“What is the meaning of life?” looks at first glance like the same kind of question as “What is the capital of Albania?”, or “What is the color of ivory?” But is it really? Could it be more like “What is the taste of geometry?”

There is one fairly standard reason why some thinkers regards the meaning-of-life question as being itself meaningless. This is the case that meaning is a matter of language, not objects. It is a question of the way we talk about things, not a feature of things themselves, like texture, weight, or color. A cabbage or a cardiograph is not meaningful in itself; it becomes so only by being caught up in our conversations. On this theory, we can make life meaningful by our talk about it; but it cannot have a meaning in itself, any more than a cloud can.


God is not a celestial engineer who created the world with some strategically calculated goal in mind. He is an artist who created it simply for his own self-delight, and for the self-delight of Creation itself. It is understandable, then, why he is widely considered to have something of a twisted sense of humor.


For many philosophers, however, not least Anglo-Saxon ones, “How come Being?” is a supreme example of a pseudo-question. In their view, it would not only be difficult, if not impossible, to know how to answer it; it is deeply doubtful that there is anything there to be answered. For them, it is really just a ponderous Teutonic way of saying “Wow!”


A piece of language can have the grammatical form of a question but not actually be one. Or our grammar can mislead us into mistaking one kind of proposition for another. “What then, fellow countrymen, once the enemy is vanquished, can we not accomplish in the hour of victory?” sounds like question anticipating an answer, but is in fact a rhetorical question, to which one would probably ill-advised to return the reply: “Nothing.” The utterance is cast in interrogative form simply to enhance its dramatic force. “So what?”, “Why don’t you get lost?”, and “What are you staring at?” sound like questions but aren’t really.


The task of the philosopher, Wittengenstein thought, was not so much to resolve these inquiries as to dissolve them — to show that they spring from confusing one kind of “language game” with another. We are bewitched by the structure of our language, and the philosopher’s job was to demystify us, disentangling different uses of words. Language, because of it inevitably has a degree of uniformity about it, tends to make different kinds of utterance look pretty much the same.


But it does not follow from the fact that the parts have meaning that the whole has a meaning over and above them, any more than it follows that a lot of little things add up to one big thing simply because they are all colored pink.


Questions are worth examining since the nature of a question is important in determining what might count as an answer to it. In fact, it could be claimed that it is questions, not answers, which are the difficult thing. It is well known what kind of answer a silly question provokes. Posing the right kind of question can open up a whole new continent of knowledge, bringing other vital queries tumbling in its wake.


Not any question is possible at any given time. Rembrandt could not ask whether photography had rendered realist painting redundant.


This is not of course to suggest that all questions are answerable. We tend to assume that where there is a problem there must be a solution, just as we tend rather oddly to imagine that things which are in fragments should always be put back together again. But there are plenty of problems to which we will probably never discover solutions, along with questions which will go eternally unanswered. There is no record of how many hairs adorned Napoleon’s head when he died, and now we shall never know. Perhaps the human brain is simply not up to resolving certain questions, such as the origins of intelligence.


It is even conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life, rather as not counting how many words I am uttering when I give an after-dinner speech helps me to give an after-dinner speech. Perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning, as capitalism is for Karl Marx. For Nietzsche, the true meaning of life is too terrible for us to cope with, which is why we need our consoling illusions if we are to carry on. What we call “life” is just a necessary fiction. Without a huge admixture of fantasy, reality would grind to a halt.


There are moral problems, too, to which no solution can be had. Because there are different kinds of moral goods, such as courage, compassion, justice, and so on, and because these values are sometimes incommensurable with one another, it is possible for them to enter into tragic conflict with each other. As Max Weber bleakly remarked: “The ultimate possible attitudes to life are irreconcilable, and hence there struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.” Isiah Berlin writes in similar vein that “the world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others.”


It also contrasts with a more up-beat brand of liberalism for which plurality is inherently beneficial and the conflict between moral values invariably energizing. But the truth is that there just are situations from which one can emerge only with dirty hands. Pressed far enough, every moral law starts to come apart at the seams. There is simply no answer to the question of which of your children you should sacrifice if a Nazi soldier orders you to hand over one of them to be killed.


