the meaning of life definition essay

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point?

Author: Matthew Pianalto Categories: Ethics , Phenomenology and Existentialism , Philosophy of Religion Word Count: 1000

Editors’ note: this essay and its companion essay, Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? both explore the concept of meaning in relation to human life. This essay focuses on the meaning of life as a whole, whereas the other addresses meaning in individual human lives.

At the height of his literary fame, the novelist Leo Tolstoy was gripped by suicidal despair. [1] He felt that life is meaningless because, in the long run, we’ll all be dead and forgotten. Tolstoy later rejected this pessimism in exchange for religious faith in life’s eternal, divine significance.

Tolstoy’s outlook—both before and after his conversion—raises many questions:

• Does life’s having meaning depend on a supernatural reality?
• Is death a threat to life’s meaning?
• Is life the sort of thing that can have a “meaning”? In what sense?

Here we will consider some approaches to questions about the meaning of life. [2]

1. Questioning the Question

Many philosophers begin thinking about the meaning of life by asking what the question itself means. [3] Life could refer to all lifeforms or to human life specifically. This essay focuses on human life, but it is worth considering how other things might have or lack meaning, too. [4] This can help illuminate the different meanings of meaning .

Sometimes, we use “meaning” to refer to the origin or cause of something’s existence. If I come home to a trashed house, I might wonder, “What is the meaning of this?” Similarly, we might wonder where life comes from or how it began; our origins may tell us something about other meanings, like our value or purpose.

We also use “meaning” to refer to something’s significance or value . Something can be valuable in various ways, such as by being useful, pleasing, or informative. We might call something meaningless if it is trivial or unimportant.

“Meaning” can also refer to something’s point or purpose . [5] Life could have some overarching purpose as part of a divine plan, or it might have no such purpose. Perhaps we can give our lives purpose that they did not previously possess.

Notice that even divine purposes may not always satisfy our desire for meaning: suppose our creator made us to serve as livestock for hyper-intelligent aliens who will soon arrive and begin to farm us. [6] We might protest that this is not the most meaningful use of our human potential! We may not want our life-story to end as a people-burger.

Indeed, a thing’s meaning can also be its story . The meaning of life might be the true story of life’s origins and significance. [7] In this sense, life cannot be meaningless, but its meaning might be pleasing or disappointing to us. When people like Tolstoy regard life as meaningless, they seem to be thinking that the truth about life is bad news. [8]

2. Supernaturalism

Supernaturalists hold that life has divine significance. [9] For example, from the perspective of the Abrahamic religions, life is valuable because everything in God’s creation is good . Our purpose is to love and glorify God. We are all part of something very important and enduring : God’s plan.

Much of the contemporary discussion about the meaning of life is provoked by skepticism about traditional religious answers. [10] The phrase “the meaning of life” came into common usage only in the last two centuries, as advances in science, especially evolutionary theory, led many to doubt that life is the product of intelligent, supernatural design. [11] The meaning of life might be an especially perplexing issue for those who reject religious answers.

3. Nihilism

Nihilists think that life, on balance, lacks positive meaning. [12] Nihilism often arises as a pessimistic reaction to religious skepticism: life without a divine origin or purpose has no enduring significance.

Although others might counter that life can have enduring significance that doesn’t depend on a supernatural origin, such as our cultural legacy, nihilists are skeptical. From a cosmic perspective, we are tiny specks in a vast universe–and often miserable to boot! Even our most important cultural icons and achievements will likely vanish with the eventual extinction of the species and the collapse of the solar system.

4. Naturalism

Naturalists suggest that the meaning of life is to be found within our earthly lives. Even if life possesses no supernatural meaning, life itself may have inherent significance. [13] Things are not as bad as nihilists claim.

Some naturalists argue that life—at least human life—has objectively valuable features, such as our intellectual, moral, and creative abilities. [14] The meaning of life may be to develop these capacities and put them to good use. [15]

Other naturalists are subjectivists about life’s meaning. [16] Existentialists , for example, argue that life has no meaning until we give it meaning by choosing to live for something that we find important. [17]

Critics (including nihilists and supernaturalists) argue that the naturalists are fooling themselves. What naturalists propose as sources of meaning in life are at best a distraction from life’s lack of ultimate or cosmic significance (if naturalism is true). What is the point of personal development and good works if we’ll all be dead sooner or later?

Naturalists may respond that the point is in how these activities affect our lives and relationships now rather than in some distant, inhuman future. [18] Feeling sad or distressed over our lack of cosmic importance might be a kind of vanity we should overcome. [19] Some also question whether living forever would necessarily add meaning to life; living forever might be boring! [20] Having limited time may be part of what makes some of our activities and experiences so precious. [21]

5. Conclusion

In Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the supercomputer Deep Thought is prompted to discover “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.” After 7 ½ million years of computation, Deep Thought determines that the answer is…

forty-two .

Reflecting on this bizarre result, Deep Thought muses, “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” [22]

Adams may be wise to offer some comic relief. [23] Furthermore, given the various meanings of “meaning,” perhaps there is no single question to ask and thus no single correct answer.

Tolstoy’s crisis is a reminder that feelings of meaninglessness can be distressing and dangerous. [24] However, continuing to search for meaning in times of doubt may be one of the most meaningful things we can do. [25]

[1] Tolstoy (2005 [1882]). For discussion of Tolstoy’s rediscovery of meaning that extends his ideas beyond the specific religious outlook he adopted, see Preston-Roedder (2022).

[2] For more detailed overviews of the meaning of life, see Metz (2021) and the entries on the meaning of life by Joshua Seachris and Wendell O’Brien in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

[3] Ayer (2008) suspects the question is incoherent. For a response, see Nielsen (2008). For helpful discussion of the meanings of meaning, see Thomas (2019).

[4] For discussion of meaning beyond humans (and agents), see Stevenson (2022).

[5] Notice that purpose appears to be one type of value, as discussed in the preceding paragraph.

[6] Nozick (1981) develops this point about purpose; Nozick (2008) offers the key points, too. In a different spirit, the ancient Daoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (2013) provides some perspective on the advantages of being “useless” (having no purpose) and the dangers of being “useful.”

[7] On this proposal of the meaning of life as narrative, see Seachris (2009). A similar approach that emphasizes the notion of interpretation rather than story or narrative is proposed in Prinzing (2021).

[8] A starter list of life’s features that might lead one to tell such a story about life: war, poverty, physical and mental illness, natural disasters, addiction, labor exploitation and other injustices, and pollution. For more, see Benatar (2017).

[9] Some, like Craig (2013), argue vigorously that life can have meaning only if supernaturalism is true. For further discussion and examples, see discussions of supernaturalism in Seachris, “The Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives” and Metz (2021).

[10] See Landau (1997) and Setiya (2022), Ch. 6, for discussion of the origin of the phrase.

[11] Nietzsche’s discussion of the “death of God” in The Gay Science (2001 [1882]) reflects these sorts of concerns.

[12] For recent defenses of this view, see Benatar (2017) and Weinberg (2021).

[13] See I. Singer (2009) for a wide-ranging naturalist approach. Wolf’s (2010, 2014) approach to meaning in life is one of the most widely accepted views amongst contemporary philosophers.

[14] For a helpful discussion of the idea that some things might be objectively valuable, see Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf.

[15] Metz (2013) and P. Singer (1993) defend this sort of view of meaning in life. Transhumanists would argue that the best uses of our abilities will be those that help us overcome the problems, like disease and mortality, that beset humans and may transform us in substantial ways: perhaps we can achieve a natural form of immortality through technology! On transhumanism, see Messerly (2022).

[16] Representative subjectivists include Taylor (2000) and Calhoun (2015). Susan Wolf’s works (2010 and 2014) develop a “hybrid” account of meaning that combines objective and subjective elements.

[17] For classic expressions of this existentialist view, see Sartre (2021 [1943]) and Beauvoir (2018 [1947]). For a brief overview of existentialist philosophy, see Existentialism by Addison Ellis. For a more detailed, contemporary overview, see Gosetti-Ferencei (2020).

[18] On this point, see Nagel (1971), Nagel (1989), and “The Meanings of Lives” in Wolf (2014). For further discussion see Kahane (2014).

[19] Marquard (1991); see Hosseini (2015) for additional discussion. Albert Camus makes a similar point, invoking the notion of “moderation,” at the end of The Rebel (1992 [1951]).

[20] Williams (1973) gives the classic expression of this idea. For a brief overview of Williams’ argument, see Is Immortality Desirable? , by Felipe Pereira.

[21] Of course, this outlook does mean that death can sometimes rob people of potential meaning, since death can be untimely. But death would not erase the meaningfulness of whatever one had already experienced or achieved. For arguments concerning whether death harms the individual who dies, see Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman.

[22] Adams (2017), Chapters 27-28. Asking a computer to give us the answer might also be a problem.

[23] For additional comic relief, see the film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). Such playfulness may seem irreverent of these “deep” philosophical questions, but Schlick (2017 [1927]) argued that the meaning of life is to be found in play!

[24] For discussion of crises of meaning and an introduction to psychological research on meaning in life, see Smith (2017).

[25] William Winsdale relates that the existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was once asked to “express in one sentence the meaning of his own life” (in Frankl (2006), 164-5). After writing his answer, he asked his students to guess what he wrote. A student said, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” Frankl responded, “That is it exactly. Those are the very words I had written.”

Adams, Douglas (2017). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . Del Rey. Originally published in 1979.

Ayer, A.J. (2008). “The Claims of Philosophy.” In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 199-202.

Beauvoir, Simone de (2018). The Ethics of Ambiguity . Open Road Media. Originally published in French in 1947.

Benatar, David (2017). The Human Predicament . Oxford University Press.

Calhoun, Cheshire (2015). “Geographies of Meaningful Living,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32(1): 15-34.

Camus, Albert (1992). The Rebel . Vintage. Originally published in French in 1951.

Craig, William Lane (2013). “The Absurdity of Life Without God.” In: Jason Seachris, ed. Exploring the Meaning of Life . Wiley-Blackwell: 153-172.

Frankl, Viktor E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning . Beacon Press.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna (2020). On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life . Oxford University Press.

Hosseini, Reza (2015). Wittgenstein and Meaning in Life . Palgrave Macmillan.

Kahane, Guy (2014). “Our Cosmic Insignificance.” Noûs 48(4): 745–772.

Landau, Iddo (2017). Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World . Oxford University Press.

— (1997). “Why Has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?” Philosophy Today 41(2): 263-269.

Marquard, Odo (1991). “On the Dietetics of the Expectation of Meaning.” In: In Defense of the Accidental . Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Oxford University Press: 29-49.

Messerly, John (2022). Short Essays on Life, Death, Meaning, and the Far Future .

Metz, Thaddeus (2013). Meaning in Life . Oxford University Press .

— (2021). “The Meaning of Life.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

Nagel, Thomas (1971). “The Absurd,” Journal of Philosophy 68(20): 716-727.

— (1989). The View From Nowhere . Oxford University Press.

Nielsen, Kai (2008). “Linguistic Philosophy and ‘The Meaning of Life.’” In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 203-219.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001). The Gay Science . Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff. Cambridge University Press. Originally published in German in 1882.

Nozick, Robert (1981). Philosophical Explanations . Harvard University Press.

— (2018), “Philosophy and the Meaning of Life,” in: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Fourth Edition . Oxford University Press: 197-204.

O’Brien, Wendell. “The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Last Accessed 12/19/2022.

Preston-Roedder, Ryan (2022). “Living with absurdity: A Nobleman’s guide,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Early View) .

Prinzing, Michael M. (2021). “The Meaning of ‘Life’s Meaning,’” Philosopher’s Imprint 21(3).

Sartre, Jean-Paul (2021). Being and Nothingness . Washington Square Press. Originally published in French in 1943.

Schlick, Moritz (2017). “On the Meaning of Life,” in: In: E.D. Klemke and Seven M. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life, Third Edition . Oxford University Press: 56-65. Originally published in 1927.

Seachris, Joshua. “The Meaning of Life: Contemporary Analytic Perspectives.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Last Accessed 12/19/2022.

— (2009). “The Meaning of Life as Narrative.” Philo 12(1): 5-23.

Setiya, Kieran (2022). Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way . Riverhead Books.

Singer, Irving (2009). Meaning in Life, Vol. 1: The Creation of Value . MIT Press.

Singer, Peter (1993). How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest . Prometheus.

Smith, Emily E. (2017). The Power of Meaning . Crown.

Stevenson, Chad Mason (2022). “Anything Can Be Meaningful.” Philosophical Papers (forthcoming).

Taylor, Richard (2000). Good and Evil . Prometheus. Originally published in 1970.

Thomas, Joshua Lewis (2019). “Meaningfulness as Sensefulness,” Philosophia 47: 1555-1577.

Tolstoy, Leo (2005). A Confession . Translated by Aylmer Maude. Dover. Originally published in Russian in 1882.

Weinberg, Rivka (2021). “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad,” Journal of Controversial Ideas 1(1), 4.

Williams, Bernard (1973). “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” In: Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972 . Cambridge University Press: 82-100.

Wolf, Susan (2010). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters . Princeton University Press. ( Wolf’s lecture is also available at the Tanner Lecture Series website ).

— (2014). The Variety of Values . Oxford University Press.

Zhuangzi (2013). The Complete Works of Zhuangzi . Translated by Burton Watson. Columbia University Press.

Related Essays

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pianalto

Existentialism by Addison Ellis

Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus by Erik Van Aken

Nietzsche and the Death of God by Justin Remhof

Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman

Ancient Cynicism: Rejecting Civilization and Returning to Nature by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

The Badness of Death by Duncan Purves

Is Immortality Desirable? by Felipe Pereira

Hope by Michael Milona & Katie Stockdale

Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf

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Matthew Pianalto is a Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of On Patience (2016) and several articles and book chapters on ethics. philosophy.eku.edu/pianalto

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Open a textbook in biology and you’ll find a purported definition of life, usually in the form of a list of characteristics that apply to organisms, their parts, their interactions, or their history. Often these definitions will be nothing more than descriptions or rely on more controversial theoretical commitments.

Like many basic concepts, it is difficult to non-controversially define life. Most people simply avoid the issue by ignoring marginal cases, accepting the vagueness of the boundary cases, or setting aside the whole issue as beyond their scope. Nonetheless, there are many people whose work seems to require a rigorous demarcation of life, especially in new scientific contexts, such as astrobiology, origins of life, or synthetic biology. As such, the nature of life continues to be a hotly debated topic.

