What does it mean for life to have ‘meaning’? An attempt to respond to this issue by introducing one of the fundamental insights of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenology.

Frege’s distinction about meaning Gottlob Frege ( ) made a very important distinction between two concepts of meaning: sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). Sense refers to the internal content of a word, how it is conceptually distinguished from other words. Reference refers to the actual, physical things (referents) of words. For example: I can talk about the courses offered at HCC by distinguishing that concept from courses taught at UH, etc. The concept ‘courses taught at HCC’ has a meaning internal to it that can be distinguished from other concepts, described, and understood independently. The concept ‘courses taught at HCC’ also has a reference, i.e., every course in the catalogue.

Frege on ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ “We now inquire concerning the sense and reference for an entire declarative sentence. Such a sentence contains a thought. [5] Is this thought, now, to be regarded as its sense or its reference? Let us assume for the time being that the sentence has a reference. If we now replace one word of the sentence by another having the same reference, but a different sense, this can have no bearing upon the reference of the sentence. Yet we can see that in such a case the thought changes; since, e.g., the thought in the sentence 'The morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun' differs from that in the sentence 'The evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun.' Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the morning star might hold the one thought to be true, the other false. The thought, accordingly, cannot be the reference of the sentence, but must rather be considered as the sense.” Frege, On Sense and Reference, trans. by Max Black ( [5]

Say again? Declarative sentences (i.e., complete sentences that describe a state of affairs) express a ‘thought’. Thoughts have sense, even though they may also be about something, i.e., they may also have a reference. To illustrate: a person who says “the evening star is a body illuminated by the sun” expresses a thought that refers to the planet, Venus. In other words, this thought recognizes that the bright object in the sky is a planet (and does not produce its own light) rather than a star. But if that same person does not also know that the bright object in the sky early in the morning, the ‘morning star’, is also Venus, that person could hold that the first sentence is true, while the second sentence (‘the morning star is a body illuminated by the sun’) is false.

What kind of ‘meaning’ do we intend when we talk about the ‘meaning of life’? We want the meaning of life to be ‘objective’, i.e., non-subjective. But is the meaning of life captured by pointing to objects, i.e., the reference of sentences? Is the meaning of life expressive of our thoughts about life? When we talk about life’s meaning, are we talking about objective facts or thoughts that have sense?

Take a step back: what does a ‘life’ consist in? (Here we do not mean ‘life’ in the sense of what is studied by biology, or the ‘life sciences’.) Above all, I think we mean the life of a person, my life or your life, a life that (potentially) has meaning. Life is something lived, experienced. A life must be living, i.e., changing, growing, developing, decaying. Can life be frozen in an instant, or extracted out of time? Is life a ‘thing’? Is life a ‘process’?

How do we get at these questions? How do we inquire into the meaning of life? What kind of science, what kind of investigation gives us access to life’s meaning? “What are we really asking when we ask about the meaning of life? Partly, it seems we are asking about our relationship to the rest of the universe—who we are and how we came to be here.” John Cottingham, On The Meaning of Life (Routledge), pg. 2. “Meaningfulness is what we might call a hermeneutic concept: for something to be meaningful to an agent, that agent must interpret it or construe it in a certain way… for me to engage in meaningful activity, I must have some grasp of what I am doing, and my interpretation of it must reflect purposes of my own that are more or less transparent to me.” Cottingham, ibid.,

To summarize: These statements lead us to believe that the meaning of life is expressed in the internal, or subjectively constituted, thoughts about life. The ‘meaning’ we are looking for is what Frege calls ‘sense’. We are not talking about objective facts, we are talking about the concepts, thoughts, and attitudes that either do or do not adequately describe human ‘life’. Cottingham says that finding meaning in life is a “hermeneutic” project, it requires interpretation, or the way a particular person makes sense of it.

Heidegger on the question of the meaning of ‘to be’ Certainly the nature of ‘being’ is central to the issue of meaning in life, and Heidegger’s response offers an illuminating paradigm for responding to this question. “If the question of being is to be explicitly formulated and brought to complete clarity concerning itself, then the elaboration of this question requires … explication of the ways of regarding being and of understanding and conceptually grasping its meaning…. Thus to work out the question of being means to make a being—he who questions—transparent in its being. Asking this question, as a mode of being of a being, is itself essentially determined by what is asked about in it—being.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh, §2, 5-6.

