Richard Taylor: Does Life Have Meaning?

Richard Taylor talks about life and whether or not it has meaning. Even though he addresses that the question “does life have meaning?” is perplexing, he does say it is important to arrive at a noteworthy answer. He goes into answering it by bringing up and observing the ancient myth of Sisyphus, a king who was destined by the Greek gods to roll a stone to the top of a hill just to see it roll back down. This will happen again and again till he faces death. This is a clear representation of a meaningless life according to Taylor. Even though many people will look at it as a symbolization of struggle, it is not. The struggle Sisyphus faces is that his existence does not mean anything because he does not achieve anything. As Taylor puts it, his efforts come

“The point of living is simply to be living.”

Damiel and Cassiel are two angels who spend their entire immortal lives watching over men, women, and children in Berlin. Their job is to observe behaviors and thoughts of individuals and report back to one another. No one can see them besides children as they are naïve and curious. “When the child was a child,” refers to the innocence of childhood. If we look back on the thoughts of adult citizens, they were experiencing pain. Some examples were parents worrying about their children, adults worrying about their lives being completely over because they have no one, or even people emptily staring at their television. For example, a father was upset over his child listening to loud music and proceeds to say how he gave his child what he wanted, which was a guitar but the father was not happy because his son was not doing anything with his life. As the scene continues to play, he changes the channel from an actual show to nothing. He changed the channel to a grey screen. They are absolutely distressed with their lives, reflecting either on their past or on their