What Is Meaning?

Core Concepts

A field that only came of age in the 1990s

If you expected philosophy to have a settled answer to "what makes life meaningful," here's the surprising fact: rigorous analytic work on meaning in life is relatively young. Susan Wolf's "fitting fulfillment" view, consolidated in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010), reframed the field and became the focal point for three decades of concentrated research. The debate it generated — from both pure subjectivists and pure objectivists — has structured how contemporary philosophy approaches the question. This module maps that terrain.

Meaning is not the same as happiness

The most important preliminary move is to separate two things that everyday language tends to run together: being happy and living meaningfully.

Wolf argues that meaningfulness is conceptually and evaluatively distinct from happiness. You can be deeply engaged in something meaningful while it makes you unhappy — caring for a sick parent, finishing a difficult creative project, pursuing justice in an unjust institution. And you can achieve happiness without meaningful engagement — a life of pleasant distraction can be happy without being meaningful. Wolf treats meaningfulness as a third dimension of the good life, alongside happiness and morality, not reducible to either. This distinction matters because it blocks the temptation to collapse meaning into well-being, positive affect, or moral virtue.

The three main positions

Contemporary philosophy of meaning recognizes three systematic positions:

Subjectivism holds that the subject's caring about something in some suitable way is all that matters. Meaning is entirely a function of one's own attitudes, desires, and commitments — what Metz's taxonomy calls "naturalist subjectivism": meaning arises when you want something and get it, or set something as an end and achieve it, without requiring any external backing for those desires.

Objectivism holds that objective value alone can ground meaning, regardless of whether the subject cares about or is engaged by it. On this view, what matters is whether your activities and projects are genuinely valuable, independent of how you feel about them.

Hybridism — Wolf's position — holds that meaning requires both subjective engagement and objective value, working together. Neither alone is sufficient; both must be present and properly connected.

"Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something with it or about it." — Susan Wolf

Wolf's fitting fulfillment view

Wolf's hybrid theory specifies two jointly necessary conditions for meaningful life:

1. Subjective attraction/engagement: you must be gripped, fulfilled, genuinely attracted to what you are doing. You must, in Wolf's phrase, love what you do — find it worthy of care and attention, not merely acknowledge its value intellectually.

2. Objective worth: the thing you are engaged with must have value independent of your engagement with it. It must be a "project of worth," something that commands independent regard.

The engagement condition is stronger than mere interest: it requires active, emotional engagement. Knowing that something is objectively valuable while remaining cold toward it does not suffice. The objective condition specifies four characteristics: the value must be subject-independent (existing regardless of the subject's attitudes), grounding (explaining why fulfillment is appropriate), recognizable (the subject must be capable of recognizing it), and fallible (the subject can be mistaken about whether value is present, yet still be engaged with something genuinely valuable).

Critically, Wolf's subjective attraction must be grounded in "reasons of love" connected to the object's actual worth — you are attracted to the thing because it is genuinely valuable, or at least your attraction is consistent with recognizing its worth. This is what distinguishes Wolf from pure subjectivism.

Wolf's counterexamples — and why they motivate the hybrid

Wolf defends each side of the hybrid by running the theory against our intuitions:

• Against pure subjectivism: a person deeply fulfilled by staring at a wall — genuinely absorbed, reporting authentic satisfaction — would not, Wolf argues, be living a meaningful life, however intense the subjective fulfillment. Fulfillment alone, disconnected from genuine value, cannot ground meaning.

• Against pure objectivism: a person forced to engage in objectively valuable work they find empty, alienating, and deadening — who does not feel gripped by it — would also fail to live meaningfully. Objective value without subjective engagement runs into the problem of alienation.

Both pure views fail where the hybrid survives.

Frankfurt's alternative: caring and love

Harry Frankfurt offers a different, subjectivist answer. For Frankfurt, it is through caring that we infuse the world with meaning. The key text is The Reasons of Love: caring provides the stable framework of aims and concerns that shapes how we lead our lives, and the most important form of caring is love — a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what is loved.

Frankfurt's caring is not mere preference. Wholehearted caring involves a hierarchical structure: you care about what you care about — your deepest commitments are integrated into your sense of identity and character, reflectively endorsed rather than just experienced as passing desire. This is what distinguishes Frankfurt from naïve preferentialism. Love is the paradigm case: the authoritative form of caring that, for Frankfurt, provides life with significance.

Crucially, Frankfurt explicitly rejects the requirement that what one cares about must be objectively valuable. For Frankfurt, a life has meaning when you are wholeheartedly committed to pursuing what you care about — the worth of the object is not a separate, external requirement.

The Frankfurt–Wolf disagreement

This brings the central tension of the module into focus. Frankfurt and Wolf represent a foundational disagreement:

• Wolf requires that what you care about must be worthy of care — love must be directed at love-worthy objects. Without that external standard, caring about trivial things cannot make a life meaningful.
• Frankfurt holds that genuine, wholehearted caring is what generates meaning — the question of objective worth is separate and unnecessary.

The question is not merely academic: it shapes what you would look for when asking whether a given project gives your life meaning.

Setiya's frame: telic vs. atelic activities

A further tool for thinking about meaningful engagement comes from Kieran Setiya's distinction between telic and atelic activities.

Telic activities have a built-in endpoint: reaching a specific goal, completing a project, making partner. Their value is oriented toward a terminal state. Once complete, they are done — the activity exhausts itself in its outcome.

Atelic activities have no built-in endpoint: spending time with friends, walking, making art for its own sake, learning without a fixed destination. They are intrinsically rewarding; they do not point beyond themselves to a goal whose achievement would conclude them.

