The Meaning of Life and the Absurd: From Schopenhauer and Camus to Nagel and Susan Wolf

Few questions are as immediate and as difficult as this one: does life have a meaning? It can erupt in a sleepless night, in grief, or in the tedium of a routine, and it challenges believer and skeptic alike. Though ancient in substance — it runs through Ecclesiastes, the Stoics, and Augustine — it became an explicit and technically worked topic of philosophy only recently. This article surveys its main formulations: the crisis of cosmic meaning, pessimism, Camus’s absurd, Nagel’s ironic response, and the analytic turn that distinguishes the meaning of life from meaning in life.

1. Two questions in one

Contemporary philosophy usually distinguishes two senses of the question. There is the meaning of life (singular, cosmic): why is there something rather than nothing? Does human existence, as a whole, have a purpose inscribed in the order of things? And there is meaning in life (individual): what makes a life meaningful, worth living, distinct from an empty one? Much of our anguish springs from confusing the two: discovering that the universe has no cosmic purpose does not entail that no concrete life can be full of meaning. Separating the planes is the first philosophical step.

2. Cosmic meaning and its crisis

For centuries, meaning was guaranteed by a religious or cosmic framework: life had a purpose because it fit within a divine plan, a natural order with ends (the Aristotelian telos), or a providential creation. Modernity shook that frame. With what Nietzsche called the “death of God” — the collapse of credibility of transcendent guarantees — the problem of nihilism opens up: if no values are inscribed in being, then everything would be permitted and nothing would be worth more than anything else. Nietzsche saw in this both a danger (passive nihilism, exhaustion) and an opportunity: the task of creating values and saying “yes” to life.

3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer

Before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had given the question the darkest answer in modern philosophy. For him, the ground of the world is a blind, insatiable Will; to live is to will, to will is to lack, and satisfaction is only the brief interval between two sufferings — when it ceases, boredom comes. Life thus oscillates between pain and tedium, and existence, on balance, “does not pay.” Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the backdrop against which many later answers — from Nietzsche to Camus — would define themselves.

4. Tolstoy and the crisis of meaning

The existential force of the problem appears in exemplary form in A Confession (1884), by Leo Tolstoy. At the height of fame and fortune, the writer is seized by a paralyzing question: “Is there any meaning in my life that would not be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Neither science nor philosophy satisfies him; his way out was faith, understood less as a doctrine than as the vital force that allows one to go on living. Tolstoy formulates the modern problem in its pure state: the awareness of death seems to threaten any human enterprise with absurdity.

5. Camus and the absurd

It is Albert Camus who gives the theme its most famous formulation. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he begins with a brutal claim: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” The absurd, for him, lies neither in man nor in the world, but in the confrontation between them: on one side, the human demand for meaning, unity, and clarity; on the other, the irrational, indifferent silence of the universe. From this divorce the feeling of the absurd is born.

Faced with it, Camus examines three exits. Suicide — rejected, for it suppresses one of the terms of the confrontation rather than facing it. The religious or metaphysical “leap” — what he calls “philosophical suicide,” the evasion of those who (like Kierkegaard or Shestov) resolve the absurd by positing a God or an Absolute; Camus rejects it as a betrayal of lucidity. What remains is revolt: to live the absurd without annulling it, holding the tension, with no appeal to consoling hopes. That is why the absurd hero is Sisyphus, condemned to push his rock forever: conscious of his fate and yet master of his days. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus concludes (note that he refused the existentialist label, precisely because he opposed it to the “leaps” of his contemporaries — see the survey of existentialism).

6. Nagel and irony

Analytic philosophy took up the question in a different key. In “The Absurd” (1971), Thomas Nagel agrees that life is absurd but disagrees with Camus’s diagnosis. The absurd does not come from the clash between man and a mute universe, but from an internal collision: we take our lives seriously, investing in them as though they greatly mattered; and, at the same time, we are able to step back and view them under the aspect of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis), from a standpoint where everything we do appears arbitrary and open to doubt. This capacity for self-transcendence is the mark of our condition.

The upshot, for Nagel, is that the absurd is not a tragedy to be met with heroic revolt — that would be, he says, too dramatic. If nothing matters from a cosmic point of view, then it equally does not matter that nothing matters. The fitting response is neither despair nor defiance, but irony: to face our own seriousness with a smile, without sinking into anguish.

7. The analytic turn: meaning in life

From the 1980s on, English-language philosophers shifted the focus from cosmic to individual meaning, proposing a finer taxonomy. One distinguishes supernaturalism (meaning is possible only if there is a God or an immortal soul) from naturalism (meaning is possible in a purely natural world). Within the latter, subjectivism (a life is meaningful if it realizes whatever the subject cares about) is opposed to objectivism (meaning depends on values that do not depend on individual taste alone).

The most influential synthesis is Susan Wolf’s (Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, 2010): meaning arises when “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” — when one actively engages in projects one loves and that have value beyond one’s own pleasure. Meaning, on this view, is neither happiness nor morality: it is a third dimension of the good life. The South African philosopher Thaddeus Metz, in turn, systematized the field, arguing that meaning tends to be bound up with orienting reason toward ends connected to the true, the good, and the beautiful.

8. The contemporary pessimist counterpoint

Not everyone accepts that the problem dissolves so neatly. The philosopher David Benatar, in Better Never to Have Been (2006), defends a form of antinatalism: given an asymmetry between pain and pleasure, he draws the provocative thesis that coming into existence is always a harm. Even the most “meaningful” lives would be, from a cosmic standpoint, minuscule and marked by suffering. Benatar keeps the voice of pessimism alive in the contemporary debate — a reminder that the question is far from settled.

9. Assessment

The question of meaning resists a single answer, but philosophy offers distinctions that dissolve part of the despair. To recognize that life has no inscribed cosmic meaning does not by itself decide whether a concrete life can be full of meaning — and most contemporary answers hold that it can, whether through lucid revolt (Camus), irony (Nagel), or engagement in worthwhile projects (Wolf). What remains open is the decisive question: does meaning require a transcendent ground, or can it be built within the immanence of a human life? That is perhaps the most honest way to keep the question — and to go on living it.

Essential reading

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
• Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (1884).
• Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd” (1971; in Mortal Questions).
• Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010).
• Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (2013).
• David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (2006) — the pessimist voice.

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