French author and 1957 Nobel laureate Albert Camus once wrote:
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end.
When I read this the first time I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, i.e., I was unable to identify with “the absurdity of everything all around us”. Most of the things going around me seemed to make reasonably good sense most of the time and if there was something going on I didn’t quite understand I was quite confident that it made sense to someone else.
However, over the years I have come to the realization that this is all a matter of one’s point of view, and that – yes – life, existence, appears to make little sense when you take a step back and consider the human effort as a whole, including its history, when seen from the vastness and complexity of a seemingly infinite material universe. And as it has been said, the universe remains absolutely silent on these matters: it fails to provide the very reasons for its existence and everything that can be found in it, including our lives.
By way of a simple analogy, accepting this is a lot like waking up one day and discovering that you are travelling on a train with an unknown destination and having absolutely no prior knowledge from where it departed from or how you ended up being on board. With little choice other than accepting the fact of the matter your options are going to be limited in terms of what to make of it.
When I write this I am once again reminded of Kafka’s short story The Passenger that I have written about elsewhere, about being confronted by an existential disconnect, the acute realization that the immediacy of the moment is unable to account for whatever situation you find yourself caught up in, e.g., what am I doing here, or: why am I here at all?
It is in this context – or more likely in the absence of any kind of context that would be able to account for it – and what I have frequently referred to as “the greater context” that some have deemed life or existence an absurdity, and a seemingly meaningless exercise that appears to have no particular purpose beyond being there for its own sake.
However, it is once thing to conclude this about life, but – as Camus suggested – this should not be an end in itself. To contemplate one’s existence this way would be very much like staring down into the void – the realm of infinite nothingness. And to paraphrase something Nietzsche once said: if you stare into the void long enough, the void will look back at you, i.e., it will vacuum out your soul, and you might as well end it all right then and there.
Interestingly, to consider suicide as an option is according the Camus the one truly serious philosophical problem we face in life: Judging whether life is or is not worth living. But while this might be an interesting question for philosophers, one doesn’t need to be overly presumptuous for suggesting that the vast majority of people do not consider their existence a waste of time, and an absurdity which must be endured one way or another. Instead, they experience life as meaningful given that meaning is always relative and a function of what one is experiencing within the context of the here and now. Even in the darkest of times it is within the human spirit to try to make sense or look for meaning in what one is experiencing at the moment. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” as Alexander Pope once said.
The bottom line is that we remain challenged to provide the meaning of life beyond the immediacy of finding ourselves immersed in it. As to the suggestion that there is no meaning beyond it was a consideration for Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who suggested that “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” And that “In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Finally, I believe that – as a species – we are initially prevented from looking beyond the immediate substance of our lives and seeing the apparent absurdity of it, as we remain preoccupied by the trivial and perhaps not so trivial. But that doesn’t mean that we are unable to encounter it and be challenged by it as a means to gain a greater understanding of the predicament we find ourselves in, e.g., why is it that we are here and what is it, exactly, that is expected of us?