The Meaning of Life According to Different Philosophies

Can the meaning of life be told in a word? Maybe it is naive, but there is nothing wrong with wanting a simple answer to an apparently simple question: why live? Here we visualized the most prominent philosophies that tackled this question over the past 5000 years.

All philosophies on the meaning of life seem to fall into one of the four groups:

1. life has an objective meaning;
2. life has a subjective meaning;
3. life has no meaning;
4. life has a supernatural/unexplainable meaning.

The philosophies of the East and West also follow a pattern: Easterners think in terms of “we”, the community, while Westerners think in terms of “I”, the individual…

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