The Absurd

[malakaix]

How does one reconcile this?

The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it.

This has been the poison coursing through my veins for many years now, slowly corroding my spirit. It'a paradoxical in the sense that the realization of this concept grants the subject the freedom to create meaning and define life without restriction, but always aware that existence is objectively meaningless.

"Existential angst", sometimes called dread, anxiety, or anguish, is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.

Albert Camus wrote about this in his essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus'; in Greek mythology Sisyphus was a king who was punished by been compelled to roll a boulder up a hill and watch it roll back down, repeating this action forever. Camus concluded in his essay that '"The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

I personally feel like this is a situation that can't be resolved on its own, i can distract myself for a period of time but i always come back to the void. I am always operating from a place of emptiness, there is no foundation. This has slowly lead me into existential nihilism. It would seem to me based on Camus's conclusion that the solution is to become completely engaged with the struggle, finding oneself in a state of been perpetually busy. - But is this really it?

Could this existential crisis also be catalyzed by a society and culture that no longer has a collective vision, but is becoming increasingly individualistic? Or be more prominent in lower context cultures opposed to higher context cultures which are more collectivist.

There are few times in my life that i recall feeling content and fulfilled, and they always involved been a part of a community working towards a collective goal. That goal may have be meaningless in the spectrum of everything if we follow the principles of existentialism, but the journey towards it with people who shared the same vision provided me with a sense of purpose, which i believe was the point Camus was making.

What do you think?

 

[Flickering]

I think you more or less said it. We hear so often that 'we're social creatures,' and what this means is that it's encoded into our genetics to want to be part of something bigger. Other people serve as a reference point and a feedback loop for your thoughts and your sense of reality. They create, emulate and validate all meaning in your life. Without other people, you have nothing to compare yourself to, and you're nothing much at all. Life becomes meaningless. If you think of a man going slowly insane by himself in solitary confinement, as the years pass by, human contact, and therefore all perception of relevance or purpose, becomes nothing but a memory that draws more and more distant.

Existential angst is bound to be endemic to a society that values individualism so highly. We feel cut off from each other. It's all up to us, if you lean on other people you're being 'selfish,' this life is all for you and nothing matters more than your happiness. This makes us miserable, because what a tremendous weight it is to dump on the shoulders of some poor primate who must carry it alone, even though he's programmed to work in union.

Most of us find it fills the hole to turn to religion where we can follow the edicts of a priest and be welcomed in the congregation. Or to warfare where we can follow the commands of an officer and fight alongside our comrades. Or to whatever trend is fashionable today (Obama '08, celebrity fixation) or even fashionably unfashionable (goths, bronies). When you're part of a group where everyone thinks alike, there's a sheer buzz of validation and it's powerful enough to make ordinary people do unimaginably horrific, or just plain baffling, things. Humans have been known to get so hooked on it that, when the Mezatecian cultures had their great days of sacrifice, many of the sacrifices themselves were not only willing, but ecstatic to take part. They wanted nothing more than to have their hearts cut out of their chests still beating, so that they may be fed to the gods. And why not - they had a crowd hundreds of thousands strong telling them it was the right thing to do and it was where they belonged.

What's the common theme here? Directive.

The mind needs to serve a function just like the heart does. The heart is there to pump blood, the lungs are there to circulate air, the stomach is there to digest food. What's the mind there for? It's there to process input and to react according to a very complex set of priorities. Those priorities vary and are flexible. If you're a willing Incan sacrifice, your priority is to appease the heavens with your own blood, and you look forward to dying on the altar, you accept the fact of your death the same way a plant 'accepts' that it is about to be harvested. You're just fulfilling your purpose, life and death do not factor. If you're a soldier, your purpose is to keep your buddies safe and if you're the squad's LT or captain, your purpose is to lead your men. If you're the congregation, your priority is to do God's will, and if you're the priest, your purpose is to convey it. If you're a goth, your purpose is to dress all in black and confide the darkness of your life with your friends, and if you're a bronie, your purpose is to do what all the other bronies are doing, which just happens to be clopping.

These people caught up in existential angst, what's their purpose? Where do they belong? Who or what is telling them how they're supposed to function?

Most of the time, it's a passive and uncaring consumerist message about 'being happy' and 'winning'. Which are both goals so vague and ideal we can never fulfill them.

So, we feel like orphans. No place, no time and no reason. We're junkies and we need our fix but we don't even know what we're hooked on. We're hearts but we're not beating to any rhythm and it feels like death.

 

[malakaix]

That was an excellent post Flickering, thanks for writing it up i really related and don't have much else to add but to agree.

