UC Santa Cruz

The question of the meaning of human existence is relatively neglected in contemporary philosophy. Some might wish to explain this by claiming that it is because the question itself is unintelligible, otherwise inappropriate to be the subject of proper philosophical reflection and debate, or not of central importance to philosophy.

My conviction is that those who ignore, dismiss, explain away, deny, diminish, or otherwise refuse to address this question do so because they have not been sufficiently self-critical about the presuppositions of their own thinking. In order to revive the problematic of existential meaning and refocus debates surrounding it in philosophy, I aim to show that formulating and answering the question is possible, and that promising, underexplored directions for inquiry into and debate about it stand open.

I offer a coherent, reflexively self-consistent account of the question of existential meaning’s formulation and answer, thereby illustrating the possibility of such an account by way of an actuality. I draw on the resources of Martin Heidegger’s own account, eventually supplementing it with the ethical insights of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. The resulting account attempts to establish its own coherence and possibility as a philosophical inquiry by maintaining throughout the inquiry a self-critical view of its own presupposed understandings of the meaning, philosophy, and the nature of human existence. At the same time, it attempts to treat the issue of meaning in a way which plausibly connects it to the perennial issue while having the resources to recognize and interpret concrete experiences which might be plausibly understood in terms of meaning or meaninglessness. Finally, this account presupposes a non-objectifying conception of persons - fidelity to which entails, among other things, one’s refraining from offhandedly dismissing the concerns about meaning that some profess to hold - and undogmatically indicating the grounds for an ethical responsibility to inquire after meaning.

By my account, broadly following Heidegger’s, the question of the meaning of human existence is the question of which horizon immediately conditions the possibility of the intelligibility of that existence as a whole. The question of existential meaning could hence be formulated as: “What (should one think) is the human being/existence?” My answer is that the conception of the human being as an existentially free, responsible, and ultimately creative being makes the most sense of human existence, giving rise to a world of abundant significance.

I part ways with Heidegger, however, where I take an account like this one to only find reflexive self-consistency only to the extent that it justifies its own bindingness - that is, accounts for why one should want to make existence maximally intelligible. This, I suggest, ultimately requires sufficiently accounting for the ethical dimension of human existence, understanding the human being in their capacity to become a person - that is, their capacity to stand in properly responsible ethical interpersonal relations with other persons. Meaning and the ethical, belonging in the home and venturing into the foreign, are co-constitutive, co-justifying moments of the virtuous hermeneutic circle of philosophy.