Life, Meaning Of

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love, 2015

The question, "What is the meaning of life?" was once taken to be a paradigm of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and when the question is brought up, by a naïve student, for example, or a prospective donor to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable embarrassment. What is so wrong with the question? One answer is that it is extremely obscure, if not downright unintelligible. It is unclear what exactly the question is supposed to be asking. Talk of meaning in other contexts does not offer ready analogies for understanding the phrase "the meaning of life." When we ask the meaning of a word, for example, we want to know what the word stands for, what it represents. But life is not part of a language, or of any other sort of symbolic system. It is not clear how it could "stand for" anything, nor to whom. We sometimes use "meaning" in nonlinguistic contexts: "Those dots mean measles." "Those footprints mean that someone was here since it rained." In these cases, talk of meaning seems to be equivalent to talk of evidence, but the contexts in which such claims are made tend to specify what hypotheses are in question within relatively fixed bounds. To ask what life means without a similarly specified context, leaves us at sea. Still, when people do ask about the meaning of life, they are evidently expressing some concern or other, and it would be disingenuous to insist that the rest of us haven't the faintest idea what that is. The question at least gestures toward a certain set of concerns with which most of us are at least somewhat familiar. Rather than dismiss a question with which many people have been passionately occupied as pure and simple nonsense, it seems more appropriate to try to interpret it and reformulate it in a way that can be more clearly and unambiguously understood. Though there may well be many things going on when people ask, "What is the meaning of life?", the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or a point to human existence. It is a request to find out why we are here (that is, why we exist at all), with the hope that an answer to this question will also tell us something about what we should be doing with our lives. If understanding the question in this way, however, makes the question intelligible, it might not give reason to reopen it as a live philosophical problem. Indeed, if some of professional philosophy's discomfort with discussion of the meaning of life comes from a desire to banish ambiguity and obscurity from the field, as much comes, I think, from the thought that the question, when made clearer, has already been answered, and that the answer is depressing. Specifically, if the question of the Meaning of Life is to be identified with the question of the purpose of life, then the standard view, at least among professional philosophers, would seem to be that it all depends on the existence of God. In other words, the going opinion seems to be that if there is a God, then there is at least a chance that there is a purpose, and so

Human Affairs, 2019

In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of "life's meaning". Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort of enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a noticeable trend among philosophers to try to change our understanding of what talk of "life's meaning" connotes. For example, whereas most philosophers for a long while had held that such talk is about a kind of value possible in the life of human beings, recently some have argued that certain non-human parts of nature can exhibit meaningfulness, which, furthermore, is not necessarily something valuable. The second claim I advance is that there is strong reason to reject this trend, and instead for philosophers to retain the long-standing approach.

The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret. This is the big question-the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure. The more we concentrate our critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude us, or to evaporate as any intelligible question. For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. The basic idea of the question of life's meaning is depicted, to rethink the age-old question again, in this article by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question and basic categories of the answer.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2018), 2018

The article concerns the meaning of life issue that has been a fundamental problem of philosophical reflection for ages. Every generation introduces own connotations to it. In modern culture, a tendency of spreading addictive forms of behavior is being observed, and, as a result, the formation of a "conceptual vacuum" around the problem of the meaning of life. On the other hand, in the postmodern world the problem of the meaning of life becomes more urgent than ever. In the paper, we consider the main meaning-of-life orientations and their philosophical justifications.

This article defends a conception of philosophy popular outside the discipline but unpopular within it: that philosophy is unified by a concern with the meaning of life. First, it argues against exceptionalist theses according to which philosophy is unique among academic disciplines in not being united by a distinctive subject matter. It then presents a positive account, showing that the issue of the meaning of life is uniquely able to reveal unity between the practical and theoretical concerns of philosophy, while meeting a range of desiderata for a typical specification of subject matter. After showing how recent analytic work on “the meaning of life” has conflated the traditional question with issues of social meaningfulness, it offers an explanation of why the traditional question has become marginalised in philosophy. The reasons are not good, however, so it concludes that philosophy should embrace its popular image.

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a 'form of life', and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something 'beyond the human'. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the 'beyond the human' which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and 'intimate' with life itself.

Philosophy Compass, 2007

In this article I survey philosophical literature on the topic of what, if anything, makes a person's life meaningful, focusing on systematic texts that are written in English and that have appeared in the last five years. My aims are to present overviews of the most important, fresh, Anglo-American positions on meaning in life and to raise critical questions about them worth answering in future work.

Life is a rather vague notion with many meanings since it refers to elementary phenomena, like those of nutrition or reproduction, that are found in all beings which have attained a minimum degree of organization, as well as to both a person's ordinary activity and their highest spiritual experiences. Doesn't the "laudatory import" of the word "life," the prestige of the romantic philosophies which exalt its expansion, rest simply on this confusion? To the idea of life is bound that of the spontaneity which devalues, in one sweep, mechanism, logic, pale abstraction and reason itself. It is to escape the unreality of ideal creations that we plunge back into life, whether it is instinctive or unconscious, supernatural or mystical. Yet if a rigorous philosophy took account of all these various meanings, it would certainly find, in each of them, the very same mysterious essence, approached directly or by analogy, namely that which causes us to be alive. That is why, upon opening the scriptures, we read: "I am the Way, the Truth and Life," or when Kierkegaard wrote that "The Truth is that which we desire to live or die for," or Marx declared: "It is not a man's consciousness that determines his life, but his life that determines his consciousness," we are, in spite of progress in the analysis of language, affected deep within ourselves and deeply moved in our very being. So what do we mean by the word "life?"