It's just all so ridiculous and absurd that i can't help but laugh with despair. Is this eventually where the mind ends up when it is no longer distracted with the world? The solution as i see it is to become involved and focused on a goal, and allow purpose to cultivate as a result of the pursuit itself.. but there's always a part of me that knows at any point it could all fall apart or change because it's entirely built upon my own subjectivity.

It's like trying to build a house on sand... there's no solid foundation. There's nothing but a void.. life feels like a game of "how long can you pretend to be the idea of yourself before you eventually collapse back inwards". I had a friend tell me this some five years ago and at the time i had no idea what he meant.. it was beyond me at the time, but now i understand completely what he was conveying.

- I would say this is why music is so therapeutic for me because it provides the means for me to melt into nothingness.

 

[neurotic]

i think we get frustrated on the meaninglessness of it all when we aren't particularly passionate about anything.

the notion of absurd i find quite liberating. 'do whatever suits you, it's all pointless anyway'. meaningless shouldn't necessary be a negative charachteristic, but lacking passion definitely is. that is, i don't think we need meaning as much as we need passion. emotions can drive us to do something as much as meaning.

say, if you had to draw something to win a contest. the contest provides meaning to the act of drawing. but when you realize the absurdity of it all it's like realizing that the contest has no prize after all. shitty situation. but what if, you are drawing something because, instead of a contest, you actually love drawing?

instead of working towards an ultimately meaningless goal, what if working itself (the activity, the 'distraction from death') is the goal itself?

thankfully, as we are able to feel emotions, activities can be pleasurable. i for example used to love playing guitar and making music. i didn't make music or played the guitar for any reason other than i enjoyed it, and the key is enjoying something is reason enough to do it... i didn't need any deeper goal or meaning to do it.

when we're madly passionate with someone, we don't really give a shit about the pointlessness of it all. we are driven by passion.

passion is enough to (perhaps even the only thing that can) satisfy us. and personally i don't find 'being distracted by passion' sad, because well, i feel fulfilled by the activities i love when i do them. if you feel simply 'distracted from death' when you do something, then you're not really passionate about it, easy as that.

the universe being meaningless is a logical, rational conclusion, but we are not really moved by things like that, we are moved by emotion. i think anyway

we are not working towards any meaningful thing, so uh, enjoy your vacation on earth while you're alive i guess?

well, i don't know

 

[Foreigner]

I've always found Absurdism incredibly egocentric, but innocently so. You'll know if your applied meaning works or not because reality will eventually reflect the truth back at you, unless your denial is so strong that you can't see the contradiction... which many humans fall prey to. I do admit, that initially the realization of what 'this' is, can feel rather catastrophic. It means the end of everything you know to be true: family, friends, work/career, what you're doing here exactly. At its ultimate level, this kind of ego death is very painful, and that may be what the existentialists are peripherally touching on; however, they never take it to its ultimate destination, they kind of linger in the depression/devastation zone and never leave it... or they take it to nihilism, which is even more depressing. Beyond these, is a great deal of inner peace and contentment that there is no goal, no meaning required, nothing is wrong, nothing needs to be fixed, no action needs to be taken. It all just is. There's no self in any of it. If you still feel shitty after realizing that life has no fixed meaning, then it means you've still got something to lose, which means there's an ego attachment happening.

What the existentialists do is they say "there is no real meaning to anything", and then own that as the ideology, which then becomes another force of attachment, and as a further place for ego to dwell. The ultimate state of Emptiness is beyond nothingness because it doesn't have self-involvement or egoic involvement, so there's nothing left to dwell on, not even existentialism itself. It's hard to describe with words because it's a meditative state beyond semanticism.

I can say that this state, ultimately, is rather peaceful and benign.

Even if you find meaning in your short life and create a whole institution that supports it, in 500 years no one will even know. This room I'm in, and this computer I write on, having meaning to me, but from one light year away I'm so small and invisible that I might as well not exist.

To me... personal meaning is about personal function. We're biological creatures with higher ordered brains that need purpose to survive, for the most part. I read a study some years ago that people who have a driving purpose tend to live longer. Their physical bodies will actually adapt to live longer, as long as there is a need to keep doing. People who sit around tend to die young, and not just because of laziness. There is no driving force to keep them alive.

 

[Flickering]

The solution as i see it is to become involved and focused on a goal, and allow purpose to cultivate as a result of the pursuit itself.. but there's always a part of me that knows at any point it could all fall apart or change because it's entirely built upon my own subjectivity.

