The Author’s Position on the Issue
The issue under consideration is that the inevitability of death makes life meaningless. Landau presents the commonly heard arguments that may lead some people to wonder whether their lives can be meaningful, while others hold that their lives cannot be because death is inevitable. The author claims that life cannot be meaningful because of the eventual death and annihilation ( Landau, 2017) . The best response to this claim is that life is meaningless because whatever man does is negligible when examined in the context of the universe at large. For example, the author believes that some people feel that their lives are meaningless from the fact that they lack the responses to questions why they live and the specific purpose of their life ( Schinkel, 2018) . Moreover, the author believes that most of the people in the world engage with what is meaningful to them because they have often failed to identify it.
Just as many philosophical discussions do, Landau clarifies the main terms of his thoughts. The author’s position is that when talking about the meaning of life as the subject matter for this discussion, human beings understand it in more than one way ( Schinkel, 2018) . For example, this can be taken to refer the lives of individuals like his and other people or to human life overall ( Steger et al., 2006) . The meaning of life may also be understood as the biological life that includes the life of humans, animals and plants. Even though what is presented about the meaning of individual lives can easily be extrapolated to considerations of the meaning of human life of the biological life, his argument majorly focuses on the individual human lives. He also shows that meaning can be understood in more than one way ( Landau, 2017) . For instance, the author is of the view that in regular speech, meaning has two major senses, where the first sense related to the family of notions including interpretations, explanations, and understandings, while the other belongs to a family of notions including importance, worth, and value.
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Landau takes into account the fact that the meaning of life is with worth or value. He shows that those people who take their lives to lack meaning or one that has insufficient sense are saying that they do not consider the central aspects of their lives to be sufficiently worth ( Schinkel, 2018) . He goes further to show that the people who may wonder what would happen to make their lives do not will always wonder about the things that would insert more value or worth into their lives. This means that thinking about the inevitability of death as something that can render life meaningless is a thought that is associated with the lack of sufficient aspects of life that are worth or can add value to life ( Schinkel, 2018) . The author uses the example of Viktor Frankl to describe how concentration camp prisoners retained meaning in their lives, while others did not.
On end, readers get the notion that those who retain meaning in their lives do so by helping others or by planning and hoping for a better future after the war ( Schinkel, 2018) . Therefore, Landau’s position is that the people who can hold on meaning to their lives do so because they know that some aspects of life hold value for them and could have value in the future ( Landau, 2017) . However, his paradox on the subject matter comes about when he shows that considering lives from the objective and wide perspective, it may seem to lack meaning as it has a negligible effect on the universe considering that all living things will die.
Arguments against the Position
Landau shows that life cannot be meaningful because of our eventual death and annihilation ( Steger et al., 2006) . The first argument against the position of the author is that what makes life meaningless is not essentially its finitude, but the failure to include valuable and significant elements such as engagement in valuable and significant activities and attitudes including taking responsible activities and doing honest work ( Landau, 2017) . At some point in life, people may find life to be meaningless not because they know that death is infinite, but because they lack answers to questions such as the reason why they live and the purpose in their lives. Most of the people may fail to engage with what is meaningful in life as they do not have the means of identifying it.
The best example that can support this argument that the finitude of life may not render it meaningless is supposed a traveler, instead of hanging on a stem and licking drops of honey from dirty leaves before dying would have done something else ( Schinkel, 2018) . Or suppose the traveler would have done something valuable before his death like saving the lives of some children before falling into the jaws of a dragon. In such a case, the eventual death of the traveler would not probably be taken to make his achievements, experiences, and life meaningless ( Landau, 2017) . Rather, it would be taken in the opposite view, where he would have taken the last minutes of his life or days before his death to be particularly meaningful. In such a case, it may seem that it is not finitude that cancels the meaning of life, where the decisive issue is the value of what we do within the finite life ( Steger et al., 2006) . Moreover, the life that includes a sufficient number of sufficiently valuable experiences and sound behaviors is found out to be meaningful even though it is not finite.
The second argument is that because there is no free will, life cannot be regarded as meaningless. In this case, free will is the ideology that humans can have some choices on how they act and assumes that they are free to choose their behavior and are therefore self-determined. The best example is where people can make free choices as whether to commit a crime or not unless in the case of incapacitation such as insanity. The lack of free will means that behavior is not random, even though humans are free from causal influences of their past. This also means that people are responsible for their actions ( Landau, 2017) . Free will may also mean having the ability of acting and thinking voluntarily, where external conditions or fate determine the actions of human beings.
