the next adventure, growing jaded with what came before because the end of progress for people would be the whole universe’s practical (rather than just imaginary) personalization.

Broaching this dispute about human nature takes us to the question of whether life generally has a meaning. This is a philosophical rather than a scientific question, so Vervaeke is inclined to dismiss it. But that’s only lingering scientism on his part. What people ought to do with their life is a perfectly meaningful question that’s beyond science because the application of scientific methods never entails anything’s non-instrumental worth.

What is human life worth, given the knowledge of how we differ from animals? What should we do with our freedom and our destabilizing knowledge of how the gods are dead, our evolution has been impersonal and largely accidental and pointless, and there’s a universe out there to explore, exploit, and redeem?

That’s a question for philosophy, religion, and art, although science has brought this question to the fore by supplying us with a wealth of natural facts that have disenchanted our natural roles. The more naturally functional our behaviour, the more we’re thinking and acting like animals, and animals are defined by their slavery to their environment. Vervaeke dresses up this servitude by calling it a “bond,” or a feeling of “belonging.”

But whatever we might think of that state of being united with a habitat, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. What alienates us isn’t just our native cognitive capacities, but science-centered cultures which provide the background knowledge that living things aren’t meant to fit in anywhere. Nature can’t possibly care whether we live or die. Life evolved for the same reason molecules and solar systems developed — because that’s how the cookie crumbled.

Why should people who care about themselves and other living things want to bond with that wilderness that underlies all our artifacts and institutions? This question is comparable to one we might pose to an enslaved person: Why should the slave want to serve a master who has only contempt for him or her? Granted, nature’s indifferent rather than malevolent, but neither state bonds well with human pride.

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