Abstract

This paper aims to show current philosophical anthropology pertinence to face up the question of meaning of human life. Exploring Marquard’s theory and his comprehension of human being as Homo Compensator‒ which allow to overcome the problems of modernity plunged in the gnosis dilemma, that in the absence of an absolute meaning it fails to understand the problem of evil‒ this paper firstly analyzes how modernity answered that problem from theodicy and philosophy of history. Afterwards, due to the failures of these attempts, Marquard’s compensation proposal will be discussed as a search on a substitute meaning in the context of a philosophy of finitude, which advocates for a rhetorical-narrative meaning. The paper concludes with the problem of the non-compensable and its dilemmas on understanding meaning.