Something of the same goes for political life as well. It is surely clear that the only ultimate solution to terrorism is political justice. Terrorism, however atrocious, is not in this sense irrational.


But this may be to say no more than that the problem has now escalated beyond all feasible resolution. This need not be a defeatist judgement, simply realistic. Destructive forces which spring from remediable causes can take on a lethal momentum of their own which there is finally no stopping.


Tragedy at its finest is a courageous reflection on the fundamental nature of human existence, and has its origin in an ancient Greek culture in which life is fragile, perilous, and sickening vulnerable.


Tragedy at its most potent is a question without an answer, deliberately depriving us of ideological consolation. If it demonstrates in its every gesture that human existence cannot tolerably carry on like this, challenges us to find a solution to its anguish which is more than just another piece of wishful thinking, piecemeal reformism, sentimental humanism, or idealist panacea. In portraying a world in urgent need of redemption, it intimates at the same moment that the very thought of redemption may well be just another way of distracting ourselves from a terror which threatens to turn us to stone.


Humans are distinguished from other beings by their capacity to put their own existence into question. They are the creatures for whom existence as such, not just particular features of it, is problematic.


It is also true that human beings, not least because they have language, are capable of objectifying their own existence in a way that tortoises presumably are not. We can speak of something called the “human condition,” whereas it is unlikely that tortoises brood under the shelter of their shells on the condition of being a tortoise.

Language allows us not only to get a fix on ourselves, but to conceive of our situation as a whole. Because we live by signs, which bring along with them the capacity for abstraction, we can distance ourselves from our immediate contexts, free ourselves from the imprisonment of our bodily senses, and speculate on the human situation as such. Like fire, however, the power of abstraction is an ambiguous gift, at once creative and destructive. If it allows us to think in terms of whole communities, it also allows us to lay them waste with chemical weapons.


Other animals may be anxious about, say, escaping predators or feeding their young, but they do not give the appearance of being troubled by what has been called “ontological anxiety”: namely, the feeling that one is a pointless, superfluous being.

Even so, talk of dread, anxiety, nausea, absurdity, and the like as characteristic of the human condition is a lot more common among 20th-century artists and philosophers than it is among 12th-century ones. What marks modernist thought from one end to another is the belief that human existence is contingent — that it has no ground, goal, direction, or necessity, and that our species might quite easily never have emerged on the planet. This possibility then hollows out our actual presence, casting across it the perpetual shadow of loss and death. Even in our most ecstatic moments, we are dimly aware that the ground is marshy underfoot — that there is no unimpeachable foundation to what we are and what we do. This may make our finest moments even more precious, or it may serve to drastically devalue them.

This is not a viewpoint which would have rallied much support among 12th-century philosophers, for whom there was a solid foundation to human existence known as God.


To claim that God transcends his own Creation is to say among other things that he did not need to bring it about. He did so out of love, not need. And that includes bringing us about as well. Human existence is gratuitous — a matter of grace and gift — rather than indispensable. God could have got on perfectly well without us, and would have had a much quieter life had he done so.


In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced post modern capitalism, with its skepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, “life” is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big — ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it.The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.


The very idea of interpretation thus comes under assault. Things are just badly themselves, rather than enigmatic signs of something else. What you see is what you get. Meaning and interpretation imply hidden messages and mechanisms, depths stacked beneath surfaces; but for postmodern thought, this whole surface/depth model smacks of and old-fashioned metaphysics.


One name for this excavatory enterprise is science, which on a certain view of it seeks to reveal the invisible laws and mechanisms by which things operate. There are still depths, but what is at work in them now is Nature rather than divinity.


Like these other absolutes, it is impossible to delve beneath it. For postmodernism, this is known as Culture.


Meaning-of-life queries, when launched on a grand scale, tend to arise at times when taken-for-granted roles, beliefs, and conventions are plunged into crisis. Perhaps it is not accidental that the most distinguished works of tragedy tend to spring up at these moments as well.