This article focuses on the subject matter of biology: life. The first half of this article will focus on attempts to characterize life by both philosophers and scientists. The first section will describe alternative accounts of definitions, its two subsections will cover historical and contemporary definitions, and section 2 covers the recent countertrend in skepticism toward definitions of life. Because the various stakeholders have different goals, the second half will focus on those goals. Sections 3, 4, and 5 cover topics that some believe require a definition of life: artificial and synthetic life, the origin(s) of life, and the search for life in the Universe. Section 6 covers entities that are much larger or smaller than organisms, while section 7 covers the role life takes in the context of society, especially with respect to questions raised by new technology.

1.1 Definitions of Life from Antiquity to Darwin

1.2 contemporary definitions of life, 2. definitional skepticism, 3. artificial and synthetic life, 4. origin(s) of life, 5. search for life, 6. the macro and the micro perspectives, 7. ethics, law, and politics, 8. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. definition(s).

Few things in biology have been more extensively discussed than the definition of life. It is frustrating so little progress has been made on the topic in the face of so much research, theory, and debate. There are many reasons for this failure: disagreements about how abstract or specific definitions should be, different commitments as to what ought to be included in a definition, and even disagreement about the nature of definitions themselves. This section covers the nature and role of definitions. Each of these has been used in approaching the question of life.

Historically, when philosophers and scientists define a concept, the aim is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions. These theoretical definitions (also called real , ideal or philosophical definitions) are often impractical or fragile as they can be challenged with a single imagined counterexample. A classic case is the definition of “bachelors” as “unmarried males.” It is trivial to find examples that fit this definition without intuitively being bachelors: male dogs, baby boys, widowers, etc. Similarly, for any definition of life, one can either show living cases that are left out of the definition or non-living cases that are included by it. Life is organized, but so are geological formations. Life processes energy, but so does fire. Life evolves using complex biochemistry, but so do prions. Life is self-sustaining, but parasites are not. Life is at thermodynamic disequilibrium, but so is much else. As we’ll see shortly, perhaps theoretical definitions are too rigid a standard. The real world is far too complex for limited criteria to decide every marginal case.

Non-philosophers are typically quite frustrated by the back-and-forth that results from theoretical definitions. To that end, some favor operational (or working ) definitions, ones that work in practice to narrow down the range of phenomena under consideration. This approach is often not considered a kind of definition by philosophers (see Gupta 2021). Operational definitions tend to be philosophically shallow. For example, NASA’s operational definition of life as “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution” (Joyce 1994) might include viruses while excluding mules. The lack of depth of an operational definition can frustrate theoretically minded people, including other scientists.

There are several other conceptions of definition, as well. The nominal (also lexicographer or dictionary ) definition is determined by analyzing usage. It will not work for cutting edge or controversial issues because such definitions follow the slow process of cultural acceptance rather than provide guidance to researchers at the forefront of these debates. Scholars are more likely to quote a dictionary definition than be illuminated by one.

There are also demonstrative or ostensive definitions, which are concepts we can convey by mere shared observations: “that is red” while pointing at a red object, for instance. Potter Stewart famously defined pornography in this manner by saying “I know it when I see it” (Stewart 1964). Knowledge by ostension may reflect epistemic access to a natural kind, although this may feel indistinguishable from an internalized cultural category. There is huge variation among what scientists consider ‘life,’ even among objects on Earth, like viruses and prions, which suggests this kind of definition is not viable for this target.

Then there are stipulative definitions, which are terms introduced and defined by fiat. A circle in Euclidean geometry can be defined as a round plane figure whose boundary consists of infinite points equidistant to a single other point. There are no possible counterexamples to this definition, given the axioms of Euclidean geometry. This approach provides little refuge in the real world. Consider an attempt to define swans as “white birds with long necks.” By stipulation, storks, great egrets, and many cranes would be swans, while Australia’s black swans would not. Such a quick and dirty definition seems to define the category out of hand and perhaps only works within accepted axioms or theories. Life could be stipulated as “carbon-based reproducing entities,” which would rule out silicon-based life by fiat. Such a definition merely pushes the debate to the scenarios in which the stipulated definition goes against intuitive notions.

The 20th century saw some steps away from definitions toward alternative views of concepts, notably prototypes , exemplars , and theories (Machery 2009). Prototype concepts are abstract features shared by most, but not all members of a category (Rosch & Mervis 1975; Rosch 1978; Hampton 1979, 2006; Smith 2002). The definitions of life in biology textbooks might be charitably understood as prototype concepts. So, too, are the property cluster natural kinds popular in philosophy of biology (Boyd 1991, 1999, 2010; Diguez 2013; Slater 2015). Exemplars are concepts built around similarity to a particular individual case (Medin & Schaffer 1978, Nosofsky 1986). Both prototypes and exemplar concepts rely on similarity to paradigmatic cases, with the former being an imagined ideal and the latter being a real instance (Komatsu 1992). For similarity-based concepts to work in scientific cases such as life, we need an account of which similarities matter, how much, and why. In contrast to similarity-based concepts, the requirements of theory concepts are somewhat more nebulous. Theory concepts are modeled on scientific theories and thus reflect their diversity (Carey 1985, Murphy & Medin 1985, Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997). At the core, theory concepts rely on explanations for why the members of a category share certain properties. Marginal cases of life, such as viruses, prions, or protocells, might be included in some theories of life but not others.

In sum, there are many potential approaches to definitions, each with different benefits, drawbacks, and standards of success. Much more could be said about these and other possible approaches, but this will suffice for our purposes. Some of the disagreements about defining life dissolve upon clarifying which type of definition or concept is being used. Many of the explicit attempts to define life have focused on either operational and philosophical definitions, while often not acknowledging or misunderstanding the distinction between these. One will note these two definitions are at cross-purposes – operational definitions can be quick and dirty, but philosophical definitions seek to give necessary and sufficient conditions. Less work has been done on life as a non-definitional concept, although that is perhaps changing.

This subsection briefly explores historical definitions of life. There are more in depth treatments of the matter, to which an interested reader should turn (Bedau & Cleland 2010, Riskin 2015, Mix 2018). Approaches to this issue vary widely across historians, philosophers, and scientists, so some skepticism about any individual author’s approach to the topic is warranted.

We begin with the Greeks. In several dialogues, notably the Phaedrus , Timeaus , and Republic , Plato divided life into three parts: vegetable life, animal life, and rational life. All living creatures possessed the first in the form of nutrition and reproduction, animals were additionally capable of sensation and locomotion, and humans also had rational souls. Plato’s subsequent influence in Christian theology may be apparent in spirit if not in detail. In Christian theology, human life was not only rational, but also involved an eternal, spiritual soul and an internal, conscious life.

Plato’s student, Aristotle, had a different notion in which living things had an appropriate form, material, and goal-directedness ( De Anima , 412a1–416b). Aristotle held life to be a form of self-motion, perpetuation, or self-alteration (Byers 2006). For Aristotle, the capacity to resist internal and external perturbations was the essential distinction between living beings and non-living objects. Other features were accidental. This quest for demarcating the essential from the accidental for life has persisted to this day in searches for theoretical definitions of life as well as in attacks against those not interested in such definitions.

Centuries later, Descartes drew a sharper distinction between animal life and rational life than between inanimate objects and animal life. This was a turn away from medieval approaches, which had taken the gap between vegetables and animals to be broader. For Descartes, animals are analogous to complex clocks and lack the inner or spiritual life central to the human experience (Descartes 2010/1664). As such, Descartes’ category of life neither mapped onto Greek conceptions nor current conceptual frameworks. The mechanistic view developed by Descartes and his followers is often thought to be continuous with current scientific thinking, but this is perhaps anachronistic, as much of the theoretical underpinning separating animal life and rational life is no longer accepted.

The responses to Descartes came to be grouped under the heading ‘vitalism.’ Vitalism, which spanned three centuries, was a heterogenous philosophical position unified by adherents’ doubt of a fully mechanistic view of life. Vitalists had ontologies of defining features of life as varied as immaterial causes, particular arrangements of matter, a special life fluid, a particular end goal, or even mental forces. A whiggish history of biology will declare the death of vitalism with Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate. The suggestion is that if biological chemicals can be produced from mere chemistry, then biology is also mere chemistry. Although this was an important step, many chemists already had accepted a mechanistic world view, and many other researchers continued to develop vitalist theories well into the 20th century (Bergson 1959, Driesch 1905/1914).

The 20th century largely saw the mechanist/vitalist divide dissipate. Despite the difficulties described above about definitions, hundreds of scientists, philosophers, and others have tried their hand at defining life. Much of the interest is motivated by new science and new technologies – including artificial life, synthetic biology, origins of life, and astrobiology – which complicate the issue by violating some of the traditional groupings of properties associated with life. There are numerous books, articles, and workshops on the nature of life (Pályi et al. 2002, Popa 2004, Bedau & Cleland 2010).

Table 1. Some recent attempts at meta-categories for life definitions. Each column is one account’s categories, the rows are lined up according to rough similarity.

There are perhaps thousands of competing definitions proposed across hundreds of articles. A true survey of that variety would be beyond the scope of this article and beyond your patience as a reader. Nevertheless, some broad categories have been proposed that might offer some insight into current contending definitions. Table 1 summarizes three of the most rigorous attempts this century to categorize definitions of life.

Each of these authors used different approaches to arrive at their categories. Popa 2004 and Trifonov 2011 attempted to reverse engineer the categories from dozens of definitions collected from many dozens of experts, while Malaterre and Chartier 2019 conducted a more extensive, text-mining approach across 30,000 scientific articles selected from journals that published pieces in biology. As one can see, there are areas of rough overlap, but each categorization scheme has its own unique categories as well.

Most of the definitions considered by these authors straddle some of these distinctions and are often ambiguous as to whether they are intended to be theoretical definitions, operational definitions, or something else. For example, Popa 2004 considers definitions ranging from Oparin 1961’s “Any system capable of replication and mutation is alive” to Schulze-Makuch et al. 2002:

We propose to define living systems as those that are: (1) composed of bounded micro-environments in thermodynamic equilibrium with their surroundings; (2) capable of transforming energy to maintain their low-entropy states; and (3) able to replicate structurally distinct copies of themselves from an instructional code perpetuated indefinitely through time despite the demise of the individual carrier through which it is transmitted.

Categorizing definitions such as these necessarily requires some choices and reasonable people can disagree about whether each belongs in one or more categories.

The takeaway from current understandings of the definition of life is that there is no consensus forthcoming in the near future. One concern is that these are summaries of attempts to define a category for which there is only loose agreement. Many scientists disagree as to the phenomena a definition of life is intended to unify. Some scientists would include prions, viruses, and entities only hypothesized to exist in the origin of life, while others would completely reject them. Some might accept digital organisms as alive, others would deny this approach. Conceptual equivocation could have significant costs for research. One field recently quantified this cost, suggesting it is more than a merely theoretical concern (Trombley and Cottenie 2019). Given the diversity described above, one may be tempted to adopt a definitional pluralism : there are many ways to be alive. For some reason, that approach is not common in the literature.

Nearly everybody agrees there is a distinction between life and non-life, typically understood as a difference in kind rather than one of degree. Furthermore, most people involved accept that life is some sort of natural kind, rather than a human psychological concept. That said, a common theme in recent philosophical work has been to express skepticism of life definitions as a goal. The literature on the definition of life is vast, repetitive, and utterly inconclusive. Philosophers have disagreed as to the ultimate source of the lack of consensus, citing unstated assumptions in either the definer’s approach or the question itself. Note that many scientists are less likely to be skeptical of the goal of defining life, though also more resistant to engaging in the philosophical debate.

One skeptical view has arisen from the observation that theoretical definitions of life presume a theory of life (Cleland and Chyba 2002, Benner 2010, Cleland 2019). Although it is not obvious that the authors allude to the theory-theory of concepts, described in section 1, a common analogy is to early chemical theory. According to this analogy, early alchemists likened the alchemists’ Aqua regia (“royal water”) and Aqua fortis (“strong water”). Development of atomic theory revealed, Cleland argues, that the true nature of water was H 2 O, while the other ‘waters’ were HNO 3 + 3 HCl and HNO 3 , respectively. Cleland advocates avoiding definitions altogether, fearing they will blind us to new instances of life, and instead opts for tentative criteria, which she believes avoid the implicit dogma of even operational definitions.

Other authors have pointed out that the explanandum of life is itself up for debate (Tsokolov 2009, Mix 2020, Parke 2020). According to Emily Parke, some accept life as applying to individuals, whereas other definitions apply to collectives first (including entire planets) and individuals derivatively. Relatedly, most believe life is some kind of entity rather than some kind of relation or process (but see Nicholson and Dupré 2018). Parke also points out that some definitions seek a material basis, perhaps limiting life’s substrate to the biochemistry we know on Earth, while others are functional. Sagan famously worried about biochemical definitions because they were prone to ‘Earth Chauvinism’ for privileging our own biochemistry (1970). Other authors take our biochemistry to be independently justified as universal (Pace 2001, Benner et al. 2004, but see Bains 2004). Finally, Parke distinguishes between those that seek clean boundaries and those that accept the possibility of a continuum of ‘lifelikeness.’

Other authors have advocated a kind of quietism about definitions, maintaining that folk concepts need not match up with scientific ones (Machery 2011), any definitions would not change scientific practice (Szostak 2012), advocated a radical conceptual rethinking (Mariscal & Doolittle 2020), or denied the distinction between life & non-life entirely (Jabr 2013).

This last position of eliminativism could be expanded as it helps illustrate all other life skeptical positions. Cowie 2009 classifies eliminativist goals as either linguistic or ontological. Ontological eliminativists don’t believe the objects they are eliminating truly exist. We’re all eliminativists about something, perhaps ghosts or fairies. Linguistic/conceptual eliminativists, on the other hand are merely suspicious of theoretical terms or concepts, what Ramsey 2020 calls ‘category dissolution’ or ‘conceptual fragmentation.’ In essence, it’s not that there aren’t living things, it’s just that the category life is heterogeneous rather than a natural kind. According to Cowie, one can deny that anything matching our theoretical definition of life actually exists in the world while still accepting it as a useful fiction. Conversely, one may think scientific theories about life are fruitless or that the term is too vague and confused to be useful, without doubting life exists. If we accept any of these alternatives, we should perhaps avoid ever using the term ‘life’ in isolation and instead reference Metabolic Life and Evolutionary Life and all the other conceptions.

