Remembrance of Former Things

How does a meaningful world differ from a meaningless one? If the difference lay in some fact about the world, we might expect scientists to discover it. But that is absurd. Science deals with causes, not meanings or purposes. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” It is not some fact, but the sense of the world as a whole that makes it meaningful or meaningfulness.