Thinking and talking about meaning and meaninglessness always raises, at least in an ethical orientation, the question of responsibility. Above all, are we ethically and philosophically obligated to deliver the internal dialogue we have about meaning and meaninglessness outside, outside ourselves, with all the risks and pitfalls that this entails. Where do we start if we know that the talk about meaning and its opposite is too much in progress?
Rene Descartes once established that we must always begin only with our own thought activity, placing thought as a prerequisite for being. May we here, however, reverse his famous formula and say: So, I think so.. Precisely because we are part of being, projected into it, in all its irreversibility, finality and tragedy, a thought awakens in us. And the original, at the same time essential thought touches on Kantian questions: what can I know, what should I do and what can I hope for? Additionally: why are we here and what must we do? It is not even necessary to refer to the testimonies of prominent philosophers; we simply know that these are fundamental questions, the only ones that matter. They probably appear to everyone, but they do not receive many answers. Sometimes the fragile human spirit declares them empty, denigrates them as meaningless because they are metaphysical, which is largely patronized by science, and concludes that they should be avoided for the sake of the greater good. But no: philosophy springs from the question of meaning. Its hope is meaning. That hope may never turn into certainty, it will never be a given. But all philosophy and all life are based on hope. Hope is constitutive of life, immanent to it, a hope that governs meaningful survival, struggle, and survival: a hope that is, ultimately, directed toward examining and finding the telos of our earthly journey.
Hope also obliges us to be attentive to the meaning of life, or rather the direction in which it takes us.
And one of the directions is the search for man, humbled by the spirit of the times that has embraced him with a cruel grip, without asking whether he can bear this grip, i.e. expecting him to internalize this oppression, to live with it and become alien to himself and others. The spirit of the times is no longer a spirit, it is mediation, a machine, a tool, a tool. Between time and man, an emptiness flows, a warning screams, a scream Valeri's farewell to humanity: “Farewell, ghosts! The world needs neither you nor me any more. Having given the name progress to its own tendency towards fatal precision, the world seeks to add the advantages of death to the benefits of life. There is still some confusion; but soon all will be clarified and we will witness the miracle of animal society, the perfect and final anthill.”
The poet, like the philosopher, is always a prophet. All who responded to the prophetic call, whether they wanted to or not, were not mistaken. And all of them, which is perhaps superfluous to mention, were truly terrified of the coming, galloping technology. With complete right, it turns out. But in the search for man and the humanity that has escaped us, it seems to me that morality, not knowledge, is decisive. In this regard, responsibility would be given the distinction of meaning, and irresponsibility, of meaninglessness. If we search for man, it means that we are following him, but at the same time we are falling behind him. Has today's man escaped so much that he cannot be slowed down or stopped by voices that sometimes worry, sometimes shout to be called? We are faced with the responsibility to answer the question: is time meaningless because it is not designed? Is meaninglessness subjective or objective? How can we distinguish between a lack of trust in objective forms of the spirit and a hyperpsychologized reality? Can we wriggle out of the dense darkness of human mediation and see the horizon of a real struggle, intellectual, but above all ethical: between the power of dehumanization and the power of the meaning of life?
At the beginning The myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus writes that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: whether life is worth living. The question of whether life is worth living today is equivalent to the question of whether life can have meaning. The answer is simple: life cannot be meaningless.
In fact: either it exists or it does not. But if it does not, if life is “absurd,” as Camus’ generation thought, it is because we assume that it must have meaning. Life can feel “meaningless” in light of the expectation of meaning. Precisely because life should have meaning, one can speak of a life that has no meaning. That is why the thinkers of the absurd seem to us quite rationalistic: by attributing a very strong meaning to life, they proclaim the absurdity of existence. I would say that philosophers who dispute the meaning of being perhaps believe in it the most. However, they perceive a kind of wear and tear of the world, they perceive that there is a lack of a conceptual horizon in which to frame an understanding of the world and the significance, or meaning, of life. They want to find a new way to speak in a language that attempts to consider and point the finger at the world in which we no longer live.
The conceptual pair meaning-nonsense can be considered in two ways: from the psychological and ontological plane. The question of why it is justified to speak of an age of meaninglessness, although that sounds too strong or perhaps defeatist, has at least two answers: because today there is a devaluation of concepts, but also of their manifestations. For example, the concept of intellect, since Aristotle, and throughout history, represents the divine in man, with which he outlives himself, while today artificial intelligence threatens to surpass man, in all this transhumanist chaos that has no end in sight, on the contrary.
However, this is only a “natural”, “expected” and “meaningful” consequence of the long-standing general instrumentalization of everything real, the reduction of meaning to its making and usability. Once celebrated and exalted sensus communis, which empiricism and positivism boasted of, has been reduced to the level of doxa, i.e., to absurdity: namely, we have stepped deep into an era where machines and algorithms are mocked common sense-u. Considering the radical instrumentalization to which humanity is exposed, it turns out that the philosophers of the absurd are far from absurd - they, but not only they, were a warning that today turns into questions: what is skillful, what is artificial, and what is intelligent? Why is the question of technique and not spirit?
Why do we seem to lag behind technology, even though we know that it is a tool - and a tool has been intended since the beginning of civilization to serve man, not for the human being to be his servant? As soon as meaning was reduced to logic and technology, it was immediately abolished. Following Heidegger's lead, we observe that persistence in mere logic becomes logistics: the relation and horizon of means and ends are lost, that is, becoming a means becomes our only purpose. And when everything becomes a means, everything becomes purposeless, meaningless. It is no wonder that the meaningful plane of today's man has deeply surpassed the plane of doxe.
