Chapter 4
The Grammar of Meaning
The question "What is the meaning of life?" contains multiple problematic terms that require careful examination. For religious believers, life's meaning isn't a "what" but a "Who" - specifically their deity or divine purpose. This fundamental distinction shapes how different worldviews approach the question of meaning. Even the word "meaning" itself has numerous uses falling into three distinct categories: intending something (related to mind), signifying something, or intentionally signifying something.
The first category involves intentions or mental states ("Did you mean to strangle him?" or "I meant to call you yesterday"), reflecting conscious purpose and agency. The second involves signification without intention ("Those clouds mean rain" or "A high temperature means fever"), representing natural or logical connections. The third combines both by referring to intentional signification ("What did she mean by that phrase?" or "The author means to suggest that war is futile"), encompassing human communication and interpretation.
These distinctions critically matter for understanding life's meaning-is it something we actively give to life (meaning as act), like an artist creating meaning through their work, or something life has regardless of our activity (meaning as structure), like the inherent patterns in nature? Yet these aren't entirely separate domains, as words gain meaning through historical usage and cultural context while simultaneously constraining what we can intend to say. We cannot simply make words mean whatever we want (try declaring "cat" means "democracy"), nor can we intend something entirely outside our conceptual framework shaped by language and experience.
When people claim life is meaningless, they aren't saying it's unintelligible like gibberish or random sounds. Rather, they mean it lacks significance, purpose, value, and direction in a deeper sense. Macbeth's famous soliloquy "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" reveals this existential despair, though his metaphors contain fascinating contradictions. He laments both life's transience ("brief candle") and emptiness ("signifying nothing"), comparing it to a poor actor's brief strutting on stage and "a tale told by an idiot." Yet these images paradoxically suggest life might potentially have meaning-even a nonsensical tale requires some narrative structure, and death might actually be necessary for life to have shape and significance, just as a story needs an ending to have coherence.
This linguistic analysis reveals that our very conception of meaning is deeply rooted in our use of language and the metaphors we employ to understand existence. The way we frame the question of life's meaning inevitably shapes the kinds of answers we can discover or create.
Chapter 5
Beyond Divine Authorship
The meaning of life needn't depend on divine authorship. While some viewed life as God's utterance, others find meaningful patterns without supernatural sources. Marxists and Whig historians, though typically atheists, discern significant narratives in human history - seeing purpose in class struggles or the march toward liberal democracy. Realist novelists like George Eliot excavate meaning inherent in reality through careful observation of social dynamics and human psychology, while modernists like Joyce and Woolf impose artistic patterns on what they perceive as underlying chaos, creating order through literary form.
The cosmos itself reveals beauty, symmetry and economy in its laws that move scientists to tears. From the elegant simplicity of E=mc2 to the intricate dance of subatomic particles, the universe displays an inherent mathematical harmony that suggests meaning without requiring a divine author. The notion that meaning requires either God or nothing is a false antithesis-a neurotic anxiety that religious fundamentalism and nihilism both share. Many sensitive religious believers don't imagine non-believers live in absurdity, nor do they believe God makes life's meaning transparent. Indeed, for some like Kierkegaard and Tillich, divine presence makes existence more mysteriously unfathomable, not less, deepening rather than resolving life's fundamental questions.
Kant wrote of natural organisms and art displaying "purposiveness without purpose" - a concept that illuminates how meaning can emerge without conscious design. The human foot has no designed purpose yet has meaningful function within the body, evolving through natural selection to serve essential roles. Similarly, we can ask about the "meaning" of a wind's eerie sound-not because it expresses anything intentional, but because it signifies through natural causes, creating patterns we recognize and interpret. Even random patterns can accidentally signify something, as when we see faces in clouds or meaning in coincidences.
Something accidental, like life itself, can still exhibit design through emergent properties and self-organizing principles. "Accidental" doesn't mean "unintelligible"-car accidents have specific causes though unintended, following the laws of physics and human behavior. Processes may seem random but retrospectively form meaningful patterns, as in Hegel's view of history where apparent chaos resolves into rational progression. Contemporary complexity theory shows how order can emerge spontaneously from chaos, suggesting that meaning need not be imposed from above but can arise organically from natural processes.
The search for meaning thus extends beyond traditional theological frameworks to embrace multiple paths: scientific wonder at natural laws, artistic creation of form, philosophical investigation of emergence, and recognition of patterns in seemingly random phenomena. This broader view enriches rather than diminishes our understanding of life's significance.
Chapter 6
The Specter of Meaninglessness
One can believe existence has significant design without divine intent, or conversely, that life's chaos was deliberately intended by malevolent forces. Schopenhauer represents this latter view, seeing reality as product of "the Will"-a voracious, implacable force generating everything merely to perpetuate itself. This Will creates consciousness as a mechanism of self-deception, fooling us into believing our lives have meaning while using us as instruments for its blind self-reproduction. Like puppets dancing on strings, we imagine ourselves free while serving an unconscious master.