- I would say this is why music is so therapeutic for me because it provides the means for me to melt into nothingness.

When you listen to music, are you trying to build anything that could fall apart or change? Or are you just enjoying it?

Are you building your life, or enjoying it?

the universe being meaningless is a logical, rational conclusion

The logic of no logic?

 

[murphythecat]

we all need and really want the same thing fondamentally. whats absurd is as a society, we havent been able to make a consensus of what we all really need.
we indeed lack of goal and what MOST people do in this society is absurd at best and at worst, very detrimental for any individual.

what people want is not what people need.

the society offers us what we want and not what we need.

BTW, be careful with authors like camus or sartre: while I thought they were deep in my youth, with some distance, I really think they were bit depressed individuals.

 

[neurotic]

The logic of no logic?

what? meaningless doesn't mean illogical

things in the universe can still be governed by causality even if the universe isn't inherently meaningful, that is my interpretation from the notion of the absurd presented by existentialism at least

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

that existence is objectively meaningless.

In the sense that there is no external, metaphysical purpose or concrete goal despotically set over mankind, that's true enough. Though I'd say that our existence is meaningful relative to our experience as human beings rather than being purely subjective to the individual. As flickering pointed out, the means by which people find meaning are a matter of nature as much as nurture, and similar enough that we might consider the issue objective (we are not free to create meaning, but to decide which pursuits are most conducive to that sense that we are living meaningfully...and even that is largely determined by one's life experience). Furthermore, your statement about the lack of a collective goal suggests that your problem may not be that meaningfulness is absent from some suprahuman perspective, but that it has not been decided for you, and that your anomie has made it much harder for you than most to find that association of persons with shared values that is so important to our psychological health.

I used to suffer from bouts of nihilism as bad as yours, what helped me was an unintentional reframing of the problem. Through my reading and discussing my issues I became aware that what I was most concerned with was what I, and other people, both as individuals and as members of civil society should be doing. This is not the realm or metaphysics or epistemology, but of ethics. If this resonates with you, I'd suggest that instead of worrying about some nonexistent grand unified theory that would dictate our lives' directions from some principle of or beyond nature, drop the rest and take the time to consider ethics as a discrete subject. There's a lot of diversity in the field, and no reason not to be eclectic in what you take from it. My efforts, which are still in their infancy, have done a great deal to attenuate that corrosion of my spirit. I am less focused on drowning myself with this or that passion or clinging to the memory of that reciprocal sense of value derived from collective effort; I have become more focused on how reason may best determine what I/we ought to do. It is not a thing of absolute certainty, but that is not to be had in this world outside of mathematics and formal logic. All we can do is pursue accuracy to the best of our abilities, if that doesn't sound like much (I know that I've suffered from an unhealthy preoccupation with certainty), look at what the scientific method has accomplished. The physicist has revolutionized the world several times over by building ever more accurate models to predicate and explain empirical phenomena, while the metaphysician is no more certain of what the nature of reality is now than he was in Athens 2,500 years ago.

More broadly, if the state of society is a big concern of yours, not just culturally but in terms of the administration of governance and those duties we possess as members of civil society, then reading the works or the great political thinkers may be worthwhile. I'm talking about pre-20th century stuff like Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, etc. etc. And for someone dissatisfied with contemporary Western society, I cannot recommend strongly enough the study of the Greco-Roman classics. Ancient thought can be quite refreshing, and give you a different perspective on just what our civilization was/is/can be.


If I've gone too far in projecting my own issues upon you to be helpful, then I hope that I have least been interesting.

 

[swilow]

^Really good post THR

The physicist has revolutionized the world several times over by building ever more accurate models to predicate and explain empirical phenomena, while the metaphysician is no more certain of what the nature of reality is now than he was in Athens 2,500 years ago.

I think that's because metaphysical enquiry can never be truly innocent or objective. Its very bound up with the subject in question. Subjects and culture change over time, meaning the basis for comprehending metaphysical inquiry is always changing (though the questions don't appear to). Physical and unchanging laws don't have that same restriction, so a mechanical truth derived 2500 years is still true today.

Maybe our modern time needs more and new philosophers.

 

[herbavore]

I think that the intersection of meaning and meaninglessness is the sweet spot in life where I can just be. Plan A is full of trying to figure it all out and that little 3 letter word 'all' is a vortex of infinite depth. Plan A is interesting but I like Plan Be. Floaty, encompassing both detachment and attachment, appreciative. The first part of my life was painful. I attached to everything fully--both the skinny coyote needing to feed her self and her young and the terrified house cat writhing in her jaws. How do you embody your own existence in this web? Every baby born is born with the knowledge of deep, safe connection to another human being. Every child will come in his or her own time up to the edge of the void and know his/her own complete alone-ness. Maybe it is only age that makes me feel so tender seeing how we can embrace these two experiences, albeit clumsily. Appreciation of what is loads every single moment with meaning and relieves every single moment of needing any meaning at all.

