Sure, this is the purely "psychological" or "existential" view of meaning. I agree that one may experience life in this way.
The tiny flaw, as I see it, is that if one starts to ask "is this all just a little subjective?" then one may wonder how easy it could have been to travel down a different path with equal ease. And that could make it feel arbitrary -- that one's choices didn't really matter.
It could, but only assuming that intuition wasn't valid in determining the thing that is valuable to us. I think this is clearly how I live my life in the day-to-day world. For example, Kierkegaard's view of despair is directly related to what we call existential meaning; despair is the state, basically, of not pursuing not just a general idea of meaning, but your own particular meaning in the moment. How do you know you aren't in despair? Well, you feel it -- it's called happiness, I'd say. Happiness is the barometer of meaningfulness. The interesting thing here is that Aristotle and existentialism seem to share a good deal in common on this point.
But one may still wonder... why fulfill one's natural function? Why not act contrary to this? Why is ugliness not an option? My possibly somewhat un-Nicomachean answer is that our natural function is needed for creating those values needed for our survival and flourishing as the sort of beings we are. Beauty may be an end-in-itself in certain respects, but the context in which it is an end-in-itself is our existence as rational value-creators.
That's a brilliant thought. But let's consider, from an evolutionary perspective, what death really means. Human beings seem to be unique in their conceptualization and consequential fear of death. Other animals, not attaining a level of consciousness that we have, would therefore need some other sort of evolutionary cue that would keep the organism from jumping into situations that were more likely than others to bring about death. Thus they would fear, say, huge angry predators rather than death per se. But, see, if this is the case, then they fear really uncomfortable or painful situations, and we're back at the question of pain and pleasure, goodness and badness that we were before. So it's not perpetuating one's own
survival that's directly evolved, but rather perpetuating those non-painful or dangerous states that would eventually lead to death, as well as (and more importantly) perpetuating those positive, flourishing states that lead to the propagation of one's genes. But if we're back at positive, flourishing states, we're back to a state that's more congruent with choosing the good for its own sake.
I'm saying that the existential fear of death doesn't quite seem to be an evolutionary construct -- at least, not a direct one. Perhaps the
concept of nonexistence is inherent to consciousness, and that even though consciousness evolved by natural selection, the fear of death didn't -- it sort of came with the deal, what Gould called a "spandrel". If this is the case, then there's no evolutionary explanation for the fear of death that relates to our survival. It's not death lower animals fear, but certain evolutionary situations that typically precede death; and death as we understand it is a byproduct on consciousness not directly evolved.
Actually, no, it isn't the opposite. One can hold both positions simultaneously, because they refer to different contexts. Death can be bad in some ways, and good in others.
I can only say that death would be good if the individual was incapable of living a life of some sort of meaning or flourishing. And I don't know if such a life is possible.
