meaning of life philosophy essay

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus on Our Search for Meaning and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation

By maria popova.

In the beautifully titled and beautifully written A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning ( public library ), historian Robert Zaretsky considers Camus’s lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his “yearning for a meaning or a unity to our lives,” and its timeless yet increasingly timely legacy:

If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy. […] Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophy — the questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the world — less with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase.

Reflecting on the parallels between Camus and Montaigne , Zaretsky finds in this ongoing chase one crucial difference of dispositions:

Camus achieves with the Myth what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed for Montaigne’s Essays: it places “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.” For Camus, however, this astonishment results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute, of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.

Camus himself captured this with extraordinary elegance when he wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus :

This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.

To discern these echoes amid the silence of the world, Zaretsky suggests, was at the heart of Camus’s tussle with the absurd:

We must not cease in our exploration, Camus affirms, if only to hear more sharply the silence of the world. In effect, silence sounds out when human beings enter the equation. If “silences must make themselves heard,” it is because those who can hear inevitably demand it. And if the silence persists, where are we to find meaning?

This search for meaning was not only the lens through which Camus examined every dimension of life, from the existential to the immediate, but also what he saw as our greatest source of agency. In one particularly prescient diary entry from November of 1940, as WWII was gathering momentum, he writes:

Understand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims.

For Camus, the question of meaning was closely related to that of happiness — something he explored with great insight in his notebooks . Zaretsky writes:

Camus observed that absurdity might ambush us on a street corner or a sun-blasted beach. But so, too, do beauty and the happiness that attends it. All too often, we know we are happy only when we no longer are.

Perhaps most importantly, Camus issued a clarion call of dissent in a culture that often conflates happiness with laziness and championed the idea that happiness is nothing less than a moral obligation. A few months before his death, Camus appeared on the TV show Gros Plan . Dressed in a trench coat, he flashed his mischievous boyish smile and proclaimed into the camera:

Today, happiness has become an eccentric activity. The proof is that we tend to hide from others when we practice it. As far as I’m concerned, I tend to think that one needs to be strong and happy in order to help those who are unfortunate.

This wasn’t a case of Camus arriving at some mythic epiphany in his old age — the cultivation of happiness and the eradication of its obstacles was his most persistent lens on meaning. More than two decades earlier, he had contemplated “the demand for happiness and the patient quest for it” in his journal, capturing with elegant simplicity the essence of the meaningful life — an ability to live with presence despite the knowledge that we are impermanent :

[We must] be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death.

But his most piercing point integrates the questions of happiness and meaning into the eternal quest to find ourselves and live our truth:

It is not so easy to become what one is, to rediscover one’s deepest measure.

A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning comes from Harvard University Press and is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons , then revisit the story of his unlikely and extraordinary friendship with Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod.

— Published September 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/22/a-life-worth-living-albert-camus/ —

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section The Meaning of Life

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The Meaning of Life by Thaddeus Metz LAST REVIEWED: 10 May 2010 LAST MODIFIED: 10 May 2010 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0070

For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. This article concentrates nearly exclusively on approaches to the question taken by analytic philosophers in the postwar era, by and large omitting reference to prewar Anglo-American works, texts from other traditions such as Continental or African philosophy, and writings from nonphilosophical but related fields such as religion and psychology. Much of the contemporary analytic discussion has sought to articulate and evaluate theories of meaning in life, i.e., general and fundamental principles of what all meaningful conditions have in common as distinct from meaningless ones. This entry accordingly focuses largely on these theories, which are distinguished according to the kind of property that is held to constitute meaning in life (see Supernaturalism , Naturalism , and Non-Naturalism ).

These texts are more introductory or have been written in a way that would likely be accessible to those not thoroughly trained in analytic philosophy. Baggini 2004 and Eagleton 2007 are pitched at a very wide, popular audience; Thomson 2003 and Belshaw 2005 would be best for undergraduate philosophy majors; and Belliotti 2001 , Martin 2002 , and Cottingham 2003 are probably most apt for those with some kind of university education or other intellectual development, not necessarily in Anglo-American philosophy.

Baggini, Julian. What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life . London: Granta, 2004.

Defends the view that meaning in life is largely a function of love; addresses approaches or maxims (e.g., Carpe diem ) more than it does principles.

Belliotti, Raymond Angelo. What Is the Meaning of Human Life? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

A thoughtful treatment of a variety of issues; defends an objective naturalist approach to meaning in the context of critical discussion of classic thinkers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

Belshaw, Christopher. Ten Good Questions about Life and Death . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Engagingly written, analytic treatments of several key “life and death” issues, many of which bear on meaningfulness, which the author cashes out objectively in terms of relationships and projects.

Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life . Thinking in Action. London: Routledge, 2003.

An elegantly written book that defends an Aristotelian, God-based (but not soul-based) approach to meaning in life.

Eagleton, Terry. The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

A light and lively essay on a variety of facets of the question of life’s meaning, often addressing linguistic and literary themes. Rejects subjective or “postmodern” approaches to meaning in favor of a need for harmonious or loving relationships.

Martin, Michael. Atheism, Morality, and Meaning . Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002.

A vigorous defense of a naturalist approach to morality, in the first half of the book, and to meaning, in the second. Very critical of Christian approaches to both.

Thomson, Garrett. On the Meaning of Life . London: Thompson/Wadsworth, 2003.

Argues that nine common views on meaning in life (e.g., that an infinite being is necessary for meaning or that meaning is exhausted by happiness) are flawed. Emphasizes that meaning must reside largely in activities we engage in, lest our lives be reduced to “tools” for the sake of ends beyond us.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful?

Author: Matthew Pianalto Category: Ethics ,   Phenomenology and Existentialism ,   Philosophy of Religion Word Count: 997

Editors’ note: this essay and its companion essay, The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point? both explore the concept of meaning in relation to human life. This essay focuses on meaning in individual human lives, whereas the other addresses the meaning of life as a whole.

Imagine becoming so fed up with your job and home life that you decide to give it all up. Now you spend your days lounging on a beach.

One day, your friend Alex finds you on the beach and questions your new lifestyle: “You’re wasting your life!” says Alex. You tell Alex that you were unhappy and explain that you are much happier now.

However, Alex responds: “There’s more to life than happiness. You aren’t doing anything meaningful with your life!” [1]

But what is a meaningful life?

Here we will review some influential answers to this question.

1. Cosmic Pessimism vs. Everyday Meaning

Pessimists might say that life has no ultimate or cosmic meaning and thus that a beach bum’s life is no more or less meaningful—in the grand scheme of things—than the lives of Beethoven, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Marie Curie. [2]

However, many philosophers argue that even if there is no ultimate meaning of life, there can be meaning in life. Our lives can be meaningful in ordinary ways, ways that don’t require that we play a special role in some kind of grand cosmic narrative. Call this everyday meaning . [3] What might give our lives this kind of meaning?

2. Subjectivism

Subjectivists say that someone’s life is meaningful if it is deeply fulfilling, engaging, or satisfying. [4] And different people find different things meaningful; a challenging career might be engaging and fulfilling for others, but boring and unsatisfying to you: you may find life on a beach much more fulfilling.

Some subjectivists distinguish between the judgment that one is fulfilled and actually being fulfilled. Fulfillment feels good, but it seems possible to be mistaken about whether we are fulfilled. Perhaps, as you lounge on the beach, you confuse being merely content with fulfillment. [5] If you tried other things like writing poetry, volunteering, or starting a business, they might end up being more fulfilling, and hence more meaningful for you. [6]

Subjectivism, however, has counterintuitive implications. Suppose someone found it fulfilling to spend all their time gazing at the sand. This may seem too bizarre, aimless, or trivial to credit as meaningful. And what if someone found meaning in ethically monstrous activities, like torturing babies or puppies? Vicious projects like these don’t seem to add positive meaning to someone’s life. [7]

Someone would have to be a rather atypical sort of human being to be truly fulfilled by sand-gazing or puppy-torturing. Could such strange lives count as meaningful? Subjectivists may say yes, but many would reject that answer and conclude that subjectivism is false.

3. Objective Meaning

Objective accounts hold that meaningful lives involve projects of positive value, such as improving our character, exercising our creativity, and making the world a better place by pursuing and promoting truth, justice, and beauty. [8]

Being a beach bum doesn’t really make the world worse , but it doesn’t make much of a positive contribution either. Your friend Alex is concerned that you are squandering your potential and thereby failing to make something meaningful of your life.

However, your decision to become a beach bum could be a way of rebelling against the “rat race” of a workaholic and overly competitive society. Perhaps you are choosing to cultivate a life of mindfulness and aesthetic contemplation of natural beauty, in protest against superficial or soul-crushing social norms. Framed that way, your life seems to align with important, enduring, objective values.

Objective accounts of meaning, however, must explain why some activities are objectively more meaningful than others.

The difficulty is that what seems frivolous or pointless from one point of view may seem valuable and worthwhile from another. For some, climbing Mount Everest might count as an admirable exercise of physical and mental endurance, an inspiring achievement. Others may think it is stupid to climb big rocks, risking death and wasting resources that could be directed toward other more valuable causes.

But perhaps such people are just being narrow-minded. The meaningfulness of being a beach bum, a mountain-climber, or anything else might depend on our motives or options and not just on what the activity involves. [9]

4. Hybrid Theory

The hybrid theory of meaning in life combines insights from subjectivism and objective accounts: a meaningful life provides fulfillment and does so through devotion to objectively valuable projects. [10]

Hybrid theory differs from objective accounts because it insists that a meaningful life must also be fulfilling for the person living it. There are many such projects available to us, since there are many fulfilling ways, given our distinctive personalities and abilities, that we can engage with values like truth, justice, and beauty.

However, just as a subjectively fulfilling life might seem trivial or despicable, perhaps a meaningful life doesn’t always feel fulfilling. [11]

Consider George Bailey in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life . [12] George thinks his life has been wasted and wishes that he’d never been born. Luckily, his guardian angel Clarence rescues George from a suicide attempt and helps George understand how meaningful his life choices have been. Hybrid theory implies that George’s life now becomes meaningful because he is finally fulfilled by all his good works, but objective accounts suggest that George’s life was meaningful all along even though he didn’t realize it! [13]

Recall the opening scenario: did you ditch a meaningful (but sometimes frustrating) life for the beach?

5. Conclusion

The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl held that the search for meaning is the fundamental human drive. [14] He claimed that a sense of meaning in life gives people the strength to persevere and even thrive despite the adversity and injustice we must sometimes confront. [15]

Questions about meaning in life often arise when we suspect that something is missing from our lives. Despite their differences, the theories surveyed above seem to agree that there are many things we might do—or try—that would be meaningful. Talking about it with your friend Alex may be a good place to start. [16] Why? Because good relationships frequently rank as important sources of meaning: perhaps meaning is often made—or discovered—together.

[1] Emily Esfahani Smith (2017) uses this distinction between happiness and meaning in life in her survey of psychological research on meaning in life. See also her TED Talk, “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy.”

[2] See, e.g., Benatar (2017) and Weinberg (2021) for defenses of the pessimistic outlook. At least one theist agrees with the pessimists that if life has no divine meaning or purpose, then nothing we do or become has any lasting significance and that our lives are all equally absurd: see Craig (2013).

