Damascene Philosophy

QuestionsXVII

Does life have meaning without being given one?

If no one designed us for a purpose, is a human life meaningful anyway, or do we have to make meaning ourselves, or is the search itself the problem?

Reading time
5 min
Difficulty
Introductory
Branch
Meaning
First posed
Ecclesiastes and the ancient schools; sharpened by Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus

The question

In 1879, at the height of his fame and success, Leo Tolstoy was struck by a question he could not shake: 'What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?' He had wealth, family and acclaim. And it suddenly seemed to him that none of it meant anything, since it would all end in death and be forgotten.

Most people meet some version of Tolstoy's question. Usually it passes. But it is a serious question. In the past, many people found an answer in a cosmic order or a divine plan that assigned each life its place. If no such plan exists, or if you are unsure, where does meaning come from?

Philosophers distinguish several questions here. Is the universe as a whole meaningful? Can an individual life be meaningful even if the universe is not? And what makes one life more meaningful than another: happiness, achievement, love, connection to something larger?

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates, in Plato, Apology, 38a (trans. Benjamin Jowett)

Why it matters

The sense that one's life lacks meaning is linked to despair, and its presence to resilience. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, argued that the search for meaning is the primary human motive, and that people can endure almost anything if they have a reason.

The question also shapes daily choices: what career to pursue, whether to have children, how to spend the limited time we have.

Key terms

  • NihilismThe view that life has no meaning or that there are no real values. In ethics, it can mean the denial that anything is truly right or wrong.
  • The absurdIn Camus, the conflict between the human demand for meaning and the universe's silence in reply.
  • ExistentialismA movement holding that human beings have no fixed nature or given purpose, and must create meaning through free choices for which they are wholly responsible.
  • EudaimoniaGreek for flourishing or living well. For Aristotle, the highest human good: an active life of reason and virtue over a complete lifetime.
  • Objective valueValue that something has independently of anyone's attitudes towards it, as opposed to value it has only because someone cares about it.

The positions

Position I

Meaning comes from God or a transcendent order

Life is meaningful because it has a purpose given by something beyond us. Without that, it would be meaningless.

Position II

Meaning is objective but natural

Lives can be meaningful through engagement with things that are genuinely valuable: love, knowledge, beauty, helping others. No cosmic purpose is needed.

Position III

Meaning is created

There is no given meaning. Each person must create meaning through their own choices and commitments.

Position IV

The absurd

Humans demand meaning; the universe offers none. The right response is neither false hope nor despair, but defiant, lucid living.

Position V

Nihilism

Life has no meaning, and no meaning can be made. Nothing ultimately matters.

Arguments and objections

Meaning comes from God or a transcendent order

Best argument
Only a source beyond us can give life a meaning that is not arbitrary or temporary. If everything ends in death and the heat death of the universe, nothing we do seems to matter ultimately. Many religious traditions, and philosophers like Al-Ghazali in his account of his own crisis of doubt, located meaning in a relation to the divine.
Strongest objection
Being assigned a purpose by someone else does not obviously make a life meaningful; a creature designed to serve as food has a purpose but not a meaningful life. And if meaning requires God, the many who live richly meaningful lives without belief seem to be mistaken about their own lives.

Meaning is objective but natural

Best argument
Susan Wolf argues that meaning arises when you are drawn to something that is genuinely worth being drawn to: when you love something that is actually worth loving. A life devoted to curing disease is meaningful in a way that a life devoted to counting blades of grass is not, however much the counter enjoys it. This fits our judgments about which lives are meaningful.
Strongest objection
Who decides what is objectively valuable? The view needs objective values, which raises all the difficulties of moral realism.

Meaning is created

Best argument
Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we are condemned to be free: with no fixed human nature or divine plan, we define ourselves through what we do. Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to become creators of value after the 'death of God'. Meaning made by us is not lesser; it is the only kind that could be genuinely ours.
Strongest objection
If meaning is whatever you choose, then a life devoted to collecting bottle caps is as meaningful as one devoted to justice, provided it is chosen. That seems wrong. And if meaning is invented, it may feel too flimsy to bear the weight of real hardship.

The absurd

Best argument
Albert Camus described the absurd as the confrontation between our longing for meaning and a world that answers with silence. Religion and philosophy that promise hidden meaning are a kind of escape. Instead, we should live fully with the absurd, in revolt, freedom and passion, like Sisyphus pushing his rock. See the myth of Sisyphus.
Strongest objection
If life has no meaning, why is revolt better than giving up? Camus's prescription seems to bring values back in through the side door.

Nihilism

Best argument
Seen from far enough away, every human concern shrinks to nothing. Thomas Nagel noted that from the perspective of the universe, our lives are absurdly small. If nothing matters from that perspective, our sense that things matter may be an illusion.
Strongest objection
Nagel himself argued the opposite lesson: we can never fully take up the cosmic perspective, and the clash between it and our engaged lives is what makes life absurd, not meaningless. Many nihilists, moreover, go on caring, which suggests that the claim that nothing matters is not one anyone can actually live by.

Who argued what

Where you stand

Where does meaning come from?

Choose one to see how people answer.

Variations

The cosmic zoom

Shrink yourself to the scale of the galaxy, then the universe. Your life is a blink on a speck. Now zoom back in, to a single conversation with someone you love. Which perspective is the truer one? Nagel argued that we can occupy both, and that the tension between them is the absurdity of human life.

The happy pill

Would you take a pill that made you feel your life was deeply meaningful, without changing anything you do? If not, you seem to believe meaning is more than a feeling. See the experience machine.

Go deeper

Meaning and happiness are not the same

Psychological research by Roy Baumeister and colleagues found that happiness and a sense of meaning overlap but diverge. Happiness was linked to having needs met and to the present; meaning was linked to thinking about past and future, to giving rather than taking, and sometimes to stress and struggle. Raising children, for example, tends to increase meaning more than day-to-day happiness.

Schools of thought: Existentialism, Absurdism, Stoicism, Epicureanism

Related ideas

Thought experiment

Must we imagine Sisyphus happy?

Condemned by the gods to roll a boulder uphill forever, only to watch it roll back down. Camus saw in him an image of every human life, and concluded that he could be happy.

Question

Are you born with a nature?

A knife is made for cutting before it exists. Sartre argued that people are the reverse: we exist first, and only then decide what we are.

Question

Should we fear death?

Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us: when it comes, we are gone. Few have found the argument convincing, and fewer have refuted it.

Thought experiment

Would you live your life again, forever?

A demon tells you that you will live this exact life again, every moment, infinitely many times. Would you curse him, or call it the most divine thing you ever heard?

Thought experiment

Would you plug into the experience machine?

A machine can give you any experiences you want, indistinguishable from reality, for the rest of your life. Would you plug in?

Question

Should you only care about what you control?

The Stoics divided the world into what is up to you and what is not, and argued that peace comes from caring only about the first.

Further reading and sources

Open questions

  • If your life had meaning, how would you know?
  • Does something need to last forever to matter?
  • Can meaning be chosen, or only discovered?

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