The sense of life: existential problem and conceptual confusion

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to show that the issue about the meaning of life is a wholly intelligible and legitimate one, as long as we don't consider it a factual problem and, accordingly, only if we do not try to give an answer to it in terms of facts, however special. By means of examples, I try to show that there is simply no intelligible literal use of the notion of meaning applied to the whole of human life, except when it is used in the past tense and in the third person. Any other kind of employment can only give rise to nonsense:. I argue that there is a "grammatical" link between the notions of "the meaning of life" and "the morally good life" (or, in the Tractatus terminology, "the happy life"). This leads me to try to elucidate the nature of a moral problem and to the description of the application of the expresion the meaning of life, since it is only this task which could eventually reveal its real meaning.