Abstract
In African philosophy, not much has been done in addressing the question of the meaning of life from an African perspective. Thus, in this thesis, I attempt to bridge this intellectual gap and proffer answers to the questions: what are the African conceptions of the meaning in/of life? Which one, if any, is defensible? And what does the most defensible account of meaning entail for how to live? To do this, I first distinguish between meaning in life, which involves those moments of meaningfulness that may dot a person’s existence, and the meaning of life, which involves the meaningfulness of the entirety of a person’s life considered as a whole. From clues in the literature, I present four salient accounts of meaningfulness viz. the African God-purpose theory, the vitalforce theory, the communal normative function theory and the consolationist theory. Finding them inadequate because of the legitimate scepticism about the metaphysical foundations on which they are built as well as the fact that some other types of meaningful acts and some criteria for meaningfulness are not fully captured by the most plausible versions of these theories, I propose the passionate yearning theory, which involves a clear devotion to an intrinsically determined object of meaning, and ratio-structuralism, which involves creating and making sense of an enduring structure and rationale with regards to the entirety of a person’s life even after death, as an alternative to the African theories of meaning in life and as a theory of the meaning of life respectively. However, while factoring in the finality of death, I insist that life as a whole is ultimately meaningless and therefore propose the philosophy of indifference, which is a philosophy that adopts suicide and living for living sake, as a viable mode or mood of living with the meaningless of life.
Ph.D. (Philosophy)