What is the meaning of life? A beginner’s guide to how philosophers answer it

"What is the meaning of life?" is probably the question people most expect philosophers to answer, and the one many philosophers are most embarrassed to be asked. Part of the embarrassment is that it is several questions at once. This guide separates them, sets out the main kinds of answer, and suggests where to start reading. The card on this topic puts it in a form that is easier to work with: does a life need a point, and where would it come from?

First, which question?

Two different things can be meant.

The meaning of life asks about life as a whole, or the universe: is there a purpose to the whole show? Did someone or something intend it?

Meaning in life asks about individual lives: what makes a particular life meaningful rather than empty, whether or not the universe has a purpose?

The phrase "the meaning of life" is itself fairly recent, usually traced in English to the nineteenth century. Older traditions asked related questions in other forms: what is the highest good, what is a human being for, how should one live? One thread on this site asks whether the question in its modern form is a European one. Wherever it comes from, most philosophers writing today work on the second question, partly because it can be answered without first settling the first.

The main families of answer

Writers on meaning in life usually sort the answers into a few families.

God-centred views. A life is meaningful because it fulfils a purpose God has for it, or because it is connected to something eternal. Without God, on the strongest version, nothing ultimately matters. This was the fear behind Leo Tolstoy's crisis, described in A Confession. At around fifty, famous and prosperous, he found he could not say what would come of anything he did, given that he would die and be forgotten. He retells an Eastern fable of a traveller clinging to a branch in a well, with a dragon below and two mice gnawing at the branch, while he licks drops of honey from its leaves. Tolstoy eventually found his way back to a kind of faith, by watching how ordinary believers lived.

Objective views. Meaning comes from engaging with things that are genuinely valuable, whatever anyone thinks of them: knowledge, creativity, love, helping others, justice. On this view a life spent counting blades of grass is not meaningful, however much the counter enjoys it.

Subjective views. Meaning comes from caring deeply about something, or fulfilling one's own desires and commitments. Richard Taylor imagined that the gods, out of mercy, gave Sisyphus a strong desire to roll stones. Then, he argued, the task would be meaningful to him, and that is all meaning can be.

Hybrid views. Susan Wolf's influential answer, in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, combines the two: meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. You must care about what you are doing, and what you are doing must be worth caring about.

Nihilism. Nothing has meaning, and we should admit it. Few philosophers defend this outright, but it is the position many of the others are trying to answer.

The absurd, and other responses

Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by saying there is only one really serious philosophical problem: judging whether life is worth living. For Camus the absurd is not a fact about the world, or about us, but about the collision between them, our demand for meaning and the world's silence. He rejects both suicide and religious faith as ways of escaping it. Instead we should live in full awareness of it, in revolt, and his book ends with the famous line that one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Thomas Nagel, in his essay "The Absurd" (collected in Mortal Questions), places the absurd differently. It comes from our ability to step back from our own lives and see them as arbitrary, while we still have to live them seriously from the inside. We cannot stop doing either. His advice is to meet the situation with irony rather than despair. His short book What Does It All Mean? has a clear chapter on the subject for beginners.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, gave a practical answer in Man's Search for Meaning. He described three main sources of meaning: creating a work or doing a deed; experiencing something or loving someone; and the attitude we take towards suffering we cannot avoid. The last is the one he became known for. Even when nothing else can be chosen, the stance can be.

Many traditions approach the question by changing it. In the Zhuangzi, a tree that no carpenter will cut lives to a great age precisely because it is useless; the demand that a life have a point may itself be the trap. Buddhist teaching treats the craving for a lasting self, which might seem to give life its meaning, as part of the problem rather than the solution. And several religious traditions answer the first question, about the meaning of life, directly: to know and serve God, to realise one's identity with Brahman, to reach awakening.

Where to start

If you are new to the topic:

1. Read the card, then Tolstoy's Confession, which is short and painfully honest.
2. Read the first and last chapters of The Myth of Sisyphus.
3. Read Wolf's book, which includes replies from her critics.
4. Then come back and argue. The site has threads on meaning in midlife, on retirement and the useless tree, and on whether anything matters if nothing will matter in a million years.

The question may never have a single answer. But working out which question you are asking is most of the way to an answer you can live with.