ABSTRACT
Grand-narrative, end-of-history, ‘true-world’ philosophies offered, as we saw, a meaning of life that is universal, the same for all human beings at all times and places. Though there is no necessary reason why this should be so – nothing in logic says that a universal meaning to life can be provided only in terms of a grand-narrative, end-of-history structure (a point to which I shall return) – the death of God, in all his forms, has, de facto, meant the death of the attempt to discover a universal meaning, the abandonment of the quest to discover anything that could count as the meaning of life. With the exception of posthumous Nietzsche’s view that the meaning of life is power (which doesn’t really count since posthumous Nietzsche never existed), post-death-of-God philosophers are generally agreed that there is no meaning of life, that life as such is meaningless – ‘chaos’ (Nietzsche), ‘absurd’ (Camus).
