Elijah Millgram, "John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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What is the central question about John Stuart Mill’s life and the meaning of a project‑based life?
Hello. Thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books and Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the channel with Carrie Figder, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. My guest on the program today is Elijah Milgram. Lige is the E.E. Erickson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He works primarily in moral philosophy with special interests in practical reason. But some of his more recent work has to do with the history of philosophy. Lige's new book is titled John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life. It's just been published by Oxford University Press. Listeners are probably aware that the great 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill had an unusual upbringing under the constant, and we may suppose imposing, oversight of his father.
The boy's education was devised to instill in him a fully utilitarian character. Now, as many listeners know, and as we'll be discussing more shortly, the young Mill suffered a serious mental crisis as he began adulthood. Now, an intuitive view of what gives meaning to life has it that lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness, a project, such that the desperate events and endeavors add up to one's life. Mill's life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense. And yet Mill's life was, in many respects, unsatisfying. It was riven with anxiety and trauma. Does Mill's life provide a test case for this project's view of what meaningful lives are like? Now in the book, John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life, Elijah Milgram weaves together intellectual biography with philosophical analysis, all in the service of what strikes me as a distinctive style of moral philosophizing.
So as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But also as usual, why don't we begin, as we usually do, with our guest, Hello, Laj.
Hi, Bob. How's it going?
It's going well. How are you?
I'm good.
Why don't you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Okay. Well, let me give a slightly different characterization of what my main philosophical interests are, which is kind of appropriate for the venue. So it's unusual for... academic philosophers to think of themselves as focused on the meaning of life as their kind of research area. But that's actually what I went into philosophy to think about. It's actually what I went to college to think about. I guess I can describe it this way. When I was around, I guess I must have been in my very late teens or maybe twenties, I had, I suppose you could think of it as an existential crisis. Life looked meaningless, and the world looked meaningless, and I actually had a regress argument to explain why, not that I knew that phrase at the time.
You know, for something to be important or matter, something else has to be important or matter, and then something else has to be important, and eventually you run out. And so I thought, well, you know, either life is meaningless or it's not. If it's not, and I study philosophy and become a philosopher, I might figure out what the meaning of life is. But if not, I wouldn't have wasted my time doing that any more than anything else. So this has really been a focus of mine from the very beginning of my interest in philosophy. And my other research focus is theory of rationality. You mentioned practical reasoning, and that's one side of it. But, you know, I'm also interested in theoretical rationality, thinking about what it is to reason about how the facts stand.
And these two interests seem to me to, they're not separate or kind of distinct. They overlap a good deal. And I kind of expect this will emerge in the conversation.
Fabulous. I guess, I mean, I came to know your work from the first book, actually, from the practical induction book. Um, and I guess now I can see how the connection to the meaning of life might be evident in some of the substantive views that you have in that book. But we're here to talk about the newest book, not the first. So let's begin by talking about the genre, let's say, of the new book.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about John Stuart Mill’s life and the meaning of a project‑based life?
0:02–7:54
2
How does Mill’s unusual childhood and education set up the test case for a project‑based view of meaning?
7:54–15:05
3
Why does Mill experience a mental crisis in his twenties and how does it challenge the project view?
15:05–24:15
4
What is the Wiggins‑Williams coherence condition and how does Mill’s life illustrate its limits?
24:15–32:01
5
How does Mill reformulate utilitarianism—higher vs. lower pleasures—to support a meaningful life project?
32:01–41:56
6
Why does Mill treat free will and moral freedom as higher pleasures, and what does that reveal about his project?
41:56–50:31
7
What does Mill’s political activism (liberty, women’s rights, etc.) show about the feasibility of a life‑wide project?
50:31–58:36
8
What overall lesson does Mill’s tragic yet accomplished life give us about the viability of project‑based meaning?
58:36–1:07:28
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