The lack of free will makes people fight so hard to live. For example, people take medicines because they understand that illness may cause death. Thus, they fight to live as they know that they are not automated machines without any sense of purpose ( Schinkel, 2018) . Moreover, the lack of free will is it that makes people struggle to reach for the illusions that appear so real that they cannot comprehend that they are possible at one point in life. Knowing that their thoughts are born out of illusions may not detract humans from enjoying life, which qualifies the statement that the lack of free will may not essentially mean that life is meaningless.
Support of the Arguments
The first argument is that what makes life meaningless is not essentially its finitude, but the failure to include valuable and significant elements such as engagement in valuable and significant activities and attitudes including taking responsible activities and doing honest work. I highly support this argument because, in my view, death does not make life meaningless, but only living a life that is filled with meaningless activities does ( Schinkel, 2018) . In this case, death only cancels the meaning of life but does not define how worth a person lives. This implies that charitable activities can contribute to the meaning of life, while meaningless activities may make life unworthy. This implies that it is not finitude that cancels the meaning of life, but the value that people hold in life while they are still living ( Landau, 2017) . All living things die, which is a biological characteristic. However, their life is meaningful only if they make positive contributions to the universe. For example, the life of trees is meaningful if they contribute to the atmosphere by making positive contributions to the climate. However, the life of humans may be rendered meaningless if they contribute negatively to the environment through pollution.
I also support the argument that because there is free will, life is meaningful. In supporting this argument, I consider the determinist approach that proposes that all behavior is caused by preceding factors and may thus be predictable. The approach in psychology sees the source of determinism as being outside the individual, which is a position that is understood to be environmental determinism ( Schinkel, 2018) . For instance, when children grow up in an environment that is violent, they will learn to become violent. This implies that people can have some choice in how they act, while the principle of free will assumes that humans can choose their behavior because they are self-determined.
Regarding the importance of life, people are determined to make their life worthy, and therefore meaningful. For instance, if people work hard and choose to live happily, they can find meaning in life and find that death is a fateful occurrence that does not even define the meaning they had in life before they died ( Landau, 2017) . The deterministic approach can also be used to define how people struggle hard to remain alive because they find it meaningful. This also means that meaning in life is not determined by death, but by the choices that people make while interacting with their immediate environment. Being determined to change the environmental conditions to suit the life we want to live can also define the meaning of life as opposed to considering that we cannot define life as meaningful just because we know we will die.
Objections to the Claims
I object to the claim that life meaningless is not necessarily its finitude, but the failure to include valuable and significant elements such as engagement in the relevant and significant activities and attitudes including taking responsible activities and doing honest works ( Landau, 2017) . In this case, finitude cancels the meaning of life because all the things that the value of the things done in the finite life continue to exist upon death ( Schinkel, 2018) . In my view, life is meaningless because it is hard to respond to questions such as the purpose of it and the reasons why we live. For instance, people often work hard towards achieving the end, but then once they attain it; its meaning vanishes just because they eventually die.
This means that death essentially overpowers the strength that would have been used to attain the perceived end. It is thus evident that death is the best definition of the end to the meaning of life. This means that life must be one extremely painful and vicious endeavor that defines the cycle of humans, whose end is defined by death ( Steger et al., 2006) . The biblical interpretation of life can also be used to refute the claim that the meaning of life is not dependent on the valuable things that people do ( Landau, 2017) . For instance, Ecclesiastes identifies how people toil with their hands, and they realize on the end that it is all vanity and comparable to striving after the wind and that there is nothing that is gained under the sun ( Schinkel, 2018) . This shows that all the actions of bringing value to life are worthless and futile for they do not bring about anything valuable.
On the contrary, I oppose the second argument that states that since there is no free will, life if meaningful. In this case, I argue that even if people can justifiably claim that their desires and abilities are entirely the results of genetics and not free will, what they do with these desires and abilities is what will eventually determine their fate including the definition of meaning to life. Suppose people continue to appreciate the illusion of free will, they have to be aware of the factors that may determine their thoughts and actions and they may not need to have complete control over those factors ( Landau, 2017) . I, therefore, argue that just because there is no free will, life cannot be considered meaningful. In this case, life is meaningless because blind chance impacts much of what happens to humans no matter how happy they are in life.
References
Landau, I. (2017). Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World . Oxford University Press.
Schinkel, A. (2018). Wonder, Mystery, and Meaning. Philosophical Papers , 1-27.
Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The meaning in life questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of counseling psychology , 53 (1), 80.
