Meaning Of Life In Susan Wolf's The Meanings Of Lives

Susan Wolf’s The Meanings of Lives Wolf’s “The Meanings of Lives”, states a meaningful life must have some subjective and objective element to it and must be somewhat successful; Wolf’s idea of subjectivity is that projects and activities eventually make life meaningful. The projects must fulfill certain circumstances on the subjective and objective side. I’m going to introduce Wolf’s “fitting fulfillment” idea, raise a point against it and argue her idea, that success defines a meaningful life. According to Wolf, all meaningful lives have both a subjective and an objective aspect to them. These basics can make lives important only together. The general idea is that a person’s projects and activities in the end make his or her life meaningful,

Wolf argues that a person must feel something towards his or her project or activities and that the person must feel gravitated toward this project and it must excite them or they may be passionate about it. But, not all people feel the same way in what they do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that their lives are meaningless, just that they look at what they’re doing with a different perspective. The person might be (i) spontaneous in what they choose to do; the activity excites them but they like to do things at different times, (ii) unreflective or idle; they don’t really think about or are not self-reflective about their beliefs, (iii) episodic and has no long term commitments to their projects, or they may be (iv) detached in what they do and they may not love or feel passion towards anything they do. Each example is of a person who may not be passionate and not feel anything towards their projects but have at least some success in such activities. This person may do different kinds of work, help people, and admire art the same way normal people do just with less passion and excitement but with the same amount of success. It would not be fair to say this person’s life lacks meaning because they’re less