Meaning of life

In plain terms

The question is a modern one. Ancient philosophy asks how to live; it does not ask whether living has a point, because the frameworks it worked in supplied one.

When that supply stopped, the question appeared - and with it three possible answers. That meaning is given from outside, by a purpose one is here to serve. That it is made, by committing to things and following through. Or that there is none, and the demand for one is a mistake.

The useful thing to notice is that meaning is not the same as happiness or as morality. A life can be pleasant and empty. It can be blameless and pointless. And it can be difficult, unhappy and unmistakably about something - which is why the three questions have to be kept apart.

As a philosopher would put it

Supernaturalism holds that meaning requires a purpose assigned by God or by a cosmic order, so that without one, life is meaningless by definition. Naturalist objectivism holds that certain activities - knowledge, love, creation, moral achievement - confer meaning whether or not anyone finds them fulfilling. Subjectivism holds that meaning is constituted by engagement: whatever a person cares about deeply enough makes their life meaningful to them.

Wolf's hybrid account is the most influential recent position: meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, so that a life spent passionately on something worthless is not meaningful and neither is a valuable life pursued without engagement.

The distinction from happiness and morality is standard and load-bearing. Nagel's version of the problem is that the sub specie aeternitatis view makes any human project look arbitrary, and that the absurdity consists in our capacity to take that view while continuing to care - which is a diagnosis rather than a solution.

What is actually disputed

Whether the question is well formed.

One view is that meaning is a property a life can have or lack, and that the disagreement is about which. Another is that the phrase runs together several distinct questions - why anything exists, what one should do, whether one's life matters to anyone - and that treating them as one produces the sense of an unanswerable mystery.

Wittgenstein's remark that the solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem points at this: those to whom the sense of life became clear could not say what constituted it.

And the objective-subjective dispute has not resolved. Subjectivism accommodates the enormous variety in what people find meaningful and licenses the conclusion that a life devoted to something trivial is as meaningful as any other. Objectivism blocks that and owes a list, and every proposed list looks like the compiler's own values written out.