 

[swilow]

There is a version of detachment and surrender to the meaningless that is filled with light and a carefree spirit, a feeling of relief and whimsical childishness. It gives rise to deep, tangential and free-thinking, and doesn't dwell on any one thing, but just takes the needed and moves on. It feels free in the face of the vast and impersonal universe because no rules or storylines or external expectations means nothing can go wrong. Ultimate freedom. Nature can be appreciated for what it actually is.

There's the other type, which is apathetic and cold. That see's meaninglessness as an excuse to exploit, as there are no true consequences. It is a negation and can be sometimes (mistakenly) be called evil. It sees no point in striving for better. Just keep degrading and plunging down. There is no greater good and no point. Obscurity and seperation are default and, as such, should be enjoyed and furthered.

Its really important to clarify which version you seek, because the latter is almost in-built (at least for me...). The former is attainable (I think) through use of logic, but must be accompanied by emotive understanding of that logic; you need to feel the joy of understanding stuff . You can think yourself in freedom as easily as into despair- or so I've come to try and believe. I used to think that I was always about two minutes from being able to render my entire life pointless by "logically" stripping away all meaning through deep introspection. I've never been game to try it but I've tried the opposite- to look at the relative lack of truth around me, the non-presence of fundamentals like justice, mercy, love, and to realise that manifesting those is even more vital because they otherwise would not exist. I should feel obligated (almost) to feel happy and spread it, knowing that it totally and utterly cannot hurt. Its a strange game that I'm coming to believe you cannot really win or lose at.

Bit off topic, yeah Thinking aloud....

 

[Xorkoth]

In the sense that there is no external, metaphysical purpose or concrete goal despotically set over mankind, that's true enough. Though I'd say that our existence is meaningful relative to our experience as human beings rather than being purely subjective to the individual. As flickering pointed out, the means by which people find meaning are a matter of nature as much as nurture, and similar enough that we might consider the issue objective (we are not free to create meaning, but to decide which pursuits are most conducive to that sense that we are living meaningfully...and even that is largely determined by one's life experience). Furthermore, your statement about the lack of a collective goal suggests that your problem may not be that meaningfulness is absent from some suprahuman perspective, but that it has not been decided for you, and that your anomie has made it much harder for you than most to find that association of persons with shared values that is so important to our psychological health.

I used to suffer from bouts of nihilism as bad as yours, what helped me was an unintentional reframing of the problem. Through my reading and discussing my issues I became aware that what I was most concerned with was what I, and other people, both as individuals and as members of civil society should be doing. This is not the realm or metaphysics or epistemology, but of ethics. If this resonates with you, I'd suggest that instead of worrying about some nonexistent grand unified theory that would dictate our lives' directions from some principle of or beyond nature, drop the rest and take the time to consider ethics as a discrete subject. There's a lot of diversity in the field, and no reason not to be eclectic in what you take from it. My efforts, which are still in their infancy, have done a great deal to attenuate that corrosion of my spirit. I am less focused on drowning myself with this or that passion or clinging to the memory of that reciprocal sense of value derived from collective effort; I have become more focused on how reason may best determine what I/we ought to do. It is not a thing of absolute certainty, but that is not to be had in this world outside of mathematics and formal logic. All we can do is pursue accuracy to the best of our abilities, if that doesn't sound like much (I know that I've suffered from an unhealthy preoccupation with certainty), look at what the scientific method has accomplished. The physicist has revolutionized the world several times over by building ever more accurate models to predicate and explain empirical phenomena, while the metaphysician is no more certain of what the nature of reality is now than he was in Athens 2,500 years ago.

More broadly, if the state of society is a big concern of yours, not just culturally but in terms of the administration of governance and those duties we possess as members of civil society, then reading the works or the great political thinkers may be worthwhile. I'm talking about pre-20th century stuff like Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, etc. etc. And for someone dissatisfied with contemporary Western society, I cannot recommend strongly enough the study of the Greco-Roman classics. Ancient thought can be quite refreshing, and give you a different perspective on just what our civilization was/is/can be.


If I've gone too far in projecting my own issues upon you to be helpful, then I hope that I have least been interesting.