At play in these various forms of skepticism are several underlying assumptions. Among other disagreements, researchers disagree about what life is, whether it is a natural kind with an essence or a human construct; they disagree as to the purpose of defining life, especially if it will not change scientific practice; and they disagree as to the features of life that are relevant and the ones that are mere consequences. When researchers hold unstated assumptions such as these, they are liable to mistake the source of their disagreement.

The rest of this article will focus on uses of the various life concepts. Some of the definitions described above are derived from, or necessary for, specific scientific and societal purposes. This section focuses on artificial and synthetic life.

In principle, most contemporary scientists and philosophers believe life can be created, but there is broad disagreement as to what needs to be recreated for something to be life. In functional approaches, mere formal organization sufficiently similar to organisms may be enough. Complexly configured robots (“hardware”) or computer programs (“software”) might qualify. This view is known as Strong Artificial Life (A-Life for short) and has received much of the same pushback as the Strong Artificial Intelligence approach before it (Sober 1991, Boden 1999, Brooks 2001). Those who reject the Strong A-Life view believe that functional approaches miss some of the essential features of biology for either epistemic or ontological reasons. Epistemic objections might be consistent with the possibility of Strong A-Life, but doubt that we have the knowledge to recreate the relevant biological functions in a digital framework. Conversely, most of the objections to Strong A-Life have been ontological, resting on the view that representations cannot be equivalent to that which they represent and that perhaps life requires chemical embodiment, ruling Strong A-Life impossible by fiat.

Weak A-Life approaches, on the other hand, don’t presume the ontological equivalence of structurally similar circuits and cells. Instead, proponents suggest the more modest goal of developing a deeper understanding of life as we know it by exploring the effects of various parameters in simulations, effectively placing life in a broader context of possible biology (Langton 1989, 1995). For example, in the Terra program, software was pitted against other software for processing power (Ray 1993). Unexpected by the researchers at the time, software parasitism evolved: software would co-opt the reproductive processing of other software. Policing mechanisms also evolved, leading to an arms race between free-riders and the software trying to stop them.

Whether one accepts the strong or weak interpretation of A-Life, these in silico approaches are cheaper than equivalent work done in real organisms. They also offer possibilities that are not available in ordinary biology, such as programming alternative parameters to take the place of laws of nature and exploring relationships across deep time and space quickly and efficiently.

Another approach worth highlighting is that of synthetic life (“wetware”). Less conceptually troubled, synthetic life can also address some questions of A-Life, while allowing for a finer grain of realism. Synthetic life approaches have explored creating self-replication (Lincoln & Joyce 2009), minimal genomes (Koonin 2000, Hutchinson et al. 2016), a chemical evolution (Gromski et al. 2020), and other projects. Not all synthetic biology is in the business of investigating life as it could be, as not all computer programming is A-Life. Nevertheless, the tools developed by both can be illuminating. By exploring possibilities, scientists can discover previously hidden relationships, revealing which aspects of life are more or less plausible than expected.

Inextricable from the question of life’s nature is the question of its origin. Ancient and modern thinkers accepted that life often arose spontaneously from non-life. Two centuries of experiments eventually overturned this widely accepted view, culminating in Louis Pasteur’s swan-neck bottle experiments. Since then, the puzzle of Life’s origin has been one of the biggest and most important in all of science.

Darwin was famously silent about the problem, although in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, Darwin confided that he imagined life originating in “some warm little pond” (see Other Internet Resources below; and Peretó et al. 2009). Subsequent work on the subject was sparse until the 1920s when Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane independently proposed hypotheses for life’s origin in then plausible early Earth conditions (Haldane 1929; Oparin 2010/1936). As a graduate student in the 1950s, Stanley Miller tested the proposal, discovering dozens of amino acids in the mixture (1953). Since then, the field of origins-of-life studies has expanded dramatically.

Our earliest reliable records of this planet, some 3.5 billion years ago, contain distinctive evidence of microbial fossils, including distinctive shapes that correlate to the sizes and shapes of current prokaryotes, as well as carbon-ratios distinctive to life as we know it (Schopf 1993, Schopf et al. 2017). Many analyses have pushed our confidence in life’s earlier origin significantly further back, suggesting that basically as soon as Earth was not molten, it was filled with life (Pearce et al. 2018, Lineweaver 2020). How life started and why it started so quickly remains one of the most pressing open questions in science.

There are many open philosophical issues in origins of life research. Several of these are centered around the explanandum in question and epistemological limits to our knowledge. Researchers differ, for example, as to whether the purpose of origins-of-life research is to discover how life could have originated or how it did originate (Scharf et al. 2015, Mariscal et al. 2019). Some steps in the process could have been chancy, others could have been deterministic but highly contingent, still others could have been the only way life ever originates anywhere in the Universe.

There are several broad approaches to investigating the origin of life. “Bottom-Up” approaches begin with pre-biotic chemistry and explore how it could withstand stressors in order for lifelike entities to form and evolve. At present, there are many unsolved problems, most notably that most energetically favorable interactions would consume the proto-life forms involved. Scientists have cleverly attempted to ease the problem by relaxing assumptions: perhaps the environment provided our first boundaries (Koonin 2009), or perhaps it provided porto-genetic material (Mathis et al. 2017), all of this could have occurred in a viscous solvent instead of a cell (He et al. 2017), or on a surface (Wächtershäuser 1988), or using a variety of entities that eventually became encapsulated (Eigen & Schuster 1977). Nevertheless, the gulf between the pre-biotic chemistry and the simplest life forms is still huge and any number of explanations only account for a tiny portion of the conceptual distance.

Another approach, “Top-Down,” uses current taxa to infer the nature and timing of the origin of life on Earth. To do so, we take current examples of life on Earth and trace their ancestry, by comparing the nearly hundred shared genes, primarily associated with biological translation (Koonin 2011). All life shares a last universal common ancestor, “LUCA” for short. There may have been several origins of life, but our evidence is insufficient to distinguish this scenario from a single origin. Nevertheless, at least one origin, presumably in Earthly pre-biotic conditions, led to the existence of LUCA, an important constraint upon theorizing about the origin of life. It is widely expected that LUCA was merely one creature in a larger population and existed long after the origin of the first organism. There are also a variety of concerns with respect to LUCA: whether it was simple or complex (Mariscal & Doolittle 2015); whether it had a membrane that resembled any of the current membranes (Koonin 2011); whether the genes it contained were ancestors of our own genes or subsequently acquired (Doolittle & Brown 1994, Woese & Fox 1977; Woese 1998); whether its genome was made of DNA (Forterre 2006a), whether it was a heterotroph or autotroph; where it lived; and when it lived.

The gap between Top-Down and Bottom-Up approaches is huge: untold generations passed between pre-biotic chemistry and LUCA. We may never be able to solve Life’s origin, but each step brings us closer to understanding the trajectory.

Even the most pessimistic analyses of the likelihood of life suggests life on Earth is not unique (Frank & Sullivan 2016). Many scientists take that as a good reason to search for life elsewhere in the Universe. The current search for life elsewhere focuses on two extremes: the chemical byproducts of life and the technological signals of intelligent life. The social interactions of alien populations might be interesting, but they are hard to study as of yet. Thus, we search for biosignatures that might uniquely identify life from a great distance. We’ll take each in turn.

Biosignatures, as the name implies, are purported to be markers of life. Chemical biosignatures are compounds either rarely or never produced without the assistance of life on Earth. Finding biosignatures thus implies a material conception of life, likely in the form of biochemistry, metabolism, or thermodynamics. There have been many attempts to detect biosignatures, primarily on Mars. These approaches include experiments done on planetary surfaces, observations from Earth or low-earth orbit, and study of meteors and other debris from nearby planetary bodies.

More practically, satellite or telescope observations of other planets have been used to search for gasses outside of thermodynamic equilibrium. Methane has been sporadically detected on Mars since 2004 (Formisano et al. 2004, Webster et al. 2018) with an accompanying claim of formaldehyde detection (Peplow 2005). Venus has also been a source of attention, with phosphine gas detected in the clouds above Venus (Greaves et al. 2020). A controversial finding, it nevertheless caught the scientific imagination. Future scientific research is expected to accelerate this method of observation, especially with new data gathered by the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With its equipment, JWST is able to image exoplanets at resolutions allowing the detection of gas biomarkers in the atmospheres of exoplanets (Loeb & Maoz 2013).

By contrast, there have been scarce attempts to detect chemical life while on the surface of another planet. In 1975, NASA sent the Viking landers to Mars, tasked with a variety of scientific experiments including some that were purported to detect life if it was present. One, the Labeled Release Experiment, did, but its results were inconsistent with the other on-board experiments, so the result was deemed inconclusive (Levin & Straat 1976, Ezell & Ezell 1984). The current Perseverence rover on Mars is able to assess certain biosignatures and upcoming missions by NASA, the Chinese National Space Administration, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency all seek to determine whether Mars has evidence of past or current life.

It is not obvious that life on Mars would be a separate origin than life on Earth, as the two planets exchange tons of rocks each year and it is at least theoretically possible that life could have formed on one planet and been subsequently transferred to the other (McKay 2010). Since Mars is a smaller body than Earth, it coalesced before Earth and thus it is conceivable that life might have formed there first, although this is a relatively marginal view in the astrobiology community. Meteorites from Mars and other planetary bodies have also been the source of purported biosignatures. The Martian meteorite ALH84001 was instrumental in forming the science of astrobiology in 1996, after NASA scientists discovered bacteria-like structures (McKay et al. 1996). Subsequent meteorites have also garnered scientific interest (e.g. White et al. 2014).

The other major attempt to search for life, that of searching for intelligence, more readily captures the imagination. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been ongoing for centuries (Dick 1982). Fierce debates between those that took Earth to be unique and those that took it to be one of a plurality of worlds persisted for millennia (and still do, to some extent). Advocates of the plurality of worlds view searched their telescopes for evidence. A famous instance is Percival Lowell’s drawings of Martian canals in the 1890s. Influenced by the mid-1800s observations of what appeared to be channels criss-crossing Mars, Lowell drew a series of canals based on his observations. Science fiction soon picked up the observation and conjectured a dying civilization, hoping to squeeze water out of the last bits of remaining ice in the Martian poles.

Partially driven by the science fiction following Lowell’s drawings, the early 20th century saw increased interest in detecting radio signals from Outer Space. This interest accelerated after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and was more systematically and formally approached starting in the late 1970s. SETI research has not been publicly funded since 1994, but private and public donors, as well as academic and lay researchers have kept the program going since. There are many technical challenges to the search: space is unimaginably huge, signals are weak, possibilities of interstellar communication are myriad, and our searches can only cover an insignificant portion of the task.

More controversially, many dozens of messages have been sent into Outer Space since 1974. A few have been in the form of physical objects aboard spacecraft, but most have been radio signals aimed at promising stars or star clusters. sometimes called Active SETI or METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Although the practice continues due to its low cost and relative ease, many philosophers, scientists, and policy experts have come out against the practice largely due to the risk of broadcasting our presence to potentially hostile forces on behalf of future generations that cannot consent (Smith 2020).

Scientists grow more concerned about philosophical questions when scientific limitations or conceptual choices are made apparent to them. Those scientists who study deep time, deep space, abstract issues, or questions of ethics are often keenly aware of the philosophical choices that influence their research from identification of research question to interpretation of the data. This section briefly goes through other scientific contexts in which how life is defined is relevant, which address scales well below and well above the organism level.

There are several biological entities for which it is an open question as to whether they are alive. Viruses, for example, are units of genetic material encased in a protein coat. It is unknown whether all viruses share common ancestor (Koonin et al. 2006, Moreira and López Garcia 2009) nor how they originated, be it escaped transposable elements, reduced cells, or some ancestral third option (Forterre 2006b). The status of viruses as living is mired with controversy, with some people holding virons to be alive, others believing them not to be, and a third camp has them as living only in the context of an infected cell, but a mere ‘seed’ otherwise (Forterre 2010).

There are other entities in the “twilight zone of microbiology,” including transposable elements, viroids, unculturable (but putatively existing) microbes, organisms in vegetative states, and prions (Postgate 1999). The problems facing each of these are similar: several of them can evolve by natural selection, are biochemically complex, but lack other properties associated with life. For example, prions are protein products of life that can fold other prions in a way that allows for cumulative evolution (Li et al. 2010). They are rarely included in the category ‘life’ due to their inactivity in most settings and rather simple origin as a misfold of a functional protein.

If there is a twilight zone of microbiology, there is also a twilight zone of ecology. Organisms form populations, species, lineages, clades, and ecosystems. The status of each of these is an open question, but they have many of the same features associated with life as described above. Perhaps the strongest case can be made for eusocial insects, such as some ants, bees, wasps, and termites. In several species, there are rigid distinctions between the castes that reproduce and those that do not, with many of the latter serving the role of caring for the young (Hölldobler & Wilson 2009). One might note that entities above the organism level are as a rule less integrated and connected than the organisms that comprise them. This is perhaps a general feature of life: from the perspective of every item in the biological hierarchy, its parts are much more homogenous than it is. Our cells seem much more integrated and self-contained than our bodies, so, too, are individual insects more self-contained than the colonies to which they belong.

Most controversial has been the case of Gaia. Gaia is a term from Greek mythology; she is a personification of the planet Earth. In 1979, James Lovelock, revived the concept in his book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth . In his view, the Earth-wide set of interlocking ecosystems could be viewed as a single entity. One insight of Lovelock’s was already mentioned in the previous section: planet-wide interactions are the scale that matters in detecting life elsewhere. Lovelock’s book sparked controversy centered around the plausibility of his model of the Earth as a self-regulating homeostatic system. In the view of many at the time, it was an inaccurate description: Earth could not evolve in principle, and the subsequent ontological move of granting Earth the status of life was unmotivated (Doolittle 1981). Recent attempts to revitalize the notion of Gaia on a more theoretic footing involve both abiotic and biotic regulatory mechanisms and natural selection acting at the level of clades (Lenton et al. 2018, Doolittle 2019). Regardless of current attempts at a theoretical justification, the thought of Earth as a living entity motivated many in the environmental movement and the idea remains a common reference.

