The notion of the "Absurd" has always fascinated me. Throughout my self-study of philosophy - which includes mainly lectures (via audible) from universities I’m not rich and smart enough to attend - I found myself regularly returning to thinkers who addressed the clear and present absence of a "natural ontology" - thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer.

I first encountered the idea of the Absurd in lectures on Existentialism by Professor Robert C. Solomon, and then later in Albert Camus' 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus. I was struck immediately by the definition. I know of very few concepts defined in this way.

The Absurd is understood by Camus to refer to the fundamental conflict between what we human beings naturally seek in the universe and what we find in the universe. The Absurd is a confrontation, an opposition, a conflict, or a "divorce" between two ideals: On the one hand, we have man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity; On the other hand, we're faced with the formless chaos of an uncaring universe.

As such, the Absurd exists neither in man nor in the universe, but in the confrontation between the two. We are only faced with the Absurd when we take both our need for answers and the world's silence together. Recognition of the Absurd is perhaps the central dilemma in the philosophical inquiry of Existentialism.

And while phenomenologists, such as Husserl, attempt to escape from the contradiction of the Absurd, Camus emphatically insists that we must face it. This paradox affects all mankind equally, and should merit our undivided attention and sincere efforts.

In his attempt to approximate a "solution" for the Absurd, Camus elaborates three options over the course of The Myth of Sisyphus:

1. Suicide: Camus notes that not only does suicide compound the absurdity, it acts as an implicit confession that life is not worth living. Additionally, he declares that suicide is of little use to us, as there can be no more meaning in death than in life.

2. Faith in God: In the face of the Absurd, other authors propose a flight towards religious doctrine. Chestov asserts that the Absurd is God, suggesting that we need God only to help us deal with the impossible and incomprehensible. Dostoyevsky hints at similar conclusions. Kierkegaard is famous for making the "Leap of Faith" into God, where he identifies the irrational with faith and with God. However, Camus retorts that this blind acceptance of supposed, yet elusive high meaning is akin to "philosophical suicide," or abdicating one's will in exchange for an existential analgesic.

3. Revolt: Finally, Camus proposes that the only way to reconcile with the Absurd is to live in defiance of it. Camus' Absurdist Hero lives a fulfilling life, despite his awareness that he is a reasonable man condemned to live a short time in an unreasonable world. The Absurdist Hero may choose to create meaning, but he always maintains an ironic distance from his arbitrary meaning. Always, the conflict between our desire and reality is present-most in the mind of the Absurdist Hero, and so he lives, defiantly content, in a state of perpetual conflict.

Here I should clarify. Absurdity does not entail a certain style of life, but a certain frame of mind. An office clerk or a politician can also live an absurd life, so long as they maintain an awareness of the futility and meaninglessness of all their struggles and remain determined to live consistently and with integrity in the present moment. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus concludes by remarking that the seducer, the actor, and the conqueror are only three examples of the Absurd Man, and that other models must surely exist.

Camus follows Descartes' example in doubting every proposition that he cannot know with certainty, but unlike Descartes, Camus does not attempt to impose any new metaphysical order. Rather, he forces himself to find contentment in uncertainty and insecurity. Uncertainty about the future, insecurity about your place.

The broad majority of our social conventions and frameworks have been implemented with the promise of a "better tomorrow"; of less uncertainty and less insecurity. Every revolution, every new religion, and every new political movement has proposed a morality which would create a better future. And they certainly have. Must this continue inevitably? or could it all be doomed to end? This kind of concern; concern about the uncertainty of the future is ever-present.

There is something more fundamental behind this concern, however. Something that isn't contingent on particularities. There doesn't need to be a collapse of society, or global warming pandemic, for this concern to apply to each individual, since the demise of each individual is certain, and from the perspective of our own lives, as catastrophic and philosophically problematic as any grander narrative.

Heidegger, for example, is correct when he argues that the fundamental element of human concern is death, and that death hangs over us, threatens and defines our very being. Even if you become a scientist and successfully prevent global warming, or succeed in a grand revolution against capitalism, the possibility of your own death, the death of everyone you love, still exists, and with it, all the challenges of nihilism pertaining to our existential condition. Heidegger shows that the fundamental problems of our existence cannot be worked out, solved, fixed, or avoided. They follow us everywhere and define who we are at our core.

