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Mar 13, 2019 · He answers it with irreverent wit and a life-affirming answer that’ll swing the worst of nihilists among us. The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so...
If you turn to someone else asking “what is the meaning of life?,” this act alone puts you in a vulnerable position. It’s clear to the other person that you haven’t found your own meaning, and if they have a malevolent bent, that person will coerce you into adopting their ideology, beliefs and agenda.
Aug 11, 2017 · WIRED. It’s one of humanity’s biggest questions, and there’s no simple answer, but let’s give it a try anyway: what is the meaning of life? We asked a philosopher and a physicist to shed some...
May 15, 2007 · Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997).
- Existentialism. Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe.
- Absurdism. Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival Albert Camus. It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason.
- Religious existentialism. While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “God is dead” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of Søren Kierkegaard.
- Buddhism. Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani. Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed.
It is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning. And it is Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the first-person perspective that enables existentialism to investigate such meaning. It informs and lays the conceptual groundwork for finding solutions to the problem of nihilism that — due to their use of ‘objective’ rational ...
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A person's life has meaning (for themselves, others) as the life events resulting from their achievements, legacy, family, etc., but, to say that life, itself, has meaning, is a misuse of language, since any note of significance, or of consequence, is relevant only in life (to the living), so rendering the statement erroneous.