The term ‘life’ is important outside of biology. Often, the focus is not on the concept of life or life in general, but on the status of individual living entities. Typically, the focus is on the beginning and end stages of individual lives, which raises legal, religious, and moral questions. The start of an individual life has been the source of contraception and abortion discussions (Noonan 1967, Dellapenna 1978). Unfortunately, developmental biology does not provide an uncontroversial starting point for when ‘life’ begins (Maienschein 2014). The end of individual lives was also a heated debate in the 20th century as new technologies were able to keep human bodies alive long after they would have died in nature (DeGrazia 2016).

Any discussion of defining life in these contexts should begin by distinguishing between life and other phenomena that are often conflated with it in public discourse, such as sentience, personhood, and moral considerability. It’s unclear how much ontological, epistemic, or moral weight the category of life has independently of other properties. Attributing moral worth to non-living entities is still a minority position in environmental or comparative philosophy (but see Leopold 1949, Basl 2019). Thus, a starting position might be that life is a prerequisite for moral considerability. Nonetheless, most humans don’t mind killing bacteria for the sake of cleanliness and many people eat or wear the flesh of animals. So, in many discussions, life is only valuable when it is the vehicle for other equally nebulous properties like sentience, personhood, or immaterial souls.

If any living entities have a distinct moral or ontological status, most philosophers would accept that humans are among them (Rolston 1975, Goodpaster 1978). In these contexts, it matters when individual humans come into being and acquire such a status in their own right, be it conception, birth, or some time period in between. Considered opinions differ as to when this occurs and in virtue of what, be it mere possibility of self-sustained life, sentience, or other features. There is still a rampant pro-life/pro-choice split in cultural politics, which is somewhat lessened in European countries (Corbella 2020). There are equivalent, but less tendentious analogues in the contexts of euthanasia, the death penalty, war, and the prevention of death and disease. In these debates, both ethical and metaphysical commitments matter.

The public questions of life are often raised by new technologies. In the abortion discussion above, for example, new techniques to end pregnancies, from birth control to abortion procedures, as well as new medical technologies facilitating premature deliveries made the topic more contentious. Other technological innovations also raise questions about life. One such area is that of transhumanism (c.f. More and Vita-More 2013). Transhumanism is the movement aimed toward the use of technology for the human enhancement of social, psychological, and physical lives. These can range from prosthetics to implants or from pharmaceuticals to mental ‘uploading.’ There are bioconservatives, who argue against transhumanism for practical, moral, or aesthetic reasons. There are also posthumanists, who look forward to a world in which humans are replaced or eliminated by subsequent artificial intelligence. The debate over whether such posthumans might be ‘alive’ is similar in structure to the artificial life discussion in section 3. Bioconservatives also argue against this view. Among the topics in these debates are whether a particular technology counts as therapy or enhancement, whether the risks of alteration outweigh the benefits, whether certain goals of transhumanism are even possible, and which alterations will affect the moral or ontological status of the people that receive them.

That life is a source of ethical, legal, and political controversy is to be expected. And although it is beyond the scope of this article to adjudicate these debates, advocates ought to be aware of the deep vagueness in biology and disagreement within philosophy with respect to what life is, what an individual living organism is, when individual lives begin or end, and what features of life ground moral considerability.

Although the conceptual terrain of life concepts is well covered, there is no accepted view as yet. This is unlikely to change given the disciplinary backgrounds, explanatory values, and theoretical commitments of the stakeholders involved. A wide range of practices rely on competing conceptions of life: including artificial life, origins-of-life research, the search for life, and other projects described above.

Future scientific discoveries or inventions may break this impasse, as they have in other cases of theoretical gridlock. The development of atomic theory, discussed in section 2, created new categorical divisions that scientists accepted as more real than the categories of the ancients or alchemists. With this conceptual fragmentation, old categories were discarded and new ones accepted. One can imagine something similar happening in the case of life: many discoveries might show a clear cluster of how complex, lifelike entities can form from prebiotic chemistry, eventually winning over the majority of the scientific and philosophical community (e.g. Weber 2007, 2010).

Conversely, a simple decision might be made based on shared values or explanatory goals. The example of death may be illustrative. After decades of debate, a new decision, not a discovery, was made. Physicians concluded the irreversibility of death was the most important property for their purposes. They adopted the concept of whole-brain death as their operational criterion (DeGrazia 2016). The facts on the ground did not change, but the shared understanding did.

Finally, perhaps life will be accepted as a polysemous concept with each definitional cluster applying to a subset of the whole: biochemical life, evolutionary life, metabolic life, etc. Researchers may rely on context, accept some miscommunication, or simply stipulate the kind of life they mean. The example of planets, discussed in Brusse 2016 may help make this point. There was always a huge diversity within the category planet, which included the Sun and Moon until the Renaissance. In the early 1800s, asteroids were discovered. Initially, they were considered planets, they were demoted to ‘minor’ planets a few decades later, then simply ‘asteroids’ after the 1950s. Pluto was discovered in 1930, recognized as the smallest planet by the 1970s. From 1992 until 2006, many objects similar to Pluto were discovered until astronomers decided that the term planet actually covered at least two distinct, but scientifically interesting categories: typical planets and dwarf planets. Similarly, perhaps some of the categories described in section 1.2 will form the basis of accepted sub-categories of life.

It is still an open question as to how long the current situation will persist before a discovery forces a scientific reckoning or a decision obviates the need. For now, the debate continues.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Weber, Bruce, “Life”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/life/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section The Meaning of Life

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• General Overviews
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• The Meaning of “Meaning”
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The Meaning of Life by Thaddeus Metz LAST REVIEWED: 10 May 2010 LAST MODIFIED: 10 May 2010 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0070

For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. This article concentrates nearly exclusively on approaches to the question taken by analytic philosophers in the postwar era, by and large omitting reference to prewar Anglo-American works, texts from other traditions such as Continental or African philosophy, and writings from nonphilosophical but related fields such as religion and psychology. Much of the contemporary analytic discussion has sought to articulate and evaluate theories of meaning in life, i.e., general and fundamental principles of what all meaningful conditions have in common as distinct from meaningless ones. This entry accordingly focuses largely on these theories, which are distinguished according to the kind of property that is held to constitute meaning in life (see Supernaturalism , Naturalism , and Non-Naturalism ).

These texts are more introductory or have been written in a way that would likely be accessible to those not thoroughly trained in analytic philosophy. Baggini 2004 and Eagleton 2007 are pitched at a very wide, popular audience; Thomson 2003 and Belshaw 2005 would be best for undergraduate philosophy majors; and Belliotti 2001 , Martin 2002 , and Cottingham 2003 are probably most apt for those with some kind of university education or other intellectual development, not necessarily in Anglo-American philosophy.

Baggini, Julian. What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life . London: Granta, 2004.

Defends the view that meaning in life is largely a function of love; addresses approaches or maxims (e.g., Carpe diem ) more than it does principles.

Belliotti, Raymond Angelo. What Is the Meaning of Human Life? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

A thoughtful treatment of a variety of issues; defends an objective naturalist approach to meaning in the context of critical discussion of classic thinkers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

Belshaw, Christopher. Ten Good Questions about Life and Death . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Engagingly written, analytic treatments of several key “life and death” issues, many of which bear on meaningfulness, which the author cashes out objectively in terms of relationships and projects.

Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life . Thinking in Action. London: Routledge, 2003.

An elegantly written book that defends an Aristotelian, God-based (but not soul-based) approach to meaning in life.

Eagleton, Terry. The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

A light and lively essay on a variety of facets of the question of life’s meaning, often addressing linguistic and literary themes. Rejects subjective or “postmodern” approaches to meaning in favor of a need for harmonious or loving relationships.

Martin, Michael. Atheism, Morality, and Meaning . Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002.

A vigorous defense of a naturalist approach to morality, in the first half of the book, and to meaning, in the second. Very critical of Christian approaches to both.

Thomson, Garrett. On the Meaning of Life . London: Thompson/Wadsworth, 2003.

Argues that nine common views on meaning in life (e.g., that an infinite being is necessary for meaning or that meaning is exhausted by happiness) are flawed. Emphasizes that meaning must reside largely in activities we engage in, lest our lives be reduced to “tools” for the sake of ends beyond us.

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The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life

Iddo Landau is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. His publications include ‘The Meaning of Life sub specie aeternitatis ’ ( Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 2011) and Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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This volume presents thirty-two essays on a wide array of topics in modern philosophical meaning in life research. The essays are organized into six parts. Part I, Understanding Meaning in Life, focuses on various ways of conceptualizing meaning in life. Among other issues, it discusses whether meaning in life should be understood objectively or subjectively, the relation between importance and meaningfulness, and whether meaningful lives should be understood narratively. Part II, Meaning in Life, Science, and Metaphysics, presents opposing views on whether neuroscience sheds light on life’s meaning, inquires whether hard determinists must see life as meaningless, and explores the relation between time, personal identity, and meaning. Part III, Meaning in Life and Religion, examines the relation between meaningfulness, mysticism, and transcendence, and considers life’s meaning from both atheist and theist perspectives. Part IV, Ethics and Meaning in Life, examines (among other issues) whether meaningful lives must be moral, how important forgiveness is for meaning, the relation between life’s meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) and procreation ethics, and whether animals have meaningful lives. Part V, Philosophical Psychology and Meaning in Life, compares philosophical and psychological research on life’s meaning, explores the experience of meaningfulness, and discusses the relation between meaningfulness and desire, love, and gratitude. Part VI, Living Meaningfully: Challenges and Prospects, elaborates on topics such as suicide, suffering, education, optimism and pessimism, and their relation to life’s meaning.

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General Introduction (Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide)

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A 10,000+ word critical overview of analytic philosophy devoted to life's meaning, with some focus on books and more recent works.

Human Affairs

In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of "life's meaning". Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort of enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a noticeable trend among philosophers to try to change our understanding of what talk of "life's meaning" connotes. For example, whereas most philosophers for a long while had held that such talk is about a kind of value possible in the life of human beings, recently some have argued that certain non-human parts of nature can exhibit meaningfulness, which, furthermore, is not necessarily something valuable. The second claim I advance is that there is strong reason to reject this trend, and instead for philosophers to retain the long-standing approach.

James Tartaglia

Philosophy Compass

David E Cooper

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a 'form of life', and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something 'beyond the human'. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the 'beyond the human' which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and 'intimate' with life itself.

This article defends a conception of philosophy popular outside the discipline but unpopular within it: that philosophy is unified by a concern with the meaning of life. First, it argues against exceptionalist theses according to which philosophy is unique among academic disciplines in not being united by a distinctive subject matter. It then presents a positive account, showing that the issue of the meaning of life is uniquely able to reveal unity between the practical and theoretical concerns of philosophy, while meeting a range of desiderata for a typical specification of subject matter. After showing how recent analytic work on “the meaning of life” has conflated the traditional question with issues of social meaningfulness, it offers an explanation of why the traditional question has become marginalised in philosophy. The reasons are not good, however, so it concludes that philosophy should embrace its popular image.

Journal of Philosophy of Life

Masahiro Morioka

This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life.

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4 philosophical answers to the meaning of life

• Finding meaning in the face of what can feel like a meaningless universe is a daunting challenge.
• Many philosophical thinkers spent their careers finding a path to a meaningful life.
• While philosophers may disagree on the solution to the problem, they all offer interesting routes to a more meaningful existence.

A common question posed to philosophers and hermit gurus is, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s an important question. Having a sense of purpose in life is associated with  positive health outcomes ; conversely, not having one can leave a person feeling listless and lost. Friedrich Nietzsche even feared that a lack of meaning would plunge the world toward nihilism, a transition he believed would prove disastrous. 

Several philosophers have proposed answers to the age-old question. Here, we will consider four. The list is not exhaustive, however, as many thinkers from many different schools have considered the problem and proposed potential solutions.

Existentialism

Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe. Many thinkers and writers are associated with the movement, including Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But perhaps the most prominent of the 20th-century existentialists was  Jean-Paul Sartre .

In  Existentialism Is a Humanism ,  Sartre lays out the fundamentals of the philosophy. He explains, “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” In other words, for humans, e xistence precedes essence.  Humans have to decide what it means to be human through their actions and thereby give their lives meaning.

Those choices also define humanity as a whole. As such, Sartre argues that some variation of the categorical imperative — the moral rule that states you should only act in a way that everyone could logically act in — is a vital part of decision-making. Those afraid of existentialists choosing values that would ruin society might also breathe a little easier with this knowledge. 

Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival  Albert Camus . It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason. It is related to, but not the same as, existentialism. 

Camus argues that  absurdity  arises when humans try to impose order and meaning on an inherently irrational and meaningless world. However, the irrationality of the world and the inevitability of the end of our time in it always come together to mock our best attempts at meaning. This is the struggle we all face. 

For Camus, the answer lies in embracing the meaninglessness. He points to Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who Zeus sentences to push a bolder uphill. Sisyphus can make no progress because whenever he’s near the top, the boulder rolls downhill. His task is ultimately meaningless and must be repeated for all eternity. Despite this, Camus asks us to “imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Like us, he faces an absurd situation with no hope of escape. All the order he imposes on the world will eventually come rolling down again. However, Camus tells us that Sisyphus can rebel against the meaninglessness of the situation by embracing the absurdity. He can assert the value of his life and embrace the meaninglessness of his task. By doing so, he can find meaning in the absurdity — even if his work comes to naught in the end. Sisyphus is Camus’s absurdist hero.

Religious existentialism 

While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “ God is dead ” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of S ø ren Kierkegaard . A Danish philosopher working in the first half of the 19th century, he turned his rather angsty disposition into a major philosophy. 

Kierkegaard is concerned with actually living one’s life, not just thinking about it. But in every life, there comes a point where reason runs dry. At that point, passion can help, but Kierkegaard argues that faith is required to really find meaning. That requires a “leap of faith,” and he finds an example of such a leap in the biblical figure of Abraham. As Camus has Sisyphus, so Kierkegaard has Abraham. 

In his book  Fear and Trembling,  Kierkegaard argues that Abraham simultaneously knew that sacrificing Isaac was murder, that God was to be obeyed, and that Issac would be alive and well. For his faith and for voluntarily going through with God’s demands, he was rewarded. Abraham embraced the absurd through belief. Rationality was of little use to him, but faith was. In  Either/Or , Kierkegaard also praises Diogenes as a “Knight of Faith” who earned the title through more mundane activities. 

Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher  Keiji Nishitani . Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed. 

Nishitani saw the modern problem of nihilism as everywhere and tied closely with the tendency for technology to allow us to become more self-centered. While we often encounter “nihility” during major life events like the death of a loved one, it can arise at any time — making the question of how to handle it all the more important. 

He describes human life as taking place in  three fields : consciousness, nihility, and emptiness (or  śūnyatā,  as it is often named in Buddhist thought). We live in the first field most of the time, and it is where we get ideas like dualism or that there is a self. However, nearly everyone eventually encounters the nihility and has to face up to the idea of death, meaninglessness, and the void inherent in our ideas.  Stopping here is what causes problems . Nishitani argues we must push through to the third field. Emptiness surrounds the other two. It allows the individual to understand the true self, how nihility is just as grounded in emptiness as consciousness, and the interrelation of all beings. 

On a more practical level, he suggests Zen meditation as a tool to understand the emptiness inherent in reality. While this is actionable, he does not think it a cure-all to addressing the problem of nihilism as it existed in Japan. 

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The Meaning of Life, Essay Example

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The meaning of life is one of the fundamental questions of philosophy. But what are the presuppositions that frame this question? On the one hand, the very question “what is the meaning of life?” means that life poses us with a problem about its meaning. This is to say that even if we accept a nihilistic position and state that life has no meaning, there is still the appearance of this question of meaning within a meaningless existence. This ties into a second presupposition at stake in this question: what do we intend by the concept of meaning and what do we intend by the concept of life? It would seem that on an intuitive level, when we talk about life, we are talking about any living thing. But is a living thing only something material, or can we consider immaterial phenomena, such as souls, as also living? From another perspective, when we talk about the meaning of life, are we therefore talking about the meaning of all life, such as plants and animals, or are we just talking about human beings? Are we discussing a multitude of meanings, for example, a specific meaning for a plant and a specific meaning for a human being, or are we discussing a singular meaning to which we belong?

In order to provide an entrance-way into these questions, I would like to use this opening discussion to set the framework for my approach: I would like to use the scientific tool of Ockham’s razor to minimize the number of propositions. When we are talking about meaning, therefore, we are talking about a singular meaning for everything. To say that everyone has their own meaning, in other words, is a rejection of the concept of meaning, because it takes on so many possible definitions that the particularity of the concept loses its force. At the same time, when we use the term life, I would like to mention all forms of life, human, plant, animal, and even possible immaterial forms of life, such as the soul. In other words, the meaning of life is one of the big questions of philosophy and therefore should have a universal answer, precisely because the extent of this question itself is one that is universal: in other words, the very power of this question lies in its apparent universality. My meaning of life cannot be different from your meaning of life, in other words, for the question to not merely be trivial: we need to think about a common meaning for all life to avoid this problem of triviality.

The question of meaning is often related to purpose. Why are we here? There is a reason for this presupposed in the question. From one perspective, I would like to believe that there is a purpose and a meaning, precisely for the reason stated above: even if we accept a nihilistic world in which there is no meaning and there is no purpose, we still have to accept that the question of meaning and purpose exists. In other words, if life is meaningless, where does the question of the meaning of life even come from? Is it merely an error of our consciousness? Is it merely a linguistic mistake, an illusion? If we cannot explain how the question emerges against a meaningless backdrop of nihilism, I think then we have to assume that the meaningless backdrop is flawed, and we have to pursue the question of meaning itself.

If our concept of the question of meaning and purpose therefore infers a meaning or purpose because of the very possibility of asking the question, and, furthermore, if this question must be universal, considering the totality of life, for the question itself to have any meaning, we must look for equally universal answers to this question. Here, I believe that the concept of happiness can play an important role. Happiness, of course, is also a notoriously difficult term to define. But we can approach it from its negative element: there are people who are unhappy, who are suffering. Certainly, there may be also some people who think they are happy but are not – in this case, they may be happy because they live in an illusion. But if we accept that the meaning of life is the same for all, that it is universal, then we can also make the proposition that happiness is also universal – namely, if unhappiness exists in the world and the meaning of life is universal then life as a whole must be driven towards happiness as opposed to the happiness of individuals.

This helps elucidate a possible definition of the meaning and purpose of life. We accept that we all have the same purpose and meaning for this question itself to have any meaning. Therefore, the concept of meaning holds for us all. Happiness is something desired, but not possessed by all. Accordingly, the meaning of life would be the movement to this universal happiness, the happiness of the creation as a whole. This is not an absurd idea and finds analogues in religious and secular thought. For example, in Christian philosophy as well as Islamic philosophy, we find the idea of the resurrection of the world and the justice for all. In Marxist philosophy, we find the common task of eliminating inequality in the world to create a happiness for all. In other words, our meaning of life is a process, a type of goal that we move towards that must be universal in its scope, since it addresses the fate of the universe as such and an attempt to improve life in all its forms.

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Question of the Month

What is life, the following answers to this fundamental question each win a random book..

Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth (reproduction and metabolism). The crucial difference between life and non-life (or non-living things) is that life uses energy for physical and conscious development. Life is anything that grows and eventually dies, i.e., ceases to proliferate and be cognizant. Can we say that viruses, for example, are cognizant? Yes, insofar as they react to stimuli; but they are alive essentially because they reproduce and grow. Computers are non-living because even though they can cognize, they do not develop biologically (grow), and cannot produce offspring. It is not cognition that determines life, then: it is rather proliferation and maturation towards a state of death; and death occurs only to living substances.

Or is the question, ‘What is the meaning (purpose) of life?’ That’s a real tough one. But I think that the meaning of life is the ideals we impose upon it, what we demand of it. I’ve come to reaffirm my Boy Scout motto, give or take a few words, that the meaning of life is to: Do good, Be Good, but also to Receive Good. The foggy term in this advice, of course, is ‘good’; but I leave that to the intuitive powers that we all share.

There are, of course, many intuitively clear examples of Doing Good: by retrieving a crying baby from a dumpster; by trying to rescue someone who’s drowning. Most of us would avoid murdering; and most of us would refrain from other acts we find intuitively wrong. So our natural intuitions determine the meaning of life for us; and it seems for other species as well, for those intuitions resonate through much of life and give it its purpose.

Tom Baranski, Somerset, New Jersey

The ceramic artist Edmund de Waal places an object in front of him and begins to tell a story. Even if the patina, chips and signs of repair of the inanimate object hint at its history, the story is told by a living observer. A living thing is an object that contains its story within itself. Life’s story is held in the genome, based in DNA. Maybe other ways for memorising the story may be discovered, but in environments subject to common chemical processes, common methods are likely to emerge.

Although we have only the example of the Earth, it shows that life will evolve to fill every usable niche, and to secure and further diversify those niches. This should not be thought of as purposeful. Life embodies a ‘plan’, but one that does not specify ends, only methods acquired iteratively. Inanimate processes can be cyclic but not iterative: they do not learn from past mistakes.

Life exists at many levels. Life is also a process through which energy and materials are transformed; but so is non-life. The difference is that the process of life is intimately linked to story it contains, whereas non-life is indifferent to the story we impose upon it. Yet life is only a story, so it can act only through matter. Therefore life is by nature a toolmaker. Its tools are potentially everything that exists, and its workshop is potentially the whole universe. So why do humans risk undermining the life of which they are part? Because they try to impose upon it a story of their own making. Yet humans, the ‘tool-making animals’, are themselves tools of life, in an unplanned experiment.

Nicholas Taylor, Little Sandhurst, Berkshire

First the technical definition. Life is self-organising chemistry which reproduces itself and passes on its evolved characteristics, encoded in DNA. In thermodynamics terms, it has the ability to reduce local entropy or disorganisation, thus locally contravening the third law of thermodynamics.

But what is life really about , if anything? The two possibilities are, life is either a meaningless accident arising from the laws of physics operating in a meaningless universe, or it is a step in a planned ‘experiment’. I say ‘step’, because this cannot be the end. The current state of life is as yet too unstable and undeveloped for it to be the end. And I say ‘experiment’ because the evolutionary nature of life suggests that its future is not known. If therefore the universe itself has a purpose, it seems most likely to be to explore what the outcome of the evolutionary experiment would be.

But what will be the outcome? If, as many physicists now believe, the universe is only information, then harnessing all the resources of the universe in one giant evolutionary process could plausibly provide a useful outcome for a species clever enough to create the universe in the first place. On this interpretation, life will ultimately organise all the physical resources of the universe into a single self-conscious intelligence, which in turn will then be able to interact with its creator(s).

Dr Harry Fuchs, Flecknoe, Warwickshire

Life is the embodiment of selfishness! Life is selfish because it is for itself in two ways: it is for its own survival, and it is for its own reproduction. This desire is embodied in an adaptive autocatalytic chemical system, forming life’s embodied mind.

Anything that is not itself is the other; and the collection of others constitute its environment. The organism must destructively use the other to satisfy its reproductive desire, but on achieving this, it produces an additional other – but now one that also embodies its own selfish aim and the means to satisfy this aim. Therefore, even by an organism satisfying its desire, it makes the continuing satisfaction of its desires ever more difficult to achieve. A partial solution to this dilemma is for genetically-related entities to form a cooperating society.

The underlying mechanism of evolution is therefore the iteration of the embodied desire within an ever more complex competitive and social environment. Over vast numbers of iterations, this process forces some life-forms along a pathway that solves the desire for survival and reproduction by developing ever more complex and adaptable minds. This is achieved by supplementing their underlying cellular embodied chemistry with a specialist organ (although still based on chemistry) that we call its brain, able to rapidly process electrical signals. Advanced minds can collect and process vast inputs of data by ‘projecting’ the derived output back onto its environmental source, that is by acting. However advanced it might be, an organism is still driven by the same basic needs for survival and reproduction. The creative process, however, leads the organism towards an increasingly aesthetic experience of the world. This is why for us the world we experience is both rich and beautiful.

Dr Steve Brewer, St Ives, Cornwall

In our scientific age, we look to the biologists to define ‘life’ for us. After all, it is their subject matter. I believe they have yet to reach consensus, but a biological definition would be something like, ‘Life is an arrangement of molecules with qualities of self-sustenance and self-replication’. This kind of definition might serve the purposes of biologists, but for me, it has five deficiencies. First, any definition of life by biologists would have little utility outside biology because of its necessary inclusiveness. We humans would find ourselves in a class of beings that included the amoeba. ‘Life’ would be the limited common properties of all organisms, including the lowest. Second, the scientific definition of life is necessarily an external one. I think that knowing what life is, as opposed to defining it, requires knowing it from within. Non-sentient organisms live, but they do not know life. Third, in the scientific definition, there is no place for life having value. However, many would say that life has value in its own right – that it is not simply that we humans value life and so give it value, but that it has value intrinsically. Fourth, there is the question of life as a whole having a purpose or goal. This notion is not scientific, but one wonders if the tools of science are fit to detect any evolutionary purpose, if there is one. Fifth, for the scientists, life is a set of biological conditions and processes. However, everywhere and always, people have conceived of a life after biological death, a life of spirit not necessarily dependent on the physical for existence.

The scientific definition of life is valid in its context, but otherwise I find it impoverished. I believe there is a hierarchy of living beings from the non-sentient, to the sentient, to humans, and perhaps up to God. When I ask, ‘What is life? I want to know what life is at its highest form. I believe life at its best is spirit: it is active, sentient, feeling, thinking, purposive, valuing, social, other-respecting, relating, and caring.

John Talley, Rutherfordton, NC

I listen enthralled to scientific debate on what, how, when and where life was created. However, questions remain which may never be resolved. In this vacuum, philosophers and religious thinkers have attempted to give meaning to life by suggesting goals: Plato suggested the acquisition of knowledge, Aristotle to practice virtue, and the Stoics, mental fortitude and self-control. Today’s philosophers echo the existentialist view that life is full of absurdity, although they also tell us that we must put meaning into life by making our own values in an indifferent world. But if life is just a journey from womb to tomb, will such ‘meaning’ be sufficient to allow the traveller at journey’s end to feel that it was worthwhile?

Perhaps the hypothesis upon which Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin have based their therapy could help (see Human Givens , 2003). They describe that we are born with evolved needs that seek satisfaction from our environment. These are physical and emotional needs, which, when enough of them are met, ensure the health of the individual, maximising his or her ability to achieve meaning in life. Griffin and Tyrrell have proven empirically that when sufficient needs are met an individual will enjoy mental and physical health, unless there is damage or toxicity in the environment. Some of these needs were identified by Maslow in his ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ in his 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review , 50 (4), but Griffin and Tyrrell focus more clearly on emotional needs such as:

• To achieve, and to feel competent

• To fulfil our sense of autonomy and control

• To be emotionally connected to other people and part of a larger community

• To have a sense of status within social groupings

• For privacy and rest, to reflect and consolidate learning

• And yes – to have meaning in one’s life

Meaning becomes difficult, if not impossible, to achieve if these needs are insufficiently satisfied. Unfortunately, modern society seeks meaning to life through materialism, to the detriment of our biological needs, leading to dissatisfaction and a consequent inability to find meaning. The result is an exponential increase in mental ill-health. Sadly, then, many of us will not experience the satisfaction of a meaningful life journey.

Caryl A. Fuchs, Flecknoe, Warwickshire

Life is the eternal and unbroken flow of infinite rippling simultaneous events that by a fortuitous chain has led to this universe of elements we are all suspended in, that has somehow led to this present experience of sentient existence. Animal life (excluding that of humans) shows that life is a simple matter of being, by means of a modest routine of eating, sleeping and reproducing. Animals balance their days between these necessities, doing only what their bodies ask of them. The life of vegetation is not far from that of animals. They eat and sleep and reproduce in their own way, for the same result. So life is a beautiful and naturally harmonious borrowing of energy.

Yet we have taken it for granted. We have lost the power to simply be happy eating, sleeping, reproducing, believing we need a reason to be alive, a purpose and a goal to reach, so that on our deathbeds (something we have been made to fear) we can look back and tell ourselves we have done something with our lives. Life has lost its purpose because we have tried to give it one. The truth is that we are no more significant than the sand by the sea or the clouds in the sky. No more significant. But as significant.