Provided you agree with the axioms from which Camus and these authors operate (which are largely allegorical), it becomes clear that his synthesis of a "solution" is cogent, realistic, and most likely practicable in our individual lives. After all, if life offers no inherent meaning, what choices lie beyond suicide, religion, and revolution?

Being myself a somewhat reasonable man struggling with the knowledge of my ever so brief existence in an irrational world, I am confronting the chaos of the universe with yet another play-through of the Skyrim Special Edition, combined with the rather judicious application of gin martinis.

Death is one of those things you just have to learn to live with.


PairTheBoard

sl;dr (suitably long, did read). Camus has a good point in the 1, 2 and 3. Suicide isn't optimal. Faith in God has its problems. So I guess I'm a revolting, the definition seems to suit well. So it's number 3 for me. Vee, do you feel like a number 2? At least I don't think you are full-blown 3, correct me if being wrong.

Thinking more about it, I could be a 2.8 or maybe 2.85. The belief in the good could make me a bit under 3 flat.

Very nicely expressed.

That does not sound like a heroic and defiant creation of meaning, though most of us may end up there. Maybe Camus needs "escapism" as a fourth category. Or should we call it the "just keep swimming, swimming, swimming" theorem

But I really like the thought of heroicizing meaning in the face of the abyss. I suddenly have a new understanding of Cervantes.

Yes, a 2 on most days and high on escapism and epicureanism. Philosophical suicide I might be guilty of.

Revolting against the incomprehensible sounds a lot like swimming upstream. Good if you're looking for fight. Bad if you're here to dance and laugh.

Trying to do the best of the 0.15-0.2. For some reason I've got humor and musicality (if I dare say). The former is quite effective in diverging. The second makes contact to heaven. And then you have love. For example love for the birds starting up the day outside the window.

But all in all, much of everything is I've decided to make things matter for getting through life. And need to rest much after swimming upstream.

"If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair."
-Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd”
https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/...as%20Nagel.pdf

I think a greater intelligence than ours would look at our perspective of reality as limited, sophomoric, and naïve. We've barely begun to understand the phenomenon of experience and are practically befuddled by the relationship between now and eternity. Our newly discovered love of science and the mechanical, materialistic, realism we've stumbled into over it is like blindly touching the toe of an elephant. Great truths such as "nothing matters" derived from this perspective of we smart monkeys are highly suspect. It amounts to little more than a hunch imo. My hunch is there is much more going on.


PairTheBoard

Nicely phrased as always PTB. There's a lot more going on. Hence I'm inclined toward solution 2.

I once got into a conversation with a rather dangerous looking young man at a bar. We talked about where we were going in life and the difficulties of living. I asked him if he wasn't fearful at how much of it was subject to luck and how fragile it all was. He did not strike me as a religious fellow so his reply surprised me. He said, "I have a lot of Faith".

I think there is a kind of Faith that does not require belief in something without evidence. In fact, it is not Faith "in" anything in particular. It's just Faith. It is a Faith that stands alone. It's a Faith that provides a rock on which to build your home. I think it's the kind of Faith that man was talking about.

I cannot find this sense of Faith in any philosophical description of Faith. So I suspect it encompasses uncharted philosophical territory ripe for exploration and discovery.


PairTheBoard

I'm trying to describe the difference between our way of thinking when it comes to whether there is "more":

I'm thinking "why would there be?", you're thinking "why wouldn't there be?"

Did I nail it?

Nagel finds Camus' attitude toward the absurd "romantic and slightly self-pitying."

He says, "If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation, then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation."

Making romantic something out of nothing. Creation.

Camus is no more approaching the absurd from an unappreciative perspective than some hard-nosed nihilist. You can see Sisyphus and his existence as futile and unimportant. Entirely up to you.

Nagel seems to be pointing out the obvious a little.

Funny that absurdity lies at the heart of all comedy as well. Must be something about truth. Playing peekaboo with a 2yr old is the ultimate exercise in absurdity. 1,2,3

That type of Faith is outside of the intellectual realm. However, in response to the last sentence, it is also outside the scope of philosophy.

