What It Means to Experience One’s Life as Meaningful
摘要
Meaning subjectivism is the view that what makes life meaningful is that we experience it as meaningful. In this chapter Hauskeller tries to clarify what that means, which is not as obvious as it is often thought to be. Thus, experiencing one’s life as meaningful does not mean believing that one’s life is meaningful, nor is it simply a pleasurable sensation. It is both more than a feeling and less than a belief and consists of various psychological elements—among them a sense of connection, coherence, significance, orientation, and belonging—that combine to create the experience in question. Crucially, those elements should not be confused with the sources of meaning, which are multiple and, even though as humans we share many of them, can vary from individual to individual.