[3] Many philosophers who propose theories of meaning in life are either agnostic or skeptical of the idea that life as a whole has any divine meaning or purpose. See, e.g., Wolf (2010). Of course, if one does think life as a whole has divine meaning or purpose, then having meaning in one’s life might well involve living in accord with the supernatural point of existence. Some of the accounts of meaning in life are consistent with religious ideas about the meaning of life; I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out which views will or will not cohere with their own religious convictions.

[4] This idea is developed in the final chapter of Taylor (2000).

[5] John Stuart Mill issues a similar warning against conflating happiness and contentment in Utilitarianism , Chapter 2.

[6] This point is developed in more sophisticated subjectivist accounts of meaning in life. See, e.g. Calhoun (2015) and Parmer (2021).

[7] See Campbell and Nyholm (2015) or their contribution in Landau (2022) for discussion of “anti-meaning”: activities, projects, and lives that have negative and destructive significance.

[8] See Metz (2013) for discussion of several different accounts of this sort; Metz defends his own version in the final chapter. On creativity, see Taylor (1987) and Matheson (2018).

[9] Examples like the beach bum are often under-described–including in this essay! It is worth taking such examples and considering variations of intentions, motives, circumstances, and so forth in order to consider how changes in these various elements may alter our assessment of the meaningfulness of the life or activity. Whole lives are usually, if not always, more complex than these brief examples. Philosophers who endorse narrative theories of meaning in life would suggest that the focus on particular activities and roles fails to consider that a meaningful life might also need to make holistic sense as a meaningful story. See Kauppinen (2012).

[10] The term “project” here includes not just completable activities like painting a picture but also open-ended activities such as maintaining strong relationships with friends and family. This approach is developed by Susan Wolf in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters , and in three essays collected in Wolf (2014): see the essays in Part II: “The Meanings of Lives,” “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life,” and “Happiness and Morality.” The text of Meaning in Life and Why It Matters is available at the Tanner Lectures website. See the print edition for excellent commentaries on Wolf’s position and a response by Wolf. A similar view is developed by Peter Singer in How Are We to Live? (1993), Chapter 10.

[11] Another potential problem is that while hybrid theory aims to take the attractive features of subjective fulfillment and objective accounts of meaning in life, it inherits the possible problems with both views, too. Furthermore, if subjective and objective accounts contradict each other, hybrid theory might be inconsistent.

[12] This point is developed, using the example of George Bailey, in Smuts (2013).

[13] For a similar study in a life that seems very meaningful from the outside (a successful career, prosperity, and a happy family), but is wracked by unhappiness, existential dread, and moral guilt within, see Leo Tolstoy’s My Confession (2005). Tolstoy’s crisis of meaning is often discussed in the literature on meaning in life, both for the gripping way in which he describes his fear of death and his feeling that life is meaningless, and for his discussion of the solution to the problem to be found in religious faith.

[14] Frankl (2006).

[15] Of course, this does not justify the actions of those who have put others in despicable situations. For Frankl, the point is about motivation rather than justification. Revolting against oppressors, for example, may be a highly meaningful project for those who are oppressed. See also Camus (2018).

[16] On relationships and other sources of meaning in life, see Smith (2017). Further recommended reading: Landau (2017), Landau (2022), and Singer (2009). For discussion of how ordinary “folk” intuitions about meaning relate to various philosophical theories of meaning in life, see Fuhrer and Cova (2022).

Benatar, David (2017). The Human Predicament . Oxford University Press.

Calhoun, Cheshire (2015). “Geographies of Meaningful Living,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32(1): 15-34.

Campbell, Stephen M. and Sven Nyholm (2015). “Anti-Meaning and Why It Matters,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1(4): 694-711.

Camus, Albert (2018). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays . Trans. Justin O’Brien. Vintage.

Craig, William Lane (2013). “The Absurdity of Life Without God.” In: Jason Seachris, ed. Exploring the Meaning of Life . Wiley-Blackwell: 153-172.

Frankl, Viktor E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning . Beacon Press. Originally published in 1946.

Fuhrer, Joffrey and Florian Cova (2022). “What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives,” Philosophical Psychology.

Kauppinen, Antti (2012). “Meaningfulness and Time,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84(2): 345-377.

Landau, Iddo (2017). Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World . Oxford University Press.

Landau, Iddo (2022). The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life . Oxford University Press.

Metz, Thaddeus (2013). Meaning in Life . Oxford University Press

Mill, John Stuart (1863). Utilitarianism .

Parmer, W. Jared (2021). “Meaning in Life and Becoming More Fulfilled,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20(1): 1-29.

Singer, Irving (2009). Meaning in Life, Vol. 1: The Creation of Value . MIT Press.

Singer, Peter (1993). How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest . Prometheus.

Smith, Emily E. (2017). The Power of Meaning . Crown.

Smith, Emily E. (2017). “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy.” TED.com.

Smuts, Aaron (2013). “The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 41(4): 536-562.

Taylor, Richard (2000). Good and Evil . Prometheus. Originally published in 1970.

Taylor, Richard (1987). “Time and Life’s Meaning,” The Review of Metaphysics 40(4): 675-686.

Tolstoy, Leo (2005). My Confession . Translated by Aylmer Maude. Originally published in Russian in 1882.

Weinberg, Rivka (2021).  “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad,” Journal of Controversial Ideas 1(1), 4.

Wolf, Susan (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters . Princeton University Press. ( Wolf’s lecture is also available at the Tanner Lecture Series website ).

— (2014). The Variety of Values . Oxford University Press.

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, jean paul sartre on the meaning of life.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary and philosophical existentialism. Sartre was also noted for his long personal relationship with the feminist author and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir . He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature which he refused.

In his famous public lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” (1946) Sartre set out the basic ideas of his existential philosophy and its relationship to the question of the meaning of life. He begins by noting that the communists have criticized his philosophy as bourgeois; Christians have rejected it as morally relative; and others have described it as sordid, unappreciative of beauty, and subjective. In response Sartre explains that existentialism is based upon the doctrine that existence precedes essence ; that our concrete subjective existence comes before whatever essence we develop.

To help us understand this idea Sartre considers an artifact such as a letter opener. In this case its essence—to open letters—precedes its existence. The artisan had this essence in mind before it existed. When we think of God as creator of human beings we are reasoning similarly. God had our essence in mind first, and then created us in accord with that human nature. Sartre’s atheistic existentialism implies the reverse. For human beings our existence precedes our essence, since there is no God to give us an essence, and we freely choose what we will become. Unlike chairs and tables we have to make ourselves, and in so doing we alone are responsible for the essence we create.

Along with this responsibility comes the anguish that accompanies our decisions. We never know which action we should perform, but perform them we must. Furthermore, as there are no gods or objective moral guidelines, we alone must choose, be responsible for our choices, and accept the accompanying anguish that choice brings. We cannot escape our freedom, Sartre says, and we should offer no excuses for them. When deciding between staying with our mother or going off and fighting the Nazis, in Sartre’s example, no theory of human nature or objective moral values help. We must simply exercise our freedom, choose, and accept the responsibility and anguish that follows.

The benefits of an existential view are first, that it begins with individual consciousness, the only certain beginning for any philosophy; and second, it is compatible with human dignity, as it respects humans as subjects rather than making them manipulated objects. Individuals are artists or moral agents who have no a priori rules to guide them in creating art or living moral lives. And we should not judge others for the choices they make, unless they hide behind a doctrine and dogma. To do that is to deny one’s freedom.

In the end to be human means precisely to recognize oneself as sole legislator of values and meaning, which for Sartre is the logical conclusion of his atheistic position. But even if there were gods it would make no difference, human beings would still have to create their own values and meanings for their lives to be valuable and meaningful.  

Summary – Human beings are not artifacts with a pre-existing essence; they are subjects who must freely choose to create their own meaning.

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This concept of free will has been a point of contention for me for years. This is undoubtedly the result of breaking away from Roman Catholic roots, and establishing myself as a firm atheist.

Sam Harris’s writings in The Moral Landscape, and his book Free Will have been an enormous source of help. How would Sarte respond to the idea that free will itself may be an illusion, that we are products of random internal, and external stimuli. Consciousness could be said to be preceded by the chemicials that make up consciousness. If this is so, then are we truly “responsible”for what we “will”?

Sartre’s idea of radical freedom is hard to sustain given what we now know about the influence of genes and environment. Nonetheless most philosophers are compatibilists.

To view man as being created without essence just because there was no God there who created him is wrong. Man evolved gradually through millions of years of evolution and definitely has an essence, namely that of being created in order to live in wild nature. This is a fact. We are all, still in this modern technologized society, basically stoneage people. This means that we do have an essence and that this essence results in some basic needs that must be fulfilled. Philosophers like Sartre and also Camus always have a tendency to theorize and abstractify things as if man were an abstract being with no boundaries, capable of everything. In “The myth of Sisyphos” Camus goes far enough to say that all experiences are equal and it is our task in life to live them, to get to know them and to act accordingly to them. This however presupposes that all experiences can be considered equal, but they are not. Having gone through a divorce, however emotionally exhausting it might be, is not the same as having spent ten years in a concentration camp. With Sartre it sounds as if life is some kind of empty bowl that needs to be filled with whatever you can think of and that it, in terms of meaning in life, does not really matter what you fill it with. I think that is a very facile way of seeing things.

Lars – You are absolutely correct about our nature having been largely determined by evolution and now culture plays an even larger part in its future development. The problem with Sartre from my point of view is his exaggerated conception of freedom. And you are also right about the difficulty of an existentialist ethics – Simone de Beauvoir probably did it best. Thanks for the comments.

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4 philosophical answers to the meaning of life

• Finding meaning in the face of what can feel like a meaningless universe is a daunting challenge.
• Many philosophical thinkers spent their careers finding a path to a meaningful life.
• While philosophers may disagree on the solution to the problem, they all offer interesting routes to a more meaningful existence.

A common question posed to philosophers and hermit gurus is, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s an important question. Having a sense of purpose in life is associated with  positive health outcomes ; conversely, not having one can leave a person feeling listless and lost. Friedrich Nietzsche even feared that a lack of meaning would plunge the world toward nihilism, a transition he believed would prove disastrous. 

Several philosophers have proposed answers to the age-old question. Here, we will consider four. The list is not exhaustive, however, as many thinkers from many different schools have considered the problem and proposed potential solutions.

Existentialism

Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe. Many thinkers and writers are associated with the movement, including Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But perhaps the most prominent of the 20th-century existentialists was  Jean-Paul Sartre .

In  Existentialism Is a Humanism ,  Sartre lays out the fundamentals of the philosophy. He explains, “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” In other words, for humans, e xistence precedes essence.  Humans have to decide what it means to be human through their actions and thereby give their lives meaning.

Those choices also define humanity as a whole. As such, Sartre argues that some variation of the categorical imperative — the moral rule that states you should only act in a way that everyone could logically act in — is a vital part of decision-making. Those afraid of existentialists choosing values that would ruin society might also breathe a little easier with this knowledge. 

Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival  Albert Camus . It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason. It is related to, but not the same as, existentialism. 

Camus argues that  absurdity  arises when humans try to impose order and meaning on an inherently irrational and meaningless world. However, the irrationality of the world and the inevitability of the end of our time in it always come together to mock our best attempts at meaning. This is the struggle we all face. 

For Camus, the answer lies in embracing the meaninglessness. He points to Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who Zeus sentences to push a bolder uphill. Sisyphus can make no progress because whenever he’s near the top, the boulder rolls downhill. His task is ultimately meaningless and must be repeated for all eternity. Despite this, Camus asks us to “imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Like us, he faces an absurd situation with no hope of escape. All the order he imposes on the world will eventually come rolling down again. However, Camus tells us that Sisyphus can rebel against the meaninglessness of the situation by embracing the absurdity. He can assert the value of his life and embrace the meaninglessness of his task. By doing so, he can find meaning in the absurdity — even if his work comes to naught in the end. Sisyphus is Camus’s absurdist hero.

Religious existentialism 

While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “ God is dead ” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of S ø ren Kierkegaard . A Danish philosopher working in the first half of the 19th century, he turned his rather angsty disposition into a major philosophy. 

Kierkegaard is concerned with actually living one’s life, not just thinking about it. But in every life, there comes a point where reason runs dry. At that point, passion can help, but Kierkegaard argues that faith is required to really find meaning. That requires a “leap of faith,” and he finds an example of such a leap in the biblical figure of Abraham. As Camus has Sisyphus, so Kierkegaard has Abraham. 

In his book  Fear and Trembling,  Kierkegaard argues that Abraham simultaneously knew that sacrificing Isaac was murder, that God was to be obeyed, and that Issac would be alive and well. For his faith and for voluntarily going through with God’s demands, he was rewarded. Abraham embraced the absurd through belief. Rationality was of little use to him, but faith was. In  Either/Or , Kierkegaard also praises Diogenes as a “Knight of Faith” who earned the title through more mundane activities. 

Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher  Keiji Nishitani . Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed. 

Nishitani saw the modern problem of nihilism as everywhere and tied closely with the tendency for technology to allow us to become more self-centered. While we often encounter “nihility” during major life events like the death of a loved one, it can arise at any time — making the question of how to handle it all the more important. 

He describes human life as taking place in  three fields : consciousness, nihility, and emptiness (or  śūnyatā,  as it is often named in Buddhist thought). We live in the first field most of the time, and it is where we get ideas like dualism or that there is a self. However, nearly everyone eventually encounters the nihility and has to face up to the idea of death, meaninglessness, and the void inherent in our ideas.  Stopping here is what causes problems . Nishitani argues we must push through to the third field. Emptiness surrounds the other two. It allows the individual to understand the true self, how nihility is just as grounded in emptiness as consciousness, and the interrelation of all beings. 

On a more practical level, he suggests Zen meditation as a tool to understand the emptiness inherent in reality. While this is actionable, he does not think it a cure-all to addressing the problem of nihilism as it existed in Japan. 

The Meaning of Life: Philosophical Approaches Essay

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The meaning of life is one of the questions that have attracted the attention of many philosophers as well as writers. Two different views on this issue are expressed by Richard Taylor and Susan Wolf.

According to Richard Taylor, a person can subjectively determine whether his/her life is meaningful. In this case, perceived enjoyment and satisfaction can be the main criteria that an individual should consider. In contrast, Susan Wolf disagrees with this statement and calls for a more objective interpretation of meaningfulness. So, it is necessary to compare and evaluate these approaches.

Richard Taylor believes that a certain activity can be called meaningful if a person finds it satisfying or engaging. Additionally, an individual should focus on his/her subjective experiences in order to evaluate the quality of his/her life. In order to illustrate this argument, the author refers to the famous myth of Sisyphus, who perpetually rolls a stone up the hill. To a great extent, this myth symbolizes meaningless and endless labor, which does not bring any results.

However, this interpretation can change dramatically if one assumes that Sisyphus finds this activity satisfying or desirable in any way (Taylor 323). Additionally, the author urges the readers to remember that in many cases, people’s lives can be compared to the labor of Sisyphus. For example, one can speak about people who designed and constructed ancient temples or palaces that eventually turned into ruins (Taylor 332). It is rather difficult to suppose that they perceived their lives as something meaningless.

More likely, they assumed that they created paragons of beauty, and the meaningfulness of their actions could hardly be questioned. In this way, the author wants to show that the source of meaning lies within the individual perception of a person. These are the main details that can be distinguished.

In turn, Susan Wolf adopts a different approach to this question. According to her, a person’s life can be called meaningful if he/she actively and successfully engages in projects that promote “positive values” (Wolf 8). In this context, the word “project” can be described as any goal-directed behavior (Wolf 8). In turn, the word

“positive” implies that a certain value is recognized and accepted by other people (Wolf 10). In other words, the activities of a person should bring certain benefits to other people.

Therefore, unlike Richard Taylor, Susan Wolf believes that one should look for a more objective evaluation of a person’s life. Additionally, according to her interpretation, meaningfulness does not necessarily imply that an individual is happy. Moreover, in many cases, his/her actions can be questioned from an ethical viewpoint. These are the main elements of her approach.

Overall, I tend to support Richard Taylor’s views on this issue. In my opinion, the meaningfulness of a person’s life should be based on subjective interpretation. At first, it is important to mention that in many cases, a person can suffer from frustration and depression provided that his/her behavior does not reach the accepted standards of success. This is one of the problems that originate from Susan Wolf’s approach. Admittedly, people should be engaged in activities that promote the welfare of other individuals.

In this way, a person can make his/her life much more fulfilling. Nevertheless, it is not permissible to set the standards of meaningfulness. The approach developed by Susan Wolf is based on the premise that a person can accurately estimate the effects of his/her actions. This task is critical for determining if a certain activity promotes positive values. However, sometimes, a person cannot easily do it. Furthermore, other people may fail to appreciate the value of a person’s work.

For example, the attempts to develop non-Euclidian geometry were deemed to be useless at the least at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, mathematicians engaged in such activities were often regarded as insane because very few people could see the implications of their work (Restivo 103). If they tried to follow the line of reasoning proposed by Susan Wolf, they would have come to the conclusion that their life and work had been meaningless.

However, later, it turned out that hyperbolic geometry could benefit various areas of science, especially physics. Apart from that, the approach adopted by Susan Wolf does not include such a notion as happiness, which seems to be critical for the meaningfulness of any life. This is another reason why Richard Taylor’s interpretation seems to be more plausible. Finally, such a notion as success is often subjective, and it is difficult to measure it.

On the whole, this discussion shows that there are different approaches to the questions about the meaning of life. It is more appropriate to consider the subjective interpretation of this issue because this approach helps a person discover happiness. Admittedly, other people may not agree with this subjective assessment.

However, this evaluation has to be accepted if a person’s activities do not adversely affect the lives of other individuals. In contrast, Susan Wolf’s approach implies that there are certain objective standards. However, there are many cases when these standards are not applicable. These are the main aspects that can be singled out.

Works Cited

Restivo, Sal. Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism , New York: Ashgate Publishin, 2011. Print.

Taylor, Richard. Good and Evil , New York: Prometheus Books, 2000. Print.

Wolf, Susan. “The Meaning of Lives.” Philosophy UMass . Web.

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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Answerable or Unanswerable?

Jeffrey gordon wonders what it would mean to have meaning..

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer… The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the meaning of life became clear to them have been unable to say what constituted that meaning?)” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

For all its apparent importance, the question of the meaning of life is most strange. For the vast majority of people outside academe, it is the defining concern of philosophy, the issue that provides philosophy’s raison d’etre . Academic philosophers should hesitate before dismissing this view with a smile of polite embarrassment, for there is surely a broad but defensible sense of the question in which all philosophy is, indeed, about nothing else. The defensible sense is the conception of philosophy as an attempt to understand the human condition and our place in the universe – the attempt, in short, to answer the three questions that Kant believed to comprise all philosophy: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? But the fact is, this putatively definitive philosophical problem had rarely been addressed explicitly by any thinker before the nineteenth century, when Nietzsche and Kierkegaard made it their preoccupation. And although it would seem foolhardy or perverse to deny the importance of the question, exactly what is being asked and what might constitute a compelling answer have been notoriously elusive of clarification. In addition, the problem of the meaning of life seems to generate a multitude of paradoxes. In Waiting for Godot , Samuel Beckett’s poignant metaphor of spiritual crisis, Gogo asks Didi what will happen to them when Godot at last arrives. It soon becomes clear that neither has any idea, that the sole focus of their relentless hope is shrouded in utter obscurity. Are we not precisely in their condition whenever we wonder how our lives will be changed once the meaning of life is revealed? The above quotation from Wittgenstein alerts us to a similar paradox. Having felt perhaps for years that his life is deprived of meaning, a person now feels the meaning restored. But when we inquire of him just what this newfound meaning is, he’s inevitably unable to say. Here is a kind of knowledge or wisdom we are inclined to regard as of the utmost importance, and yet we may well be at a loss to say what difference it will make to our lives once we acquire it, and we will be unable to express the knowledge when we possess it. What other enduring philosophical problem is so scuttled in paradox and confusion?

Does human life have a meaning? If so, what is that meaning? How should I change my life to comport myself toward it? My purpose in this article will be to understand what these sentences mean. First, I will set out the difficulties we encounter in dealing with ‘the problem of life’. Then I will try to uncover the experiential source of these problems, in order to account for the difficulties in resolving them and in order to clarify their sense.

Difficulties of the Question

“Does human life have a meaning?” It seems reasonable to assume that a meaningful question points in the direction of a promising line of inquiry. But it is far from clear what promising line of inquiry this question can initiate. It may be suggested that what I want to know in raising the question of life is whether there is some larger scheme of which human life is an essential part . This may be called the religious conception of the question, since arguably one of the greatest psychological assets of the theistic tradition is to provide exactly this grand schema, with the apparent intention of assuring us that our lives do indeed have meaning. Indeed, thinkers as philosophically far-flung as Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and William James have understood the quest for meaning in just this way. In this understanding of the problem of life, the question prompts exploration of a possible divine plan or some rational order immanent in the universe such as Hegel proposed, and the role of human life in that plan or order.

However, even before we consider what this plan or order might be and how we could be certain of it, we can see that from a strictly logical standpoint such an answer would be self-stultifying: if human life can be meaningful only if it is part of a larger pattern of meaning, then by parity of reason, that larger pattern must derive its significance from its place in a still larger scheme, and so on to hopeless infinity. Our search for the meaning of life would thus be eternally deferred. Even if we could know that another life awaited us in the hereafter, this knowledge could not resolve the problem, for the meaning of the afterlife would remain a mystery, which would have to be resolved before we could be certain of the ultimate meaning of this one. So this cannot be the fruitful line of inquiry the question would hope to initiate. (My paper in The Modern Schoolman , LX, 4, 1983, presents this argument in greater detail.)

