What Is the Meaning of Life? — The Question That Cannot Be Answered

The meaning of life cannot be answered like a riddle waiting for its solution — it is an order that is perceived in felt experience and witnessed in action. Meaning is not a goal waiting at the end, but a quality that can be present in every moment, when attention is rightly attuned. That is the answer of the tradition in which I think: meaning is not invented, but perceived.

The question of life’s meaning is nonetheless considered the quintessential deep and simultaneously unanswerable question. Whoever raises it is quickly directed toward the practical — toward solid ground, toward work and concrete tasks, toward what one should really be focusing on instead of such bottomless speculation. The question does not disappear. It merely becomes quieter. And precisely therein lies its peculiar character: it cannot be answered once and for all, but neither can it be permanently silenced. The question of meaning is indispensable and dangerous at the same time, because it opens something that can have both a mysterious vastness and a terrifying groundlessness.

If you know this question — not as an academic topic, but as something that occasionally reaches you in the middle of ordinary life, in a quiet moment or after a shock — then you stand in a long line of people who could not settle for ready-made answers.

#What philosophical answers exist to the question of meaning?

The history of philosophy has not produced a unified answer to the question of meaning. What it has produced are movements of thought that differ profoundly in their depth.

One current, represented by the existential nihilism running from Camus to Sloterdijk, assumes that the human being is a cosmic idiot: a creature lost in a meaningless cosmos who should make the best of it. Peter Sloterdijk speaks of the person who should tend to their garden — an echo of Voltaire’s Candide, turned toward resignation. Meaning is not found here but invented, as a defiant gesture against the indifference of the whole.

The other current, from Heraclitus through German Naturphilosophie to the Chinese wisdom tradition, sets an entirely different starting point. It assumes that the world has an inner order and that the human being does not stand outside this order but is rooted within it. Meaning, in this tradition, is not constructed. It is perceived.

That is a difference that changes everything. In one view, the human being is the lonely bestower of meaning in a mute cosmos. In the other, the human being is an organ of wisdom — a being that carries the order of the whole within itself and can bring it to expression through knowing, feeling, and acting.

#Why can the meaning of life not be definitively answered?

The question of meaning resists any final answer, but not because it is meaningless. It resists because it is a different kind of question. Meaning is not an object you can find like a lost key. Meaning is not a thesis that could be proved. Meaning, in the philosophical tradition I follow, is a coherence perceived in lived space and born from felt experience — one that takes hold of a person in their heart and in their mind. This coherence informs action and informs what I hold to be valuable.

The question cannot be answered because the answer does not lie in the same register as the question. The question asks with the intellect. The answer reveals itself in feeling, in the body, in what happens between people when they truly encounter one another. Jochen Kirchhoff pointed out throughout his life that human beings have a deep need for meaning and that this need is not arbitrary — that it points to something real. The longing for meaning is not a psychological mechanism. It is an act of cognition. Within our capacity for knowing, everything there is to know is already laid out, and within our capacity for seeing, everything that can become visible. Cognition is therefore an act of remembrance: something unfolds that was already present as possibility.

This sounds abstract until you apply it to your own life. There are moments when you know what is right — before you could justify it. There are situations in which you feel the rightness of a decision before the intellect catches up. These moments are not a weakness of thought. They are a sign of a form of knowing that reaches deeper than conceptual analysis.

#The cosmic anthropos — a forgotten answer

Against Sloterdijk’s cosmic idiot stands an older and deeper image of the human being: the cosmic anthropos. What is meant is a picture of the human in which the individual has a cosmic dimension. What searches for meaning in the human being does not grasp at emptiness but responds to a real order.

This is the fundamental question that precedes everything: Is the human being a blind offshoot of a blind evolution, an accidental product on a speck of dust in space? Or is it a being that carries the cosmos within itself and can bring it to unfoldment? The answer to the question of the meaning of existence depends on the answer to this question. Whoever chooses the first answer must invent meaning. Whoever chooses the second can receive it.

