Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life

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 anti-meaning is (or could be taken to be); second, it discusses whether there are good reasons 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 interpretations 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.