No matter what your race, religion or gender, when you first step outside your door in the morning and feel the fresh air in your lungs and the morning sun on your face, you close your eyes and smile. In that moment you are feeling life as it should be. No defining, no understanding, no thinking. Just that feeling of pure bliss. For that is what life is.

Courtney Walsh, Farnborough, Hampshire

Of all Webster’s definitions of ‘life’, the one for me that best covers it is, “the sequence of physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual.” Indeed, life is a continuum of accomplishment, failure, discovery, dilemma, challenge, boredom, sadness, disappointment, appreciation, the giving and receipt of grace, empathy, peace, and our reactions to all sorts of stimuli – touch, love, friendship, loss… One can either merely exist or try to achieve, working through the difficult times, perhaps learning a thing or two. Everyone has a story. I’ve been surprised when learning something new about an acquaintance or friend that must have been very difficult to manage or survive; but there they are in front of me. It’s how you come out on the other side of those challenging times that is important. How you land, get on with it, and keep on truckin’.

Life cannot be planned: there’s fate, and there’s simple bad luck. Failure can bring crushing disappointment, or you can try and make a new plan. A person can waste an inordinate amount of time mourning what they don’t have, or plans that don’t work out. But who wants to waste that much time regretting?

Life has happy surprises, small moments to cherish. It’s a matter of weighing the good and bad times – the challenge is to balance both, ending up with a life looked back on that was worth the mighty effort. I’m not meaning to sound like a Pollyanna – I assure you I’m not – it’s just more pleasant to strive for a modicum of equilibrium. If I can manage that, I’m good.

Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” ( Macbeth , Act V, Scene V)

These words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth summarize interesting ideas about the nature of life. The first line expresses two of the three marks of existence as per Buddhist thinking, Anicca , impermanence, and Anatta , non-self: a “walking shadow” is as insubstantial and impermanent as anything imaginable; a “poor player” neither creates nor directs his role, and the character being played only exists because of an author. Macbeth’s entire statement, particularly the last sentence, expresses the third Buddhist mark of existence: Dukkha , dissatisfaction.

The stage metaphor in the second line represents boundaries or limits. Scientific research into the nature of life often focuses on the material, energetic, and temporal limitations within which life can exist. The temporal limit of life is known as death. In the spirit of this interpretation, the idea of being “heard no more” could imply that life constantly evolves new forms while discarding older ones.

Macbeth hints at the wisdom of mystery traditions while anticipating the revelations of genetic science by stating that life “is a tale”. Now, this refers to the language-based, or code-based, nature of life. Readers may consider this in relation to DNA and RNA, and also in relation to John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (The implications of the phrase “told by an idiot” exceed the scope of this inquiry.)

In five concise and poetic lines, Shakespeare defined life as an impermanent, non-self-directed, unsatisfactory, limited, ever-changing, and ultimately insignificant code.

Devon Hall, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Life is the realisation of its own contingency. But that’s not the end of it; it’s merely the means towards the creation of meaning. Life is thus a constant process of becoming, through creating values and meaning. Life is therefore perpetual transcendence, always moving into the future, creating the present. Life is also acceptance: the acceptance of finitude; acceptance of one’s responsibilities; acceptance of other human beings’ existence and choices. Life is neither fixed nor absolute, it is ambiguous; life is the possibilities entailed by existence. Life is the consciousness of humanity; it is perception of the world and the universe. So life is sadness; life is death. Life is suffering and destruction. But life is also happiness; life is living. Life is joy and creativity. Life is finding a cause to survive, a reason not to die – not yet. It is youth and old age, with everything in between. Overall, life is beautiful – ugliness is fleeting. Corpses and skeletons are lugubrious; living flesh is resplendent, all bodies are statuesque. Human life is love and hate, but it can only be life when we are with others. Life as fear and hatred is not real life at all. For some, life is God. We would all then be His children. We are nevertheless the spawn of the Earth.

Human existence is freedom – an edifice of plurality.

Greg Chatterton, Cupar, Fife

If the ancients could do philosophy in the marketplace, maybe I can too. So I employed some modern technology by texting the question ‘What is Life?’ to all my contacts. I didn’t explain the context of the question, to avoid lyrical waxing. Here are a sample of replies. Life is: being conscious of yourself and others; a being with a soul; experience; what you make it; your chance to be a success; family; living as long as you can; not being dead; greater than the sum of its parts; complex chemical organisation; different things to different people; a mystery; a journey; don’t know; a quote from a song, “baby don’t hurt me”; life begins after death. I asked a regular in my favourite café. They said, “man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” A person suffering from a degenerative disease answered: “life is sh** then you die.” Another with the same illness interviewed in our local newspaper said, “My life is a mission to help other sufferers.” A colleague said “some would want to shoot themselves if they had my life, but I’m happy.” I posed the question at my art club and we did no painting that day…

I was surprised to find that I had no immediate definition of life myself (hence the idea to ask) and that there is no consensus (only one reply was repeated), but then, that also is life.

I sometimes catch myself considering life when I arrive at the turning point on my evening walk. It’s a dark spot which makes stargazing easier, and the heavens are a good place to start, since life as we know it began there (the heavier atoms like carbon which make up our bodies initially formed in dying Red Giant stars). This makes me feel two things about my life: it’s a dot because the cosmos is immense; but it’s an important dot in the cosmos because I can consider it.

Kristine Kerr, Gourock, Renfrewshire

Next Question of the Month

Now we know what life is, the next question is, How Should I Live? Please give and justify your ethical advice in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines or envelopes should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 9th June. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address. Submission implies permission to reproduce your answer physically and electronically. Thank you.

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The Meaning of Life: Personal Essay Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

When it comes to the meaning of life, there are two different ways we can look at it. Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages, and ultimately it is up to the individual to decide which sense of the term they use when discussing the meaning of life. In my opinion, life has meaning which comes from the choices, relationships, and experiences that an individual has, so I find personal meaning within myself.

The external meaning of life is something that is imposed upon us from an outside source. This could be anything from a religious belief system to a set of societal norms and expectations. For example, some people may believe that the meaning of life is to serve God, while others may think that the meaning of life is to be successful in their career. The advantage of this type of meaning is that it provides a clear goal and a sense of purpose, which can help people stay focused and motivated (Novosel, 2020). The disadvantage, however, is that it can be limiting and can make it difficult to explore and find meaning in other areas of life.

The internal meaning of life is something that we find within ourselves. I believe that life is a journey and the meaning of life comes from the choices we make and the relationships we form. Expressing creativity and helping others by making a positive impact on the world are just a few ways to find purpose in life (Novosel, 2020). Nevertheless, it can be challenging to discover the meaning of life, as it requires self-reflection and exploration. The reward of this effort is the sense of freedom it brings, allowing us to define our own sense of purpose.

In conclusion, life is a journey and the meaning of life is a combination of both the internal and external meaning. It is often said that there is no definite answer to the question of the meaning of life. Everyone has their own distinct point of view and it is ultimately the individual’s choice to select which interpretation they would like to embrace. It could be an external interpretation or an internal one; the essential thing is to uncover something that brings pleasure and satisfaction to your life.

Novosel, N. (2020). The meaning of life: A guide to finding your life’s purpose . Nathanael Garrett Novosel.

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Family Walking on Highway, Five Children (June 1938 ) by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy the Library of Congress

Rawls the redeemer

For john rawls, liberalism was more than a political project: it is the best way to fashion a life that is worthy of happiness.

by Alexandre Lefebvre   + BIO

John Rawls, the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century whose masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971), fundamentally reshaped the field, lived a quiet and – I mean this the best way – boring life. After an eventful and sometimes tragic youth (more on this later), he settled into an academic career and worked at Harvard University for nearly 40 years. There, he developed ideas that transformed our thinking about justice, fairness, democracy and liberalism, and also trained generations of students who are now leading members of the profession. He died aged 81 in 2002, the year I began my graduate studies, so I never had the chance to meet him. Yet every single account I’ve heard from his students and colleagues attests to his genuine kindness. Decent is the word that comes up time and again, in the understated sense of unshowy goodness.

Still waters can run deep, however, and from archival research I’ve discovered charming eccentricities. Every year, for instance, his family would put on a Christmas play that worked in his famous concepts as minor characters. My favourite bit of oddness, though, comes from an interview he gave to mark his retirement. In 1991, he sat down with undergraduate students to discuss his life, work, reception and teaching. But in a draft copy of the interview, included in his personal papers at Harvard, he added a weird and wonderful section that does not appear in the published version (and that, it seems, he wrote only for himself). After answering the questions from the students, he noted down a few ‘Questions They Didn’t Ask Me’ and played the role of interviewer and interviewee. Here’s the addendum in full:

There were lots of questions they didn’t ask me in [ The Harvard Review of Philosophy ( HRP )] interview. Some of those they could have asked I’ll answer here:

HRP (as imagined): You never talk about religion in your classes, although sometimes the discussion borders on it. Why is that? Do you think religion of no importance? Or that it has no role in our life?

JR: On the role of religion, put it this way. Let’s ask the question: Does life need to be redeemed? And if so, why; and what can redeem it? I would say yes: life does need to be redeemed. By life I mean the ordinary round of being born, growing up, falling in love, and marrying and having children; seeing that they grow up, go to school, and have children themselves; of supporting ourselves and carrying on day after day; of growing older and having grandchildren and eventually dying. All that and much else needs to be redeemed.

HRP : Fine, but what’s this business about being redeemed? It doesn’t say anything to me.

JR: Well, what I mean is that what I call the ordinary round of life – growing up, falling in love, having children and the rest – can seem not enough by itself. That ordinary round must be graced by something to be worthwhile. That’s what I mean by redeemed. The question is what is needed to redeem it?

This is bizarre for many reasons. I mean, first, who does this? Who goes home after an interview and, just for the fun of it, invents and answers hypothetical questions? But stranger still is the content. Readers of Rawls don’t expect him to speak this way. He is, after all, a political philosopher and the main question associated with his work is the following: how is it possible for an institutional order to be just? Yet, what if, when the chips were down at the end of his career, he spoke more directly and plainly, even if only to himself, to state a more fundamental question at the root of his life and thought: how is it possible for a human life – yours, mine, or any – to be worthwhile?

Ordinary life, says Rawls, needs to be redeemed. By what? It depends on what you believe in. A theist will have one response, an atheist or agnostic another. The young Rawls was a believer, and after completing his undergraduate studies had planned to become a minister. But he lost his faith as a soldier in the Second World War. Even so, he never abandoned a conviction that ordinary life needs to be elevated (‘redeemed’ or ‘graced’) by something beyond it.

I believe Rawls found that thing in liberalism and the tradition of liberal moral and political thought he devoted his life to. He never stopped trying to work out how a life based on liberal ideals can be not only happy but worthy of happiness. This makes him the perfect guru for our times.

T o see why Rawls fits this role, I need to say something about the peculiar moment we live in. As everyone knows, religion is in decline throughout the Western world. To name only the most populous Anglophone liberal democracies, surveys of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show that 30, 53, 32, 40 and 49 per cent, respectively, of citizens in these countries claim no religion. People who tick the ‘no religion’ box on the census are the fastest-growing population of religious affiliation, or in this case, of non-affiliation.

This raises a tricky question. If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?

When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’. But to this I reply, as politely as possible, that those are not suitable answers. Personal experience, friends and family and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political and cultural contexts. So I ask again: ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’

In my book Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024), I argue that the unchurched in the Western world should point to liberalism as the source of who they are through and through. Liberalism – with its core values of personal freedom, fairness, reciprocity, tolerance and irony – is that society-or-civilisation-sized thing that may well underlie who we are, not just in our political opinions but in all walks of life, from the family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between.

How can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous, despite new temptations not to be?

This argument will not be news for conservative critics who are keenly aware of how hegemonic liberalism has become. Ironically, though, it may surprise liberals themselves, who often fail to recognise how widely and deeply their liberalism runs. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a ‘social and political philosophy’ based on ‘support for or advocacy of individual rights, civil liberty, and reform tending towards individual freedom, democracy, or social equality’, liberals too quickly adopt this narrow institutionalist definition and assume that liberalism is an exclusively legal and political doctrine. Liberals, in other words, fail to recognise not just what liberalism has become today (a worldview and comprehensive value system) but who they are as well: living and breathing incarnations of it.

The founders of liberalism would have been disappointed in us. A newcomer by the standards of intellectual history, it was created in the 19th century by such greats as Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, George Eliot and John Stuart Mill. While there are many differences between them, they all conceive of liberalism first and foremost in ethical terms – a ‘moral adventure’, as Adam Gopnik has called it, for living well in the modern world. As Helena Rosenblatt states in her excellent book , The Lost History of Liberalism (2018): ‘Today we may think that they were naive, deluded, or disingenuous. But to 19th-century liberals, being liberal meant believing in an ethical project.’

What does this mean? Then, as now, the word ‘liberal’ (with its roots in the Latin liber and liberalis ) combines two meanings: freedom ( liberty ) and generosity ( liberality ). When 19th-century thinkers (and statespersons, journalists, novelists, soldiers and more) claimed this mantle for themselves, they wrestled with a very deep question. How, they asked, can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous, despite all kinds of new temptations not to be? Capitalism, for example, entices us with shiny consumerism; democracy can lull us into conformity; and nationalism ensnares us in unearned partiality. These are social and political dangers to be sure. But early liberals also saw them as bedevilments apt to make us mean, restless, unhappy and just generally shitty people. Liberalism was the ethical and political doctrine they created to try to bring these new forces under political and psychological control.

Which raises an important question: what the hell happened to liberalism? If in the 19th century it was an aspirational doctrine for living well, but in the 20th and 21st century it retreated to a much more staid legal and political project, the question is why and when were its ethical guts stripped out?

Historians and philosophers blame different and complementary causes. Rosenblatt points to early 20th-century thinkers who, dissatisfied with New Deal progressivism, invented a retrenched ‘classical liberalism’. In Liberalism Against Itself (2023), Samuel Moyn names the Cold War liberals who repudiated the progressivism and perfectionism of their forebearers. For my part, I focus on a branch of contemporary political philosophy (‘political liberalism’ – founded, ironically, by Rawls’s 1993 work of the same name, after A Theory of Justice ) that eschews questions of the good life to work out a conception of liberalism fit for a pluralist society divided by disagreements between citizens on questions of value and meaning.

