The Meaning of Life

A meaningful life, Nozick argues, is one that involves genuine connection to something of value beyond itself. This is what distinguishes the meaningful life from the merely happy or pleasant one: a life of continuous pleasure in a Nozick's "experience machine" — a virtual reality that simulates all the feelings of a rich, successful life — is not meaningful, because there is nothing actually valuable being done. Meaning requires contact with real value: genuine achievement, genuine love, genuine understanding, genuine contribution to the lives of others or to the cultural inheritance of humankind.

Nozick's most famous thought experiment — the experience machine, first introduced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia — is developed further here. Imagine a machine that can give you any desired experiences. Would you plug in? Most people, reflecting carefully, say no — and this reveals that we care about actually doing things, not merely having the experience of doing them; about being a certain kind of person, not merely seeming to be; and about being in genuine contact with a reality deeper than our own mental states. The experience machine argument is Nozick's most powerful case that well-being is not purely a matter of subjective experience.

Nozick proposes two metaphors for what the examined life aspires to: light (understanding, clarity, the illumination of reality) and gravity (the weight of genuine concern, the importance of what matters). A life that has both light and gravity — a life lived with genuine understanding and genuine care — is a life in which meaning and well-being are not in tension but mutually reinforcing. The philosophical life, far from being an escape from full human engagement, is the form of engagement most likely to achieve both: the understanding that makes love and commitment meaningful, and the commitment that makes understanding more than mere cleverness.

The meditation on the meaning of life runs through The Examined Life and is connected to Nozick's broader reflections on death, spirituality, and the nature of the divine. His treatment of the experience machine here extends and deepens the brief argument in Anarchy, State, and Utopia chapter 3.