It is not true, in other words, that you’re only happy if you don’t know it. For this naively Romantic view, self-reflection is always fatally stymieing. It is what one might call the high-wire-act-cross-an-abyss theory of life: think about it and you instantly come a cropper. But knowing how tings stand with you is a necessary condition for knowing whether to try and change them or to keep them more or less as they are. Knowledge is an aid to happiness rather than its antagonist.


As for culture, the artist was less a solitary, alienated figure lounging in some raffish bohemian cafe than a public functionary with an ordained role in the tribe, clan, or court. If he was not in the pay of the Church, he might be hired by the state or some powerful upper-class patron. Artists were rather less inclined to mull over the meaning of life when they had just received a lucrative commission to compose a Requiem Mass. Besides, the question was largely settled for them by their religious faith.


Love, religious faith, and the preciousness of one’s kin and culture: it was hard to find more fundamental reasons for living than these. In fact, a great many people over the centuries have been ready to die, or prepared to kill, in their name. People turned to these values all the more eagerly as the public domain itself became increasingly drained of meaning. Fact and value seemed to have split apart, leaving the former a public affair and the latter a private one.

Capitalist modernity, so it appeared, had landed us with an economic system which was almost purely instrumental. It was a way of life dedicated to power, profit, and the business of material survival, rather than to fostering the values of human sharing and solidarity. The political realm was more a question of management and manipulation than of the communal shaping of a common life. Reason itself had been debased to mere self-interested calculation. As for morality, this, too, had become an increasingly private affair, more relevant to the bedroom than the boardroom. Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.


They were inspired in this by the banal misconception that spirituality must surely be something outlandish and esoteric, rather than practical and material. After all, it was the material, in the shape of private jets and hordes of minders, that they were trying (mentally, at least) to escape from.


Sports involves tribal loyalties and rivalries, symbolic rituals, fabulous legends, iconic heroes, epic battles, aesthetic beauty, physical fulfillment, intellectual satisfaction, sublime spectaculars, and a profound sense of belonging. It also provides the human solidarity and physical immediacy which television does not. Without these values, a good many lives would no doubt be pretty empty. It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people.


Men and women who were disenchanted with a world obsessed with making money turned to the purveyors of spiritual truth, who made a lot of money out of purveying it.


In this situation, it is always possible for some to find the meaning of life, or at least a sizable chunk of it, in the very diversity of views on the subject. People who feel this way are generally known as liberals, though nowadays some of them are also known as postmodernists. For them, what matters is not so much a definitive answer to the meaning-of-life question as to the fact that there are so many exotically varied ways of answering it. In fact, the freedom which this signifies may itself be the most precious meaning we shall ever stumble upon. What some see as hopeless fragmentation, then, others regard as exhilarating liberation.


The meaning of life consists in the search for the meaning of life. A good many liberals tend to prefer questions to answers, since they regard answers as unduly restrictive. Questions are free-floating, whereas answers are not. The point is to have an inquiring mind, not to snap it shut with some drearily determinate solution.


Even the liberal must be rigorously exclusive here, ruling out any solution (the building of a totalitarian state, for example) which might undermine his or her commitment to freedom and plurality. Freedom must not be allowed to destroy its own foundations, even though radicals would argue that in capitalist conditions it does so every day of the week.


Anyway, it may be that life has a number of meanings. Why should we imagine that it has only one? Just as we can assign it many different meanings, so it may have a variety of innate meanings, if it has innate meanings at all. Or perhaps life changes its purpose from time to time, just as we do.


For the countless millions of people who are religious believers, the meaning of life is not a what but a Who.


Men and women whose lives lack meaning in that sense of the word are psychotic, not just down-hearted. The mean, rather, that their lives lack significance. And to lack significance means to lack point, substance, purpose, quality, value, and direction. Such people mean not that they cannot comprehend life, but that they have nothing to live for. It is not that their existence is unintelligible, merely empty.


Achievements are hollowed out by the fact that they fade away so quickly. Yet the ephemerality of things is not necessarily tragic: it can be seen simply as part of the way they are, with no inevitably doleful implications. If fine dinners fade away, so do tyrants and toothache. Could a human life which had no limit, stretching all the way to infinity, have a significant shape to it? Isn’t death in this sense one of the pre-conditions for life having meaning at all?


