Sometimes it arrives in a crisis, sometimes on an ordinary Tuesday: is this it? The question of meaning is the oldest in philosophy, and the traditions disagree sharply about it. Some say meaning is built into the world; others say you have to make it yourself. Here are five answers worth living with.
“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.”Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows” 12
The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), often quoting Nietzsche’s line above. He saw meaning arriving in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or loving someone; and, when nothing else is left, by the attitude we choose to take towards suffering we cannot avoid. In the camps, he observed, those who had something or someone to live for were better able to endure.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
Camus took the bleakest view: we demand meaning and the universe answers with silence. That clash is “the absurd”. His conclusion was not despair but revolt: to live fully, lucidly, without false hope. His image is Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever, who makes the struggle itself his own.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
The Gita’s answer is svadharma, the duty and calling that fits your own nature and place. Better, says Krishna, to follow your own path imperfectly than to follow another’s perfectly. Meaning is not found by copying the life that looks impressive on someone else.
Bhagavad Gita 3.35 and 18.47
For Aristotle the purpose of a human life is eudaimonia, flourishing: using your distinctively human powers, above all reason and character, well. And it is measured over a lifetime.
“As it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7 (tr. D. P. Chase)
Illustration: many ladders, one question
The famous ikigai diagram, four overlapping circles of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for, is a recent Western invention. It was made around 2014 by combining an existing “purpose” Venn diagram with the Japanese word.
In Japan, ikigai simply means something that makes life worth living, and it is often small and has nothing to do with money: a morning routine, grandchildren, a garden. The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya’s classic study On Ikigai (1966) grew out of her work with patients at a leprosy sanatorium, asking what keeps a person going when much has been taken away.
More popular ideas that drifted from their sources: Quotes They Never Said
Write one honest sentence for each. Come back to them in a month and see what has changed.
Go deeper: Finding Purpose, a six-day journey, or the big question What makes a good life?
At about fifty, famous, rich and healthy, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina behind him, Leo Tolstoy was overcome by the question “what for?” and hid ropes and guns from himself. In A Confession (1882) he describes how no science or philosophy answered him, and how he found meaning again by watching ordinary working people who lived by faith and labour. Whatever one makes of his answer, the book is one of the most honest accounts of a meaning crisis ever written.
Man’s Search for Meaning · Stanford Encyclopedia: The Meaning of Life · Ikigai · Existentialism
