Western thought often explains systems—from societies to ecosystems—by breaking them down into their parts: atoms, rocks, trees, individual people. But many African philosophies like Ubuntu challenge the idea of pre-defined, isolated entities forming larger wholes. As philosopher Elvis Imafidon argues, relationships don’t connect pre-existing individuals, rather all things become what they are through their relations with other things. From this relational understanding of being, a dominant theme in African philosophy develops a distinctive community-centred ethics, which places equal value on both human and non-human aspects of reality.

One question that has kept philosophy thriving for thousands of years is the existential question of the human: What makes human existence meaningful? This is in some ways different from the question of origins: What makes human existence possible? While the latter is a shared concern across disciplines—from anthropology and biology to philosophy—the former, about the meaningfulness of human existence, is often primarily within the radar of philosophy and sibling disciplines such as religion.

But these questions also have shared boundaries, a common metaphysical concern. The answer we give to the question of the origin of human existence significantly impacts our understanding of the meaningfulness of human existence. Whether we understand meaning to arise entirely from within this world, or from some transcendent, other-worldly source, will be influenced by whether we believe that life originates solely from material substances or from something transcendent and spiritual. The interwovenness of these two questions will continue to unfold during our discussion in this short essay, even though our focus is on the question of the meaningfulness of human existence.

___

The implications of existentialism for the meaningfulness of existence, which reflects much of our thinking today on the matter, are that meaningful existence is both anthropocentric (centred on the human) and subjective (defined by the self).

___

It is easy to decipher how the experience of two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, during which human experience must have sometimes seemed meaningless, urged philosophers to think more concretely about meaning. What may not be readily decipherable is that the existentialist movement that arose in this period was also a radical shift from a transcendent, other-worldly understanding of the meaningfulness of human existence to a this-worldly perspective. In this shift, the idea that the essence and meaningfulness of a human’s existence transcends or precedes their this-worldly existence is rejected and replaced with the idea that the human being exists first and only in this world, and then gradually forges out and curates their own essence and meaning. This is why, for Friedrich Nietzsche, “God” or the dominant religious and moral tradition of Europe had to die first for the Übermensch (super-human) with the will to create their own meaning and morality to emerge. And it explains why in the existential ontology of Martin Heidegger, any understanding of being and existence has to begin from and centre the human subject, Dasein.