Whether we are Kantians or not, we see the forgetfulness of reason, the forgetfulness of the responsibility of reason. (One of the examples he gives is Lace is too illustrative: a doctor, if guided only by rationality, can also be a poisoner, but if guided by reason, it is not possible for him to be so, because the mind that identifies itself with duty, responsibility and morality does not allow him to do so). Likewise, inspired by the Kantian idiom, we rightly ask ourselves whether sense can be sensuous, i.e. does sensuality have meaning if there is no sense at all, as such? Or if sensus is transformed into sensation? Paul Valéry cried out: “Farewell, ghosts” unable to bear the obvious disintegration of the culture of his time, embodied, among other things, in man’s growing tendency towards sensation and the sensational, and the oblivion of meaning.
The crisis of the spirit he witnessed sharpened his critical ardor, and he would write that “there is an element of suicide in the feverish and superficial life of the civilized world”. One can only lose oneself in the sensational, never find oneself. The crisis is, by all accounts, total and permanent, and today, like Valery, we too observe a world that is on the verge of meaninglessness or has been reduced to a mere sum. placed. In such a world, it is true, a human being can manage, even be successful and happy for a while, but in positive-objective givens we will search in vain for it, no matter how skilled we are in the search. Meaning gives meaning to facts. Facts preserve traces of meaning, but they cannot create it by themselves - isolated and dominant -. A man of facts, data, information and sensations is on a risky path to becoming hardened. However, we will not make harsh and dark diagnoses - this is not allowed by philosophical, nor by human hope for transformation, a kind of resurrection, or at least in the determination to look upwards.
In the search for man, we seek the coincidence of the human and the intellectual, the human and the moral, the human and the philosophical. While searching for man within himself, the philosopher simultaneously searches for the philosopher within man. And he does not hesitate to say that living with meaning and with meaning is a philosophical position, the next to all, the thinker hopes. In doing so, the philosophy of meaning does not seek to impose meaning, but to extract it from life itself, from the meaning towards which it carries us: life itself has meaning, even before we have given it to it. Here we must also bear in mind the linguistic use of the term. It is said that it has meaning, not that there is meaning. Meaning precedes the human order, consisting in direction and aspiration. Just as a plant turns towards the light of the sun, because it “wants” to live, without any reflective will, just because of the mere aspiration towards life, so too man emerges, grows, strives towards something with his gaze fixed upwards. At least, the philosopher hopes. This gaze is, for example, for Aristotle, directed towards man's natural place, for Plato towards the world of ideas, above all towards the Good, for Levinasa towards the infinite transcendence of the face of another human being. It is here that we discover an order that surpasses us and awaits us, ready or unready, dwarfed by tools, caught in an unattainable but longed-for future. And this is the fragility of man, whose powerlessness before the powers of his own destiny cannot be alleviated or erased by any technology. A fragility that, admittedly, often allows the awareness of limitation and fatality to be forgotten. Without this awareness, there is neither humanity nor meaning. We share a fragility: we all live in the same situation of uncertainty and encounter with the inevitable, which in turn opens the door to generosity, solidarity, responsibility and care for others. The Feeling of Good is a reminder of this essential ethos, which I understand as the only meaningful state in the time against which we constantly, desperately, but also in vain fight. The Feeling of Good is the hope that human finitude gives itself when it transcends itself.
Responsibility as meaning means being connected to others, being caught up and drawn into a relationship, being displaced outside oneself, understanding that life cannot be self-founded and be self-sufficient. A meaningful life transcends itself, because it is aware of its limits and finitude. It is based on the awareness of connection with Others and a sense of Good, which can neither be controlled nor defined, because it precedes us, while at the same time giving meaning to our lives. At least the philosopher hopes, looking upwards.
Good is a calling. It is simultaneously within us, but also outside us, that is, it resides in transcending oneself. A life that has meaning is a life of responding to Good and the good and dedicating oneself to the direction of self-transcendence.
Meaningful life, life wise, perhaps the most difficult to achieve, but it is certainly the most beautiful and most humane hope.
That's why we must be steadfast and patient while the lights from the surrounding stages are shining. While another in a series of world-historical crises is ongoing. Not to close our eyes, not to look away, not to shed tears, not to fall asleep.
A voice will whisper: our time is full of confusing opacity - its meaning seems hidden, if it has any. The whisper: we must come to terms with our time, but not submit to it. If our “today” is opaque or devoid of meaning, then reconciliation with the world would imply a feat of meaning-making, of clarification, of moving forward, outward, into the darkness. And that is an ethical feat, the power of which is born and established before all knowledge. Responsibility embraces us before we know it.
Before we know the good, we do it. Morality demands responsibility in the self before the "I think" that is considered the basis of knowledge. Nietzsche's The thought: “Around the hero everything becomes tragedy, around the demigod satire, around God the world” should be supplemented with hope: “around man meaning”. If it is ethically durable. Nothing is weaker, and at the same time nothing is stronger than man - because he has a moral power, which surpasses all others, no matter how great its scope. The philosopher hopes.
(The author is a professor at the Humanities Studies Department at the University of Donja Gorica; Presentation presented at the scientific conference "Modern Man and Meaning", Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, October 6 and 7, 2025)
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