Whatever the reason for why liberalism’s ethical side vanished, it is high time to reclaim it. Let me be blunt: liberals are awful at defending themselves. First of all, the global conversation about the current crisis of liberalism tends to fixate on the opponents of liberalism, and how horrible populists, nativists and authoritarians are. Rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up. Moreover, when liberalism is defended, the reasons given are almost exclusively legal or political. Politicians and journalists insist on the indispensability of such institutions as division of powers, rule of law and individual rights. Certainly, that kind of defence is crucial. But by claiming that liberalism not only can be, in general, a way of life, but much more pointedly, may already be the basis of your own, I am drawing attention to a whole other set of reasons – call it ‘spiritual’ or ‘existential’, no matter how jittery such terms make liberals – for why we should care deeply about the fate of our creed.

T here is no better guide to this endeavour than Rawls. To use an old-fashioned word, he is a superb moralist, gifted at detecting the underlying moral commitments of a liberal democratic society and showing how we, as its members, understand and comport ourselves. It is as if he speaks directly to our conscience to say: ‘OK, if you see your society and yourself in a liberal kind of way, here is what you can do to live up to it.’ Then he adds: ‘Oh, I almost forgot, great joys and benefits come from living this way. Let me show you.’

We’ll get to these joys in a moment. Every guru, however, has an origin story and Rawls’s is worth telling. A few years before he died, he wrote a short, unpublished autobiography titled ‘Just Jack’. ‘Jack’ was what friends and family called him, and ‘just’ was a play on the meanings of justice and simply . As I said, in contrast to his tranquil decades as a Harvard professor, his youth was eventful and at times tragic. On two separate occasions as a child, he passed fatal illnesses to his younger brothers (diphtheria to Bobby Rawls in 1928, and then pneumonia to Tommy Rawls in 1929) and developed a stammer from the trauma. In 1944, he served as an infantryman in the Pacific, was nearly killed in battle, and got a Bronze Star for bravery. Yet in telling his life story, Rawls dwells on a minor incident from his early 20s, when he had to go out and get a real job. While an undergraduate at Princeton in 1941, he had wanted to go on a sailing trip with friends and expected his family would pay. To his chagrin, his father had other ideas, telling Jack to work if he wanted a holiday. He did, and the experience was formative:

Jobs were hard to find in those days. The depression was beginning to ease by that time, of course, but the best I could do on short notice was a 12-hour job – 6 am to 6 pm, six days a week – in a doughnut factory somewhere in downtown Baltimore, whose location I have conveniently repressed. I was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life …

Ernie was decent and considerate, and never spoke harshly to me. He seemed resigned to the fact that he would always have that sort of job. There was no prospect of advance, really, or much hope of anything better for him. As for me, I decided to look elsewhere. There must be jobs easier than this, I thought, and 12 hours a day breathing flour dust was too much …

I came to feel very sorry for Ernie. Often I’ve felt my days at the doughnut factory and Ernie’s decency and stoicism in view of his fate – or so it seemed to me – made a lasting impression. So that was how most people spent their lives, of course not literally, but to all practical purposes: pointless labour for not much pay, and even if well paid it led nowhere. Even business and law struck me as dead ends. While trying not to forget the plight of the Ernies of this world, I had to find my place in life in some other way. Did these things influence me in proposing the difference principle years later? I wouldn’t claim so. But how would I know?

Who am I to gainsay Rawls? Still, his thought makes a lot of sense when viewed through the prism of this experience. It might even help us learn how to live liberally in the 21st century.

Fairness is the most important concept of Rawls’s philosophy. It is, negatively speaking, the precise quality missing when a person like Ernie must toil endlessly at a job that a college student like Jack can quit after six weeks because he finds it difficult and demeaning. And decades later, when it came time to write A Theory of Justice , Rawls crowned it as the defining ideal of liberal democracy. Society , he states, should be conceived of and run as a fair system of cooperation . Or in the words of one contemporary acolyte, Leif Wenar: ‘Our country is built for everyone.’

H ow Rawls arrives at this notion is significant. Crucially, he doesn’t claim it as his own insight. Nor does he derive it from first moral or philosophical principles. He believes instead that citizens of liberal democracies by and large already see and structure their societies as fair systems of cooperation. They have, after all, grown up in countries where all major public institutions profess to advance the freedom, dignity and equal opportunity of all citizens. In Australia, for example, politicians of all stripes insist on the importance of a ‘fair go’. That’s why the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation is accessible to a wide readership: not merely because Rawls’s readers ‘know’ or ‘understand’ what he’s talking about, but much more powerfully because they already affirm it as expressing something essential about themselves and their society. It is no surprise that some of Rawls’s best interpreters, such as Samuel Freeman, report that reading him for the first time can elicit strong feelings of déjà vu, a recognition of what we already know.

Rawls isn’t oblivious to real-world injustices. He knows that no society lives up to this ideal. Nor does he think that citizens of liberal democracies wear rose-coloured (or, worse, ideologically tinted) glasses. Still, he bases his theory on the assumption that his fellow citizens recognise that the key purpose of their main public institutions is to ensure that society is seen as, and remains, a fair system of cooperation. Virtually everyone can be expected to know, on his account, that the purpose of a legal constitution is to establish equal and reciprocal rights, the job of the police is to protect them, and progressive taxation is meant to ensure a level playing field.

Rawls is enjoying a renaissance in public philosophy, with several authors applying his conception of fairness to different domains. In Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler investigates education, workplace democracy and universal basic income, while in his recent essay for Aeon, Matthew McManus calls for a revival of liberal socialism on Rawlsian principles. And I’ve tried to bring this notion to bear on psychology and culture to help liberals unlock the best part of themselves.

Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position. Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imagine you are with a group of people who are tasked to select principles of justice to regulate the fundamental institutions of society. The plot twist, however, is you don’t know anything about yourself. You agree to step behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and pretend that you don’t know your sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness or anything that might distinguish you from others.

There are great spiritual goods – great joys – that come from living up to liberal principles

Which principles would you pick? It’s a no-brainer for Rawls: those that favour fairness when it comes to basic rights, self-respect, and resources and opportunities. Why? Prudence, in part: the pie should be divided as equally as possible lest it be revealed that you’re in a less-advantaged position. But the moral oomph of the original position is to remind citizens of liberal democracies – particularly those of privilege – that the dumb luck of social position and natural abilities shouldn’t bear on issues of justice. A liberal person should leave all that at the door.

This may be fine in theory but let’s make it concrete. Suppose this hypothetical society has only two members. Their names are Ernie and Jack, and they’ve been asked to play the game of the original position.

Ernie goes first and, frankly, he’s got nothing to lose. He can happily pretend not to know who he is because, under fair principles of justice, he stands to gain a much better deal in life. No fuss, no muss for Ernie.

Now it’s Jack’s turn. This involves a different calculation. Why should he – pampered Princeton princeling that he is – ever agree to bracket the positional advantages that have worked out so well for him thus far in life? Disgraced or not, a remark by the comic Louis CK is painfully apt. On whether it is better to be Black or white in the United States, the answer for him is obvious: ‘I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option, I would re-up every year: “Oh yeah, I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that. I’m gonna stick with white, thank you.’’’ For Jack to suspend knowledge of his advantages – his good looks, impeccable WASP credentials, upper-middle-classness and all the rest – in reflecting on which principles of social cooperation to affirm might seem positively irrational.

So why do it? What’s in it for Jack? First, it’s the right thing to do. But second, just as importantly, there are great spiritual goods – great joys – that come from living up to liberal principles.

By engaging in the original position, Jack embraces impartiality and autonomy as core virtues. This means liberating himself from the narrow confines of self-interest and positional bias. In a world rife with inequality and injustice, impartiality allows Jack to see beyond his own perspective, fostering empathy and understanding for others. Autonomy, on the other hand, empowers him to act in accordance with his values, free from external coercion or undue influence.

By embodying impartiality and autonomy, Jack also cultivates resilience in the face of temptation and adversity. In a consumer culture where self-restraint and stalwartness are often tested, adherence to liberal principles instils moral fortitude. And if Jack gets good at navigating such ethical dilemmas, we might even say that he will become graceful. He will fulfil the requirements of justice with pleasure and relative ease.

In short, Jack’s decision – and our decision, which can be made at any time – to embrace the original position is not just a thought experiment but a transformative spiritual practice. And now we return to where we began with Rawls: on redemption. Liberalism, it is true, has no metaphysics to speak of. The soul? The Great Beyond? The purpose of it all? ‘Pfffftt,’ goes the liberal. Yet we’ve never given up on the core of religion: to seek meaning in life through something beyond us. Our Beyond is found not on another plane of existence but instead in something worldly just beyond our grasp – an ideal of becoming a free and generous person in a fair and just society. Redemption is not found only in a liberal way of life. Heaven forbid. Yet it’s there too, waiting for liberals to answer its call.

Adapted from Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024) by Alexandre Lefebvre, published by Princeton University Press.

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Stella Sandford

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

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At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought

Rami Gabriel

3 Things That Give Life Meaning

2. feeling that you matter..

Posted July 26, 2022 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• “Sense of meaning in life” refers to the subjective sense that a person’s life as a whole is meaningful.
• New research suggests the sense of meaning is associated with the feeling that life has purpose and direction.
• Meaning in life is also related to the perception that a person’s life matters and her experiences make sense.

What is meant by a meaningful life ? A meaningful life is commonly associated with or predicted by the following:

• Positive self-views (e.g., high self-esteem and self-confidence ).
• Seeing oneself as distinct (i.e., different from others in a positive way).
• Sense of self-continuity , meaning a connection between the past and present.
• Satisfaction of basic psychological needs —the need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

An important question is what makes a certain aspect of one’s life or worldview meaningful. According to a recent study by Costin and Vignoles, published in the August issue of the Journal of Personality , a sense of meaning in life is based on:

• Perceptions of life as making sense
• Feeling that one’s life matters and is worthy
• Having a purpose and moving toward valued goals

The study is described below, after a few definitions.

Meaning in Life

The sense of meaning in life refers to subjective perceptions of one’s life as a whole being meaningful. Note that this is different from the meaningfulness of particular activities within life. For instance, despite engaging in activities you consider meaningful (e.g., volunteering or teaching), you may feel your life as a whole is not meaningful.

In addition, people may perceive certain aspects of their worldview or self-view (e.g., occupation, talents, abilities, intimate relationships) as more meaningful than others. But what determines the meaningfulness of these aspects? More generally, what makes a particular worldview, attitude, belief, value, or identity —collectively called “mental representations”—meaningful?

Vignoles and Costin hypothesize that mental representations “foster a sense of [meaning in life] to the extent that they provide feelings of coherence, purpose, and existential mattering.” The three investigations described in the next section tested the authors’ hypothesis.

Before we continue, a few additional definitions:

• Coherence : “Perceptions of order... applied to self-related experiences.”
• Purpose : “Having an overarching life aim that subsumes and organizes other goals.”
• Existential mattering : “An evaluation that one’s life is worth living and matters on a wider scale.”

What Makes Life Meaningful?

Sample: 208 (108 females) American Amazon MTurk workers; average age of 38 and with an age range of 20 to 74; 94 atheists and agnostics, 92 Christians; 120 were full-time employed and 50 were self-employed or part-time employed.

Methods: Information was collected on participants’ mental representations regarding the domains of family identity, role identity, national identity, religious identity, socioeconomic beliefs, beliefs related to free will and determinism, beliefs about human nature, personal values, moral values, and attitude toward abortion and death penalty.

These mental representations were then rated in terms of meaning in life and related constructs, such as self-efficacy , belonging, self-continuity, personal control, self-esteem, meaning, purpose, coherence, and mattering.

For instance, participants were asked whether the representation provided “a sense of meaningfulness,” “a sense of purpose and direction,” “a sense of order and coherence,” and “a sense of control.”

An analysis of the data showed mental representations that give one a sense of mattering, coherence, and purpose were perceived as more meaningful.

Furthermore, mattering and purpose predicted meaning in life even after researchers controlled for various factors, like self-esteem and individual differences in religious beliefs.

Coherence, however, did not predict meaning in life in some analyses.

Sample: 106 UK college students (87 females); average age of 19 years old, and with an age range of 18 to 27 years; 78 were agnostic or atheist.

Methods: Similar to the above investigation, with minor variations. For example, self-insight and self-reflection were also measured.

The results indicated that coherence, mattering, and purpose predicted the sense of meaning in life, though coherence was less predictive.

Sample: A nationally representative group of 296 British participants (151 females); average age of 45 years old, with an age range of 18 to 82; 242 Whites; 170 atheists or agnostics, 94 Christians.

Methods: Similar to the earlier investigations, with minor variations. For instance, a potential fourth dimension of meaning in life, called experiential appreciation, was also tested. And since the data collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were additional questions concerning pandemic-related fears and worries.

Analysis of data replicated previous findings: Mattering, coherence, and purpose predicted the sense of meaning in life, even after researchers controlled for experiential appreciation. The biggest predictor was having a purpose in life.

Predictors of Meaning in Life

In summary, the reviewed investigations found that existential mattering , coherence , and a sense of purpose predicted meaning in life.

The strongest and most reliable predictor was a sense of purpose.

In addition, existential mattering was a stronger predictor than coherence.

Because living a meaningful life is essential to well-being and life satisfaction, let me conclude by recommending ways to enhance meaningfulness.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself on a regular basis, in order to get a sense of how meaningful your life is to you at the moment and whether it is becoming more or less meaningful over time.

• Coherence: Does your life make sense? Is there clarity? Are things as they “should” be? Do the different aspects of your life fit together nicely? Or is your life confused and fragmented?
• Mattering: Do you matter? Is your existence valuable? Have your actions and life as a whole made an important difference in the world? Or do you believe the world would not have really noticed or cared if you had not existed at all?
• Purpose: Do you have a clear view of the direction your life is headed? Do you have important goals in life and are you committed to them? Or are you wandering aimlessly, with no appealing or worthy goal in life?

Facebook /LinkedIn image: Taras Grebinets/Shutterstock

Arash Emamzadeh attended the University of British Columbia in Canada, where he studied genetics and psychology. He has also done graduate work in clinical psychology and neuropsychology in U.S.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Fahrenheit 451 — The Symbolic Meaning of Fire in Fahrenheit 451

The Symbolic Meaning of Fire in Fahrenheit 451

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Published: Aug 1, 2024

Words: 1009 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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Suppression and control, rebellion and resistance, transformation and renewal, bibliography.

