The answer is Always 42

A hand-drawn Venn diagram of three overlapping circles labelled Life, The Universe and Everything, with the number 42 in the small space where all three meet, under the words The Answer Is. It is a logician’s joke on the oldest question in philosophy – a precise answer delivered with total confidence, while nobody is quite sure what the question was.

The number became famous as a joke in late 20th-century comic science fiction, where a vast computer works out the answer to life, the universe and everything, and it turns out to be 42 – useless, because no one knows the exact question. That is the philosophical point. An answer only means something relative to a well-formed question, and the meaning of life may be a question we have not yet learned to ask properly.

Philosophers disagree. Aristotle saw the good life as eudaimonia, flourishing through the exercise of virtue and reason (Nicomachean Ethics). Epicurus aimed at tranquillity and freedom from fear. Existentialists like Sartre argued that existence precedes essence – there is no given meaning, so we create it through our choices. Camus called the clash between our hunger for meaning and the silent universe the absurd.

At the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Wittgenstein writes that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. And – the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. For him the meaning of life cannot be stated as a fact, only shown in how one lives.

Absurdism is the philosophy associated with Albert Camus. The absurd arises from the confrontation between the human need for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the world. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus rejects both suicide and a leap into religious hope, and proposes revolt instead – living fully and lucidly without final answers. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Nihilism, from Latin nihil, nothing, is the view that life has no inherent meaning, purpose or value, or that moral truths do not exist. The word was popularised by Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Nietzsche saw nihilism as the crisis following the death of God, announced in The Gay Science (1882), and hoped it could be overcome by creating new values rather than despairing.

The English logician and philosopher John Venn (1834–1923) introduced the diagrams in an 1880 paper on the diagrammatic representation of propositions and developed them in his Symbolic Logic (1881). Similar circle diagrams had been used earlier by Leonhard Euler, but Venn’s method shows every possible overlap between sets, which is exactly what lets 42 sit where life, the universe and everything intersect.

Yes – it is an instant secret handshake for science-fiction readers, logicians, mathematicians and philosophy students, and an easy conversation starter for everyone else. It suits birthdays, graduations and anyone who answers big questions with a straight face. The design comes as a classic T-shirt, women’s T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.