Some may say that the infinite regress I am pointing out here is not nearly so damaging to the religious conception of the answer as I am claiming it is, for it does not follow from the fact that one can keep searching for a yet more comprehensive schema that one must do so in order to establish meaning: a religious believer may see no need to exceed the bounds of the hereafter in order to determine the meaningfulness of this earthly sojourn. Heavenly bliss may be meaningful enough.

But the fact that one may be content to stop the regress at a certain point does nothing to undermine its destructive logical force. That a great many people have found deep consolation in the idea of an afterlife cannot be denied. That these same people were satisfied to stop their search for meaning there is also undeniable. But the question of the meaningfulness of the afterlife remains despite the fact that they are content not to raise it. On the contrary, their satisfaction with this vision of the whole may give us insight into their aesthetic or emotional needs and commitments. Perhaps it is not meaning they seek, but a kind of emotional fulfillment – the sense that the world is hospitable, or the assurance that they are loved. But the fact that they end their quest with the afterlife does not get us any closer to understanding what would make the afterlife meaningful. As we observe the characters in Waiting for Godot it occurs to us that the failure of Godot to appear might well be a blessing to them, for were Godot at last to come, they would be forced to confront the question of precisely in what sense they are saved. If we can establish meaningfulness only by being part of a larger framework, then once presented with any such scheme, we have no logical recourse but to embark on a search without end.

If a larger schema does not logically end our quest, perhaps then, in asking the question of life, we are searching for the internal order of the whole , as we might do in trying to determine the meaning of a play, to borrow a thoughtful analogy from John Wisdom in The Meaning of Life , p.221. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ might, then, really mean, ‘What is the order in the drama of time?’ Is life a tragedy, or is it a comedy, or is it the sort of tragicomedy depicted in the works of Kafka and Beckett?

However there are also serious problems with this new candidate for the direction of our inquiry. Unlike this question of the meaning of the play, this question about life seems to be a request for a kind of knowledge . But what would it mean to know that human life is a comedy or a tragedy, or a random mixture of elements of both? And how would such knowledge be confirmed?

Perhaps someone will argue that we complicate matters unnecessarily by suggesting that our question is a search for knowledge. Perhaps it is not a certain, verifiable fact that we seek, but rather a plausible story, a persuasive and satisfying picture, a comprehensive interpretation, such as we would seek in searching for the meaning of the play. But suppose we contrive such a picture or arrive at such an interpretation – indeed, suppose we attain knowledge after all – why must my conviction that life is (say) tragic establish its meaningfulness ? Albert Camus judges human life to be absurd because of the incompatibility between the human desire for rational order and the silence of the world: “I said the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.” ( The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays , 1958, p.21, translated by Justin O’Brien.) If this is an accurate rendering of our condition this is certainly tragic, for it makes of the human struggle an exercise in abject futility. But in this case, the tragedy of human life, far from establishing its meaningfulness , would derive from its absurdity .

So we must distinguish between making sense of life and uncovering the source of its meaning. To pronounce that human life is a tragedy would be to make a certain sense of it, but not necessarily to attest to its meaningfulness. As Wisdom admits, it is possible that there is no order in the drama of time, that the story of humanity is a disarray of tragic and comic elements. To see this would still be to make some sense of it all, to find ‘the meaning of life’ in Wisdom’s use of the term. But this demonstrates the limitations of his use of the term, for surely the absence of order would challenge rather than establish the meaningfulness of life.

It is not merely the genre we are searching for when we ask the question of the meaning of life. If we could discover that life is a tragedy or a comedy, we would still have a further question. We would still want to know whether the tragedy or the comedy has meaning, or whether, on the contrary, it is tragic or comic precisely because it is meaningless.

If a question is to be meaningful, it must be possible at least to conceive of an answer to it, Wittgenstein asserts: “If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.” ( Tractatus §6.5.) Even so, it soon becomes clear that the obstacles to our conceiving an answer about life do not end with those detailed above. For instance, if I feel the need for an answer, I must be convinced that this is not a matter that each person must decide on wholly subjective grounds; for if I thought it were merely a subjective question, I would have no cause for perplexity. I would understand that the meaning of life was as near to hand as my own resourcefulness allowed it to be – that is, whatever I chose to constitute the meaningfulness of life would by that token make life meaningful (for me). So my existential disquietude is a sign that I am searching for an answer susceptible to objective validation. But here our embarrassments multiply. For if I am fortunate enough to find an objectively justifiable source of meaningfulness, it can serve my purposes and silence my doubts only if it is a source of meaning I can appropriate as my own – in short, subjectively endorse . It will be altogether useless to me if the objectively sanctioned meaning is one that I cannot find personally fulfilling. Suppose, for example, that I were to learn that the objectively true purpose of human life, the pursuit of which alone can establish its meaningfulness, is to commune with God. But suppose further that the concept of God seems so abstract that the prospect of such communion is wholly empty for me. Of what possible value could knowledge of the objectively valid source of meaning have for me then? Kierkegaard puts this point well in his Journals : “What good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life –what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?” (p.44)

Perhaps then in asking the question of meaning I seek assurance that the significance with which I subjectively endow my commitments is objectively confirmed . As Sartre points out in Existentialism Is A Humanism , we all valorize something. Perhaps what I seek therefore is some affirmation that I have made the right choice – that what I take to be most important is, indeed, defensibly so. But still, the necessary condition of my accepting this objective confirmation is that it accord with my values . So the meaningfulness of my life, my belief in the worthwhileness of my commitments, is in no way enhanced by its having this objective sanction: far from reforming my subjective values in face of my discovery of the objective meaning of life, I will use my subjective values to test the cogency of that objective meaning. It seems, then, that I seek neither a subjective nor an objective meaning in raising the question of life. But in that case, what sort of answer will do?

Experiencing Meaninglessness

These many confusions are indications of a deeper perplexity, I think. We need to return to the origin of the question in our experience in order to uncover the source of these difficulties and to see the true nature of the problem of life in its original presentation, its primary meaning.

The question of the meaning of life is less likely to be conceived in wonder than in a mood of disquietude. It is not asked seriously in a spirit of disinterested intellectual curiosity or grateful life-affirmation. Rather it emerges when one’s sense of the meaningfulness of life has been deeply shaken – when one fears that life, or at least one’s own life, is without meaning. The typical intonation of the question may be more revealing than the words. “What can it all mean?” may have more in common with a sigh than with a grammatical question. It’s an announcement that the foundation of one’s sense of meaning has been undermined. The question declares that the bulwarks are crumbling, that they seem now to have been the fabrications of a remarkably comprehensive self-deception: How could I have believed that this repetitive, pallid daily routine had the slightest significance? What besides the mere fact that this life is mine had convinced me that its victories and losses counted for something? If the nihilistic condition becomes more severe, these questions cast a pall over every observation and every encounter. Why is that woman so elegantly dressed, so punctiliously made up? What foolish vanity possessed her in her elaborate preparations? Why is that man chasing the ball so intently? Can he really believe that any importance whatsoever attaches to his returning the serve? Why are those people laughing so gaily? Is there not something false, desperate, in those guttural eruptions?

Camus writes of a man in a telephone booth whose animated dumbshow he observes from a distance. Why, he asks, is this man alive? Is not the entire human scene undergirded by a thoroughgoing tacit conspiracy of interlocking deceptions? In Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), das Man is the conspiracy of the nameless, the everyone and no one, to assure a universal tranquillized flight from the anguishing demands of authentic individuation. Is not the principal accomplishment of das Man this most fundamental social contract – the unspoken compact we enter into to protect ourselves from the isolating and crippling realization that there is no significance whatsoever in either our individual or our collective presence on this earth?

Granted, this mood sustained over days and weeks, or incorporated into one’s manner of being, is an extreme state. But is there anyone for whom this kind of alienation is wholly unfamiliar? Still, most of us most of the time dismiss such thoughts as expressions of a passing perversity. What, then, allows this mood to entrench itself when it does? What are the conditions for a preoccupation with emptiness and futility?

Our premonition of the meaninglessness of life is a case of our capacity for disinterested reflection serving a personal will for release. Weary with life, we wish to withdraw from it, and intellect furnishes an irrefutable justification for doing so. The significances with which we invest our daily agitation are of strictly human invention; they are not shared by the dog in the chair falling into the slumber of boredom, nor by the feverish soldier termite protecting its hive against assault, nor by the placid angel strumming its harp in the clouds. And my deeply felt personal significances begin with the birth of my consciousness and end with its dissolution – never to be shared, never to be repeated. It is also my distinctly human point of view that allows me to perceive what is pitiable in another’s situation, what is triumphant in a person’s self-overcoming, what is humorous in someone’s pretensions. And it is my individual subjectivity that enables me to experience without mediation the urgency of events in my own life.

But I am not confined to the borders of my familiar subjectivity, and I am not confined to the human perspective either: I can abandon the familiar co-ordinates of my inner life; and I can in imagination remove myself wholly from the human scene – experience the uncanny, in which the most natural human sympathy appears alien, unjustifiable, de trop . It is not only Hamlet who can inhabit a perspective from which all the uses of this world seem weary, stale, flat and unprofitable; and not only Macbeth for whom all human beings can seem fools on their way to dusty death. And when I am seeing the world as Hamlet sees it and people as Macbeth sees them, no argument can convince me to rejoin the everyday fold, for any such argument will presuppose some human values that remain for me in unresolved suspension. If I am told, for example, that in indulging these thoughts I allow my talents to rust, that I abrogate my opportunity to contribute positively to the welfare of society, I can only smile, for nothing has established for me the value of the society I would serve; and nothing could. David Hume wrote that when similar reflections depressed him, he’d leave his philosophy books and have a game of backgammon with his friends. An impulse to self-preservation may urge me to follow Hume to his backgammon board, but while this is a perfectly legitimate motive, it furnishes no reason for me to go. In summary, one day life was charged with meaning, and the next day meaning was sucked from events like sap from crippled trees. In both the fullness and the void, I myself seem to be the source. And for this reason no rescuing rope can be hurled from the rich, energetic external human world to the dry flat world of my disengagement: there is no one in the latter world who can conceive a reason to catch it.

But why would anyone become so disengaged in the first place? Surely the answer must vary from person to person. In any case, this is a question for psychologists. For us as philosophers it is enough that we recognize that once this disengagement is in place no case can be made against it, for any such case will pre suppose at least one of the values that have been put in question.

The question, “Does life have a meaning?” is an announcement of this condition of disengagement: it is an expression of disillusionment, a marking of loss. Events that had been shot through with charm and excitement are now as dry and colorless as winter grass. Doubts about the very meaningfulness of life are a most natural expression of this state of affairs. What I am proposing here is that the meaning of the question of meaning is exhausted in this expression of mourning for the purpose no longer felt. But since it is after all a question we are asking, we are bewitched into believing that we are seeking a kind of knowledge in asking it, although we remain at an embarrassing loss to say what this knowledge could be. We are mistakenly led to think of the meaning of life as a datum, a fact, a possible object of knowledge. Yet meaningfulness in relation to life connotes not a propositional content, but a manner of being .

We find ourselves in a similar linguistic situation when we use the quite natural expression, ‘a meaningful relationship’. Although we have no difficulty distinguishing meaningful relationships from those that are without this characteristic, we would be just as disconcerted as we are by the question of the meaning of life were someone to ask of our avowedly meaningful relationships just what their meaning is. This is because the word ‘meaningful’ in the phrase ‘a meaningful relationship’, as in the phrase ‘a meaningful life’, expresses a quality of experience , a sense of depth or richness, and nothing more .