The Naturphilosophie of German Romanticism — in Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe — took precisely this second path. Novalis put it this way: The world must be romanticized — that is how one finds the original meaning again, the original thought of everything. Romanticizing does not mean embellishment. It means a qualitative intensification: seeing the ordinary in such a way that its deeper ground becomes visible. The lower self is identified with a better self — not through heightened performance, but through a transformed perception.

Zhuangzi, the Chinese sage, captures the fruit of such perception in an image: To be elevated without rigid principles, to possess morality without insisting on love and duty, to create order without works and fame — that is the MEANING of heaven and earth, the LIFE of the appointed sage. Meaning here is not something added. It is what remains when everything forced falls away.

#Atman projects: where do you look for your soul outside yourself?

Atman projects are attempts to find one’s own soul, atman in Sanskrit, in an outward undertaking rather than within oneself; the term comes from the American thinker Ken Wilber (Wilber, 1990, Das Atman-Projekt). Gwendolin Kirchhoff takes it up in the symposium “What Is the Meaning of Life?” with Jochen Kirchhoff and sums it up in a single sentence: “One looks for the soul” (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, 27:18, transl.), the atman, as Wilber calls it, in an external project.

For her, it begins with an omission: whoever does not take themselves seriously goes looking for what is their own on the outside (cf. ibid., 27:05–27:18). The world, as she sees it, is “crammed full of such atman projects” (ibid., 27:24, transl.), and she gives examples: “Atman projects in the field of technology, quite clearly, technological world-redemption, transhumanism.” (ibid., 27:29, transl.) And further: “We see the atman projects in saving the world, in global ecology and so on.” (ibid., 27:34, transl.)

What these projects share is not their subject but their structure. In the external project one looks for what lies within the person: one’s own soul. That is why the atman project belongs to the question of meaning and not merely to a diagnosis of the times. Earlier in the same conversation, Gwendolin Kirchhoff speaks of how the theosphere has become the technosphere (cf. ibid., 19:05): “the God who fell away was replaced by technology” (ibid., 19:12, transl.). Whoever does not orient themselves toward a spiritual transcendence finds their striving for transcendence passing into another form of redemption, technological world-redemption (cf. ibid., 19:22–19:32). Jochen Kirchhoff replies that technology has in a sense become a god, charged with religious meaning, a thesis he says he has held for decades (cf. ibid., 19:33–20:20). Later Gwendolin Kirchhoff names transhumanism explicitly as an atman project (ibid., 27:29, transl.).

The description of the symposium on her YouTube channel sets the atman project against the cosmic anthropos: there the cosmic idiot appears as one essentially half-born, who seeks salvation in atman projects, while the cosmic anthropos aims at birth (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2025, video description).

#How do you find meaning in life?

In the symposium on the meaning of life, Gwendolin Kirchhoff names a first step: noticing where you hand yourself over to an atman project and clarifying what you yourself truly feel. The first thing, she says in the same symposium, would be “to become aware of where one hands oneself over” (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, 28:14, transl.), to such an atman project, that is, to “notice: where do I do this, in which fields do I do this?” (ibid., 28:27, transl.).

The fields are the five fundamental questions from Jochen Kirchhoff’s Was die Erde will (What the Earth Wants), as she lists them: the relationship between the sexes, the body, death, God or transcendence, and nature (cf. ibid., 11:56–12:54; Kirchhoff, J., 1998). Everyone answers these questions in some form (cf. ibid., 12:42–12:54); Jochen Kirchhoff adds: through the way they live, even without ever having asked them (cf. ibid., 12:54–13:20). In each of these fields one can examine which thoughts one has merely taken over and, in her words, “what do I myself really feel?” (ibid., 28:38, transl.).

Jochen Kirchhoff objects that this is exactly what is hard: the inner world of modern people has long been colonised, the cup filled to the brim (cf. ibid., 29:02–29:43). Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s answer: “So first of all, it is about emptying the cup.” (ibid., 29:46, transl.)