Marxists are usually atheists, but they believe that human life, or what they would prefer to call “history,” has a meaning in the sense of displaying a significant pattern.


The cosmos may not have been consciously designed, and is almost certainly not struggling to say anything, but it is not just chaotic either. On the contrary, its underlying laws reveal a beauty, symmetry, and economy which are capable of moving scientists to tears.


Religious fundamentalism is the neurotic anxiety that without a Meaning of meanings, there is no meaning at all. It is simply the flip side of nihilism. Underlying this assumption is the house-of-cards view of life: flick a way the one at the bottom, and the whole fragile structure comes fluttering down.


Nobody designed the human foot, and it would no doubt be an abuse of language to speak of its “purpose” as being to help us kick, walk, and run. But the foot has a function within the whole organism of the body, so that it would make sense for someone ignorant of human anatomy to ask about its significance. Just as one thing we mean by “meaning” is the function of a word within a system, so we can say with only a modest straining of language that the foot is meaningful within the body as a whole. It is not just a random flap or hinge on the end of your leg.


A process may seem accidental at the time but fall into a significant pattern retrospectively. This is more or less how Hegel viewed the history of the world. It may seem pretty meaningless while we are living it, but for Hegel it all makes perfect sense when, so to speak, the Zeitgeist looks back over its shoulder and casts an admiring eye upon what it has created. The opposite view is the one implicit in the old joke “My life is full of fascinating characters, but I don’t seem to be able to work out the plot.” It seems meaningful from one moment to the next, but it doesn’t appear to stack up.


In Schopenhauer’s view, the whole of reality (and not just human life) is the passing product of what he terms the Will. The Will, which is a voracious, implacable force, has a kind of intentionality about it; but if it generates everything there is, it is for no more reputable reason than to keep itself in business. By reproducing reality, the Will serves to reproduce itself, though to absolutely no purpose.


We may believe that our lives have value and meaning; but the truth is that we exist simply as the helpless instruments of the Will’s blind, futile self-reproduction. In order to achieve this, however, the Will must fool us into supposing that our lives indeed have meaning; and it does so by evolving in us a clumsy mechanism of self-deception known as consciousness, which permits the illusion of having ends and values of our own. It dupes us into believing that its own appetites are ours, too. In this sense, all consciousness in Schopenhauer’s eyes is false consciousness. Just as it was once said of language that it exists so that we can conceal our thoughts from others, so consciousness exists to conceal from us the utter futility of our existence.


What Schopenhauer names the Will, Freud re-baptizes as Desire. For Freud, misperception, and a repression of the Real are constitutive of the self, not accidental to it. Without such saving oblivion, we would never get by. What, then, if there was indeed a meaning to life, but that it was preferable for us not to know it? We tend to assume that discovering the meaning of life would naturally be a worthwhile thing to do, but what if this is a mistake? What if the Real was a monstrosity that would turn us to stone?


Maybe the meaning of life is something I am doing right now, as simple as breathing, without the faintest awareness of it. What if it is elusive not because it is concealed, but because it is too close to the eyeball to have a clear view of?


If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feeling like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too and the solution which has now been discovered seems fortuitous in relation to how things were then.


Maybe fictions and myths are not just errors to be dispelled, but productive illusions which allow us to thrive. Life may be no more than a biological accident, and not even an accident was waiting to happen; but it has developed in us a random phenomenon known as the mind, which we can use to shield ourselves from the frightful knowledge of our own contingency.


We can turn our minds to bleak speculations on the way that Nature seems so indifferent to individual lives in its ruthless concern for the species as a whole. Or we can divert our thoughts to the business of building life-giving mythologies — religion, humanism, and the like — which might assign us some status and significance in this inhospitable universe.


Like the humanities in general, such myths can be said to contain their own kind of truth, one which lies more in the consequences they produce than in the proposition they advance. If they allow us to act with a sense of value and purpose, then perhaps they are true enough to be going on with.


