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Articles

The Original Meaning of Life

Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia investigate where the idea of the meaning of life originated.

What is the meaning of life? In the twentieth century most analytic philosophers either ignored the question or dismissed it as meaningless. This may be largely attributable to the influence of the school of thought known as logical positivism. Continental philosophers were always somewhat more tolerant of the question, even though they rarely put it in those familiar terms; Heidegger came close, however, with his discussion of the meaning of ‘Being’.

The logical positivist idea that the question is meaningless seems to have filtered into the public consciousness with the idea that what is most bewildering about the question is not how it should be answered, but rather what it is asking. Douglas Adams picked up on this nicely in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with his plot about the planet Earth being a supercomputer designed to work out what the question means – the answer having been much easier to determine.

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