What Is Existential Meaning?

Quick Answer

Existential meaning refers to the significance and value that human beings attribute to their own existence, actions, and experiences. Unlike meaning in the linguistic or cosmic sense, existential meaning is lived — it is the sense that one's life matters, that one's choices are one's own, and that one's existence is not absurd or gratuitous but directed toward something worthwhile. Existentialist thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche argued that meaning is not given to us by nature, God, or tradition but must be created or discovered through individual choice and commitment. The question of existential meaning remains urgent in a secular age when inherited frameworks of significance have weakened and individuals must confront the responsibility of constructing lives that are authentically their own.

Definition

Existential meaning can be defined as the subjective and intersubjective significance that individuals experience in relation to their lives as a whole. It involves several dimensions: the sense that one's life has purpose (a direction or goal worth pursuing), coherence (a narrative or pattern that makes one's experiences intelligible), significance (the feeling that one's existence matters, that one is connected to something larger than oneself), and mattering (the conviction that one's choices and actions have weight and consequence).

What distinguishes existential meaning from other kinds of meaning is its connection to freedom and finitude. Existential meaning is not simply discovered like a fact about the world; it is constituted through the choices of a finite, mortal being who must live forward into an uncertain future. The awareness of death, contingency, and absurdity — that the universe does not provide ready-made meaning — is the condition that makes the search for meaning both necessary and possible.

The concept draws on the existentialist tradition, which emphasizes individual existence over abstract essence. Where other philosophical approaches might ask "what is the meaning of life?" as though there were a single answer to be found, existentialism insists that the question must be asked in the first person: what is the meaning of my life, and what am I going to do about it?

The Existentialist Framework

Existentialism, as developed by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and others, provides the philosophical framework for thinking about existential meaning. Though these thinkers differ profoundly, they share several core commitments.

First, existence precedes essence. Sartre's famous formulation captures the idea that human beings are not defined by a pre-given nature or purpose. A knife is designed to cut; its essence precedes its existence. But a human being simply is — and must then define what it is through choices and actions. There is no human nature, in the sense of a fixed essence that determines what we are, because we are always free to choose otherwise. This is the radical insight that separates existentialism from every philosophy that grounds meaning in a fixed human nature or cosmic order.

Second, freedom is both a gift and a burden. We are, as Sartre put it, "condemned to be free." We cannot escape the responsibility of choosing — even refusing to choose is a choice. This radical freedom is the source of both dignity and anguish. It gives us the power to create meaning, but it also places the weight of that creation entirely on our shoulders. There is no authority — divine, natural, or historical — that can relieve us of this responsibility.

Third, absurdity. Albert Camus argued that the human desire for meaning meets the indifferent silence of the universe, and the confrontation between these two is the absurd. The question of existential meaning is inseparable from the problem of absurdity: if the universe has no intrinsic meaning, how can our lives have any? Nietzsche's Zarathustra confronted this question directly, announcing the death of God and the terrifying freedom that follows: if the old sources of meaning have collapsed, we must become the creators of new values.

Fourth, authenticity. Existentialists distinguish between living authentically — owning one's freedom, confronting one's finitude, and taking responsibility for one's choices — and living inauthentically, which means drifting along on the expectations of others ("the crowd," in Kierkegaard's terms; das Man, in Heidegger's) without genuine self-determination. Authenticity is not a state to be achieved once and for all but an ongoing struggle to live in truth.

Meaning vs Purpose

A crucial distinction within the concept of existential meaning is between meaning and purpose. Though often used interchangeably, they are not the same.

Purpose is teleological — it concerns goals, aims, and direction. To have a purpose is to be oriented toward something one seeks to accomplish: raising a family, creating art, pursuing justice, understanding the world. Purpose is forward-looking and projective.

Meaning is broader and deeper. It concerns the significance that one's life, experiences, and actions have, both for oneself and in relation to a larger context. A life can have purpose without meaning — one might pursue a goal relentlessly and yet feel that it is empty, that it does not truly matter. Conversely, a life can have meaning without a single overarching purpose: one might find significance in relationships, in small moments of beauty and connection, in simply being present to one's experience, without being driven by a particular ambition.

The distinction matters because the cultural emphasis on purpose — on finding one's "passion," one's "calling," one's grand project — can obscure the deeper question of meaning. A person who has achieved every purpose society applauds — wealth, status, accomplishment — may still experience existential emptiness if those purposes do not connect to a sense of genuine significance. The existentialist insight is that meaning cannot be guaranteed by achieving any particular purpose; it must be grounded in a more fundamental relationship to one's own existence and freedom.

