My Philosophical Reflections (I): What Is Meaning?

Meaning is a relation: a thing points to, and connects with, something of value beyond itself.

That is, meaning is not some concrete entity but a structure, a relation, such that when we speak of the meaning of A we are linked to things beyond A. It is the same structure as "meaning" in language: a word has meaning because it points to something beyond the word; a stretch of life has meaning because it connects to something larger than that life itself — other people, a cause, truth, beauty. As Nozick puts it, meaning comes from transcending one's own limits.

Q: Suppose the gods injected Sisyphus with a drug that made him love pushing the boulder with all his heart. He feels fulfilled, full of energy every day. Is his life meaningful?

It is like someone injected with a hormone who, every morning, carries bricks from one end of the village to the other, and every afternoon carries them back, over and over. My first reaction was that meaning can be given by the individual: if they feel it is meaningful, then their life is meaningful. But here they don't seem to be trying to build meaning for themselves. What they have is a "feeling" — a sense of fulfilment in something that, objectively, has no meaning. The feeling is artificial, given from outside, but there is no denying that they really feel it.

Now I would lean towards this: if they chose to be injected, or were simply born with this love, I would consider it meaningful. If there is meaning here, it is the feeling gained beyond the endless labour, and I think that kind of good feeling is also a form meaning takes.

That is my intuition. But if I think more deeply, or consider some variants — wouldn't a machine that produces happiness, joy and fulfilment be able to create meaning artificially? If you could experience these positive feelings for a long time at no cost, what reason would anyone have not to get in?

I would be against that — yet this seems to contradict my answer above.

So, after thinking further, I lean towards something Claude prompted me to see: "acknowledging that meaning requires the object itself to be truly worthwhile". Carrying bricks back and forth between the two ends of the village is plainly not worthwhile, so however much they love doing it, it has no meaning.

So I turn to Susan Wolf's position and take it into my own philosophy: meaning arises only when subjective engagement meets objective value.

More concretely, when does meaning appear?

Meaning arises only when subjective engagement meets objective value.

1. Subjective engagement

What is "subjective engagement"? It is neither effort nor positive feelings such as "fulfilment" or "satisfaction", but caring: you identify with the thing; it matters to you. Its opposite is detachment and numbness, not pain. On the contrary, precisely because of engagement and caring, such things often come with pain: you only feel anxious and pained about what you care about, while what you don't care about you are content to let fail.

Caring is not mainly an emotion but a stance, shown in what you give your attention to and what you are willing to pay for. I long, for instance, to spend a great deal of time on research that interests me, seeking truth and contributing to humanity's intellectual progress, and I am willing to give it a great deal of time, give up entertainment, and forgo high material rewards. So I can say that I care about doing research — and it has objective value, so I can say that what I am doing is meaningful.

2. Objective value

What has a positive effect on society can be said to have objective value.

So can the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful. One example I myself find valuable, and an ideal I pursue, is living as a recluse in the mountains, practising, while doing research I find interesting — even if no one ever knows or sees it. Clearly this has no so-called social value, yet I still find it meaningful. Understanding and practice are valuable in themselves; they need no witness. That is my philosophical position. See also:

"And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a philosopher, as well as a just man or one possessing any other virtue, needs the necessaries of life, when they are sufficiently equipped with things of that sort the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly … but the philosopher, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient."

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (tr. W. D. Ross)

The Master said: "Those who studied in ancient times did so for their own sake; those who study now do so for the sake of others."

— Confucius, Analects, "Xian Wen"

By the "objective" in "objective value" I mean that it does not depend on my attitude towards the thing — the thing is worthwhile in itself, whether or not anyone knows (even though value often lies in letting others know — in other words, in influence). When the recluse in the mountains comes to understand a truth, that understanding is real, and objectively there.

Beyond that, I agree that everyone is born with a mission of their own; some people are destined to do something, to make something. So I hold that following one's own "sense of mission" wholeheartedly brings objective value with it.

(A distinction: the "sense of mission" pursued here is not a "subjective feeling" — otherwise we would circle back to the subjective condition we rejected at the start with the Sisyphus drug, "meaning is a feeling". This "sense of mission" presupposes a mission that objectively exists, something like a calling from heaven. That raises another question, which I will discuss in detail later; here I take it only as a premise. Still, if the task my "mission" assigned me were carrying bricks, I would find that meaningless too; I believe a "mission" is always something worthwhile — either a positive influence on society, or the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful.)

Looking back at my first intuition:

"If they chose to be injected, or were simply born with this love, I would consider it meaningful."

From Wolf's position, which I accept: if they chose to be injected, or were born with this love (as if the gods had injected the drug from the very start), and so came to love doing research, then clearly there is both subjective engagement and objective value, and this too can be called meaningful. What matters is not where the love comes from (innate or acquired) but whether, having reflected on it, they accept it or disown it. Whereas if they chose to be injected and so came to love carrying bricks — carrying bricks back and forth across the village has no objective value, and so it is meaningless.

(2026.10.3, in the small hours, written in my apartment in Berkeley)