If after being deprived for some time of life’s excitement, richness, and charm, these qualities return to our sense of life, swelling events again with their honey, it is as natural for us to mark this resurgence by speaking of the renewed meaningfulness of life, as it was to mark the deprivation by speaking of the loss of meaning. But since excitement, richness, and charm are not cognitive properties, we have nothing to say in answer to the question, “In what now does the meaning of your life consist?” All we could point to in face of this challenge are the very features of our life that had seemed before our conversion to be without meaning: the beauty of a beloved companion, the warm good humor of our friends, the brisk enlivening autumn air. The only difference is that we are once again inhabiting the life we had merely been observing from a dispassionate distance.

Truth is subjectivity, Kierkegaard taught (see Concluding Unscientific Postscript , 1846), and by that he meant that what is important in the commitments that define us is not the demonstrability of the objective truth of our beliefs, but the originality, passion, and depth with which we appropriate them. In this he provided an apt analogy to our present concern. As Kierkegaard forswore any interest in objective demonstrations of God’s existence, so are we now, with meaning restored, wholly indifferent to the fact that no objective proof validates the significance of our vital choices. Investing our life once again with our passion, we no longer have a motive to raise the question of its meaning. For the investment of passion is its meaningfulness.

Our engagement in life always dances astride the abyss of our possible fall. Meaning is a kind of grace. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the question.

© Prof. Jeffrey Gordon 2009

Jeffrey Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities at Texas State University.

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Alan Watts' Guide To The Meaning Of Life

One of the biggest questions we will ask ourselves is what the meaning of life is. Is it to find happiness? How about helping others or spreading world peace ? Or does life have no inherent meaning at all? The possible answers to this question are endless, and there is no objective answer to a question as big as the meaning of life. Philosophers have debated the meaning of life for centuries. Aristotle believed the meaning of life is happiness . Everything we do should be to be happy. The Stoics had similar views to Aristotle but also believed virtue was an important part of achieving happiness. Existentialists had different views on the meaning of life. They believed life has no inherent meaning. While this idea can sound bleak, it is also liberating. Alan Watts , another revolutionary thinker, believed we overthink the meaning of life. According to him the purpose of life is just to live. Being alive is a big enough purpose. This idea sounds simple enough but Watts had more thought behind it.

Satisfaction From Belonging

According to Watts, one of the biggest problems with the search for the meaning of life is that we often overlook life. When we ask ourselves what the meaning of life is, we get so caught up in looking for an outside meaning that we ignore the world around us. Many people want to feel that their life amounted to something. This could mean joining a group with a particular cause. For example, a church can find a holy purpose or a nonprofit dedicated to giving food to vulnerable people. There is nothing wrong with these endeavors. Many of them do help the world. Watts merely points out that some people get a sense of satisfaction by pursuing belonging to a group with a purpose. This satisfaction gives their lives meaning. He questions why people get this feeling of satisfaction and what needs are being fulfilled.

On the one hand, Watts sees belonging to a group as fulfilling biological needs. Beyond immediate needs such as hunger, he points to needs such as the sense of love and the sense of self-expression in activity. However, Watts questions beyond these biological needs. He asks what these needs point to. At their core, these processes are just that—biological processes. The point of them is to continue the life of the organism. They don't provide a satisfactory explanation for Watts.

Watts goes on to question theology. Some people get meaning from their relationship with God. In many religions, the meaning of life is God. In this view, the relationship between the person and God is the most important. Watts pushes past this idea, too. He questions what people are yearning for in this relationship.

Significance Versus Satisfaction

When people talk about something giving meaning to their lives, they usually use words like significance. Watts suggests that while "significance" is a word many people naturally say, this isn't the right word. He uses the example of music to explain his idea. Sometimes, when people hear a song that moves them, they believe it is special. They might say it is significant or believe that the song has significance. However, Watts believes what people really mean is that the song is satisfying. When we can appreciate a song and believe it is significant, Watts says we are appreciating ordinary things. We are able to appreciate the ordinary things at this time because hearing a song that moves us puts us in a different state of mind. In this state of mind, we are able to see ordinary things as amazing and recognize them.

Appreciating the Ordinary

Appreciating the ordinary happens when we are mesmerized by something. Whether it's a song, dance, bird, or delicious meal, these moments are what Watts referred to as moments of deep spiritual experience. Different religions celebrate these moments. In Hinduism , they are referred to as Moksha or release. In Zen, these moments are called Satori. Watts explains that when we experience these moments, we are experiencing the world as it is. Instead of looking for an external meaning, we find it in the present moment, in the world around us. Nothing needs justification; we allow ourselves to simply experience the world in the present.

Allowing ourselves to enjoy the present allows us to feel joy. Watts points out that this is often the driving force behind activities that give us a sense of significance. For example, we listen to music or dance to feel joy. Watts questions why we are motivated to do these things. Some people enjoy singing out loud in the shower or playing ball with their dog. Why do we enjoy these activities?

Further, what is the point? Watts suggests having joy might make us want to continue the human race because living is fun. He further questions this idea by asking what the point of that is. Why continue the human race endlessly? He concludes that there is no purpose and that we just enjoy nonsense.

Just Enjoy Life

The takeaway message from Watts's philosophy on the meaning of life is that we should enjoy life. In today's world, we can easily be caught up in what we should or should not be doing. Many people spend their lives searching for the meaning they should live for. Watts's philosophy urges us to stop searching for meaning outside of life. Getting satisfaction out of ordinary phenomenon shows us life in itself is worth living for. We don't need a purpose designed for our lives. There is no meaning other than to live life. In the words of Allan Watts "It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we get the profoundest meaning."

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms. Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and morality, they are straightforwardly construed as accounts of which final ends a person ought to realize in order to have a life that matters. Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only in the last 50 years or so that something approaching a distinct field on the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American philosophy, and it is only in the last 30 years that debate with real depth has appeared. Concomitant with the demise of positivism and of utilitarianism in the post-war era has been the rise of analytical enquiry into non-hedonistic conceptions of value, including conceptions of meaning in life, grounded on relatively uncontroversial (but not certain or universally shared) judgments of cases, often called “intuitions.” English-speaking philosophers can be expected to continue to find life's meaning of interest as they increasingly realize that it is a distinct topic that admits of rational enquiry to no less a degree than more familiar ethical categories such as well-being, virtuous character, and right action.

This survey critically discusses approaches to meaning in life that are prominent in contemporary Anglo-American philosophical literature. To provide context, sometimes it mentions other texts, e.g., in Continental philosophy or from before the 20 th century. However, the central aim is to acquaint the reader with recent analytic work on life's meaning and to pose questions about it that are currently worthy of consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people often pose one of two questions: “So, what is the meaning of life?” and “What are you talking about?” The literature can be divided in terms of which question it seeks to answer. This discussion starts off with works that address the latter, abstract question regarding the sense of talk of “life's meaning,” i.e., that aim to clarify what we are asking when we pose the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful. Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaning as a property. Some accounts of what make life meaningful provide particular ways to do so, e.g., by making certain achievements (James 2005), developing moral character (Thomas 2005), or learning from relationships with family members (Velleman 2005). However, most recent discussions of meaning in life are attempts to capture in a single principle all the variegated conditions that can confer meaning on life. This survey focuses heavily on the articulation and evaluation of these theories of what would make life meaningful. It concludes by examining nihilist views that the conditions necessary for meaning in life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless.

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

• 2.1 God-Centered Views
• 2.2 Soul-Centered Views

3.1 Subjectivism

3.2 objectivism, 4. nihilism, works cited, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One part of the field of life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of “life's meaning” (and of “significance,” “importance,” and other synonyms). A large majority of those writing on life's meaning deem talk of it centrally to indicate a positive final value that an individual's life can exhibit. That is, comparatively few believe either that a meaningful life is a merely neutral quality, or that what is of key interest is the meaning of the human species or universe as a whole (for discussions focused on the latter, see Edwards 1972; Munitz 1986; Seachris 2009). Most in the field have ultimately wanted to know whether and how the existence of one of us over time has meaning, a certain property that is desirable for its own sake.

Beyond drawing the distinction between the life of an individual and that of a whole, there has been very little discussion of life as the logical bearer of meaning. For instance, is the individual's life best understood biologically, qua human being, or instead as the existence of a person that may or may not be human (Flanagan 1996)? And if an individual is loved from afar, can it logically affect the meaningfulness of her “life” (Brogaard and Smith 2005, 449)?

Returning to topics on which there is consensus, most writing on meaning believe that it comes in degrees such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others (perhaps contra Britton 1969, 192). Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people's lives are less meaningful than others, or even meaningless, and still maintain that people have an equal moral status. Consider a consequentialist view according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life (cf. Railton 1984), or a Kantian view that says that people have an intrinsic worth in virtue of their capacity for autonomous choices, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity (Nozick 1974, ch. 3). On both views, morality could counsel an agent to help people with relatively meaningless lives, at least if the condition is not of their choosing.

Another uncontroversial element of the sense of “meaningfulness” is that it connotes a good that is conceptually distinct from happiness or rightness (something emphasized in Wolf 2010). First, to ask whether someone's life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is happy or pleasant. A life in an experience or virtual reality machine could conceivably be happy but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, many would say that talk of “meaning” by definition excludes the possibility of it coming from time spent in an experience machine (although there have been a small handful who disagree and contend that a meaningful life just is a pleasant life. Goetz 2012, in particular, bites many bullets.) Furthermore, one's life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one's happiness, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one's self-interest.

Second, asking whether a person's existence is significant is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there seem to be ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with morality, at least impartially conceived, for instance, making a scientific discovery.

Of course, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if (or even because) it were unhappy or immoral, particularly given Aristotelian conceptions of these disvalues. However, that is to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, and is far from indicating that speaking of “meaning in life” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness, which is what I am denying here. My point is that the question of what makes a life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the question of what makes a life happy or moral, even if it turns out that the best answer to the question of meaning appeals to an answer to one of these other evaluative questions.

If talk about meaning in life is not by definition talk about happiness or rightness, then what is it about? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One answer is that a meaningful life is one that by definition has achieved choice-worthy purposes (Nielsen 1964) or involves satisfaction upon having done so (Hepburn 1965; Wohlgennant 1981). However, for such an analysis to clearly demarcate meaningfulness from happiness, it would be useful to modify it to indicate which purposes are germane to the former. On this score, some suggest that conceptual candidates for grounding meaning are purposes that not only have a positive value, but also render a life coherent (Markus 2003), make it intelligible (Thomson 2003, 8–13), or transcend animal nature (Levy 2005).