Created vs Discovered Meaning

One of the deepest debates within existentialism concerns whether meaning is created or discovered. This is not merely a terminological dispute; it reflects different understandings of the human condition.

The creation view, most strongly associated with Sartre and Nietzsche, holds that meaning is something we bring into being through our choices and commitments. There is no pre-existing meaning to be found; the universe is indifferent, and we must impose significance on it through acts of will and creativity. Nietzsche's figure of the Übermensch (overman) is precisely the one who creates values rather than receiving them from tradition or God. For Sartre, to recognize that existence precedes essence is to recognize that we are the authors of our own meaning — a daunting but liberating responsibility.

The discovery view, which has roots in Kierkegaard and has been developed by thinkers in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, holds that meaning is not simply imposed but emerges through engagement with a world that is not of our own making. We do not create meaning ex nihilo; we discover it in and through our relationships, our work, our encounters with beauty and suffering, and our responsiveness to the claims that the world makes on us. Meaning, on this view, is co-constituted — neither purely given nor purely constructed, but emerging in the space between a subject and a world.

Many contemporary thinkers adopt a position that combines elements of both views. Meaning is neither found lying about in the world like a pebble, nor fabricated out of nothing by an autonomous will. It is achieved — through the interplay of our freedom, our finitude, and the particularity of our historical situation. We are thrown into a world we did not choose, but we are not merely passive recipients of its meaning; we interpret, appropriate, and transform it through our projects and commitments. This dynamic interplay between givenness and freedom is what makes the question of existential meaning inexhaustible.

The Role of Choice

If existential meaning is not simply given, then choice becomes the central category of human existence. The existentialists place extraordinary emphasis on the act of choosing — not because any particular choice is guaranteed to be meaningful, but because the very act of taking a stand, of committing oneself, is what gives a life shape and direction.

Kierkegaard's analysis of choice is particularly illuminating. In Either/Or, he presents two modes of existence — the aesthetic (devoted to pleasure and immediacy) and the ethical (devoted to duty and responsibility) — and argues that the transition between them requires a radical choice, a "leap" that cannot be justified by reason alone. This choice is not about picking one option over another on the basis of evidence; it is about choosing to choose, about taking responsibility for one's existence rather than drifting.

Nietzsche similarly emphasizes choice, but in the mode of self-creation. The task is not merely to choose among given options but to become who one is — to shape oneself through disciplined self-overcoming into the person one is capable of being. This requires the courage to affirm one's own existence, including its suffering and contingency, rather than seeking escape in resignation or resentment.

The existentialist emphasis on choice has sometimes been criticized as voluntaristic — as if one could simply decide to be meaningful. But the deeper point is that meaning cannot be achieved without engagement, without throwing oneself into projects, relationships, and commitments that one takes seriously. Passivity — the refusal to choose, the attempt to live without risk or commitment — is the enemy of existential meaning. Whether one's choices lead to fulfillment or failure, the very act of choosing with full awareness is what distinguishes a life that is genuinely lived from one that merely happens.

Existential Meaning Today

The question of existential meaning is, if anything, more pressing in the twenty-first century than when Kierkegaard and Nietzsche first posed it. The secularization of Western societies has weakened the traditional frameworks — religious, communal, teleological — that once provided ready-made answers to the question of life's meaning. At the same time, the accelerating pace of technological change, the fragmentation of communal bonds, and the sheer scale of modern anxieties — from ecological crisis to political instability — have created conditions in which the search for meaning feels both more urgent and more difficult.

Contemporary psychology has taken up the question under the heading of "meaning in life," with research suggesting that a sense of meaning is strongly correlated with well-being, resilience, and even physical health. This empirical attention validates the existentialist insight that meaning is not a luxury but a fundamental human need. At the same time, the risk is that meaning becomes instrumentalized — treated as a technique to be optimized rather than an existential question to be lived.

The existentialist tradition reminds us that meaning is not a problem to be solved but a task to be undertaken. It is not found in a single answer but enacted in the ongoing process of living — in the choices we make, the relationships we cultivate, the projects we pursue, and the way we confront the finitude and contingency that define our condition. To ask about existential meaning is already to be engaged in the search for it, and the search, as the existentialists understood, is itself part of what it means to be human.