Abstract
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.