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?

This introduces an important distinction into the discussion, namely, (a) the object, and (b) the knowledge we have of it based on our perception of it. We can make this distinction on the basis that, if we have knowledge of an object, it presupposes the existence of it, and that its existence is a function of the way it exists in the world through its various attributes, e.g., attributes related to its spatial dimensions, shape, color, etc., and that it has these attributes regardless of anyone being able to perceive them or not.

Consider that our perception of objects is, in the first instance, a function of two things. Firstly, an object being the causal element in the act of perceiving it, and secondly, the ability of our perceptual apparatus to process the sensory information in a manner that is assumed to be reliable in being able to reproduce the object accurately as a discernible event in one’s stream of consciousness. The latter would form the basis on which variable degrees of knowledge of the object can be formulated, depending on the quality and nature of the experience, and whatever else might have been know about the object prior to the particular perception of it at a given moment in time.

The latter is relevant as there are going to be differences between perceived objects on the basis that we may already have beliefs about them. In short, people sometimes see what they want to see, or are expecting to see. On this topic Nietzsche said in 1887:

As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences, depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.

This is a whole topic on its own, and we won’t go there just now, but it is just another reminder that our perception of objects might be suspect when it comes to their accuracy. But for the current exercise we’ll proceed on the premise that sensory perception is by and large a reliable enterprise, and see where it will get us.

Having said that, there is in fact some manipulation going on by the time the object arrives in our stream of consciousness as a perceptual event. Before it arrives there, it will have been processed by our brain’s neural network on the basis of the nature of the data received from the sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc.) and – as I inferred earlier – we give this process the benefit of the doubt in being able to reproduce the object exactly as it was presented to us at the moment of perception. As much as the act of perceiving is entirely transparent to the perceiver such that it would appear we have direct access to the object, I’m merely stating this as a reminder that, in fact, we do not, as we are always one step removed from it.

Finally, in addition to there being a neurological process to convert objects being perceived into mental objects in one’s stream of consciousness, human beings – as all other creatures that live on earth – will have had their sensory organs evolved to the degree that this was necessary for them to survive as a species. As such we can point to significant differences between species in how objects are perceived in terms of their properties. Think about the highly developed sense of smell that a dog has versus what the average human nose is able to detect. When faced with the same object, this would produce a different object for the perceiver with respect to at least one of its properties. To a lesser degree there are going to be (however subtle) differences between the perceived version of the same objects between humans on the basis of their individual physiologies.

So the question for us here is: Regardless of the degree of knowledge we have of an object – e.g., we only know some of its properties, do we have any reason to believe that objects in the world are in fact not what we perceive them to be? What else could they be other than what we perceive them to be? Does anyone care? Why do philosophers worry about this? Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) introduce such concepts as the “thing-in-itself” (“ding ansich”) to suggest that the true nature of things in the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them. As I attempted to point out earlier, our knowledge of the world is – so to speak – tainted by human perception, i.e., as Nietzsche says, there is no immaculate perception.

Let it suffice that (a) objects exist regardless of anyone having any knowledge of them, and (b) if we do have knowledge of an object, it would be reasonable to assume that it exist as perceived, but that (c) we will never know that it exist exactly in the manner in which we believe its exists – as that level of knowledge is simply not available to us as it cannot be verified outside the act of perception.

This leads me to conclude that – while we can make the distinction I made earlier – between (a) an object, and (b) the knowledge we have of that object, it is in fact a logical distinction as well as an ontological distinction, and that to all intents and purposes the knowledge we have of an object is in fact knowledge of its mental replica we carry around in our stream of consciousness , and that – as such – the subject defines the object to the extent that this is the only way an object is available to the subject.

So now I would be tempted to say that, whatever knowledge we have of the physical world and derived through the senses (is there any other way?), this knowledge may not be entirely truthful with respect to what it is telling you about the world and everything in it. This is what French Philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) concluded about the reliability of sensory experiences:

Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

Now “deceived” is a strong word – implying an intentionally malicious act – and I would have preferred to say that discrepancies might occur between (a) the object being perceived and (b) our perceptual apparatus being able to reproduce it accurately as a mental object in the stream of consciousness. Such is the nature of reality.

(I’m leaving some other problems alone here, e.g., in philosophy 101 we should have all learned that you cannot deduce a cause from an effect – that to do so is a logical fallacy. In the movie The Matrix they made that work by placing hapless human minds at the receiving end of a causal chain that made them interact with objects in a virtual reality that was entirely software generated. So, again,  even if you  have a mental construct of an object in your consciousness, there is no guarantee that it does in fact exist in the world in the manner that you believe it to be, and you may only have been  led to believe that it was there.)

Much has been made of Nietzsche’s concept of a superior human being – the Übermensch – but apart from being completely misunderstood and maliciously misappropriated by Hitler’s Nazi scum in the previous century – this is the future human being that will be able to rise above the present human condition.  He will have overcome it in the sense of no longer being taken down constantly by all the human frailties that continue to threaten our extinction as a species: essentially endless everything – endless greed, lust for blood, consumption, exploitation, gratification, debauchery, procreation, stupidity, superstition. In short (!) everything that, as per our exceedingly well documented history, defines us as the immature, confused and seemingly self-destructive species we are so familiar with today.