Humanity’s interest in life’s meaning is ancient
Some philosophers have argued that the idea did not exist until recently. I think they’re mistaken.
It is often claimed that the human interest in life’s meaning is timeless, and our quest for it ancient. For instance, Victor Frankl, a psychologist, claimed that a human’s “main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in [their] life” (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 115). The idea is that the search for meaning appears across cultures and historical periods because humans have an innate need to find meaning in their lives.
However, in a recent article in Philosophy Now, Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia investigate “where the idea of the meaning of life originated”. They argue — contrary to popular opinion — that the idea that life has (or can have) meaning is relatively new. They point out that expressions like “the meaning of life” have only been in use for a few centuries, probably first appearing just before the turn of the 19th century. Perhaps the first recorded use of “the meaning of life” was in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus — circa 1834. This was a translation of the German expressions “Lebenssin” and “der Sinn des Lebens”, which had only been in use since (probably) the late 1700’s.
I found Leach and Tartaglia’s historical survey both interesting and illuminating. Literary records, indexed in Google Ngrams (see below), corroborate their claims. The expressions “meaning in life” and “meaning of life” first came into use in the first few decades of the 19th century, and have been increasingly common ever since.
Yet, the conclusion that Leach and Tartaglia draw — that humanity’s interest in the topic of life’s meaning is only a couple centuries old — places too much weight on language. The claim that these English expressions are relatively new is perfectly compatible with the claim that humanity’s interest in the topic of life’s meaning is ancient. After all, it is to be expected that the language used to talk about a given topic will vary across cultures, and will evolve over time.
To illustrate, consider the following line by the eponymous protagonist of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (circa 1606). “Life is… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Though Macbeth uses the (closely related) term “signifying” rather than “meaning”, it’s clear that he’s talking about the same topic. Indeed, he is expressing a nihilistic view: life, he thinks, has no meaning.
So, if we want to know how long people have been interested in a certain topic, we should not look at the words they use, but at the ideas their words express. When we do so, I think it’s pretty clear that humanity has been interested in life’s meaning for at least as long as we have known how to write. The epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest extant literary work, is typically interpreted as being about the search for life’s meaning (see here for instance). The Iliad, a central pillar of Western literature and culture more broadly, has been described by classicists as the story of “a search for the meaning of life in a world plagued by war”. Ecclesiastes, in the Hebrew Bible, is often interpreted as a work about life’s meaning or lack thereof. One can therefore find academic articles with titles like “Ancient Israelite Perspectives On The Meaning of Life”.
We could continue with more examples. But the point is that—obviously—the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, and Israelites did not use the English words “meaning” or “life”. But people who study their writings today can see that they were interested in the same topic that we are when we use those words.
Where does interest in life’s meaning come from?
There is an increasingly popular theory of meaning that would explain why the interest in life’s meaning is so ancient. According to this view (which, I should say, I have advocated myself) meanings are revealed by interpretation. When we wonder what something means, we are trying to make sense of it, to fit it into some larger context and see how it is related to other things. This theory would explain why an interest in life’s meaning is ubiquitous. It’s an outgrowth of a basic human inclination to make sense of the world, to find patterns and understand what is going on around us. This ability can be applied to our activities, whole lives, the lives of others, and human existence itself. When it is, we start to see meaning in these things.
The theory can also explain why the search for life’s meaning has become more acute or explicit in the last couple centuries. If the world around you is chaos and carnage, you don’t have time to try to interpret life itself. You need to focus on the meaning of the shady character’s glance, or the meaning of the dark clouds rolling in. You don’t have time to think about the meaning of life. People will only do this when the world is relatively safe, regular and predictable. The Industrial Revolution, which took place in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s (right around the time that “meaning of life” came into use), brought with it a number of unprecedented changes to ordinary life. Most notably for present purposes, it massively increased the regularity and predictability of life, as well as the satisfaction of people’s material needs. If the interpretation theory is right, these changes would lead to a significant increase in the degree to which people thought about the meaning of life. It may also be worth noting that the 19th and 20th century authors who were so concerned with life’s meaning (e.g., Tolstoy) were wealthy people living comfortable, predictable lives.
In short, since the world today is safer, more predictable, and more comfortable than it has historically been, that might explain why people are more interested in life’s meaning than they were historically. Thus, while Leach and Tartaglia may be right that interest in life’s meaning has increased in recent centuries, it is a mistake to think that it’s in any way novel. Interest in life’s meaning is indeed ancient.
