I used to think that a question that was empirically meaningless was simply not worth asking.  One cannot articulate a well-defined answer without descending into a slew of vague buzzwords, so I did not think there was anything to this.  Such questions include the “meaning of life”  “nature of love” “what it is to be a good person” and essentially any question which we respond to primarily in an emotional way.  However, I think there is a place for such questions even in a logically precise philosophy.  The catch is that one does not answer these questions with a statement or proposition- one must answer with an action, habit, or way of life.

At the risk of appearing obsessed, I’d like to return to Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.”  One essential point in this book is that what language communicates cannot be referred to with language.  A series of propositional statements each have their own logical sense, but they communicate in another way as well.  The propositions also illustrate something, and this something cannot be referred to directly in language.  I think this distinction is at the heart of the merit of an illogical, unanswerable question.  The questions do not entail a precisely formulated statement which refers to something, but they can have the ability to illustrate something indirectly.  Asking a “philosophical question” is a suggestive tool to make us reflective about the world, and I think we must respond to them accordingly- we must respond through the world.

Thus, if someone asks me “what is the meaning of life,” or something else equally cheesy, I think the best way to respond is to simply live.   Given that “meaning” is itself a notoriously ill-defined term (again, that which language illustrates it cannot describe),  I think answering such a question directly reduces to a useless play with words.  That which we consider “meaning” is not something which we can logically deduce, it is in some sense an emergent property of living well.

From this point of view, I think the philosophy of existentialism is rather clearly misguided.  We cannot sit around and consciously choose what we consider meaningful.  To do so reduces to little more than trying to supply a definition to the word meaning, and such introspective philosophical techniques often reduce to little more than playing with language.   That which we can speak of we must speak of precisely, and that which we cannot must be approached by other methods.  To live in a fulfilling way, we must simply live in a fulfilling way, there is nothing more to it.  Our conscious mind does not have complete power to decide what our subjective, unconscious mind values (I’ve tried), even though we may have some ability to consciously manipulate how we think.  To imagine that our perception of meaning is totally our choice is to mistakenly overestimate the power of our ego.  We are a product of our unspeakably ill defined thoughts just as much as our unspeakably ill defined thoughts are a product of us.