Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life

Abstract

While it is widely thought that activities and lives can be meaningful or meaningless, this chapter explores the possibility that they could also be ‘anti-meaningful’. Anti-meaning is the opposite of meaning. This chapter has two main objectives: first, it discusses what an­ ti-meaning is (or could be taken to be); second, it discusses whether there are good rea­ sons to add this unfamiliar notion to our set of concepts for thinking about meaning in life. The authors review the limited literature on this topic, distinguish two formal inter­ pretations of the idea of anti-meaning, and propose different substantive theories of anti- meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. They then defend the notion of anti-meaning against scepticism about the usefulness of this concept.