Now, it might be that a focus on any kind of purpose is too narrow for ruling out the logical possibility that meaning could inhere in certain actions, experiences, states, or relationships that have not been adopted as ends and willed and that perhaps even could not be, e.g., being an immortal offshoot of an unconscious, spiritual force that grounds the physical universe, as in Hinduism. In addition, the above purpose-based analyses exclude as not being about life's meaning some of the most widely read texts that purport to be about it, namely, Jean-Paul Sartre's (1948) existentialist account of meaning being constituted by whatever one chooses, and Richard Taylor's (1970, ch. 18) discussion of Sisyphus being able to acquire meaning in his life merely by having his strongest desires satisfied. These are prima facie accounts of meaning in life, but do not essentially involve the attainment of purposes that foster coherence, intelligibility or transcendence.

The latter problem also faces the alternative suggestion that talk of “life's meaning” is not necessarily about purposes, but is rather just a matter of referring to goods that are qualitatively superior, worthy of love and devotion, and appropriately awed (Taylor 1989, ch. 1). It is implausible to think that these criteria are satisfied by subjectivist appeals to whatever choices one ends up making or to whichever desires happen to be strongest for a given person.

Although relatively few have addressed the question of whether there exists a single, primary sense of “life's meaning,” the inability to find one so far might suggest that none exists. In that case, it could be that the field is united in virtue of addressing certain overlapping but not equivalent ideas that have family resemblances (Metz 2013, ch. 2). Perhaps when we speak of “meaning in life,” we have in mind one or more of these related ideas: certain conditions that are worthy of great pride or admiration, values that warrant devotion and love, qualities that make a life intelligible, or ends apart from base pleasure that are particularly choice-worthy. Another possibility is that talk of “meaning in life” fails to exhibit even this degree of unity, and is instead a grab-bag of heterogenous ideas (Mawson 2010; Oakley 2010).

As the field reflects more on the sense of “life's meaning,” it should not only try to ascertain in what respect it admits of unity, but also try to differentiate the concept of life's meaning from other, closely related ideas. For instance, the concept of a worthwhile life is probably not identical to that of a meaningful one (Baier 1997, ch. 5; Metz 2012). For instance, one would not be conceptually confused to claim that a meaningless life full of animal pleasures would be worth living. Furthermore, it seems that talk of a “meaningless life” does not simply connote the concept of an absurd (Nagel 1970; Feinberg 1980), unreasonable (Baier 1997, ch. 5), futile (Trisel 2002), or wasted (Kamm 2003, 210–14) life.

Fortunately the field does not need an extremely precise analysis of the concept of life's meaning (or definition of the phrase “life's meaning”) in order to make progress on the substantive question of what life's meaning is. Knowing that meaningfulness analytically concerns a variable and gradient final good in a person's life that is conceptually distinct from happiness, rightness, and worthwhileness provides a certain amount of common ground. The rest of this discussion addresses attempts to theoretically capture the nature of this good.

2. Supernaturalism

Most English speaking philosophers writing on meaning in life are trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. These theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, i.e., in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views that meaning in life must be constituted by a certain relationship with a spiritual realm. If God or a soul does not exist, or if they exist but one fails to have the right relationship with them, then supernaturalism—or the Western version of it (on which I focus)—entails that one's life is meaningless. In contrast, naturalist theories are views that meaning can obtain in a world as known solely by science. Here, although meaning could accrue from a divine realm, certain ways of living in a purely physical universe would be sufficient for it. Note that there is logical space for a non-naturalist theory that meaning is a function of abstract properties that are neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the Anglo-American literature (Williams 1999; Audi 2005).

Supernaturalist thinkers in the monotheistic tradition are usefully divided into those with God-centered views and soul-centered views. The former take some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) to constitute meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance). The latter deem having a soul and putting it into a certain state to be what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Of course, many supernaturalists believe that certain relationships with God and a soul are jointly necessary and sufficient for a significant existence. However, the simpler view is common, and often arguments proffered for the more complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler view.

2.1 God-centered Views

The most widely held and influential God-based account of meaning in life is that one's existence is more significant, the better one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one's life is meaningful to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in the particular way God wants one to do so (Affolter 2007). Fulfilling God's purpose by choice is the sole source of meaning, with the existence of an afterlife not necessary for it (Brown 1971; Levine 1987; Cottingham 2003). If a person failed to do what God intends him to do with his life, then, on the current view, his life would be meaningless.

What I call “purpose theorists” differ over what it is about God's purpose that makes it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives. Some argue that God's purpose could be the sole source of invariant moral rules, where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical (Craig 1994; Cottingham 2003). However, Euthyphro problems arguably plague this rationale; God's purpose for us must be of a particular sort for our lives to obtain meaning by fulfilling it (as is often pointed out, serving as food for intergalactic travelers won't do), which suggests that there is a standard external to God's purpose that determines what the content of God's purpose ought to be (but see Cottingham 2005, ch. 3). In addition, some critics argue that a universally applicable and binding moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if the act of helping others is (Ellin 1995, 327).

Other purpose theorists contend that having been created by God for a reason would be the only way that our lives could avoid being contingent (Craig 1994; cf. Haber 1997). But it is unclear whether God's arbitrary will would avoid contingency, or whether his non-arbitrary will would avoid contingency anymore than a deterministic physical world. Furthermore, the literature is still unclear what contingency is and why it is a deep problem. Still other purpose theorists maintain that our lives would have meaning only insofar as they were intentionally fashioned by a creator, thereby obtaining meaning of the sort that an art-object has (Gordon 1983). Here, though, freely choosing to do any particular thing would not be necessary for meaning, and everyone's life would have an equal degree of meaning, which are both counterintuitive implications (see Trisel 2012 for additional criticisms). Are all these objections sound? Is there a promising reason for thinking that fulfilling God's (as opposed to any human's) purpose is what constitutes meaning in life?

Not only does each of these versions of the purpose theory have specific problems, but they all face this shared objection: if God assigned us a purpose, then God would degrade us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose (Baier 1957, 118–20; Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29). This objection goes back at least to Jean-Paul Sartre (1948, 45), and there are many replies to it in the literature that have yet to be assessed (e.g., Hepburn 1965, 271–73; Brown 1971, 20–21; Davis 1986, 155–56; Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Moreland 1987, 129; Walker 1989; Jacquette 2001, 20–21).

Robert Nozick presents a God-centered theory that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite (Nozick 1981, ch. 6, 1989, chs. 15–16; see also Cooper 2005). The basic idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one's life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. And, being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. And this work must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful finite conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something infinite, a being so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God.

The standard objection to this rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition; perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, or obtain its meaning by being related to something beautiful, autonomous or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

The purpose- and infinity-based rationales are the two most common instances of God-centered theory in the literature, and the naturalist can point out that they arguably face a common problem: a purely physical world seems able to do the job for which God is purportedly necessary. Nature seems able to ground a universal morality and the sort of final value from which meaning might spring. And other God-based views seem to suffer from this same problem. For two examples, some claim that God must exist in order for there to be a just world, where a world in which the bad do well and the good fare poorly would render our lives senseless (Craig 1994; cf. Cottingham 2003, pt. 3), and others maintain that God's remembering all of us with love is alone what would confer significance on our lives (Hartshorne 1984). However, the naturalist will point out that an impersonal, Karmic-like force of nature conceivably could justly distribute penalties and rewards in the way a retributive personal judge would, and that actually living together in loving relationships would seem to confer much more meaning on life than a loving fond remembrance.

A second problem facing all God-based views is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world. Even religiously inclined philosophers find this hard to deny (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005), though some of them suggest that a supernatural realm is necessary for a “deep” or “ultimate” meaning (Nozick 1981, 618; Craig 1994, 42). What is the difference between a deep meaning and a shallow one? And why think a spiritual realm is necessary for the former?

At this point, the supernaturalist could usefully step back and reflect on what it might be about God that would make Him uniquely able to confer meaning in life, perhaps as follows from the perfect being theological tradition. For God to be solely responsible for any significance in our lives, God must have certain qualities that cannot be found in the natural world, these qualities must be qualitatively superior to any goods possible in a physical universe, and they must be what ground meaning in it. Here, the supernaturalist could argue that meaning depends on the existence of a perfect being, where perfection requires properties such as atemporality, simplicity, and immutability that are possible only in a spiritual realm (Metz 2013, chs. 6–7; cf. Morris 1992; contra Brown 1971 and Hartshorne 1996). Meaning might come from loving a perfect being or orienting one's life toward it in other ways such as imitating it or even fulfilling its purpose, perhaps a purpose tailor-made for each individual (as per Affolter 2007).

Although this might be a promising strategy for a God-centered theory, it faces a serious dilemma. On the one hand, in order for God to be the sole source of meaning, God must be utterly unlike us; for the more God were like us, the more reason there would be to think we could obtain meaning from ourselves, absent God. On the other hand, the more God is utterly unlike us, the less clear it is how we could obtain meaning by relating to Him. How can one love a being that cannot change? How can one imitate such a being? Could an immutable, atemporal, simple being even have purposes? Could it truly be a person? And why think an utterly perfect being is necessary for meaning? Why would not a very good but imperfect being confer some meaning?

2.2 Soul-centered Views

A soul-centered theory is the view that meaning in life comes from relating in a certain way to an immortal, spiritual substance that supervenes on one's body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. If one lacks a soul, or if one has a soul but relates to it in the wrong way, then one's life is meaningless. There are two prominent arguments for a soul-based perspective.

The first one is often expressed by laypeople and is suggested by the work of Leo Tolstoy (1884; see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Tolstoy argues that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that nothing is worth doing if nothing one does will make a permanent difference to the world, and that doing so requires having an immortal, spiritual self. Many of course question whether having an infinite effect is necessary for meaning (e.g., Schmidtz 2001; Audi 2005, 354–55). Others point out that one need not be immortal in order to have an infinite effect (Levine 1987, 462), for God's eternal remembrance of one's mortal existence would be sufficient for that.

The other major rationale for a soul-based theory of life's meaning is that a soul is necessary for perfect justice, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or by Karma. Something like this argument can be found in the Biblical chapter Ecclesiastes , and it continues to be defended (Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, like the previous rationale, the inferential structure of this one seems weak; even if an afterlife were required for just outcomes, it is not obvious why an eternal afterlife should be thought necessary (Perrett 1986, 220).

Work has been done to try to make the inferences of these two arguments stronger, and the basic strategy has been to appeal to the value of perfection (Metz 2013, ch. 7). Perhaps the Tolstoian reason why one must live forever in order to make the relevant permanent difference is an agent-relative need for one to honor an infinite value, something qualitatively higher than the worth of, say, pleasure. And maybe the reason why immortality is required in order to mete out just deserts is that rewarding the virtuous requires satisfying their highest free and informed desires, one of which would be for eternal flourishing of some kind (Goetz 2012). While far from obviously sound, these arguments at least provide some reason for thinking that immortality is necessary to satisfy the major premise about what is required for meaning.

However, both arguments are still plagued by a problem facing the original versions; even if they show that meaning depends on immortality, they do not yet show that it depends on having a soul . By definition, if one has a soul, then one is immortal, but it is not clearly true that if one is immortal, then one has a soul. Perhaps being able to upload one's consciousness into an infinite succession of different bodies in an everlasting universe would count as an instance of immortality without a soul. Such a possibility would not require an individual to have an immortal spiritual substance (imagine that when in between bodies, the information constitutive of one's consciousness were temporarily stored in a computer). What reason is there to think that one must have a soul in particular for life to be significant?