She then turns to the phenomenology of the question of meaning (cf. ibid., 30:07–30:10). In nature, in the awareness that we will die, and when something breaks open in love, we are, as she describes it, flooded by something other than ourselves; longings rise, the wish to move toward something (cf. ibid., 30:10–30:48). “And this impulse toward redemption, the where-I-want-to-go, is laid down very deep in the question of meaning as such.” (ibid., 30:49, transl.) At the close she recasts it in Spinozist terms: one can conceive of a nature that far surpasses one’s own, and sense within oneself what brings one closer to it and what keeps one from it (cf. ibid., 51:13–51:31). This feeling of growing beyond oneself she describes as a birth process one can allow within oneself (cf. ibid., 51:31–51:44). If the search tips into a meaning crisis, or you wonder whether it is a depression, that needs its own answer.

#Not forcing meaning

If meaning cannot be defined, proved, or forced, only one question remains: How does a person position themselves so that meaning can show itself?

The answer is simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. It lies in the principle of not forcing. What drives the action? Is it driven by the matter itself, or does the impulse come from a nervous need for control? The feel for this difference is already a form of wisdom. Wisdom is a coherence perceived in lived space and born from felt experience — one that takes hold of a person in their heart and in their mind.

Philosophy was originally exactly this: love of wisdom, knowledge of essences. Knowledge of the deep structure of the world. The question In what kind of world do we live? stood at its centre. Scepticism dislodged that, and over the centuries philosophy became a field more concerned with texts than with reality. But the original question has not vanished. It lives in every person who is not content merely to function.

Philosophy as the love of wisdom is the irreversible movement of the soul toward wisdom — yet it requires a conscious decision and practice. For one can also drown and numb this impulse, this passion of dissatisfaction and search for meaning. But first there is this movement in the soul that seeks the highest. And this movement is not arbitrary. It belongs to the human being like breathing.

#The path slides beneath your feet as you walk

There is a subtle thought that answers the question of meaning in an unexpected way: I can only set out because I have already arrived. The constructive development begins the moment I enter into it. In the moment I act out of dignity and in acknowledgement of what has been given to me, the goal is already reached. We are not working toward something that lies in the future. The point is that we become what we already are.

This is not consolation. It is a radically different view of the question of meaning. The meaning of life is not a goal waiting at the end. It is a quality that can be present in every moment — when attention is rightly attuned. Spinoza put it this way: The free person thinks of nothing less than of death. Their wisdom is a meditation on life. And on birth. On what wants to come into being anew in every moment.

If you are asking what the meaning of your life is, you are already standing in the midst of the movement that leads you to the answer. The answer will probably not appear as a sentence. It will appear as a feeling of rightness, as a clarity in encounter, as an action that draws from something deeper than calculation.

For this specific calling that is your life, there was only you, there will only be you, there will only ever have been you. The matter is not easy. But the question of meaning is perhaps less a question demanding an answer than an invitation to go deeper — into your own felt experience, into your own judgement, into the willingness to entrust yourself to the conversation with life. One boundary, however, must be named: when the question of meaning is no longer thoughtful but desperate — in persistent hopelessness or thoughts of not wanting to live — it is time for medical or therapeutic help. In Germany the Telefonseelsorge (crisis helpline) is reachable around the clock, free and anonymous, at 0800 111 0 111; outside Germany, turn to your local crisis line.

If you sense that this question concerns you and you do not want to carry it alone, the path of a philosophical consultation is open to you. A space in which the question of meaning is not answered but thoughtfully accompanied. And if you first want to explore when such a conversation might be worthwhile, you will find a beginning there.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with J. Kirchhoff (2025). „Was ist der Sinn des Lebens? – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff – SYMPOSIUM“ [Video, in German]. YouTube, 11:56–13:20, 19:05–19:32, 27:05–30:49, 51:13–51:44. Quotations translated from the German.
• Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt: Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
• Novalis (1798). Logologische Fragmente, no. 105. In: Novalis: Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel, vol. 2. Munich: Hanser, 1978.
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
• Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
• Spinoza, B. de (1677). Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata. Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz.
• Wilber, K. (1990). Das Atman-Projekt. Der Mensch in transpersonaler Sicht. Paderborn: Junfermann.
• Zhuangzi (c. 300 BCE). Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland. Trans. Richard Wilhelm. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1912.