Great post man. I hope you keep posting in here. My own participation in this forum was slow and gradual but in all honesty I think you'll really like being here if you stick with it.

 

[sigmond]

Hopefully this will turn out to be a coherent post, my English is not so good...

“I can only quote Kierkegaard, who said something that astounded me and that I did not understand for a long time. He spoke of the three stages of existence, the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. When you pass the first two you find yourself in an existential predicament which can be open to the religious of the absurd.

He equated religion with the absurdity. He called it the leap into the absurd. But what he said and was puzzling to me was that, after the first two, the closest thing to the third stage is humor. I thought about that for a long time. I cannot explain it except I know it is true."

I imagine you're familiar with the idea of taking a 'leap of faith' instead of continuing to persist in a state of nihilistic indifference. Unfortunately, there might be no way out, this could be what Camus was alluding to when he said " A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it." I believe this to be true because the 'leap of faith' is simply a leap into the absurd. The absurdity of faith.

In regards to the comment on humor...

You find yourself in a situation where intellectually you're out of rational options and now the only choice you have is to accept something which was formerly unacceptable. So you might as well laugh and have a sense of humor about it. (even if its laughing to keep yourself from crying)

(I dug further into the absurd but my comments disappeared when I hit the advanced button)

Anyway, it was my understanding that Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus believed you should just accept the apparent meaningless and strive to become your most authentic self. Although, if you accept the scientific worldview- physicalism -and that time is linear, I would argue that authenticity is impossible. If you think about it, you have been conditioned since birth by a multitude of things outside of your control which combined to shape your personality and character. (self-illusion/delusion)
The best you can do is live what you consider a 'virtuous' life based on reason.

random rambling..
(Seemingly, Sartre thought you should go out and live your ideals even if that means becoming a radical revolutionary like Che Guevara.)

If you desire you could possibly become a monk.

 

[thujone]

I think that the intersection of meaning and meaninglessness is the sweet spot in life where I can just be.

well put. i don't have time to worry about meaning anymore, i'm too busy working through my bucket list. anything can go wrong at any time. life is fleeting. wasting time is dangerous, because we don't know how much time we really have left. the safest bet seems to be living a life we can enjoy instead of just suffering for objectives that others or society at large expects of us. everything you do carries an opportunity cost. you can make more of almost anything, the one thing nobody can ever make more of is time

 

[swilow]

Hopefully this will turn out to be a coherent post, my English is not so good...


I imagine you're familiar with the idea of taking a 'leap of faith' instead of continuing to persist in a state of nihilistic indifference. Unfortunately, there might be no way out, this could be what Camus was alluding to when he said " A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it." I believe this to be true because the 'leap of faith' is simply a leap into the absurd. The absurdity of faith.

In regards to the comment on humor...

You find yourself in a situation where intellectually you're out of rational options and now the only choice you have is to accept something which was formerly unacceptable. So you might as well laugh and have a sense of humor about it. (even if its laughing to keep yourself from crying)

(I dug further into the absurd but my comments disappeared when I hit the advanced button)

Anyway, it was my understanding that Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus believed you should just accept the apparent meaningless and strive to become your most authentic self. Although, if you accept the scientific worldview- physicalism -and that time is linear, I would argue that authenticity is impossible. If you think about it, you have been conditioned since birth by a multitude of things outside of your control which combined to shape your personality and character. (self-illusion/delusion)
The best you can do is live what you consider a 'virtuous' life based on reason.

random rambling..
(Seemingly, Sartre thought you should go out and live your ideals even if that means becoming a radical revolutionary murderer like Che Guevara.)

If you desire you could possibly become a monk.

Great post. I don't know much formal philosophy, have read The Stranger and Nausea but you've piqued my interest.

What is meant by 'authentic'? Is there an objective self, divorced from the self that learns and accumulates?

 

[sigmond]

For the the time being I'll post a link to the SEP article on authenticity
too tired for in depth thought at the moment..granted, I doubt I'll say anything that hasn't already been discussed somewhere else.

Is there an objective self, divorced from the self that learns and accumulates?

short answer is yes- unfortunately I am unsure if I understand the long answer

quick opinion on one aspect of Sartre's philosophy(which again I am not sure I understand)

A possible way of interpreting an aspect of his thought would be similar to the movie "Groundhog Day" Each morning you would wake up into a world where you have complete free will but are responsible for every action and your objective would be to live as authentically as possible. I think the idea would be to strive to always exist in a condition similar to Wu Wei (effortless action).

Pragmatically I believe he thought you should live your ideals

(I might be wrong its been a while since I read anything Sartre wrote.)