The good, the true, and the beautiful : toward a unified account of great meaning in life

Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism and consequentialism share. I instead develop their most plausible rival, a naturalist and non-consequentialist account of what enables moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation to confer great meaning on a person’s life, namely, the idea that they do so insofar as a person transcends an aspect of herself in some substantial way. I criticize several self-transcendence theories that contemporary philosophers have advanced, before presenting a new self-transcendence view and defending it as the most promising. Introduction: questioning supernaturalism and consequentialism Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. The phrase ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful ’ should be read figuratively, as a rough way of referring to certain kinds of moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation. Hence, the reader is cautioned, for instance, not to use a plain sense of ‘the good’ that would be overly broad for connoting something more than the moral such as prudence. Insofar as ‘the good’ least controversially confers superlative meaning on life, it picks out ethical accomplishments such as maintaining integrity in the face of great temptation, going beyond the call of duty to help others, and pulling off a just political revolution. Similarly, the reader should Religious Studies (2011) 47, 389–409 f Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0034412510000569