And by the title I don’t mean to say that absurdism is the cure to all ills or that it is the answer to the universe. And yet, “the absurd” as described by the great Albert Camus is the best definition of our lives.
The absurd is everywhere when one starts to look, every contradiction, every paradox is the grandchild of the absurd father.
That is being a bit poetic of course in its certainty, since such absolute certainty is impossible (another paradox, see?)
“Certainty is impossible” is in itself another certainty. And round and round it goes. It is a self referential sentence like most paradoxes.
And as humans if we are the biggest self referential systems (we desire to understand ourself from within ourselves) the “answer” to everything can’t be anything but a paradox. The absurd, as it were.
This solves nothing, it guides nothing, it shows only what there is and nothing more. And there is, dare I say it, beauty in the whole notion (a completely personal opinion)
I find that such reduction as it were “The struggle against the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” is what philosophy leads to and leads away from. Go deep enough and you find yourself back at the surface.
The act of doing anything is “enough” by itself for itself. No appeal to achievements or even goals but the action itself that we take is all there is. All other things like stakes or stories are all structures, illusions to make action happen. This action is not divine, but nothing is divine so does it matter? It is what it is and nothing else.
I suppose I just wanted to share this and ask if you philosophers of all ages have any comments.
I agree that life has no ultimate purpose. Yet we naturally create contingent purposes that enrich our lives—friendship, love, learning, work, and simple pleasures. These meanings are real without being absolute. They are held with confidence, but never certainty. Wisdom lies in recognising that they are sufficient for a flourishing life while cultivating the strength to revise or relinquish them when reason and experience demand it.
My man! You sound like a stoic.
First I would ask I guess how does one “enrich” their life? With what metric or currency? Happiness, money? I mean go bring the happiness machine and let’s measure, I guess.
And when you say love and friendship, are these the “eternal” types, or the ones felt in the moment. Cause I understand the second, the first is a story within life. And a story within life can’t effect all life it is created within it. It happens inside of it, doesn’t make it better or worse.
Same for “cultivating strength”, how does one do that or measure that? It is felt in the moment, all within thew moment we live. All there is.
I mean there are games, narratives so there can be action. But there is nothing beyond or higher than that action.
Agreed upon by who? The 6 billion humans on the planet. I mean I don’t agree, do I count?
How much learning does one need before they see the secret hidden cosmic meaning in everything that everyone agrees with?
Intelligence, rings? What does that even mean? I thought you were rational, here you’re talking about the “feel” of it.
Are we just calling each other names now? How does one even destroy intellect? Shouldn’t it be indestructable?
And I get what intellect does. It can tell you everything from the atom to gravity to the speed of light. But it can’t tell you why any of that should matter to us.
It can’t tell you why anyone should do anything in this finite life. Intellect doesn’t make people play sports or paint or make music or fall in love. Intellect fails there. At the things that are inexplainable by nature, cause if you explain them they’re boring. They’re not absurd, they’re not “magical”.
I mean understanding everything is good, but why do you want to understand everything? Isn’t that an irrational desire?
It’s my dream to be max intelligent in a few fields. I have complete confidence there is a way to understand everything.
It’s normal, for someone pro-intellect, to pursue knowledge-of-everything(but that’s technically heavyweight, it may be advised to be a lighter frame).
Dude, life would be utterly boring if you understood everything. It would be like being spoiled for every movie you’re ever gonna watch. How could you immerse yourself in play and lose yourself if you understood anything and everything. You’d just be Doctor Manhattan, cold, indifferent, uninterested.
Not sure if I find absurdism especially useful, though I’m not a philosopher. I’m more interested in what people believe and why.
Is the universe really silent on meaning? Do human beings genuinely seek order and purpose? How are the two connected? Fucked if I know.
From a personal perspective, there seems to be meaning everywhere, perhaps even an excess of it. The more difficult question is whether any of that meaning transcends human perspective and contingent circumstances. I’m not sure how we could know.
