Relation to oneself· Existence
Constructed meaning
Axis: The meaning of life — How should we respond to the enigma of life's meaning?
If meaning eludes us, it is because none is written into things: there is nothing to discover, everything to make. Faced with the enigma, the answer is to create the significance of one's life through one's choices and projects, and this freedom makes us fully responsible for what we become.
Movements 9
Existentialismexplicit
Because existence precedes essence, meaning cannot pre-exist the individual who bears it: neither providence, nor nature, nor the progress of History delivers a purpose to life in advance. Yet meaning is not abolished but displaced: it becomes a task, what each person brings about through their commitments. Here the movement parts ways with nihilism as much as with the religions of salvation, for to give up a given meaning is not to conclude to absurdity but to charge the individual with answering, as sets revolt rather than despair against the absence of meaning.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Show inferred positions (8)
Utilitarianisminferable
Utilitarianism assigns life no transcendent end: its meaning is measured by the happiness it brings and the suffering it spares, for oneself and for the greatest number. Wholly immanent, this meaning is built in the enlightened pursuit of common welfare, without providential order or the vertigo of nothingness.
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, Utilitarianism
Empiricisminferable
Empiricism reads in experience no providential end, and holds the argument from design to be fragile (Hume). Meaning is therefore not given but found at human scale: in pleasures, social affections, useful activity and virtue. An immanent, revisable significance, attuned to what experience shows, without anguish or beyond.
Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion · Mill, Utilitarianism
Epicureanisminferable
The Epicurean universe, made of atoms and void, is governed by no purpose or providence: there is no preestablished cosmic meaning. The meaning of existence is therefore to be constructed by the individual, in the pursuit of tranquillity and the cultivation of friendship (philia), without tipping into absurdity, since nature offers a clear criterion, pleasure.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book II · Epicurus, Vatican Sayings, 52
Pragmatisminferable
Pragmatism does not receive meaning from a ready-made order: it is fashioned in action, through the growth of experience and the resolution of problems that make life richer. Dewey rejects fixed ends in favor of an open, meliorist meaning, and James makes confidence in the future a faith that helps to realize it: a human, practical and revisable significance.
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy · James, The Will to Believe
Phenomenologyinferable
Phenomenology holds meaning to be constituted, not found ready-made in things: through intentionality, consciousness gives significance to the world, and Heidegger's Dasein is the being for whom its own being is in question. The meaning of existence is neither inscribed in a cosmic order nor purely absurd: it is won in the way each takes up and unfolds its relation to the world.
Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences · Heidegger, Being and Time
The Enlightenmentinferable
The Enlightenment shifts meaning from providence and tradition toward man himself: it is through the public use of reason, the progress of knowledge and autonomy that humanity makes its own history and improves its condition. Even among the deists, the remote God no longer destines: meaning is built here below, through emancipation from tutelage.
Kant, What Is Enlightenment? · Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
Marxisminferable
Marxism denies any providential finality and locates meaning in history as made by human beings: it is in liberated labor, struggle and the project of a classless society that existence finds its scope. An immanent direction animates history, but it proceeds from material contradictions and collective action, not from a transcendent design.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Cynicisminferable
The Cynics measure life against nature as opposed to conventions, but refer it to no providence: meaning lies in the virtuous, free and self-sufficient life one forges through exercise (askēsis). More than discovering a given end, the point is to win an unconditioned way of existing, which tips meaning toward human work.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI
Philosophers 11
Spinozaexplicit
Spinoza rejects all in Nature: final causes are a human fiction, a projection of our desires onto a world that acts only by the necessity of its nature. Meaning is not given by a cosmic teleology but constructed through the mind's striving toward knowledge and joy.
Ethics, I, appendix (the critique of final causes) · Ethics, IV, preface (good and evil as notions relative to us)
Beauvoirexplicit
In a world without given values or transcendent purpose, existence has no meaning other than the one freedom invents for it through its projects: meaning is constructed, never received. Beauvoir acknowledges the gratuitousness and ambiguity of the human condition, without turning it into a sterile absurd: this void is precisely what makes the creation of meaning both possible and required.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), on the meaning and gratuitousness of existence
Sartreexplicit
No teleology presides over existence: being is first of all contingent, de trop (superfluous), without reason to be, as the nausea of the hero Roquentin reveals. Meaning is therefore neither given nor discovered but constructed through each person's choices and commitments, which invent their own values. A measure of absurdity remains, as the backdrop of this radical contingency, but it is not, as in , the last word.
Nausea (1938), the experience of contingency · Existentialism Is a Humanism (man invents his values)
Nietzscheexplicit
The death of God strips existence of any pre-given end and opens the danger of nihilism, which a share of the reflects. But Nietzsche's answer is the transvaluation of values and the creation of meaning through the : meaning constructed, not discovered. No cosmic teleology is admitted.