The most promising reason seems to be one that takes us beyond the simple version of soul-centered theory to the more complex view that both God and a soul constitute meaning. The best justification for thinking that one must have a soul in order for one's life to be significant seems to be that significance comes from uniting with God in a spiritual realm such as Heaven, a view espoused by Thomas Aquinas, Leo Tolstoy (1884), and contemporary religious thinkers (e.g., Craig 1994). Another possibility is that meaning comes from honoring what is divine within oneself, i.e., a soul (Swenson 1949).

As with God-based views, naturalist critics offer counterexamples to the claim that a soul or immortality of any kind is necessary for meaning. Great works, whether they be moral, aesthetic, or intellectual, would seem to confer meaning on one's life regardless of whether one will live forever. Critics maintain that soul-centered theorists are seeking too high a standard for appraising the meaning of people's lives (Baier 1957, 124–29; Baier 1997, chs. 4–5; Trisel 2002; Trisel 2004). Appeals to a soul require perfection, whether it be, as above, a perfect object to honor, a perfectly just reward to enjoy, or a perfect being with which to commune. However, if indeed soul-centered theory ultimately relies on claims about meaning turning on perfection, such a view is attractive at least for being simple, and rival views have yet to specify in a principled and thoroughly defended way where to draw the line at less than perfection (perhaps a start is Metz 2013, ch. 8). What less than ideal amount of value is sufficient for a life to count as meaningful?

Critics of soul-based views maintain not merely that immortality is not necessary for meaning in life, but also that it is sufficient for a meaningless life. One influential argument is that an immortal life, whether spiritual or physical, could not avoid becoming boring, rendering life pointless (Williams 1973; Ellin 1995, 311–12; Belshaw 2005, 82–91; Smuts 2011). The most common reply is that immortality need not get boring (Fischer 1994; Wisnewski 2005; Bortolotti and Nagasawa 2009; Chappell 2009; Quigley and Harris 2009, 75–78). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is truly sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make.

Another argument that being immortal would be sufficient to make our lives insignificant is that persons who cannot die could not exhibit certain virtues (Nussbaum 1989; Kass 2001). For instance, they could not promote justice of any important sort, be benevolent to any significant degree, or exhibit courage of any kind that matters, since life and death issues would not be at stake. Critics reply that even if these virtues would not be possible, there are other virtues that could be. And of course it is not obvious that meaning-conferring justice, benevolence and courage would not be possible if we were immortal, perhaps if we were not always aware that we could not die or if our indestructible souls could still be harmed by virtue of intense pain, frustrated ends, and repetitive lives.

There are other, related arguments maintaining that awareness of immortality would have the effect of removing meaning from life, say, because our lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Lenman 1995; Kass 2001; James 2009) or because external rather than internal factors would then dictate their course (Wollheim 1984, 266). Note that the target here is belief in an eternal afterlife, and not immortality itself, and so I merely mention these rationales (for additional, revealing criticism, see Bortolotti 2010).

3. Naturalism

I now address views that even if there is no spiritual realm, meaning in life is possible, at least for many people. Among those who believe that a significant existence can be had in a purely physical world as known by science, there is debate about two things: the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings.

Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual's pro-attitudes such as desires, ends, and choices. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she believes it to be or seeks it out. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is (at least partly) mind-independent, i.e., is a real property that exists regardless of being the object of anyone's mental states. Here, something is meaningful (to some degree) in virtue of its intrinsic nature, independent of whether it is believed to be meaningful or sought.

There is logical space for an intersubjective theory according to which there are invariant standards of meaning for human beings that are constituted by what they would all agree upon from a certain communal standpoint (Darwall 1983, chs. 11–12). However, this orthogonal approach is not much of a player in the field and so I set it aside in what follows.

According to this view, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one's variable mental states. Common instances are views that one's life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, the more one achieves one's highly ranked goals, or the more one does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008; Alexis 2011). Lately, one influential subjectivist has maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1982, 2002, 2004).

Subjectivism was dominant for much of the 20 th century when pragmatism, positivism, existentialism, noncognitivism, and Humeanism were quite influential (James 1900; Ayer 1947; Sartre 1948; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Hare 1972; Williams 1976; Klemke 1981). However, in the last quarter of the 20 th century, “reflective equilibrium” became a widely accepted argumentative procedure, whereby more controversial normative claims are justified by virtue of entailing and explaining less controversial normative claims that do not command universal acceptance. Such a method has been used to defend the existence of objective value, and, as a result, subjectivism about meaning has lost its dominance.

Those who continue to hold subjectivism often are suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Frankfurt 2002, 250; Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79). Theorists are primarily moved to accept subjectivism because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are sure that value in general and meaning in particular exists, but do not see how it could be grounded in something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural, the non-natural, or the supernatural. In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of life. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There are two other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism. One is that subjectivism is plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1982). If a person's life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of satisfying certain desires held by the individual or realizing certain ends of hers. Another argument is that meaning intuitively comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience (Frankfurt 1982). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective element involved, that is, because of the concentration and engrossment.

However, critics maintain that both of these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value both in realizing oneself and in losing oneself (Taylor 1992, esp. ch. 4). One is not really being true to oneself if one intentionally harms others (Dahl 1987, 12), successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one's head (Taylor 1992, 36), or, well, eats one's own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22), and one is also not losing oneself in a meaning-conferring way if one is consumed by these activities. There seem to be certain actions, relationships, states, and experiences that one ought to concentrate on or be engrossed in, if meaning is to accrue.

So says the objectivist, but many subjectivists also feel the pull of the point. Paralleling replies in the literature on well-being, subjectivists often respond by contending that no or very few individuals would desire to do such intuitively trivial things, at least after a certain idealized process of reflection (e.g., Griffin 1981). More promising, perhaps, is the attempt to ground value not in the responses of an individual valuer, but in those of a particular group (Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Would such an intersubjective move avoid the counterexamples? If so, would it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning is constituted (at least in part) by something physical independent of the mind about which we can have correct or incorrect beliefs. Obtaining the object of some variable pro-attitude is not sufficient for meaning, on this view. Instead, there are certain inherently worthwhile or finally valuable conditions that confer meaning for anyone, neither merely because they are wanted, chosen, or believed to be meaningful, nor because they somehow are grounded in God.

Morality and creativity are widely held instances of actions that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow (and the other counterexamples to subjectivism above) are not. Objectivism is thought to be the best explanation for these respective kinds of judgments: the former are actions that are meaningful regardless of whether any arbitrary agent (whether it be an individual,her society, or even God) judges them to be meaningful or seeks to engage in them, while the latter actions simply lack significance and cannot obtain it if someone believes them to have it or engages in them. To obtain meaning in one's life, one ought to pursue the former actions and avoid the latter ones. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the nature of value are again relevant here.

A “pure” objectivist thinks that being the object of a person's mental states plays no role in making that person's life meaningful. Relatively few objectivists are pure, so construed. That is, a large majority of them believe that a life is more meaningful not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of subjective ones such as cognition, affection, and emotion. Most commonly held is the hybrid view captured by Susan Wolf's pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 1997a, 211; see also Hepburn 1965; Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Wolf 1997b, 2002, 2010; Dworkin 2000, ch. 6; Raz 2001, ch. 1; Schmidtz 2001; Starkey 2006; Mintoff 2008). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one's life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not worthwhile, or if one takes up a worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, care about it or otherwise identify with it. Different versions of this theory will have different accounts of the appropriate mental states and of worthwhileness.

Pure objectivists deny that subjective attraction plays any constitutive role in conferring meaning on life. For instance, utilitarians with respect to meaning (as opposed to morality) are pure objectivists, for they claim that certain actions confer meaning on life regardless of the agent's reactions to them. On this view, the more one benefits others, the more meaningful one's life, regardless of whether one enjoys benefiting them, believes they should be aided, etc. (Singer 1993, ch. 12, 1995, chs. 10–11; Singer 1996, ch. 4). Midway between pure objectivism and the hybrid theory is the view that having certain propositional attitudes toward finally good activities would enhance the meaning of life without being necessary for it (Audi 2005, 344). For instance, might a Mother Teresa who is bored by her substantial charity work have a significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she were excited by it?

There have been several attempts to theoretically capture what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning. Some believe that they can all be captured as actions that are creative (Taylor 1987), while others maintain that they are exhibit rightness or virtue and perhaps also involve reward proportionate to morality (Kant 1791, pt. 2; cf. Pogge 1997). Most objectivists, however, deem these respective aesthetic and ethical theories to be too narrow, even if living a moral life is necessary for a meaningful one (Landau 2011). It seems to most in the field not only that creativity and morality are independent sources of meaning, but also that there are sources in addition to these two. For just a few examples, consider making an intellectual discovery, rearing children with love, playing music, and developing superior athletic ability.

So, in the literature one finds a variety of principles that aim to capture all these and other (apparent) objective grounds of meaning. One can read the perfectionist tradition as proffering objective theories of what a significant existence is, even if their proponents do not frequently use contemporary terminology to express this. Consider Aristotle's account of the good life for a human being as one that fulfills its natural purpose qua rational, Marx's vision of a distinctly human history characterized by less alienation and more autonomy, culture, and community, and Nietzsche's ideal of a being with a superlative degree of power, creativity, and complexity.

More recently, some have maintained that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: transcending the limits of the self to connect with organic unity (Nozick 1981, ch. 6, 1989, chs. 15–16); realizing human excellence in oneself (Bond 1983, chs. 6, 8); maximally promoting non-hedonist goods such as friendship, beauty, and knowledge (Railton 1984); exercising or promoting rational nature in exceptional ways (Hurka 1993; Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, ch. 5); substantially improving the quality of life of people and animals (Singer 1993, ch. 12, 1995, chs. 10–11; Singer 1996, ch. 4); overcoming challenges that one recognizes to be important at one's stage of history (Dworkin 2000, ch. 6); constituting rewarding experiences in the life of the agent or the lives of others the agent affects (Audi 2005); making progress toward ends that in principle can never be completely realized because one's knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); or contouring intelligence toward fundamental conditions of human life (Metz 2013).

One major test of these theories is whether they capture all experiences, states, relationships, and actions that intuitively make life meaningful. The more counterexamples of apparently meaningful conditions that a principle entails lack meaning, the less justified the principle. There is as yet no convergence in the field on any one principle or even cluster as accounting for commonsensical judgments about meaning to an adequate, convincing degree. Indeed, some believe the search for such a principle to be pointless (Wolf 1997b, 12–13; Kekes 2000; Schmidtz 2001). Are these pluralists correct, or does the field have a good chance of discovering a single, basic property that grounds all the particular ways to acquire meaning in life?

Another important way to criticize these theories is more comprehensive: for all that has been said so far, the objective theories are aggregative or additive, objectionably reducing life to a “container” of meaningful conditions (Brännmark 2003, 330). As with the growth of “organic unity” views in the context of debates about intrinsic value, it is becoming common to think that life as a whole (or at least long stretches of it) can substantially affect its meaning apart from the amount of meaning in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficent and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2003, 210–14). And a life in which its meaningless parts cause its meaningful parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this causal pattern or being a “good life-story” (Velleman 1991; Fischer 2005).