Setiya argues that meaningful life requires sufficient atelic engagement. Orienting your entire life around telic projects — chains of goals — leaves you unsatisfied in the present and vulnerable to meaning-emptiness once goals are achieved. The antidote is not to abandon goals but to cultivate atelic engagement alongside them.

Antti Kauppinen pushes back in "Against Seizing the Day": purely atelic engagement does not suffice for meaning in the primary existential sense. Kauppinen argues that meaningful life requires both sustainable success in valuable prospective (future-oriented) projects and engagement in what he calls "weakly atelic" projects — activities that maintain significance through long-term commitment. The dispute between Setiya and Kauppinen reveals that the telic/atelic distinction, while useful, is not a final resolution.

Meaning has a temporal structure

One further dimension: meaningful lives are characterized by a kind of forward-directedness. In contemporary analytic philosophy, meaningful lives are sufficiently teleological — they have future-directed goals and purposes that give present activities their shape and significance. Many projects that feel meaningful presuppose a future audience: scientific research assumes future researchers who will build on discoveries; artistic creation assumes future audiences; institution-building accumulates value for posterity. Without an assumed future to receive these projects, their point would attenuate.

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Compare & Contrast

Subjectivism vs. Objectivism vs. Hybridism

	Subjectivism	Objectivism	Hybridism (Wolf)
What grounds meaning	Subject's caring/desire	Independent value of activities	Both: engagement + objective worth
Key thinker	Frankfurt	Various	Susan Wolf
Main strength	Respects personal autonomy; accounts for individual engagement	Avoids the conclusion that any deep care suffices	Captures both insights; avoids alienation and triviality
Main weakness	Permits trivial or deluded caring to ground meaning	Permits alienated engagement in worthwhile work	Difficult to operationalize "objective worth"
Canonical failure case	Staring at a wall, wholeheartedly	Forced engagement with genuinely valuable work one finds empty	—

Wolf vs. Frankfurt

The sharpest practical contrast is between Wolf and Frankfurt:

• Wolf requires love directed at love-worthy objects — the worth of the object is a separate necessary condition.
• Frankfurt requires wholehearted caring — love itself provides meaning, regardless of whether the object passes an external worthiness test.

Both agree that engagement matters. They diverge on whether there is an external standard the object must meet. Wolf identifies love of worthy objects as a distinct motivational category — beyond self-interest and duty — that constitutes a third dimension of the good life. Frankfurt sees caring and love as self-sufficient sources of significance.

Telic vs. Atelic (Setiya)

	Telic	Atelic
Structure	Goal-directed, has an endpoint	Open-ended, intrinsically rewarding
Relationship to time	Value deferred to completion	Value present throughout
Risk	Emptiness after achievement; unsatisfied present	Insufficient for meaning in the primary existential sense (Kauppinen)
Examples	Finishing a project, reaching a milestone	Spending time with people you love, sustained creative practice

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Thought Experiment

The Satisfied Starer and the Alienated Expert

Imagine two people:

Person A spends every free hour staring at a particular patch of wall. They report profound absorption, genuine satisfaction, and a sense that this is exactly what they want to do. Nothing is being forced; no one is coercing them. They are fully, authentically engaged. By any measure of subjective fulfillment, they are doing well.

Person B is a doctor working in an underfunded clinic in a neglected community. The work is genuinely valuable — lives are saved, suffering is reduced. But Person B finds the work deadening. They feel no connection to it. They show up, perform correctly, and go home hollow. They do not feel gripped. They find it empty.

Questions to sit with:

1. Wolf would say neither person lives meaningfully. Do you agree? What — if anything — is missing in each case?
2. Frankfurt would say Person A potentially lives meaningfully, depending on whether the caring is wholehearted. Would you say that the sustained, absorbed attention of Person A counts as genuine caring in Frankfurt's sense?
3. Is Person B's alienation a problem of the work itself, or of something that could be changed without changing the work? What would that change look like?
4. Where does Setiya's telic/atelic frame help here — and where does it fall short?

There is no single correct answer. The point is to notice which intuitions the different theories capture and which they miss.

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Common Misconceptions

"Meaning is just feeling good about your life." This conflates meaning with hedonic well-being. Wolf's distinction between meaning and happiness shows these can come apart dramatically. Some of the most meaningful activities are also the most difficult, costly, or exhausting.

"Any activity you're deeply passionate about is automatically meaningful." This is the subjectivist intuition, which captures something true — engagement matters — but misses the objectivist insight. Deep passion directed at genuinely trivial or harmful things does not obviously yield meaning. Wolf's staring-at-the-wall case is precisely designed to challenge this.

"Meaning requires moral virtue." Wolf explicitly separates meaning from morality. Living a highly moral life is neither necessary nor sufficient for living a meaningful life, on her view. You can be morally exemplary but engaged in nothing that gives your life meaning, and you can live meaningfully in ways that are largely amoral.

"Wholehearted caring means feeling certain." In Frankfurt's account, wholeheartedness is about reflective integration and endorsement — caring about your caring — not about the absence of doubt. You can be genuinely uncertain about many things while still wholeheartedly caring about something.

"Atelic engagement means having no goals." Setiya's distinction is not between having goals and not having them. Atelic engagement means engaging in activities whose value is not deferred to a terminal state — you can have goals within atelic pursuits. The distinction is about the structure of value, not the presence or absence of forward-directedness.

"The hybrid theory settles the question." Wolf's framework provides clearly identifiable necessary conditions, making it more amenable to systematic analysis than purely phenomenological accounts. But joint sufficiency is still debated, "objective worth" remains philosophically contested, and critics like Metz point to cases where meaning can arise from negative attitudes — opposing something wrong, resisting injustice — rather than from loving engagement.