Kant and the Construction of the Meaning of Life in the Modern Age

For Kant as an influential philosopher in the modern period, the question of the meaning of life is highly significant, since he provides specific and influential answers to important questions of the meaning of life in the main parts of his philosophy, that is, epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of religion. By relying on epistemological and ontological humanism in his epistemological system, Kant restricts meaningfulness to the material world and the boundaries of empirical sciences, and excludes it from metaphysics. Then, in his ethics, Kant focuses on the human being as the foundation and the end of morality, and thus, he provides moral answers to metaphysical questions about God, freedom and immortality, and thus, the religion is taken to depend on the human being, trying to de-theologize the religion by reducing it into a totally human phenomenon matching the human rationality in which God is just a servant of human tendencies. Prima facie, Kant's thought appears to construct a novel meaning for human's life, but his exaggeration in humanism and humanly interpretations of ethics and religion has led to the relativity and plurality of ethics and the religion, which leads, in turn, to their inefficiency in responding to the human fundamental questions and the true happiness, which amounts to the meaninglessness of the modern human life.