What does it mean to be a being like me? What is so unique about the human being, is that human beings are aware of their own existence, they ask the questions, what does it mean to live, what does it mean to be? Thus, if we are to get at what it means to have a life, or what it means to be (to exist), Heidegger thinks, we must engage in an investigation of the being that asks such questions. The question of the meaning of being (or the meaning of life) has lead us to a further question: what is the being of this entity that asks such questions.

How are human beings able to ask such questions? Heidegger’s response, in a nutshell, is that human beings are beings in a world. We exist, temporally and spatially involved with, and interacting with objects around us. Our lives make sense in terms of the entire context of our actions and interactions.

What does it mean to be such a being? “The being whose analysis is our task is, is always we (I) ourselves (myself). The being of this being is always mine. In the being of this being it is related to its being…. The ‘essence’ of this being lies in its to be [i.e., its existence].” Being and Time, § 9, 39. First of all, this being is in each case my being. (This is no small matter. I believe that when we ask about the meaning of life, we are fundamentally asking about the meaning of my life.) Second of all, this being that I am essentially exists. My essence is to exist. After Heidegger declared this principle, it became the rallying cry of what came to be known as “existentialism.”

What does this mean for us? We cannot study the human being, the asker of questions and investigator of meaning, the same way we study objects that are simply “there” for us, “objectively present.” Our existence is never objectively present to us, it is not simply there for us to study and apprehend. Our existence is lived out before us, in terms of future possibilities.

As a result: We can’t even investigate the nature or essence of the human being in the way would investigate ordinary objects. Heidegger has a special name for this being whose essence it is to be. He calls it Dasein, which is the German word for ‘existence’, and most literally translated it means ‘to be here or there’. This being that always already exists ‘here or there’ has a peculiar nature. In fact, every act of understanding, every act of comprehending some object already presupposes a certain kind of existence for this being, Dasein.

“In directing itself toward... and in grasping something [i.e., in understanding or comprehending anything], Dasein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in a world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its object, Dasein is ‘inside’, correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows.” Being and Time, §13, 58.

Dasein is being-in-the-world Human beings exist in a world. But the world is not something other than the human being. There is not world, and then human being. Rather the human being exists (outside of itself) in a world. The world exists as that nexus of relations in which the human being constitutes and creates meaning. The only reason we can understand objects (tables, chairs, people, etc.) is because they have a role to play in our world. They mean something to us by relating to us in a certain way. And our relation to them is defined by our existence; we exist by relating to objects outside of us. Our understanding of these objects consists in taking care of and using them.

“We shall call the beings encountered in taking care useful things. In association we find things for writing, things for sewing, things for working, driving, measuring…. Strictly speaking, there ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to…’. The different kinds of ‘in order to’ such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a totality of useful things…. In accordance with their character of being usable material, useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘things’ never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things. What we encounter as nearest to us, although we do not grasp it thematically, is the room, not as what is ‘between the four walls’ in a geometrical sense, but rather as material for living.” Being and Time, §15, 64.

The world is the totality of useful things and this is the context in which things have meaning. The hammer has no meaning without nails, wood, carpentry, construction, design, etc. A hammer is what it is by virtue of the role it plays in the world. Moreover, it is up to us, human beings, to give the hammer meaning, to put it to use. And it is by virtue of the nature of who we are, that we exist as beings-in-the-world that we can put hammers to use.

So, what’s the meaning of life, again? I think the lesson to draw from Heidegger’s analysis is to realize that everything in the world has a meaning because of its role in a larger context, a totality of useful things, a world. But the world is a world only because we, human beings, exist in it. Without us, all of the artifacts of our world would be no more meaningful than lumps of dirt, rocks, organic and inorganic material.

To put a finer point on it: The meaning of our lives is to give meaning to the world. We constitute, construct, create meaning in the world by acting in certain ways rather than others, by using things for a certain purpose rather than another, by lending a context to things. The meaning of our life is to generate meaning in the world, to make this world meaningful.