Few questions are asked as frequently and taken as rarely seriously as the question of the meaning of life. In everyday conversation it appears as either pathos or punchline. But when it truly arises — in a crisis, an illness, a collapse of previous certainties — it is the most radical of all questions. It demands no information. It demands an orientation that the intellect alone cannot supply.
The philosophical tradition has found no formula for this question. What it offers are paths of thought stretching across two and a half millennia, illuminating the question of meaning from different sides: as the question of the good life, as a confrontation with meaninglessness, as the experience of an order that exceeds the human being. The most radical reframing — developed within the cosmological tradition of Schelling and Jochen Kirchhoff — inverts the question entirely: meaning arises not from contemplating death, but from asking what wants to come into the world through us. This shifts the search from a destination to a birth process.
Eudaimonia — Meaning as a Flourishing Life
Aristotle (384—322 BCE) gave the first systematic answer to the question of meaning, even though he did not frame it in those terms. In the Nicomachean Ethics he develops the concept of eudaimonia: not happiness in the sense of a felt state, but the flourishing of a human life as a whole. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the end toward which all human action strives. It consists in the actualization of the capacities proper to human beings — above all reason, within the framework of a community, and across the span of an entire life.
The thought has a depth that is often overlooked. Aristotle does not say: the meaning of life is happiness. He says: a human being realizes itself by bringing what is latent within it to full expression. This presupposes that human nature is not arbitrary and that it can be cultivated. Two thousand years later, Goethe condensed this thought into the phrase: Become who you are.
What Philosophical Answers Exist to the Question of Meaning?
The Western tradition has essentially produced four fundamental figures, each opening a different dimension of the question.
The teleological answer (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas) locates meaning in an end: human beings are ordered toward a highest good that they can realize. The nihilistic diagnosis (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer) recognizes that previous frameworks of meaning have grown fragile and asks what comes after their collapse. The existentialist position (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus) holds that human beings do not find their meaning ready-made but must posit it — in a world that owes them no meaning. The cosmological tradition (Schelling, Jochen Kirchhoff) understands the human being as part of a living order whose meaning it shares without having invented it.
Viktor Frankl (1905—1997) carved out a singular path with his logotherapy. In the concentration camps of National Socialism, he observed that those prisoners who could discern meaning in their suffering showed the greatest will to survive. For Frankl, meaning is not something a person invents but something discovered in every situation, even the most terrible. His famous dictum: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Nihilism — When the Answers Shatter
Nietzsche was the first to name the situation in which inherited frameworks of meaning lose their bearing capacity. “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The goal is lacking; the answer to ‘why?’ is lacking.” In the Genealogy of Morals (1887) he writes that human beings would rather will nothingness than not will at all. Even the will to nothingness is a will, and therefore more than total meaninglessness.
Schopenhauer (1788—1860) had prepared the ground. In The World as Will and Representation (1844) he describes life as a pendulum swinging between suffering and boredom: every desire produces pain, and its satisfaction only produces new desire or the emptiness of boredom. Schopenhauer locates meaning not in striving but in its overcoming: in contemplation, in art, and ultimately in the deliberate negation of the will to live.
Albert Camus (1913—1960) placed absurdity at the center. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) he declares the contradiction between the human need for meaning and the silence of the world to be the fundamental condition of human existence. His Sisyphus, who rolls the stone up the hill again and again, is never redeemed. But Camus insists: one must imagine Sisyphus happy — because the conscious acceptance of absurdity is itself a form of freedom.
Why Can the Meaning of Life Not Be Answered Definitively?
The question of the meaning of life cannot be answered like a factual question because it is not a factual question. It concerns not an object that could be examined but the questioner’s relationship to their own existence. Whoever asks about meaning is not asking for a fact but for an orientation. And that can only be won through one’s own confrontation with existence.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944—2025) radicalized this insight. In Spaces, Dimensions, World Models (1999) he shows that Western nihilism is not merely a crisis of values but a cosmological crisis: whoever takes the cosmos to be dead matter in which the human being is a biochemical accident has already disposed of the question of meaning in advance. The question then becomes either self-deception or resignation. Kirchhoff, by contrast, thinks of the human being as an organ of a living cosmos that comes to self-knowledge through it. Meaning then lies not beyond life but in the depths of being alive itself.
Wisdom and Birth — A Different Perspective
The oldest and at the same time most unexpected answer to the question of meaning comes from the wisdom tradition. Zhuangzi (c. 369—286 BCE) describes the meaning of Heaven and Earth as a being in infinite serenity: forgetting everything and possessing everything, creating order without works or fame, being exalted without rigid principles. Wisdom here is not a position one takes but a quality of perception that arises when the compulsion to force outcomes ceases.
Spinoza (1632—1677) formulated in the Ethics that the intellectual love of the mind toward God and the love with which God loves itself are one and the same thing. At the third kind of knowledge, knowing and loving converge. The result is not consolation but insight: whoever penetrates more deeply into reality penetrates into meaning, because meaning is not external to reality.
From here a perspective opens that reaches beyond the Western nihilism debate. The free person thinks of nothing less than of death, wrote Spinoza. Their wisdom is a meditation on life. From this vantage point, an inversion becomes conceivable: wisdom is not a meditation on death but on birth. The question of meaning thereby shifts from finitude to origin. Not: what comes after death? But: where do I come from, and what wants to come into the world through me?
The birth process as a philosophical model understands crises not as defects but as thresholds. What feels like a loss of meaning may be the moment in which an old form of meaning dies and a new one has not yet arrived. The question of meaning then answers itself not through a theory but through the courage to endure this passage.
Existential philosophy recognized the question of meaning as the task of the individual. Yet the threshold where an old meaning dies and a new one is not yet within reach can seldom be endured alone. Philosophical accompaniment offers the space in which someone is truly seen during this passage — as a thinking companionship along a path that only the questioner can walk. If you find yourself at such a threshold, a philosophical consultation with Gwendolin can be a first step.