And when we dismiss the divine, do we really know what we’re dismissing? Often it seems that both believers and sceptics proceed with more confidence than the evidence warrants. Before deciding whether meaning is objective, subjective, divine, or illusory, we may first need an account of how anything becomes intelligible or meaningful to us in the first place. I’m not convinced we have that.
You offer no argument for the conclusion that nothing is divine, but you just make that assumption. Let’s assume proof or disproof of the divine is impossible. Does that reduce your theory to “Without the divine, all is absurd.”
Absurdism is useful to understand certain things better in my opinion. But everything is useful for a goal, nothing is useful for the goal.
We can never know for certain about meaning or transcendance. That was my point about certainty. Yet we must act taking things as certain, we must act “as if” as it were.
That “as if” is sight of the absurd. The fact that we fight to survive knowing full well that we’re going to die is the absurd. It is a paradox. Some escape it with divinity, “meaning beyond life” but they still act within life. They still fear death.
Things are meaningful as much as we give them meaning. The very concept of meaning is invented by humanity to begin with. It is always within life, not beyond it.
I don’t know if there is a god or not, but I know that one must live either believing or not believing so they can act. I accept this inconsistency.
I suppose I should prefice that with “I believe” or “In my opinion” but in a world without objective meanings, that usually goes without saying.
The fact that you can believe totally differently from me is proof if anything that universe does not hand out meaning and yet we so much yearn for it.
We want something to be “objectively” beautiful, or objectively good. Like a mountain or a lake or a movie or a song.
I yearn so much for my perspective to be “the reality” and yet the world won’t give me that.
I accept that contradiction, I live within it seeing it. I live assuming my perspective to have some meaning so I can do things and live a life. A life that will end and be forgotten not so long after.
Without such proof or disproof, it follows that no “thing” whether it be action or emotion or state can be “above” any other. Not with proof anyways.
Murder to the “universe” is then equal to charity. You can’t “prove” that it isn’t. But we still want it otherwise. We want charity to be meaningful, we want murder to be “universally evil” there is the absurd.
To this I’d say there is nothing absurd or paradoxical about a mortal creature fighting to survive. It’s not as though you’re going to die immediately you finish fighting; it might be decades away. There’s a great deal to experience or achieve before death comes… even in the space of a single week. It only seems absurd if we push the framing.
And as for those who hold beliefs in an afterlife, not all of them fear death, so there’s that. But even if some of them do, so what? Actors often fear public speaking and struggle with stage fright. Doctors fear making diagnostic mistakes despite years of training. The things we care about most often require us to confront anxieties rather than be free of them.
But what is the difference between living 1 more day or 10 more years. They both end the same way. The experiences you cultivate aren’t recorded or counted, they simply live in your mind and experience. They matter to you but you will cease to exist anyways.
There is no higher reason or any reason at all besides desire to live longer. And that desire itself is irrational. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying it’s very human and hence absurd. It is the very state humans live in.
But I will concede the point about the fear of death, some people indeed don’t fear it.
Well, the difference is ten years. If that doesn’t matter to you because it all ends in death, I would say that is a framing question. Are you suicidal now? Do you hate your life and seek solace in death?
I don’t enjoy a good meal any less knowing it will be over in an hour or so. I don’t value my house any less knowing that one day it will be ruins. I think the absurdity of this approach is to see some kind of cessation of pleasure simply because there is a time limit to experience and, perhaps, a lack of transcendence.
Personally I’m an atheist, but I see no reason to wallow in the kind of trite framing that says something like we are alone in an indifferent universe and are destined to suffer and die, so we must create meaning somehow, absurdly, in the face of nihilism. I don’t see that it follows that because we die, everything means nothing. It’s still everything. This framing sounds more like the kind of conclusion an evangelical apologist might make. Perhaps it’s a Christian inheritance within existentialism, the idea that without transcendence, human existence becomes a problem with no solution?