Extreme versions of holism are also present in the literature. For example, some maintain that the only bearer of final value is life as a whole, which entails that there are strictly speaking no parts or segments of a life that can be meaningful in themselves (Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). For another example, some accept that both parts of a life and a life as a whole can be independent bearers of meaning, but maintain that the latter has something like a lexical priority over the former when it comes to what to pursue or otherwise to prize (Blumenfeld 2009).

What are the ultimate bearers of meaning? What are all the fundamentally different ways (if any) that holism can affect meaning? Are they all a function of narrativity, life-stories, and artistic self-expression (as per Kauppinen 2012), or are there holistic facets of life's meaning that are not a matter of such literary concepts? How much importance should they be accorded by an agent seeking meaning in her life?

So far, I have addressed theoretical accounts that have been naturally understood to be about what confers meaning on life, which obviously assumes that some lives are in fact meaningful. However, there are nihilistic perspectives that question this assumption. According to nihilism (or pessimism), what would make a life meaningful either cannot obtain or as a matter of fact simply never does.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether God exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither exists, then you are a nihilist, someone who denies that life has meaning. Albert Camus is famous for expressing this kind of perspective, suggesting that the lack of an afterlife and of a rational, divinely ordered universe undercuts the possibility of meaning (Camus 1955; cf. Ecclesiastes ).

Interestingly, the most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism. The idea shared among many contemporary nihilists is that there is something inherent to the human condition that prevents meaning from arising, even granting that God exists. For instance, some nihilists make the Schopenhauerian claim that our lives lack meaning because we are invariably dissatisfied; either we have not yet obtained what we seek, or we have obtained it and are bored (Martin 1993). Critics tend to reply that at least a number of human lives do have the requisite amount of satisfaction required for meaning, supposing that some is (Blackburn 2001, 74–77).

Other nihilists claim that life would be meaningless if there were no invariant moral rules that could be fully justified—the world would be nonsensical if, in (allegedly) Dostoyevskian terms, “everything were permitted”—and that such rules cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, ch. 1). While a number of philosophers agree that a universally binding and warranted morality is necessary for meaning in life (Kant 1791; Tännsjö 1988; Jacquette 2001, ch. 1; Cottingham 2003, 2005, ch. 3), some do not (Margolis 1990; Ellin 1995, 325–27). Furthermore, contemporary rationalist and realist work in meta-ethics has led many to believe that such a moral system exists.

In the past 10 years, some interesting new defences of nihilism have arisen that merit careful consideration. According to one rationale, for our lives to matter, we must in a position to add value to the world, which we are not since the value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value must be infinity.

One way to question this argument is to suggest that even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly obtains merely by being the source of value. Consider that one does not merely want one's child to be reared with love, but wants to be the one who rears one's child with love. And this desire remains even knowing that others would have reared one's child with love in one's absence, so that one's actions are not increasing the goodness of the state of the universe relative to what it would have had without them. Similar remarks might apply to cases of meaning more generally (for additional, and technical, discussion of whether an infinite universe entails nihilism, see Almeida 2010; Vohánka and Vohánková n.d.).

Another fresh argument for nihilism is forthcoming from certain defenses of anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would be a harm to them. There are now a variety of rationales for anti-natalism, but most relevant to debates about whether life is meaningful is probably the following argument from David Benatar (2006, 18–59). According to him, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, existing is always a net harm compared to not existing. Although this argument is about goods such as pleasures in the first instance, it seems generalizable to non-experiential goods, including that of meaning in life.

The criticisms of Benatar that promise to cut most deep are those that question his rationale for the above judgments of good and bad. He maintains that these appraisals best explain, e.g., why it would be wrong for one to create someone whom one knows would suffer a torturous existence, and why it would not be wrong for one not to create someone whom one knows would enjoy a wonderful existence. The former would be wrong and the latter would not be wrong, for Benatar, because no pain in non-existence is better than pain in existence, and because no pleasure in non-existence is no worse than pleasure in existence. Critics usually grant the judgments of wrongness, but provide explanations of them that do not invoke Benatar's judgments of good and bad that apparently lead to anti-natalism (e.g., Boonin 2012; Weinberg 2012).

This survey closes by discussing the most well-known rationale for nihilism, namely, Thomas Nagel's (1986) invocation of the external standpoint that purportedly reveals our lives to be unimportant (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Benatar 2006, 60–92; cf. Dworkin 2000, ch. 6). According to Nagel, we are capable of comprehending the world from a variety of standpoints that are either internal or external. The most internal perspective would be a particular human being's desire at a given instant, with a somewhat less internal perspective being one's interests over a life-time, and an even less internal perspective being the interests of one's family or community. In contrast, the most external perspective, an encompassing standpoint utterly independent of one's particularity, would be, to use Henry Sidgwick's phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers the interests of all sentient beings at all times and in all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one's finite—and even downright puny—impact on the world, little of one's life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over an approximately 75 years just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of years and likely trillions of beings that are a part of space-time.

Very few accept the authority of the (most) external standpoint (Ellin 1995, 316–17; Blackburn 2001, 79–80; Schmidtz 2001) or the implications that Nagel believes it has for the meaning of our lives (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Singer 1993, 333–34; Wolf 1997b, 19–21). However, the field could use much more discussion of this rationale, given its persistence in human thought. It is plausible to think, with Nagel, that part of what it is to be a person is to be able to take up an external standpoint. However, what precisely is a standpoint? Must we invariably adopt one standpoint or the other, or is it possible not to take one up at all? Is there a reliable way to ascertain which standpoint is normatively more authoritative than others? These and the other questions posed in this survey still lack conclusive answers, another respect in which the field of life's meaning is tantalizingly open for substantial contributions.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Seachris, J., 2011, “ Meaning of Life: The Analytic Perspective ”, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , J. Fieser and B. Dowden (eds.)
• Vohánka, V. and Vohánková, P., n.d., “ On Nihilism Driven by the Magnitude of the Universe ”.

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Five Famous Philosophers On The Meaning Of Life

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of life?

Do we serve a greater purpose than our own pleasure or satisfaction?

Is the meaning of life to be found inside us or are we meant to explore the world to find the answer?

These big questions have been asked by most people at some point in their lives.

They are significant questions that have led to the formation of thousands of different religions and philosophies over the years.

One of the best ways to think about these issues in greater depth is to read the opinions of philosophers and religious scholars.

Their writings are a source of knowledge and wisdom that may help you find answers you are satisfied with.

This article will focus on five famous philosophers and their answers to these big questions.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Kierkegaard is a Danish existential philosopher, poet and theologian.

Existentialist philosophers believe that every person is a free agent who determines their own future with acts of free will.

Kierkegaard believed that life is nothing but a series of choices that we make for ourselves.

Each person is responsible for finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility.

Existentialists like Kierkegaard believed that we should make choices free of tradition, religion, ethical rules, and the rule of law.

These structures are only restricting a person’s free will and ability to make their own decisions.

While Kierkegaard believed individuals should have complete free will — he said no one is free from the repercussions of the choices they make.

Personal responsibility, discipline and informed decision making are important concepts for existentialists.

Existentialist philosophers do not believe that money, fame, or pleasure are important to the individual.

An individual should accept what is and get on with their life.

The existentialist is the protagonist who must decide their own future.

Zeno of Citium (333 – 264 BC)

Zeno of Citium is a very famous Greek philosopher who founded the stoic school of philosophy.

Stoics believe that virtue (based on wisdom) is the highest good and will lead to happiness.

They suggested that the wise live in harmony because they are rational and reasonable.

Once a person is virtuous, they no longer care about the vicissitudes of fortune or pleasure and pain.

Stoicism was a relatively simple philosophy with a few central themes.

Stoics believed that the world is an unpredictable place.

To live a good life in this unpredictable place, people should be strong, steadfast and in full control of themselves.

They also believed that dissatisfaction with life is a result of using reflexive senses and emotion instead of logic.

Stoicism was practiced by many famous historical figures including Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world during the time of the Roman Empire, used stoicism to be humble, compassionate, and restrained in his actions.

Susan Wolf (1952 —)

Susan Wolf is an American philosopher who is currently teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She has written extensively on the meaning of life in her essays and books.

Dr. Wolf often writes about the relationship between meaningfulness, morality, happiness, and freedom.

She has written that a meaningful life consists of one’s active engagement with objectively worthwhile things.

Essentially, the meaning of life is one’s ability to find something they love to do which is worthwhile.

That might be creating art, writing a book, helping other people and so on.

Dr. Wolf also says that meaningfulness is only achieved when there is some success associated with their project.

The definition of success is up to the individual working on the project.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson is an American poet, writer, and philosopher who led the transcendentalist movement in the 19th-Century.

Emerson believed that god was in everyone and everything.

He also believed anyone could express their divinity by finding out who they are, being true to themselves and living as an individual.

Transcendentalism places a strong emphasis on the rights of the individual, self-reliance, and independence.

This philosophy also suggests that individuals should be wary of social pressures to conform or assimilate.

For Emerson, simple things could be divine.

The act of patting a dog or working on a project that you enjoy was a godly act because god is in everything.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsche remains one of the world’s most popular and influential philosophers.

He wrote about many topics during his life including morality, religion, psychology, epistemology, and ontology.

He created many important philosophical principles including the will to power, thought of eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and transvaluation of all values.

Nietzsche rejected the view that life was suffering or punishment for one’s sins as was put forward by contemporary philosophers like Schopenhauer.

Instead, Nietzsche declared that a life has meaning when a person is working on a significant projective with a long-term objective or goal.

He also believed that individuals were eventually capable of becoming the Übermensch (a superman like figure) who is capable of inventing their own meaning to life and taking responsibility for it.

Nietzsche cited some individuals who had come close to becoming an Übermensch, including Buddha, Julius Caesar, and Goethe.

If becoming an Übermensch seems a little ambitious, you could also follow Nietzsche’s decree to love your life no matter what it has in it.

That means taking on board the many good, bad, disastrous, depressing, and hilarious things that occur to you each day.

Nietzsche believed that embracing one part of life required a person to embrace all parts of life (including the bad parts) — a philosophy which has some similarities with Buddhist teachings.

Finding your own path

Finding your personal meaning of life is a journey that takes most people many years.

By continually reading and learning, you will eventually forge a philosophical framework that encompasses all of your beliefs.

Hopefully, the philosophical concepts listed here will be of use during that journey.

author: Stephen Coleclough

Stephen Coleclough is a leading international and domestic tax consultant who specialises in solving complex problems. As well as advising on tax matters, Stephen also enjoys exploring topics relating to physical and mental wellbeing. You can follow him on Twitter at SColeclough .

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Meaning of Life — What is the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

What is The Meaning of Life: a Philosophical Inquiry

• Categories: Meaning of Life Philosophy of Life

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Words: 794 |

Published: Sep 7, 2023

Words: 794 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The philosophical inquiry, different approaches to meaning, the search for purpose.

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Frankl, Viktor E. 'Man's Search for Meaning.' Beacon Press, 2006.Dweck, Carol S. 'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.' Ballantine Books, 2007.Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.' Harper [...]

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