The question \u201cWhat is the meaning in life?\u201d, asked for millennia, is one of the central questions of philosophy. There has been a growing movement to approach this question by carefully analyzing the \u201cmeaning in life.\u201d Now, Professor Masahiro Morioka of Waseda University has proposed a new idea: to explore \u201cmeaning in life\u201d as a kind of geographical landscape experienced when a person tries to engage with their life with a certain attitude or intention.<\/strong><\/p>\n Psychological and philosophical studies have long shown that a person’s subjective moods and emotions have a significant impact on how they experience the \u201cmeaning in life.\u201d Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe pointed out that a person\u2019s mood vividly operates in the background of perception and plays a major role in how they grasp the meaning of their life.<\/p>\n In psychology as well, there have been empirical studies investigating how mood affects the perception of life\u2019s meaning. Meanwhile, phenomenology has revealed that the lived, first-person experience of the body deeply influences the way we perceive the world. In adjacent fields, concepts such as affordance, solicitation, and enaction (enactivism) have been proposed one after another. These concepts focus on how human physical interactions with the world influence and form the way humans perceive and understand their surroundings.<\/p>\n In a recent study, Professor Masahiro Morioka of the Faculty of Human Sciences at Waseda University aimed to apply that same mechanism\u2014not only to the perception of the external world, but also to the perception of \u201cmeaning in life.<\/em>\u201d The results of this research were published online in Philosophia<\/a> on June 4, 2025.<\/p>\n The present study is a conceptual and theoretical investigation into the nature of \u201cmeaning in life.\u201d In the philosophy of life\u2019s meaning to date, scholars have often debated whether meaning in life is purely subjective, i.e., life has meaning if the individual believes it does; purely objective, i.e., life has meaning regardless of what the individual thinks; or a hybrid of the two. This study, however, sets aside those discussions and instead examines how \u201cmeaning in life\u201d develops between a person trying to live their life and the life they are attempting to live\u2014and how that meaning is experienced by the person.<\/p>\n As a result, the study proposes a “Geographic Model of Meaning in Life,\u201d<\/em> an active exploration model. Applied to the perception of life\u2019s meaning, this model suggests that the manner in which a person explores their life\u2014with specific attitudes and commitments\u2014elicits various responses from life itself. These responses may take the form of actual or potential experiences of life\u2019s significance or misery. In other words, life\u2019s value emerges\u2014both positively and negatively\u2014as a type of diverse geographical configuration that forms human experience. This study proposes that we understand \u201cmeaning in life\u201d as such a geographical configuration that corresponds to the person\u2019s acts of exploration and their attitude toward life.<\/p>\n The noteworthy definition as per Morioka is, \u201cThe geographic model of meaning in life is the whole set of patterns of combinations of lived experiences of the worthfulness of living a life that are experienced being activated by my action of probing into my life in the here and now, and this action is similar to the action of a blind person probing her way with a cane. This probing can be carried out with various attitudes or commitments towards life, such as positive, negative, reluctant, and so on. The worthfulness of my life is experienced differently corresponding to the attitudes or commitments I take when I probe into my life.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In many ways, this work marks a paradigm shift: it treats both meaningful and tragic experiences as parts of the same experiential landscape and explores \u201cmeaning in life\u201d as a perceptual experience of that complex geography. This shift was made possible by introducing phenomenological methodology into the philosophy of life\u2019s meaning, which could serve as a bridge between philosophy and psychology, opening the door to more productive interdisciplinary collaboration.<\/p>\n Notably, psychology has developed both quantitative and qualitative scales to measure how people feel that their lives are meaningful. These existing approaches vary widely, but the \u201cgeographical model\u201d proposed in this study approaches the experience of life\u2019s meaning from a completely different angle. It may offer new insights for psychology and related fields.<\/p>\n With eyes set on the future, Morioka remarks, \u201cMy next goal is to integrate this study with other ongoing approaches in the philosophy of life\u2019s meaning: namely, the solipsistic approach to meaning in life and the liberation and recollection approach. Through such integration, I aim to build a new, systematic framework within the philosophy of life\u2019s meaning.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Reference<\/strong><\/p>\n Title of original paper<\/strong>: A Phenomenological Approach to the Philosophy of Meaning in Life![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/assets\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Infographic_July_11_2025-scaled.jpg\")
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\nDOI<\/strong>:https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s11406-025-00854-5<\/a>
\nJournal<\/strong>: Philosophia<\/em>
\n<\/em>Article Publication Date<\/strong>: 4 June 2025
\nAuthors<\/strong><\/strong>:Masahiro Morioka
\n<\/sup>Affiliation<\/strong>:
\nWaseda University, Japan<\/p>\n