For most of Western history, the question of life's meaning pointed outward and upward, toward a comprehensive horizon that gave each person a place in a larger order. A new paper in Religious Studies argues that when people stopped asking about the meaning of life and started asking about meaning in life, they did not give up on transcendence. They changed its address. Transcendence, the authors claim, migrated from beyond the subject into the texture of the subject's own experience.
The distinction matters because it reframes a debate usually told as a story of loss. Sebastian Hüsch and Klaus Viertbauer separate two kinds of transcendence. Absolute transcendence locates meaning in a horizon beyond the situated person, and in doing so it tends toward a third-person perspective and risks displacing the subject as the place where meaning actually lives. Immanent transcendence treats the inexhaustibility of lived experience and interpretation as itself transcendent, preserving the first-person perspective and grounding meaning in a person's relation to experiences, actions, and events that exceed their control.
The argument turns on events, the moments that break into a life and resist being absorbed into a tidy story about who we are. Such events, the authors contend, reveal a dimension of subjectivity more basic than narrative identity. They call it the minimal self, a pre-reflective layer of experience that is present before we tell ourselves any story about it. Drawing on Taoist and Buddhist thought, particularly the concept of sunyata, or emptiness, they argue that meaning in life emerges through participation in a relational reality rather than through the fulfilment of an externally given purpose. Transcendence, on this reading, becomes an immanent feature of lived existence.
The method is worth stating plainly, because it bounds what the paper can claim. This is conceptual philosophical analysis, not an empirical study. It draws distinctions, builds an argument, and brings analytic philosophy of meaning into conversation with phenomenology and Eastern traditions. No data were collected. The peer-reviewed venue lends scholarly credibility to the reasoning, but the work establishes a way of framing the question, not a finding about how people in fact experience meaning.
The present account also rests on an abstract-only read of the article, so the full chain of argument, its sources, and its qualifications are not in view here. What survives that limit is a structural claim: that the modern self has not emptied meaning out of the world so much as relocated its source into first-person experience.
That relocation opens rather than closes a question about consciousness. If meaning is grounded in a pre-reflective, minimal self that precedes the stories we tell, then the ground of meaning is also the ground of subjective experience itself, the bare fact of there being a first-person point of view at all. Whether that minimal self is the floor of consciousness, or merely one more structure built atop it, is exactly what the paper leaves standing. Source: https://doi.org/10.1017/s003441252610184x