the meaning of life

Life’s true meaning is to make the most of life on a personal level

One answer to the question of the meaning of life is that humans are here simply to just enjoy life and strive for a happy existence. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese doctor who invented the psychological therapy method known as psychoanalysis, called this view the pleasure principle. The main idea behind this stance is that humanity is meant to experience maximum pleasure and minimum pain.

The humanistic branch of psychology, most associated with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, grew out of a need for more personal meaning than Freud’s psychoanalysis was thought to offer. Humanistic psychologists concentrate on individual potential and purpose in life. Many people do see personal achievement and the purpose of their own place in the greater world to hold the basic meaning of their lives.

Existentialists hold the philosophical viewpoint that humans make individual choices in this existence known as life. French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre said "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." In this view, personal freedom may be seen as having the potential of both positive and negative outcomes depending on the choices one makes.

The question itself is meaningless.

Some people answer that there is no point in even trying to find the true meaning of life because the question is just so deep. This viewpoint holds that humankind will never be able to discover the answer(s), so the question itself becomes meaningless. Others deem the question of what life’s true purpose is as meaningless because they view life as an existence with no deep meaning attached to it.

The logical positivist view of philosophy, also called the logical empiricism, involves both empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism holds that knowledge can be gained through observational evidence. Rationalism stresses that empiricism alone is not enough to provide complete knowledge, so verification is needed.

The logical positivist approach to the verification of something considered to be meaningful is that something must be able to be logically or cognitively determined to be true. Since the logical positivist verifiability criterion cannot prove the answer to the question what is the true meaning of life? positivists tend to view the question as meaningless. This view has been criticized by philosophers such as Karl Popper who thought falsifying criterion should be used to test true statements rather than relying on verifiability criterion alone.

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