Marxist theory may be aware that the individual has no great degree of unity or autonomy, or even of reality; but individual themselves must come to trust that they have, if they are to act effectively. It is the task of socialist ideology to secure this saving illusion. For Freud, much the same is true of the ego, which is actually no more than an offshoot of the unconscious, but which is so organized as to regard the whole world as centered on itself. The ego treats itself as a coherent, independent entity, which psychoanalysis knows to be an illusion; but it is a salutary illusion all the same, without which we would be unable to operate.


It seems, then, that far from speaking of the meaning of life, we might be faced with a choice between meaning and life. What if the truth were destructive of human existence?


To live with faith — any old faith, perhaps — is to issue one’s life with significance. On this view, the meaning of life is a question of the style in which you live it, not of its actual content.


To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it… what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course.


There is something ridiculous in Schopenhauer’s eyes about this pompous self-important race of creatures, each of them convinced of his own supreme value, pursuing some edifying end which will instantly turn to ashes in his mouth. There is no grandiose goal to this meaningless sound and fury, only “momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum until once again the crust of the planet breaks.”


“All willing,” Schopenhauer writes, “springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.” Desiring is eternal, whereas fulfillment is scanty and sporadic. There can be no end to the fatal infection we know as desire as long as the self endures. Only the selflessness of aesthetic contemplation, along with a kind of Buddhist self-abnegation, can purge us of the astigmatism of wanting, and allow us to see the world for what it is.


Life may not have a built-in purpose, but that is not to say that it is futile. The nihilist is just a disillusioned metaphysician. Angst is just the flip side of faith.


Beckett’s world may be mystifying, but his approach to it is one of cold-eye demystification. His language pares austerely away at the inessential, shrinking and hacking to the bone. It betrays a Protestant animus against the superfluous and ornamental. Sparseness is perhaps the closest one can come to the truth.


Unless there is an absolute foundation, there must surely be something lacking. Everything must be left hanging precariously in the air. And this, for some people, is the case with meaning. Surely, if meaning is simply something we get up to, it cannot act as a sure infrastructure to reality. Things must be inherently meaningful, not just meaningful because we make them so.


There is an analogy here with the idea that life is what you make it. Does this mean that we only get out of life what we put into it? “Ultimately,” writes Nietzsche, “man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them.” This theory of meaning, however, seems troublingly narcissistic. Do we never get outside our own heads? If life is to have a meaning, surely it cannot be whatever we whimsically project on to it. Surely life itself must have a say in the matter?


Meaning, to be sure, is something people do; but they do it in dialogue with a determinate world whose laws they did not invent, and if their meanings are to be valid, they must respect this world’s grain and texture.


Troilus is a kind of existentialist for whom things are valueless and meaningless in themselves; they acquire value and meaning only through the human energies which are invested in them. In his eyes, Helen is precious because she has been the cause of a glorious war, rather than having caused a war because she is precious.


God could easily have decided to make failing to torture each other a punishable offence. There can be no reason for his decision, since reasons would hamper his absolute freedom of action. Like all tyrants, God is an anarchist, unbound by law or reason. He is the source of his own law and reason, which are there to serve his power.


All this, to be sure, was at the same time an enormous liberation. There was no longer simply one valid way of reading reality. The priests no longer monopolized the keys to the kingdom of meaning. Freedom of interpretation was now possible. Men and women no longer had to kowtow to the ready-made meanings which God had folded into the world.


“The Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” Since the act of naming in ancient Judaic culture is always a creative or performative one, this suggests that it is humanity which is the source of meaning, while Yahweh is the source of being. God makes the animals, presents them to man, and they become what he makes of them.


Human beings are self-determining — but only on the basis of a deeper dependency upon Nature, the world, and each other. And whatever meaning I may forge for my own life is constrained from the inside by this dependency. We cannot start from scratch. It is not a matter of clearing away God-given meanings in order to hammer out our own, as Nietzsche seemed to imagine. For we are already plunged deep in the midsts of meaning, wherever it is we happen to find ourselves. We are woven through by the meanings of others — meanings which we never got to choose, yet which provide the matrix within which we come to make sense of ourselves and the world. In this sense, if not in every sense, the idea that I can determine the meaning of my own life is an illusion.