Jordan Peterson (who is a great resource for this subject) talks about how, at the deepest level, reality is made up of two categories: the known and the unknown. That’s not quite correct in my experience. It’s more accurate to divide reality into three categories:
a) the ordered known
b) the chaotic known
c) the chaotic unknown

The difference between a and b is that a is articulated, conceptualized, and organized. The intellect works in the known, and everything that we have learned intellectually has happened by going b to a.

The reason why there is no philosophical description of that Faith is because that Faith operates in c. It’s the Faith of intuition instead of the faith of the intellect.

The best piece of advice I can share about dealing with the Absurd is to engage with it but not attempt to find an answer for it intellectually the way you’ve talked about Camus doing. This is practically impossible but eventually we have to get there in order to progress.

Another way I describe it is you can’t skip steps:
Step 1 - my life is unfulfilled (existential crisis)
Step 2 - reject your coping strategies that maintain status quo
Step 3+ - eventual resolution

Philosophers (all of them) try to skip step 2 and go from 1 to 3, which is what the intellect does since the intellect cannot reject itself. Step 2 is about sacrifice - can’t skip it if you want a solution that sustains.

Not sure if there's one best way to deal with the absurd.

The solution is personal, I think.

Either you focus on the futility of your toil on this mortal coil or you create a romantic interpretation. How you interpret the absurd is more a question of how you want to live, rather than what you think the truth is. The romantic could include God, appeals to the mystery of conciousness or x,y,z, belief in the possibilities of science or in the future or any variety of beliefs that see us in the way that we fundamentaly feel - important; worthwhile.

To some, it may be about reconciling this fundamental feeling, with the reality of the 'out there'. Those who don't feel worthwhile, I imagine don't feel the universe to be either.

It’s a personal choice whether we want to resolve it completely or find ways to cope with it. I agree with that. If we decide the former, it no longer is subjective.

We can see Sisyphus’s existence as absurd, but can Sisyphus?

Nagel argues the absurd arises just because one can transcend oneself. Can you transcend you? I can’t. Me transcend me? How’s that work since me is the transcender.

Defiance always struck me as a hopeless, breathless, not quite possibility. Embracing God in the way you mentioned (as an analgesic) seems to assume he doesn't exist. What if He really does exist, and the farther you travel into philosophical thought about the nature of existence, the more you expose a hole in the very fabric of reality (and ourselves) that only He can fill? This seems to graze some other discussions we had in the Krauss thread...

In before RGT! RGT!

Camus appears very interested in the moment of reflection in which a person comes to recognise the absurd. He writes that it is not in action, but in the reflection on that action, that you come to see it. He is interested not in what Sisyphus is thinking as he pushes the boulder up hill. Rather, in what he's thinking as it rolls back down and as he's walking back down again. He believes that it is only in moments of reflection, not action, that we come to recognise the absurdity and futility of our toil and our suffering.

His ideal models of the absurd Hero are men of action, not reflection. The seducer, the conqueror, the actor. He talks about how ridiculous it is to reflect and observe someone else making out. You can't even glimpse at the meaning behind the ridiculous action of swirling tounges through reflection alone. The meaning is in the action. Sisyphus, in this way, makes the boulder his thing. He studies it's grooves and crevices and he examines how to push it more effectively and how to engage in his actions in a way that's meaningful to him.
Putting aside the fact that you think God would be a "He", do you disagree with Camus equating belief in God with philosophical suicide?

"Is our Intuition Drive ready Scotty?"
"Yes Captain"
"What's our heading, Captain?"
"Oh, out there someplace. Engage"


PairTheBoard

I don't necessarily think God is a He, I just think it's redundant and asinine to be totally inclusive of every possibility when having a philosophical discussion and so I exercise brevity.

Epistemelogically, I don't agree or disagree. I understand what he's saying, but whether or not he is right depends on the true nature of the universe.

If there is a God, then believing in one is simply true.

Ya^^

I could be misunderstanding what is meant by “philosophical suicide” but it seems that both positions are similar in that there is no philosophical certainty in either. At some point our vision of knowledge/meaning that can be expressed logically and experienced interpersonally blurs and fades away. That doesn’t mean that nothing exists beyond the horizon, just that we can not perceive it in the same everyday way necessary to communicate and perform logic with it.

Whether or not any “sub specie aeternitatis” meaning exists, it does so independently of our perception or ability to communicate it. The same way sound exists even though you might be deaf.