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What does 'woke' mean in politics? How the term is used now is far from its original meaning

The word "woke" is tossed around a lot in political and social debates all around the country. It's ramping up as Election Day draws near.

The term carries different meanings and strong emotional connections for people, and it has changed over the years. So what is the history and the meaning of the word "woke"? And why you can expect to see it become a frequently used term in the presidential election in November?

What is the definition and history of 'woke'?

The term "woke" used to have a different meaning. It was first used by Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey as early as 1923 . "Woke" was meant to acknowledge the struggles of African Americans and a word of empowerment for some Black people.

When the Black Lives Matter movement began after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, "woke" expanded outside of Black communities into the larger public lexicon and became co-opted or appropriated for various political agendas , the definition of the word has evolved and come to mean different things to different people.

What do conservatives mean when they say 'woke'?

The term woke has been used by conservative figures as pejorative term to describe the following social justice initiatives:

LGBTQ rights: A movement advocating for the equal treatment and elimination of discriminatory policies hurting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, according to Britannica .

Gender-affirming care: Access to services such as mental health, medical, surgical and nonmedical services for nonbinary and transgender people, according to the Office of Population Affairs.

Diversity, equity and inclusion measures: A form of hiring and employee retention meant to reduce biases and improve the accessibility of jobs for disenfranchised minorities. Companies such as Harley-Davidson and Tractor Supply have faced boycotts over these measures .

Critical race theory: A social and intellectual movement that studies the relationship between race, racism and power, as described by theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in their book, “Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge.”

How is the term 'woke' viewed?

A USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll from March 2023 demonstrates the varying ideas for what 'woke' means among Americans between Republicans and Democrats.

Of those surveyed , 56% percent say the term means "to be informed, educated on and aware of social injustices." That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans. Overall, 39% say the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, "to be overly politically correct and police others' words." 56% of Republicans agreed with this view.

The term will likely continue to be a point of contention heading into the November election.

'Woke culture' decried by Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and Tesla CEO Elon Musk

For years, conservative activists, lawmakers and politicians have used the term "woke" as a slam against progressive values and liberal initiatives.

The woke Left’s agenda has no place in our schools or military. Wokeness is weakness! — Glenn Jacobs (@GlennJacobsTN) July 9, 2024

Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs has previously warned Republicans against allowing a "woke" culture to flourish. He posted on X to say the "wokeness is weakness" and it has no place in schools or military. He didn't detail what he meant.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" and claimed he was tricked into signing documents agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures for her.

USA TODAY contributed to this report

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: What does 'woke' mean in politics? How the term has changed

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What is the Sahm Rule?

How the sahm rule works, types of sahm rule indicators, history of the sahm rule, limitations of the sahm rule, the bottom line, the sahm rule recession indicator definition and how it's calculated.

Erika Rasure is globally-recognized as a leading consumer economics subject matter expert, researcher, and educator. She is a financial therapist and transformational coach, with a special interest in helping women learn how to invest.

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The "Sahm Rule" is a recession indicator created and named after Claudia Sahm, a macroeconomist who worked at the Federal Reserve and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. According to the Sahm Rule, the early stages of a recession is signaled when the three-month moving average of the U.S. unemployment rate is half a percentage point or more above the lowest three-month moving average unemployment rate over the previous 12 months.

The Sahm Rule has been widely recognized for its accuracy, simplicity, and ability to quickly reflect the onset of a recession.

Key Takeaways

• The Sahm Rule is a indicator that looks at signals related to the onset of a recession.
• According to the rule, the early stages of recession are signaled when the three-month average unemployment rate moves above the lowest three-month moving average unemployment rate over the last 12 months by half a percentage point or more.
• The rule has become widely recognized as a recession indicator due to its accuracy and simplicity.
• The Sahm rule was first introduced by macroeconomist Claudia Sahm in 2019 as part of a policy proposal.

The unemployment rate represents the percentage of the overall labor force that is unemployed. The rate tends to rise when the economy is struggling and workers are having difficulty finding jobs, and fall when the economy is strong and workers can more easily find jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) typically releases the unemployment rate for the previous month on the first Friday of every month. The unemployment rate is one of the main economic indicators used to measure the health of the economy, and the Sahm Rule inputs the rate into a simple formula to determine whether the U.S. is headed into a recession.

The rule compares the value of the current three-month moving average unemployment rate to the value of the lowest three-month moving average unemployment rate over the last 12 months. If the former is half a percentage point or more above the latter, the Sahm Rule indicates that U.S. is in the early stages of a recession. The Sahm Rule uses the three-month moving average unemployment rate—rather than the current unemployment rate—to prevent overreacting to a single month of data, Sahm said as a guest on The Investopedia Express podcast released in April 2024.

The Sahm Rule simply indicates that the economy is in the early stages of a recession. Since the early 1970s, the indicator has never been triggered outside of a recession, according to Sahm. Historically, when the unemployment rate passes the threshold outlined by the Sahm rule, it continues to increase.

The Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database includes current and real-time Sahm Rule recession indicators.

Current Sahm Rule Recession Indicator

The BLS regularly revises the unemployment rate of previous months based on additional information from its survey that was not initially available. The current Sahm Rule recession indicator is calculated using the unemployment rate's revised values.

Real-Time Sahm Rule Recession Indicator

Unlike the current Sahm Rule recession indicator, the real-time Sahm Rule recession indicator uses "real-time" data. It is calculated using just the unemployment rate and recent history of unemployment rates that were available in a given month.

Sahm first introduced the indicator that would later be named after her as part of a policy proposal called "Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals" published by The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative that is part of the Brookings Institution. The proposal was also included in The Hamilton Project's book "Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy" published in 2019.

In the proposal, Sahm explained that consumer spending tends to slow significantly during recession growth, which can make job losses (and a recession overall) worse. She proposed that to combat that unemployment, the government distribute stimulus payments automatically to families in the face of a recessions—specifically, when the three-month average national employment rate jumps at least half a percentage point relative to its low over the last 12 months.

"Recent research finds that broadly distributed, lump-sum payments to individuals directly boost spending and help stabilize demand, making these types of payments effective responses to recessions," Sahm explained. "The total amount of stimulus would offset about half of the slowdown in consumer spending, totaling about 0.7 percent of GDP." Gross domestic product (GDP) refers to a country's total market value of goods and services within a certain time frame. Fiscal policies like the one Sahm proposed are known as automatic stabilizers .

The indicator became widely recognized, with the Federal Reserve adding it to the FRED database in October 2019.

As Sahm has pointed out in her newsletter, the rule is "empirical regularity," not a proposition. She emphasized that this means that the rule can also be broken.

For example, Sahm wrote in an April 2022 newsletter, imagine a scenario in which the unemployment rate increased hovered around 3.5%, up from a low of 3.0%, meeting the criteria for signaling the early stages of a recession based on the Sahm Rule. However, if around that same time, GDP growth held around 2.5%, down from a high of 5.5%, and inflation gradually slid down to 2%, such a combination of circumstances probably wouldn't constitute a recession, she explained.

What is the Sahm Rule today?

First introduced in 2019, the Sahm Rule is a recession indicator based on conditions of the labor market. When the three-month average unemployment rate rises above its 12-month low by at least half a percentage point, we are in the early stages of a recession, according to the rule.

Who created the Sahm Rule?

Claudia Sahm, a macroeconomist who worked at the Federal Reserve and the White House Council of Economic Advisers, introduced the indicator as part of a policy proposal. The rule was then named after her.

How Accurate is the Sahm Rule?

The rule has proved to be very accurate with the indicator always triggering in the early stages of a recession and never outside of one since the 1970s.

The Sahm Rule refers to an indicator that signals the early stages of a recession. According to the rule, the beginning of a recession is signaled when the three-month moving average unemployment rate is half a percentage point or more higher than the lowest three-month moving average unemployment rate over the last 12 months. Historically, when the unemployment rate has passed this threshold, it has continued to rise.

Sahm Consulting. " About ."

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. " Release Calendar: List View ."

Sahm, Claudia. " Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals ." The Hamilton Project, The Brookings Institute , May 2019, pp. 77.

Sahm, Claudia. " Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals ." The Hamilton Project, The Brookings Institute , May 2019, pp. 77-79.

Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. " FRED Adds Sahm Rule Recession Indicators ."

The Hamilton Project. " Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals ."

The Hamilton Project. " Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy ."

Stay-At-Home-Macro. " Rules Are Made to Be Broken ."

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• Olympics 2024

Simone Biles Did That for Herself. It Felt Like It Was for All of Us

I ’m sitting at my kitchen table in the middle of the day, laptop and a bowl of soup in front of me, but my eyes are locked on the TV. Simone Biles is tumbling across the screen, competing for Team USA in women’s gymnastics, and I’m ugly-crying with a dry cracker hanging out of my open mouth. 

There’s a part of the Olympics that’s emotional for all of us —the unifying power of sports, the vicarious glory of national pride, imagining that we know what it must feel like for an athlete to carry the weight of their country on their shoulders and triumph. But for me, with this sport, there’s also knowing what it takes, on a specific and granular level, to live in the body of a gymnast. 

Simone Biles got her start in gymnastics when she was 6 years old. Which is late, as she’s often said herself—a lot of girls who transcend to elite gymnastics start in their toddler years. I was 7, but I’d had a head start in ballet, already tuned to the need to control every part of my body, down to the bend of my fingers and toes. The appeal was immediate: mastering a new skill is an uncomplicated way to earn the approval of adults, and a team is a ready-made friend group to lean on through your most awkward years. Many gyms have a bell you can ring when you reach a new milestone—and everyone, even the teenagers on the boys team, will drop what they’re doing to cheer. 

Read More: How U.S Women’s Gymnastics Team Rewrote Their Story and Reclaimed Olympic Gold

Over the years, I rose from a complete beginner to a level 5 competitor to, finally, a level 7—what was then the first of the “optional” levels, where gymnasts begin to differentiate and get their own routines, rather than the standardized “compulsory” level routines. Level 7 was as far as I got. I usually say I quit because of a physical limitation, but it was equally a mental one. I felt grizzled, worn down, and done. I was 13.

When I left gymnastics behind, I was still a kid. But my history as a gymnast is one of the most indelible things about me—about anyone who has undergone the physical and spiritual commitment of competitive gymnastics. Most of us learn early what it means to retire, to walk away from something that has been your everything and wonder how you’ll fill the hole. And watching this year’s Olympic team—especially Biles, whose setback at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo was world news—there’s a little part of me that’s cracking open. 

When you take on the role of a competitive gymnast, even years before you reach Olympic-caliber levels, you give up so much. You practice for hours after school every day and longer through the summer, replacing school time with gym time. You miss slumber parties and you stay home from sleepaway camp. You watch what you eat, saying no thank you to candy and pizza and chips. You wait for your period while the girls in your class pass tampons and whisper. You study your thighs and your biceps and your calves in the mirror and push down the sting of what kids call you in school. You do your homework at night with a bag of ice under your hamstring or draped over your ankle. You learn to tape your body parts together, to carry a family-size jar of ibuprofen in your backpack, to treat the skin that’s been ripped off your palms with heavy, stinking ointment while you sleep. 

Read More: The Story Behind Simone Biles’ Viral Instagram Caption Celebrating Team USA’s Win

But you also grow up fast. You learn to take responsibility for your own time management, to create routine and discipline to ensure your own success, to set goals, break them down into steps, and feel the satisfaction of achieving them. Your body grows strong and capable. You break your school’s PE records for the 100-m sprint, bench press, and vertical leap. You beat any boy who dares to challenge you in arm wrestling. You master the art of extreme focus, tuning out the noise to apply your full attention to the task in front of you as if your life depends on it, because sometimes it sort of does. You amaze yourself with what you can do. You learn to fly.

And to give all that up—especially when you’ve accepted all the aches and pains and sacrifices that come with it—feels like leaving behind the best parts of yourself. Who are you when you can no longer strap your grips around your wrists and soar?

Which is why Biles’ return to the Olympics after pulling out from the competition three years ago is so important, why I can’t stop crying when I watch her compete. The road to gymnastics greatness is paved with girls who flamed out, girls who broke down, girls who decided it wasn’t worth it and threw in the towel. Some of us look back and marvel at how strong and fearless we were. Some of us kick ourselves for failing. What we all have in common is that we fought gymnastics, and gymnastics won. 

Three years ago, it looked like even Biles, the GOAT, had been defeated by the sport. She did the right thing prioritizing her safety, and it’s easy to feel now that the choice was obvious, but at the time we feared she was done. It was devastating, physically painful to see her disorientation from the twisties , the mental block that caused her to lose track of her body in space, and it was gutting to watch as she withdrew from event after event. What a way that would have been to end a career. 

But Biles persevered. She refused to let her story close on a low. She showed up to the Paris Olympics, ready as ever, and she brought her best. That’s winning—gold is just a bonus.

More Must-Reads from TIME

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• The Young Women Challenging Iran’s Regime
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• Can Food Really Change Your Hormones?
• Column: Why Watching Simone Biles Makes Me Cry
• Get Our Paris Olympics Newsletter in Your Inbox

Write to Lucy Feldman at [email protected]

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Where Tim Walz Stands on the Issues

As governor of Minnesota, he has enacted policies to secure abortion protections, provide free meals for schoolchildren, allow recreational marijuana and set renewable energy goals.

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By Maggie Astor

• Aug. 6, 2024

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the newly announced running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, has worked with his state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature to enact an ambitious agenda of liberal policies: free college tuition for low-income students, free meals for schoolchildren, legal recreational marijuana and protections for transgender people.

“You don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Mr. Walz wrote last year about his approach to governing. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”

Republicans have slammed these policies as big-government liberalism and accused Mr. Walz of taking a hard left turn since he represented a politically divided district in Congress years ago.

Here is an overview of where Mr. Walz stands on some key issues.

Mr. Walz signed a bill last year that guaranteed Minnesotans a “fundamental right to make autonomous decisions” about reproductive health care on issues such as abortion, contraception and fertility treatments.

Abortion was already protected by a Minnesota Supreme Court decision, but the new law guarded against a future court reversing that precedent as the U.S. Supreme Court did with Roe v. Wade, and Mr. Walz said this year that he was also open to an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would codify abortion rights.

Another bill he signed legally shields patients, and their medical providers, if they receive an abortion in Minnesota after traveling from a state where abortion is banned.

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