For Schopenhauer, all consciousness is false consciousness, existing to conceal life's utter futility. Without such delusion, confronted with history's carnage - wars, plagues, natural disasters, and countless individual tragedies - we would destroy ourselves. Even suicide serves the Will's triumph, demonstrating its immortality against our mortality. He sees humanity as ridiculous-self-important creatures pursuing ends that turn to ashes, existing in "constant struggle" with "much and long suffering" for no spectator and no purpose. Our greatest achievements, our deepest loves, our most profound discoveries - all amount to nothing more than the Will's elaborate puppet show.
What if life's meaning is something we should not discover? While Enlightenment thinkers combated error with truth, 19th century thought introduced the notion of "redemptive lies"-productive illusions allowing us to thrive. Perhaps consciousness provides both poison (awareness of our contingency) and cure (life-giving mythologies). These protective fictions - religion, nationalism, progress, love - shield us from unbearable truths while propelling us forward. Like a screen protecting us from deadly radiation, these myths filter reality into manageable doses.
These myths might not be scientifically true but contain their own kind of truth in their consequences. Marxist theorist Althusser suggested ideology might be vitally necessary, persuading us we're autonomous agents when we're actually products of social and economic forces. For Freud, the ego's illusion of coherent independence is salutary, allowing us to function despite being driven by unconscious forces we can never fully understand. For Lacan, the human subject can either "mean" or "be" but not both-we attain meaning only at the cost of being. To exist as meaningful beings requires accepting certain fictions about ourselves and reality.
This paradox suggests that meaning itself might be a necessary illusion - not something we discover but something we create and maintain through collective agreement. The question then becomes not whether our beliefs are true in some absolute sense, but whether they serve life and enable human flourishing. Perhaps wisdom lies not in stripping away all illusions but in choosing which ones to preserve.
Chapter 7
The Modernist Response
Meaning's absence can only be felt against the background of meaning itself. When Toozenbach in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" points to falling snow as meaningless, he ironically makes it signify within a meaningful world. Even declaring life "absurd" evokes some possibility of coherent sense-making, as absurdity makes sense only in contrast to meaning. This paradox becomes particularly evident in works like Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus," where the very articulation of meaninglessness creates its own form of significance.
Modernism feels the eclipse of meaning as anguish precisely because it remembers when meaning seemed plentiful. This nostalgia for lost certainty manifests in various symbolic absences throughout modernist literature. Modernist works orbit central absences marking where sense-making has leaked away-Chekhov's Moscow represents an unreachable ideal, Conrad's heart of darkness embodies the void at civilization's core, Woolf's lighthouse stands as an impossible point of connection, and Beckett's Godot becomes the ultimate absent presence. These voids function not merely as literary devices but as profound metaphysical statements about modern existence. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" perhaps best exemplifies this modernist sensibility, with its fragments shored against ruins suggesting both the memory of coherence and its irretrievable loss.
Samuel Beckett's work exists between modernist and postmodernist sensibilities, marking a crucial transition in literary history. His writing is woven with provisionality, hovering on articulation's edge before lapsing into wordless darkness. In works like "The Unnamable" and "Not I," meaning flares and fades like a guttering candle, narratives abort mid-stream for equally futile ones, creating a perpetual cycle of failed communication that paradoxically communicates profound truth about human experience.
In Beckett's post-Auschwitz world, everything is ambiguous, reflecting the impossibility of certainty after historical trauma. Waiting for Godot represents both anticipation and a way of life, suggesting that deferring final meaning makes life bearable while keeping it in motion. Vladimir and Estragon's endless wait becomes a metaphor for human existence itself - purposeless yet persistent. The world's indeterminacy leaves room for hope-Godot's absence doesn't guarantee he won't come, just as the impossibility of absolute meaning doesn't preclude the possibility of provisional significance.
Paradoxically, Beckett combines this uncertainty with monkish precision-a meticulous sculpting of vacancy, a crazed attempt to "eff the ineffable." His language pares away the inessential with Protestant austerity, evident in works like "Worstward Ho" where each word seems carved from silence itself. The formal apparatus of truth remains intact though its contents have leaked away, creating what critics have called a "literature of the unword." This approach influences later writers like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, who similarly explore the tension between precision and uncertainty in their work.
Chapter 8
The Question of Inherent Meaning
The postmodern view holds that life isn't meaningful or meaningless-these terms simply don't apply. Expecting the world to burst with inherent significance is like lamenting not being born wearing a woolly hat. Nothing is missing. Some insist all meanings must culminate in a Meaning of meanings, or everything hangs precariously in air.
But what is "inherent" meaning? Meanings aren't "in" things like ink in bottles. They're interpretations dependent on us, though life might harbor patterns we're unconscious of-as Freud believed life's true meaning was death. Immanence doesn't necessarily imply transcendence.
The debate mirrors literary criticism's question: is meaning in the poem or brought by readers? If we invest meaning, do we only get back what we put in? Nietzsche claimed we find in things only what we've imported into them. Yet this seems narcissistic-surely genuine meaning must resist us, bear upon us with ineluctability.
Meaning can be "inherent" in limited ways: artworks embody meanings materially; human artifacts have functions built into them; situations like racism contain meanings that aren't merely subjective impositions. All meanings are human performances, but valid ones respect reality's grain and texture through dialogue with a determinate world whose laws we didn't invent.
