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?

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … “So says   renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg  in his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe)”

In general, we humans like to think that things happen for a reason, either accidentally or on purpose – whatever the case may be. At least, that is the way we usually think about the world based on our very experience of it.  Seeing the world in this manner allows us to understand the interaction between things and events while enabling us to manage our lives around them with some degree of predictability.

So what about the universe? Would it not be reasonable to expect there was some reason for it to be here as well? I’m kind of two minds about that.

First of all, it is quite a conceptual leap to jump from considering the status of some event or another in the world to considering the status of world itself. Is the world  just another event in the sense that we should be able to look at it from either end, i.e., consider the likely cause of it and the effect that it has on other things in the world? Can the world be seen as an event beyond all the things that take place in it? (look up: Gilbert Ryle’s category mistake)

Since the world is both logically and physically necessary for anything to take place, I don’t believe you can put it in the same category of events that take place in the world. As such it occupies a class or category all its own. (I think I’m running into a version of Russell’s set paradox here, but let’s not go there … )

For anything to happen, the world must have happened – that much seems clear. But – as far as we know – the world appears to have happened on its own account, i.e., it is simply here – full stop. It is the container that contains everything else, but itself it is not contained other than by itself.  Such is the mystery of the world.

Now one  could argue that we just don’t know that the world isn’t part or the result of another event that brought it about, i.e., the world is a transitory event that came into being as a result of “the big bang”  – which is the prevailing view at the moment, and so on, and end up in an infinite regress of events preceding events, and then only because we cannot accept that events can appear out of thin air or materialize from within a material empty vacuum for that matter,

Our language is the limiting factor here because it is the language of the living and breathing  mortals that we are.  We cannot get beyond the logic derived from our species’ experiential involvement  with the world and make sense of events that seem to go beyond that.

But what if the point of the universe being here is simply just that: to be here for what it is, i.e., to exist for its own sake?  That we may be able to make sense of this might depend on  what sense or meaning we are able to attach to  our lives, as by extension we would  then be valuing the point of universe being here as well.

If we think about our place in the world this way, well-known  20th century existentialists such as Sartre and Camus would be wrong  classifying life as essentially meaningless and  – among other things –  attributing the absurdity of our predicament to a cold and indifferent universe that remains silent on such things, given that only human beings are able to attach meaning or value to something.  The conclusion has to be that meaning comes from within life, from experiencing life as meaningful, and not from having it  derived from a source external to it.

It would follow that no feature of the universe will likely make sense unless it is viewed in the context of providing the ground for some aspect of meaningful human activity that could otherwise not have taken place.  The logic may sound counter-intuitive but I believe that this is the only way out of the absurdity paradox that Albert Camus entertained when considering the fact that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose:

“Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’ philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)”

The question remains then how the seemingly puny human could conceivably value the existence of the mighty universe simply by finding meaning in their everyday lives.  I think it boils down to the distinction between  quantity and quality, and between form and function in the context of an evolving universe.

As such it wouldn’t matter how old or how large and complex  the world is, given that the significance of that could only be expressed by how well we would be able to experience the quality and depth of  being at the receiving end of this  spectacularly creative effort,  and then solely with the sensibility and reasoning  that has been given to us as a result of merely being a part of it. Everything beyond it is more or less irrelevant, in the sense that -as spectacular as that may be – it is at most a set decoration, the backdrop against which we play out the destiny of our species and of which we have for the moment absolutely no clue.

Sisyphus – by Franz von Stuck

Sisyphus, as we know, is the figure in Greek mythology who was punished by the local Gods for his deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down again at the top, forcing him to repeat this action for eternity.

In The Myth of Sisyphus published in 1942 French author and Nobel laureate Albert Camus retells the tale of Sisyphus as likening the futility of his labours to the human condition, the point being that all human endeavours are essentially meaningless in a cold and indifferent universe.

Camus concludes  that it is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none, and that it is equally absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world when no rational knowledge can be obtained from it.  While accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, Camus appears most interested in the question of whether or how to live in the face of it.

But there is a problem  this line of reasoning,  and not only on just logical grounds.  Firstly, we can’t exclude the possibility that there is in fact a meaning and purpose to the universe just because we can’t see the point of it.

Secondly,  it makes no sense to say that we cannot obtain rational knowledge of the world given the multitude of verifiable scientific successes that have occupied themselves with the material nature of the world. This includes the discovery of evolution as a means to provide perspective to the phenomenon that live represents as well as the context for where we are in the in the hierarchy of all things living.

And  by linking our biological ancestry to the heart of the material universe through the process of evolution, science has attached us more firmly to the world.

This leads me to believe that the universe has a plan,  and within it lies the larger context for all human endeavours, as we find ourselves at the receiving end of it.  For many this larger context simply may not exist or is merely taken for granted,  its relevancy subsumed in the background noise of every day life.

Other than that, yes, the story the greater universe may have to tell  is definitely something of interest to science, but by and large their observations and subsequent theories put it so far out of reach of everyday life that  it is difficult to see how much of it has any bearing on the way we conduct our lives.

One might presume that merely living our lives provides us with all the meaning and context we find ourselves preoccupied with at a given moment. But that might only be the case so long as we don’t look beyond the immediacy of the current moment and try to place it within the larger reality of the surrounding universe.  And just because it is seemingly so grand and perplexing that  we can’t possibly get our heads around it,  it is nevertheless part and parcel of who and what we are, yet have absolutely no clue what we all of this means.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If you are catching the flavour of what the Bard has on his mind here, and are intrigued by it, you might well be interested in a train of thought that has often been referred to as “existentialism”.

Now the term “existentialism” is a bit of a catch-all to describe a variety of philosophical views popular during the 19^th and early 20^th century that can be said to have some commonality through the notion that it is the individual who – in the face of a seemingly cold and uncaring universe – must define the meaning of existence for themselves, as no one else can do it for them.

This might or might not involve a reference to a deity of sorts – for which the former was definitely the case for Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) – often referred to as the original Existentialist – as well as for later thinkers such as the theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965).

More typically, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), as a devout atheist in 1945 described existentialism as “the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism”.  Not calling himself an atheist but an “unbeliever”, Albert Camus (1913-1960) rejected the existentialist label, but is usually included in the roundup of existentialist authors, as are Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) who are really in a category all by themselves, and some of my very favourite writers.

The kind of thinking I clearly identify with existentialism is best expressed by Camus’s view that man’s freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the acknowledgement and acceptance of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free.” Truly free to define the meaning of our own individual universe – but do we have courage and will to do this?

I like to think of existentialism as the attempt to re-define yourself in an increasingly absurd world as defined for you by the traditions of science, philosophy and religion; you cannot help but feel alien to it. Others cannot tell you who or what you are, or what your existence should mean to you. Only you can determine what you can be for yourself, as opposed to what others want you to be.

For this you must look at yourself not through the eyes of others, but from yourself, from the inside out – from within the acute reality of your own cognitive and spiritual existence. But this is no easy task – it means assuming responsibility for all your actions as you attempt to recreate yourself from the subjective contents of your stream of consciousness. It will require courage – the courage to re-invent oneself without being plugged into a god, a scientific assumption or the beliefs of society at large for confirmation that you are doing the right thing.

That this process might cause you anguish  and despair was a frequent topic for existentialist writers when they held that “… value of life – living –  is nothing more than the meaning we give it.”  (J.P Sartre).

For a more complete and erudite roundup of the existentialist movement I recommend Walter Kaufmann’s excellent 1956 anthology Existentialism: from Dostoevsky to Sartre.