How on earth could everything that falls under the heading of human life, from childbirth to clog dancing, be thought to stack up to a single meaning?


Or does “the meaning of life” mean rather “the essential significance of life” — not so much what it adds up to as what it all boil down to?


Happiness, to be sure, is a feeble, holiday-camp sort of word, evocative of manic grins and cavorting about in a multicolored jacket. But as Aristotle recognizes, it operates as a kind of baseline in human life, in the sense that you cannot reasonably ask why we should seek to be happy. It is not a means to something else, as money or power generally are. It is more like wanting to be respected. Desiring it just seems to be part of our nature.


In order to illustrate that happiness is not the be-all and end-all of life, he argues that if you are just about to embark on your quest for happiness and see someone sinking in quicksand, it would surely be better to save them than to pursue your own contentment.


This is not to say that in Aristotle’s eyes happiness and pleasure are simple opposites. On the contrary, virtuous people for him are those who reap pleasure from doing good, and those who do decent thing without enjoying it are not in his view truly virtuous. But pleasure of a merely bovine or dissolute despot variety is certainly to be contrasted unfavorably with happiness.


Suppose that you were plugged into a machine, one rather like the supercomputer in the film The Matrix, which allowed you a virtual experience of complete, uninterrupted happiness. Wouldn’t most people reject this seductive bliss on account of its unreality? Don’t we want to live our lives truthfully, without deception, aware of ourselves as the authors of our own lives, conscious that it is our own strivings and not some manufactured contraption which is responsible for our sense of fulfilment?


Sacrificing one’s happiness for the sake of someone else is probably the most morally admirable action one can imagine. But it does not therefore follow that it is the most typical or even the most desirable kind of loving. It is not the most desirable because it is a pity that it is necessary in the first place; and it is not the most typical because love at its most typical involves the fullest possible reciprocity.


If happiness is a state of mind, then it is arguably dependent on one’s material circumstance. It is possible to claim that you can be happy despite those circumstances, a case not far from that of Spinoza or the ancient Stoics. Yet it is grossly improbable that you could feel content living in an unsanitary, overcrowded refugee camp, having just lost your children in some natural disaster.


The good life requires a particular kind of political state — in his view, one well supplied with slaves and subjected women, who do the donkey-work while you yourself sally forth to pursue the life of excellence. Happiness or well-being is an institutional affair: it demands the kind of social and political conditions in which you are free to exercise your creative powers.


There are also, of course, other candidates for the meaning of life apart from happiness: power, love, honor, truth, pleasure, freedom, reason, autonomy, the state, the nation, God, self-sacrifice, contemplation, living according to Nature, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, self-abnegation, death, desire, worldly success, the esteem of one’s fellows, reaping as many intense experiences as possible, having a good laugh, and so on.


“Will to power” in Nietzsche’s thought means the tendency of all things to realize, expand, and augment themselves; and it is reasonable to see this as an end in itself, just as Aristotle regards human flourishing as an end in itself.


One of the most powerful indictments of capitalism is that it compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact purely utilitarian. The means of life become the end. Life consists in laying the material infrastructure for living. The capital which might devoted to releasing men and women from the exigencies of labor is dedicated instead to the task of amassing more capital.

If the meaning-of-life question seems pressing in this situation, it is for one thing because this whole process of accumulation is ultimately as pointless and purposeless as the Schopenhaurian Will. Like the Will, capital has a momentum of its own, exists primarily for its own sake, and uses individuals as instruments of its own blind evolution.


In this sense, death enhances and intensifies life, rather than voiding it of value.


Desire wells up where something is missing.


If death sounds rather too gloomy an answer to the meaning of life, and desire a rather too steamy one, what about intellectual contemplation? From Plato to Spinoza to the neo-conservative guru Leo Strauss, the idea that reflecting on the truth of existence is the noblest goal of humanity has had its allures — not least, needless to say, among intellectuals.


Despite this off-the-peg cosmic imagery, salvation turns out to be an embarrassingly prosaic affair — a matter of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned.


What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid-back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living this way can human beings be said to share in his life.