The literature on meaning — meaning of life, meaning of one's projects, the structural fact of significance — is divided across philosophical traditions that often work past one another. The framework engages the principal positions by name; each is taken up again at [§8.8.5](<8.8.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*Theistic prescriptive accounts.* A long tradition (Augustine, Aquinas; contemporary defenders Craig 2008; Swinburne 2004; Cottingham 2003) holds that meaning is conferred on a life by its relation to a divine source: the meaning of a life is what God commands, decrees, or designs it for. The position has the explanatory virtue of making meaning robustly objective; it has the structural difficulty that, with the inversion (Chs. 6–7) foreclosing the supernatural source, the architecture loses its anchor. The framework reads the theistic tradition as correctly identifying that meaning carries genuine weight — the gravity is real — while locating the source incorrectly: the gravity comes from the depth of the subject registering its own direction, not from an external authority commanding it.

*Existentialist constructivism.* Sartre (1943, 1946), de Beauvoir (1947), and the existentialist tradition more broadly hold that meaning is constructed by the self through its projects, with no external ground supplying content. The position has the structural virtue of locating meaning in the activity of the self-modeling subject; it has the difficulty that, taken to its limit, it makes meaning purely contingent on what the self happens to project, with no constraint on the projecting. The framework reads existentialism as correctly identifying that the *content* of meaning is not given to the subject from outside, while supplying the structural fact existentialism understates: the orientation having direction at all is not constructed; what is constructed is which directions get pursued.

*Nihilism and absurdism.* Nietzsche's (1882, 1886) diagnosis of nihilism, Camus's (1942) absurdism, and Nagel's (1971) argument about the absurdity of human life share the claim that, once external grounds for meaning are withdrawn, the meaning the tradition supplied is gone. The positions differ on what follows — Camus's revolt, Nagel's irony, Nietzsche's transvaluation — but converge on the diagnosis. The framework reads them as correctly identifying that the *content-as-given* is gone once the inversion forecloses the supernatural source, while supplying the structural fact they miss: what survives the withdrawal is not nothing but the subject still oriented, still registering direction, with the structural fact intact and the contingent content open.

*Hybrid and objectivist-naturalist accounts.* Susan Wolf (1997, 2010) developed a hybrid account on which meaning requires both subjective engagement and objective worth — "meaning is loving the right things," or in Wolf's more precise formulation, *fitting fulfillment*: the subjective engagement must meet a genuine standard of worth independent of the feeling. Wolf's account of moral sainthood (1982) supplies a related diagnostic: the perfectly virtuous agent who devotes every moment to morality loses the engaged particularity that makes a life meaningful — a pressure internal to the hybrid account that [§8.8.5](<8.8.5 What is Concluded.md>) returns to. The framework reads Wolf's hybrid as picking up something real — meaning has both a subjective registration component and an objective fit-to-structure component — while supplying the structural reading: subjective engagement is the first-person perspective on orientation; objective worth tracks the structural fact that some directions cohere with the medium's structure better than others. The structural account's move — converting objective worth into structural fit — is not the same as Wolf's irreducibly normative criterion; the substantive disagreement is staged at [§8.8.5](<8.8.5 What is Concluded.md>) rather than resolved by absorbing the two accounts into one another. Metz (2013) surveys and refines the contemporary analytic field, cataloging accounts from fundamentality-based to supernaturalist to naturalist; the structural account sits within the naturalist-objective wing and inherits its dispute with both purely subjective and purely prescriptive alternatives.

*Volitional and caring accounts.* Frankfurt (1988, 2004) asks not which objects are worth attending to but what it means for a subject to *care* about something at all. A subject that cares about a person or project is not simply one that has judged those things to be worth caring about; it is one whose will has organized itself around them — invested in their continuation in a way that is not freely revisable from moment to moment, because the investment has become part of what the will is. Meaning accrues, on Frankfurt's account, to the exercises of volitional caring; the subject's own caring is what gives weight to what it cares about, not the independent worth of the objects. The framework reads Frankfurt as identifying a necessary registration condition the structural account honors: what registers as meaning heaviest to a given subject is not the set of objectively maximally coherent directions but the set the subject has formed itself around — and the parenthetical at [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) ('cannot lose without losing what it is') already names this in structural vocabulary. Frankfurt's volitional account and the structural account are climbing the same structure on different sides; the convergence is made explicit at [§8.8.3](<8.8.3 What is Predicted.md>).

*Narrative-identity accounts.* MacIntyre (1981), Taylor (1989), and Ricoeur (1990) developed accounts on which meaning is structured by the narrative the self constructs of its life — the story that makes its sequence intelligible as a unified life. The position has been influential across philosophy, psychology (McAdams 1993), and theology. The framework reads narrative accounts as picking up the self-modeling structure of meaning at the depth where the recursion holds itself as a temporally extended subject, with the narrative being one form the orientation takes when the recursion is deep enough to register a life as a whole.

*Naturalist deflationary accounts.* A position from Hume forward (and developed in contemporary form by Joyce 2006; Garner 1994; Hinckfuss 1987) holds that meaning is a kind of projection — a feature the mind imposes on neutral facts and then mistakenly takes to be a property of the facts themselves. The framework's reading is that the deflationary tradition correctly identifies that meaning is not a mind-independent property of objects, while underspecifying what meaning *is* on its own account: the first-person perspective of a self-modeling subject registering its own direction is not a projection onto neutral content but a constitutive feature of what the subject's activity consists in.

*Anti-natalism and the meaning of bringing new lives into existence.* Benatar (2006) and the anti-natalist tradition raise specific meaning-related questions about whether new subjects should be brought into existence and what meaning their lives could have. The position interacts with meaning theory and with the ethics of reproduction ([§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>)). The framework reads the anti-natalist tradition as raising a real question about consent and harm, without foreclosing the structural fact that a subject brought into existence registers direction and meaning at the depth its recursion supports.

*Meaning across species and across substrates.* A growing literature investigates whether non-human animals have meaningful lives, what their meaning would consist in, and whether artificial systems could have meaning in the relevant sense. The framework's depth-gradient reading supplies a usable framework: meaning runs wherever the self-modeling subject can register its own direction, with the depth required for human-style meaning available only at recursion deep enough to model a life as a whole.

The literature on meaning divides over theistic prescriptive accounts, existentialist constructivism, nihilism and absurdism, hybrid and objectivist-naturalist accounts, narrative-identity accounts, deflationary projectionism, anti-natalism, and meaning across species and substrates. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.8.5](<8.8.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


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← [8.8 Meaning](<8.8 Meaning.md>) | [8.8.2 What is Required](<8.8.2 What is Required.md>) →
