On the Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of life?

Everyone has pondered this ubiquitous question as if something about life itself necessitated and birthed the question in every mind alive enough to experience it. Life’s questions are many, and this one seems to be the head of them all, from which all others pour forth.

But meaning is unique amongst the myriad questions of life. We may ask the scientist a grand cosmological question such as “what is the universe made of?” and they can respond with relative clarity that it is atoms. But meaning is not reducible to any composition of parts. The scientist cannot answer the question of meaning because meaning does not exist within the purview of the scientific method. The world of the scientist is one of information, not meaning.

Meaning is not reducible to information in the way that an object is reducible to molecules, which themselves are reducible to atoms, then to particles, etc. If one could collect all the information there is in the world, they would effectively reproduce the world, not enrich or explain it. A computer can simulate the world, but no variable can be tweaked such that anything but information changes or arises.

Information parallels the being from which it is derived, whereas meaning enriches its being by being other — meaning is always other. A dictionary entry is typically read from left to right, such that the definiendum is given meaning by the definiens, but what if this ordering was reversed? An explanation has just as much weight, as a category of thought, as what is explained, and every category exists as information with nominal existence within the boundaries of thought. Even as the definiendum and definiens coalesce in meaning, there will always be a categorical distinction between them based on their nominal nature as linguistic instances. If this is taken seriously, what results is that no two things are equivalent in meaning.

This shows that identity is not meaning. The world’s meaning cannot be explained by anything that is the world, unless meaning were unsatisfactorily reduced to information. “Cat”, “gato”, and “neko” all have different meanings, but further, “cat” and “cat” also have different meanings as nominal instances. But the whole is singular in its totality and therefore cannot be enumerated through instances. Without enumeration, no strong induction can be conducted upon the world.

The meaning of life defers to the meaning of the world as a whole. Life is a part of the world of objects but is the totality of the I-world of a person’s phenomenal existence. If the meaning of life were found to be within life, then that would be a part explaining the whole. How can one aspect of life be sufficient to explain the myriad aspects that have to be explained should life have a meaning?

When we ask what the meaning of a word is, we are usually searching for semantic content. This suggests that form is not the basis of meaning. If we avoid the deference intrinsic to definitions, it is possible to find the content of a word in sense. But not unlike the relationship of a definiendum to its definiens, the relationship of the mental object that is a word and the sense corresponding to it is one of difference: the word is not the sense, and the sense is not the word. To borrow the language of computer science, the mental word and the sense are different types of objects. Objects of different types can never be equivalent to each other in comparisons.

According to structuralism, the assignment of a word to a meaning is arbitrary. The sense is what is primary for the human, but labels are necessary for communication, and so sound-patterns are paired with senses. When asking about the meaning of life, we are starting with a label: the world. Instead of an intrinsic sense of meaning that can be paired with the world with ease, humans bear a world in need of a meaning and search for one within it.

Any meaning found within the world is insufficient. How can you explain the whole with only a part? But finding meaning beyond the world, from within it, is not possible. Humans have epistemic limits, and the limits of thought are determined by immanence. Any meaning of life must involve predication, and all predicates are derived from the world. The only entity without predication is nothingness. It is unclear whether nothingness is immanent or transcendent, or whether or not it has a positive existence at all, but either way, nothingness is not acceptable as meaning for most people. If nothingness is all that lies beyond the whole, then nothing is all that can be paired with the world to form a meaning of the whole.

Alternatively, the definition of the whole can be understood negatively, as all that is not nothing. Negative definitions are conventionally undesirable, but nothing but nothing exists to affirm the whole. In this way, all meanings are nodes in a chain of deference that all lead negatively towards nothingness.

If nothingness is all that lies beyond the world, then a symbolic meaning of life is not to be valued. Symbols are characterized by a difference in type between their signifier and signified such that nothing is the only thing different from the world. The alternative to symbolism is abstraction. If we define the meaning of life abstractly, the meaning of life is life itself. Nothing beyond the selfhood of the sign in question can be added or subtracted from an abstract definition to defer its presence as meaning.

Thus, there are two possible meanings to the world: nothingness or the world itself. The symbolic approach allows for nothing new by which life can be elevated and the abstract approach is a dead end of self-recognition.

The only possible reconciliation is to combine the meanings and see the meaning of life within the structure of semiosis itself. The contrast between transcendent nothingness and the absolute whole is the fundamental difference between the self and other. Life is understood to be meaningful in its relationship to the other. It is because of the other that the self has meaning and that the question of life’s meaning can arise in the first place.