There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

Chuang Tzu and Heidegger both emphasise the virtue of 'spontaneity' - a sort of mindful responsiveness to things as they are. It's this notion, I suspect, that is the best bet for helping to make some sense of talk about harmony or unity with nature.

There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for whom there is nothing beyond a world that is relative to human interests and conceptual schemes; and 'ineffabilists', like myself, for whom any describable world indeed exists 'only in relation to man', as Heidegger put it, but for whom, as well, there is an ineffable realm 'beyond the human'.

I think that Asian versions of 'ineffabilism' have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer's. They are free from the dualistic image of the world of experience as the joint product of mind and reality.

In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.

The Overman will himself be a nihilist in the (good) sense of rejecting any metaphysical or religious grounding for truth and value, but instead of curling up in despair, or simply going along with the crowd like the 'passive' nihilist, he will recognize himself as the sole source of truths and values to live by.

For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.