Living a Life of Meaning: Heidegger’s Suggestion

One of my greatest fears is lying on my deathbed with an unshakeable sense that my life was meaningless. I don’t mean I’ll feel selfish or useless, like I failed to properly sacrifice myself for the greater good (though I anticipate feeling that way, too). I mean something humbler. I worry I’ll feel I didn’t have enough days where I was right where I was supposed to be, where my existence, if only momentarily, was meaningful to me and those around me. 

I feel tacky confessing my concerns about meaning. Meaning seems overdone and underdelivered, attracting generations of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students ready to discover “what this is really all for.” Progress on the question capitulates to philosophy’s sticky corners: where best to draw lines in the sand, what jargon captures the edge cases. All the while, we overlook the deep and prior questions, like does the world even have meaning, or is it a lie we stuff ourselves with like candy?

The question of meaning, though, transcends the narrow context of hyper-existential philosophy undergraduates. Headlines warn that the historically central pillars to a life of meaning—faith, love, and work—are in decline. Self-help books, online therapy courses, and guided meditations promise to restore meaning and groundedness to our lives. While meaning likely lies somewhere deeper than essential oils, that many of us feel this searing void—and are motivated to remedy it—suggests it’s a question worth wrestling with, no matter how futile or pompous the pursuit. At the very least, it seems we’d be in a better place if we each tried to sort through what constitutes a meaningful life.

I’ve found one of the most compelling accounts of meaning in an unlikely source: truth. That is, Martin Heidegger’s claim that our understanding of truth has radically changed for the worse. He first alleges this shift in his 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, claiming the essence of truth has transformed from unhiddenness, where value is placed on authenticity, to correctness, where value is placed on fact. Proof is in the pudding; today, truth is so deeply understood as correctness that “truth as unhiddenness” falls largely unintelligible on modern ears. Heidegger describes “unhiddenness” in his essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” He writes, “Truth originally means that which has been wrested from hiddenness.” That is, Heidegger thinks truth used to be revealing, a presencing of something previously hidden. It’s like a sunrise creeping over the horizon, slowly bathing the world in light. In some sense, that sunrise was true.

Truth as unhiddeness runs hand-in-hand with authenticity. For a cooling breeze to be a “true” cooling breeze, it need not hit some ideal temperature or have the perfect force. Rather, it’s true insofar as it authentically comes out into itself. There’s a pull to this idea. When a cool breeze washes over you on a hot day, there’s a way in which it feels just right—perfectly true. It’s valuable not for reaching some pre-set ideal breeze threshold, but rather for how it responds to the moment: forming off the ocean, dancing down the edge of the sand, drying the beads of sweat pooling on your neck. This is how Heidegger thinks the pre-Socratic Greeks conceived of truth, and as a result, valued these authentic moments of illumination. They indulged in wine, food, pleasure, and creativity—as Nietzsche tells us “Those Greeks. They understood how to live.” They lived vibrantly and authentically, receptive to the spontaneous moments when a glass of wine at dinner rises up, takes hold of you, and demands you recognize its truth.

If this is what truth meant for the pre-Socratic Greeks, Heidegger thinks its essence has been sweepingly transformed in the modern age. Truth has come to mean correctness, something “very general and empty.” We colloquially conceive of truth as that which accords with fact: it’s true that George Washington was the first President of the United States; it’s not true that Washington was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (that was JFK). This new conception of truth immediately seems, in some fundamental way, boring, robbed of its authenticity and robustness. Truth is no longer the vibrant revelation of something coming out into its fullness—eye contact made across the dinner table, a child’s hand enveloped by their grandfather’s—but something far thinner, less interesting, and more septic. Truth has become something of a matching game: a fact over here, a claim over there, and so long as the two coincide, we’ve reached that great thing we call truth. Truth has lost its authenticity. It is dependent upon the already-existent. 

It seems this fundamental shift makes our lives feel dull, meaningless—the agony I worry I’ll face lying on my white, sterilized sheets. In many ways, truth governs and orients our world. It’s the virtue we instill in our children, what we fight over in politics, the purpose of science, what universities search for, and what justice uncovers. And yet, this great principle seems to have been stripped of its richness. Truth as correctness leads us away from meaning. It incentivizes us to orient our lives around places where we can embody objective correctness: striving towards the top job, obsessing over perfect grades, and finding the best partner. We strive towards objective perfection because, if this is our goal, then truth is an easy end. All we must do is fashion our life to cohere with what society has deemed correct: take the job with the highest salary and most prestige, buy the trendy clothes, send your kids to just the right schools.

This is not to say we only care about truth, or even that it’s the primary dimension underlying a life of meaning. Sometimes, I intentionally relish in lies: I can certainly leave two minutes before class and still make it in time, or—and this is one of my favorites—I am a moral person (better than most) and not complicit in any systems of oppression. Perhaps, though, part of what makes it seem we’ve strayed so far from the truth, why conspiracy theories proliferate and fake news abounds, is that truth has lost a core component of its essence. Now that we orient our lives around the thin notion of truth as correctness in place of the rich, alluring, authentic virtue of truth as unhiddeness, it’s no wonder truth has lost its great pull over society. 

Truth as unhiddenness offers meaning and moments of undifferentiated confidence in the self-contained value of your existence. When the sun pierces through a thick layer of clouds, or you’re enveloped by the hug of a friend, or you sit around the breakfast table with family, your existence feels wholly justified and independently meaningful. If we orient our lives around these moments, leaving time to be open to the world’s authentic calls, our lives balloon into colorful mosaics of self-standing moments of meaning.

 Some may charge this view of meaning with aestheticism: a life of meaning doesn’t reside with the hard or sacrificial, but with the easy, smelling the flowers. This critique might be partly warranted. There seem to be other dimensions to meaning that better capture the inevitable pain of existence and that explain why so much meaning seems derivative of valuing others as much as the self. But I also think this critique wrongly reduces unhiddenness to the purely aesthetic satisfaction of freshly baked bread or Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The value of unhiddeness is that it is self-sustaining, or not dependent on something external. That is, you’re not preoccupied with mere replication: striving to imitate the ‘correct’ choices of another or pursue someone else’s grand theory of sacrifice. Rather, your life assumes its own contours, producing a patchwork collection of meaningful moments tailored, specifically, to you.

My concern about meaning seems to come from the pull of correctness. I’m tempted to do the right things, work for this firm and move to that city, and I often do. And yet if these preoccupations overcome my life, I worry I’ll crowd out the moments of illumination that furnish real meaning—the moments I’ll recall on my deathbed. So I’m working, slowly and persistently, to reintroduce the value of the unhidden. To let myself be overcome by the laughter of a friend or the bell of a buoy at sea—and in this way, my fears are tempered. Maybe living a life of meaning doesn’t require a grand theory or ultimate sacrifice, but building a life filled with lots of little moments where your existence feels just right, perfectly true.