"What Is The Meaning of Life?" Is A Bad Question
A Typical Example of Bad Philosophy
Introduction
Sometimes, when I tell people that I studied philosophy at university, they ask me questions about what they think philosophy students spend their time on. A typical one is "What is the meaning of life ?" or something along those lines.
In reality, philosophers spend very little time trying to answer that question. In a typical Western philosophy program, you spend most of your time studying logic, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy—sometimes from an analytic tradition, sometimes from a continental one, and often from both. But you don’t spend time answering this question, because it’s not a good philosophical question. It’s either a confused question or a trivial one. Let me explain why.
Analysing The Question
While I think "What is the meaning of life ?" is a bad question, explaining why it's a bad question is actually a great philosophical exercise. So let's do that.
First, what is the question even asking ? Who or what is "life" ? Is it asking about the meaning of the universe ? The set of all living beings ? The set of all sentient beings ? Of all human beings ? Of one being in particular ? If so, which one ? This is the first problem with the question : it’s far too vague to be understood without clarifications.
Now, let's look at some of the possible interpretations. I’ll argue that depending on the interpretation, the question either becomes (1) meaningless or (2) trivial.
The following interpretations fall into the "meaningless" category :
"What is the meaning of the universe ?"
"What is the meaning of the set of all living beings ?"
"What is the meaning of the set of all sentient beings ?"
"What is the meaning of the set of all human beings ?"
The following interpretation falls into the "trivial" category :
"What is the meaning of this particular being X ?"
Why Are The First Ones Meaningless ?
Because "meaning" in this context—used roughly as a synonym for "goal" or “purpose”—is an agent-indexed notion. Only agents can properly be said to have meanings/goals/purposes. The universe, the set of all living beings, the set of all sentient beings and the set of all humans are not agents. So asking for their meaning is like asking, "What is the goal of this thing that has no goal ?" It’s a category error.
Why Is The Second Interpretation Trivial ?
Because it boils down to asking any agent, "What are your goals ?" or "What is your biggest goal ?" That can be interesting, sure—but it’s not some deep philosophical riddle that only trained philosophers can crack. It's basic introspection.
So that's why I think that "What is the meaning of life ?" is a bad question.
I agree that it's incoherent for a set to have a purpose, but there's another thing you could be referring to there, which is the shared purpose/goal of all agents within some set (like the set of all human beings), which would be coherent. But then you're making an empirical claim, and good luck trying to prove all humans have the same goals lol. The question ends up sounding much less interesting once you unpack the possible meanings, which happens a lot in philosophy in my experience.
"meaning", if it refers to anything at all, probably refers to a sense of purpose. a feeling which, if it had some metaphysical basis, would be much more stable.