Does life have a meaning? Can we give him one? What are we doing here? Why are we here? What can I hope for? Questions about the meaning of life have tortured more than one man in the past, from the anonymous to the most illustrious. The author and philosopher Jean Grondin believes, however, that the question was not posed so explicitly before because this meaning, in a way, went without saying. Today, it is as if this meaning is no longer transparent. But how to understand this notion of “meaning of life”?

First, it can be understood as “directional meaning” : life thus follows a direction that starts from birth and ends with death. But this meaning is not an enigma.

We can also interpret “meaning” as “signifier”. According to this approach, life is likely to be meaningful: we can give it meaning through our sensitivity. Jean Grondin speaks of a “flavor of life” and the meaning of life is, so to speak, a capacity to “feel” and enjoy life.

Finally, it is possible to understand the word “sense” as “reflective ability”, as when talking about a person of “common sense”. This more rational, more scientific approach does not suit Grondin; to find the meaning of life, it is necessary to reach ” a certain wisdom which combines experience, reason, and even a certain natural simplicity ».

The question of whether life has meaning is not for everyone. Some, who by the way are not the most unhappy, never worry about it while others, tired and jaded, have ended up forgetting it. Disenchantment, the fall of religion, galloping individualization and the multiplication of objectives will have got the better of the meaning of life. To show it, the author Moritz Schlick in From the meaning of life invites the reader to a very unique experience:

Immerse yourself in the crowd in the street of a busy city and imagine that you stop passers-by, one after the other, calling them: “Where are you running so fast?” What important business are you occupying? And if, learning the immediate goal, you asked again the goal of that goal, then the goal of that goal, you would almost always – just after a few phases of this series – come up against this goal: to survive, to earn a living. . And why survive? To this question the information obtained would rarely allow you to decipher an intelligible answer.

And you, could you have answered these questions? The simple fact of living, of surviving has no value: it necessarily needs a content and it is in it that the meaning of life can reside. And it is certainly not the subsistence activities that can, nor even the fruits of these activities, except, specifies Moritz Schlick, “ if they contribute to the fulfillment and enrichment of life, by engaging man in valid situations and activities. “

Some modern authors defend the idea that the meaning of life is actually visible, after the fact, to our existence. It is then only a question of a construction that we can deduce by retracing our course, our choices, our paths of life. An approach strongly contested by Grondin for whom “ meaning is first and foremost the meaning that carries us away, that carries us away and leads us somewhere “. In doing so, he defends a certain philosophy of the meaning of life which guides the individual according to two elements, Good (which exceeds our particular interests) and Hope, in the sense of an essential determination which runs throughout life. According to him, to say that life has a meaning is in a way to hope that it has one. 

More and more authors, won over by the boom in personal development, seek to enhance the meaning of life and to proclaim its beneficial effects on development. Finding our way, what guides us, what pushes us to act in a certain way and according to our own perception of the world, would help us to find the happiness, the breath that is lacking in our lives. To achieve this, these authors generally advise seeking to get to know each other better by answering certain questions, of which the following is a sample:

• What do you think is the meaning of life?
• What do you think is the meaning of YOUR life?
• Why do you wake up in the morning?
• Why do you live?
• What is it that “maximizes” your happiness?

« We live in a strange and wonderful Universe. We need an extraordinary imagination to be able to appreciate its age, its size, its violence and even its beauty. And the place that we human beings occupy within this vast cosmos can seem truly insignificant. So we try to make sense of it all, we try to understand how we fit into the whole. » Stephen Hawking

“There are only two ways to live your life: one by pretending nothing is a miracle, the other as if everything is a miracle.. ” Albert Einstein

« The meaning of life is the most pressing question. ” Albert Camus

« We need reasons to live as much as we need something to live on ». Abbot Pierre, French priest, resistant at World War II, and founder of the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor, homeless people and refugees

« The tragic element for modern man is not that he ignores the meaning of his life, but that it bothers him less and less. ” Vaclav Havel

« The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you understood why. ” Mark Twain

« The more meaning we give to our life, the less regret we will feel when we die. » Dalai Lama

« In the history of a life, we never have one problem to solve, the one that gives meaning to our existence and imposes a style on our relationships.. ” Boris Cyrulnik

« Life is like a fairy tale; what matters is not its length, but its value. ” Seneca

 « Whoever awakens life in others helps to give meaning to life. » Anselm Green

 « A man who realizes the extent of the responsibility he has to a human being who awaits him, or to a job that remains to be done, will not waste his life. He knows the “why” of this life, and will be able to endure all the “how” to which he will be subjected. » Viktor Frankl