The Gay Science, §125 and §301 · Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Thousand and One Goals"
Show inferred positions (7)
Benthaminferable
Bentham assigns life no cosmic or providential end: the only meaning is the one measured by the principle of utility, namely to produce happiness and reduce suffering, for oneself and for the greatest number. A wholly immanent significance, anchored in sensibility, without recourse to an order that would surpass us.
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I
Epicurusinferable
Epicurus' gods, blessed and remote, neither govern nor destine anything: no providence assigns life an end. Meaning lies wholly on the human side, in the good life within our reach, ataraxia, friendship and simple, well-measured pleasures. Freed from the fear of the gods and of death, existence finds its sufficiency in itself.
Letter to Menoeceus · Principal Doctrines
Humeinferable
Hume ruins the argument from design and judges providence unknowable: no meaning is legible in the order of things. But he draws from this neither anguish nor revolt: meaning is found at human scale, in the pleasures of sociable life, friendship, activity and useful virtue. An immanent, serene significance that does without a beyond.
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion · An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
Millinferable
Mill makes meaning depend on no cosmic purpose, which he holds undecidable: he locates it in the development of individuality and in devotion to ends beyond one's own interest, up to the service of humanity. A life has worth through the faculties it unfolds and the good it does, an immanent, cultivated meaning, not received from on high.
On Liberty, III · Utilitarianism, II-III
Marxinferable
Marx rejects all providence: meaning is not inscribed in a cosmic order, it is worked out in history through human activity. It is in unalienated labor, the transformation of the world and the collective project of emancipation that existence finds its significance. An immanent direction does run through history, but it is the work of human beings, not the design of an instance that surpasses them.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 · The German Ideology
Lucretiusinferable
No god assigns life an end and nature was not made for us: meaning is therefore not inscribed in the order of things. But Lucretius does not conclude to a desperate absurd: once fear is removed, life finds its sufficiency in the stable pleasure that nature places within our reach, and the poem itself, devoted to enlightening men, bears witness to a meaning to be built here below. The absurdist share lies in the absence of cosmic finality, but the stress falls on a human meaning built by wisdom.
On the Nature of Things, V, 156-234 (the world not made for men) and III, 1-30 (the praise of Epicurus, liberator)
Michel de Montaigneinferable
Montaigne seeks the meaning of life neither in a cosmic order nor in an afterlife, but in the quality of a present existence well lived. Without denying a nature to follow, he makes of life a personal art, a day-by-day composition of the self rather than a received destiny. Meaning is not handed down from above, it is fashioned in the way one inhabits one's own life.
Essays, III, 13, "Of Experience"
Argument
- No meaning is inscribed in things in advance: the world is there, with no instructions; we exist first, with no essence or end given to us.
- But this absence is not a lack: it is our freedom. Since nothing dictates what my life should be, it is for me to decide, through my choices and commitments.
- Meaning is therefore not found but made: it arises from what I devote myself to, and this commitment makes me fully responsible for what I become, with no received order to unload it onto.
Therefore So there is nothing to discover and everything to make: the meaning of a life is what each creates through their projects, not an order they undergo.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- If the meaning of a life is what each decides, then any project I devote myself to gives it, by that choice alone, as much meaning as any other.
- One would then have to say that a life spent collecting bottle caps, or devoted to a hateful cause, is as full of meaning as a life of love or creation, provided it was chosen. Yet we refuse to believe it.
- This refusal reveals a demand that decision alone does not meet: for a life to have meaning, it is not enough to be attached to something, the thing must also be worth it, independently of what one has decided.
Therefore So meaning does not reduce to what one decides: it requires that what one devotes oneself to be objectively worth it, and that worth one does not give oneself, one recognizes it.
See the page- Descriptive Thought experimentSisyphus and his rock
When our thirst for meaning meets the silence of the world, where can an answer lie: in an end that surpasses us, in the meaning we give ourselves, or in the lucid revolt of a life with no answer?
an existence - DescriptiveMeaning of life, or in life?
Does life have an overall meaning, an answer to « why all this? », or only local meanings, the ones we find in a love, a work, a commitment, even if the whole has none?
a life - DescriptiveWhat if nothing meant anything?
When the frameworks that gave meaning fall away, God, History, progress, does any meaning remain possible, or does the vertigo open in which nothing is worth anything?
the frameworks of meaning - DescriptiveWill any meaning do?
Can a life be full of meaning if it is devoted to something trivial, or even bad, or does meaning require that the thing be objectively worth it?
a life devoted to something