Meaning Of Life

The meaning of life, the big daddy question of them all, but what is the meaning of life itself and what have others had to say about it? From main philosophical perspectives this breaks down into four main sections:


The meaning of the word ‘life’ (AJ Ayer)

Ayer’s whole philosophy was to do with the meaning of language and how it is used so when we approach a question like ‘what is the meaning of life?’ according to Ayer we should simply look at what the word itself means. Organic life is categorised by science as an organic object that has the properties of movement, excretion, respiration, reproduction, irritability, nutrition and growth; as long as the object has all these qualities then it can be classed as being ‘alive’ but it does not necessarily mean it has a mind or is sentient of it’s own existence. Ayer said “a sentence is meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable,” on this account, ‘life is beautiful’ or ‘the meaning of life is …’ is meaningless due to the fact that there is no way to actually verify what is being proclaimed.



The meaning of biological processes (Aristotle)

Aristotle was very much a scientific philosopher himself and spent a lot of time collecting dead organisms and animals and dissecting them to see what he could discover about the intricate systems of their bodies. In this conception of the meaning of life it is all about how each organism interacts with each other in order to sustain a larger organism. For instance how all the organs interact with each other and provide the body with nutrition, how the cells reproduce themselves, how we reproduce etc etc, it basically goes into the properties mentioned above into much finer detail in order to truly understand what must be capable in order for something to be classed as a being in it’s own right. What the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ asks is more to do with what does everything as a whole in itself mean, not what do the intricate individual parts do in order to sustain that bodies physical life, that doesn’t mean the meaning of our biological systems can’t be part of this though.


Finitude (Heidegger)

Martin Heidegger introduced the concept of finitude as the meaning of life which is basically the fact that our mortality gives us a finite amount of time to do things, so we have a drive to accomplish things before our time is up. Heidegger said that humans experienced ‘throwness’ (Heidegger was infamous for making words up himself). Throwness basically means that we are thrust into a world that we have no understanding of at all and it is finitude that drives us to overcome this throwness before our time is up. If we were immortal we would have no reason to do anything in particular as we would have all of eternity to discover it, so would be far less productive humans.


42 (Douglas Adams)

Anyone that’s read or seen ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ knows that when Arthur and the gang finally make it to the supercomputer to find out the meaning of life it gives the answer as ‘42’. The computer explains that the question asked was so massive that it was hard to come out with a meaningful answer with so little to go on. The premise here is that in order to get a coherent understandable answer to a question, the question itself has to be coherent and understandable. Asking ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is just as useful as asking ‘what is the meaning of purple?’ or ‘how much time is in a snail?’ The reason we cannot understand the meaning of life is because the question itself is so ambiguous that we can only know the meaning of life to us individually through our introspections, not as an all encompassing meaning for everyone.

My own opinion is that the meaning of life runs along the lines of Plato’s soul searching for wisdom. Through reincarnation we fill our soul up with as much wisdom as possible until it is all encompassing, and each incarnation is driven by the finitude Heidegger explained in order to try and get to this goal as fast as possible. Once the soul is full I can’t legitimately postulate further what any meaning past that might be.

For all I know the meaning might be pink fluffy rabbits.