Foundations of Cosmological and Anthropological Meanings of Life in Sadrian Philosophy and Existential Psychotherapy

The meaning of life is one of the most important concerns of modern Man and one of the fate-making problems among contemporary philosophers, psychotherapists, and moral philosophers. The present study investigates the meaning of life in the view of Mullā Ṣadrā, as a Muslim philosopher, and Irvin Yalom, as a contemporary Western existentialist psychotherapist. The focal question of this paper is what the cosmological and anthropological foundations of the meaning of life in the views of Mullā Ṣadrā and Yalom are. The findings of this study indicate that God appears with beautiful and glorious manifestations as the end of being, which grants meaning to being, and Man is present with their ontological gradedness, immateriality, and plurality. By contrast, in Yalom’s philosophy, the centrality of God is denied; the world is void of meaning, and it is Man who must grant meaning to life. Therefore, it can be said that one deals with the unveiling of meaning in Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy and the creation of meaning in Yalom’s philosophy. Regarding the problem of the meaning of life, Mullā Ṣadrā’s approach is teleological and divine, while Yalom’s approach is non-teleological and atheistic.