Shakespeare was keenly aware of the tension between inherent and constructed meaning. In Troilus and Cressida, Troilus takes an existentialist position where things gain value only through human investment-Helen is precious because she caused a glorious war. Hector counters with an "intrinsicist" view that value combines the given and created.
Chapter 9
The Theological Roots of Meaninglessness
For certain Protestant thinkers, preserving God's omnipotence required stripping the world of inherent meanings that might constrain divine freedom. Creation couldn't resist its Creator or possess autonomy. Reality needed thinning out, becoming radically indeterminate-mere pliable stuff for God to shape according to whim. This theological position eerily prefigures postmodernism, where reality becomes "one enormous cosmetic surgery."
Essences-the notion that things possess determinate natures-had to be eliminated as obstacles to God's supreme power. The "realists" who believed in such natures clashed with "nominalists" who saw them as verbal fictions. This early anti-essentialism paired with voluntarism, a cult of the will. Once determinate natures vanished, God's arbitrary will could reign supreme, making things what they are by divine decree rather than inherent nature.
The Protestant self, having cleared the world of essences, discovers itself unmoored. Both exhilarated and alarmed by the absence of given meaning, it assumes God's role as supreme legislator but finds itself legislating in a void. Its commands seem as arbitrary as divine ones. This "decisionism" in morality-where things are wrong because we've decided they are-leads to a Nietzschean position where "genuine philosophers are commanders and legislators."
Triumphant yet solitary, the self becomes the sole source of meaning in a bleached world. Yet this meaninglessness invades its own sanctuary. Though free to inscribe meaning on the cosmic blank slate, it finds no objective reason to act one way rather than another. This freedom proves vacuous and self-consuming. Humanity itself becomes absurd.
Chapter 10
Happiness, Love, and Human Flourishing
If life's meaning lies in humanity's common goal, that goal is happiness. As Aristotle recognized, happiness operates as a baseline-you can't reasonably ask why we should seek it. It's not a means to something else but seems part of our nature. Yet this foundational term remains desperately indeterminate. What counts as happiness? What if someone finds it in terrorizing others?
Happiness isn't merely a state of mind for Aristotle but a "state of soul"-a disposition to behave in certain ways. It's attained through virtue, which is primarily a social practice rather than an attitude. Happiness forms part of a practical way of life, not private inner contentment.
Julian Baggini's discussion of happiness fails to fully grasp this distinction. His example of choosing between pursuing happiness and saving someone from quicksand treats happiness as a private pursuit akin to pleasure. In reality, pleasure is a passing sensation while happiness is an enduring condition. Rescuing someone could be part of one's happiness, not a distraction from it. For Aristotle, happiness involves virtuous action-doing good and enjoying it-not merely pleasant feelings or manufactured contentment.
While happiness may constitute life's meaning, it's not an open-and-shut case. Someone's life might be formally meaningful-orderly, coherent, well-patterned with defined goals-while being morally trivial or squalid. Alternative candidates for life's meaning include power, love, honor, truth, pleasure, freedom, reason, autonomy, contemplation, self-sacrifice, and many others. In practice, most people find meaning through relationships with partners and children.
Chapter 11
The Jazz of Human Flourishing
Love (agape) emerges as a leading candidate for life's meaning-not romantic feelings but a practice of creating space for others to flourish while they do the same for you. This reconciles our individual fulfillment with our nature as social animals. In damaging others, we ultimately damage ourselves, as our fulfillment depends on others' freedom.
This contrasts with liberal models where others are potential threats rather than essential to our being. Modern individualist bias sees meaning as primarily personal rather than a common, reciprocal project.
Love and happiness aren't ultimately at odds. If happiness is the flourishing of our faculties (Aristotle's view), and love enables this flourishing through reciprocity, they become complementary. A jazz group provides an apt metaphor-each musician expresses themselves freely while remaining sensitive to others, creating harmony not from a collective score but through mutual inspiration. There's self-realization through losing oneself in the whole, achievement without self-aggrandizement, and reciprocal flourishing that resembles love.
This pointless, delightful form of community represents a utopian direction worth pursuing, even if we fall short. The meaning of life thus becomes interestingly close to meaninglessness-a delight requiring no justification beyond itself.
Some philosophers from Plato to Leo Strauss have proposed intellectual contemplation as life's meaning, suggesting that reflecting on existence is humanity's noblest goal. Yet this seems curiously circular-the meaning of life consisting in pondering the meaning of life. It also wrongly assumes meaning is a proposition rather than a practice.
Wittgenstein suggested that meaning isn't a philosophical question with a factual answer. The meaning of life becomes apparent when we realize it's beyond such questions-not a "solution" at all. The meaning of life isn't metaphysical but ethical-not separate from life but what makes it worth living: a certain quality, depth, and intensity of life itself. This may disappoint those seeking something mysterious, but it returns meaning to everyday existence, like Matthew's gospel where salvation turns out to be the prosaic matters of feeding the hungry and visiting the imprisoned.
