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The absurdity of life has produced a vast array of responses. Many of these responses seem to echo the stages of grief. There is anger—the defiant rebellion against an absurd existence, seen in Camus’s solution to the myth of Sisyphus. There is bargaining—the search for some greater cause to fill the void of meaninglessness in one’s life. As we will see, Thomas Nagel explores this impulse and eventually rejects it. The position of Nagel himself, however, more closely resembles an acceptance of the absurdity of human life. I will examine the objections Nagel identifies to his ideas about the “unavoidability of seriousness” and the “inescapability of doubt” and argue that overall, he was indeed correct to dismiss these objections, which do not hinder his theory. The central point I will make is that the absurdity of life is to be actively celebrated. Life is free of meaning! There is no ordained path for us to walk! This mindset liberates us from what I refer to as “top-down” approaches to the meaning of life—i.e., the imposition of meaning and value onto our lives from other, more outwardly authoritative quarters of society, such as religion. And, as Nagel (1971, pp. 719–720) points out, humans qua humans have the impressive capacity to observe the absurdity of our lives with a sense of irony. Raymond Martin provides a less optimistic viewpoint about the human condition, but I believe his conclusion that the impermanence of satisfaction makes it some sort of defeat is overly pessimistic. Martin (1993, p. 559) dismisses Richard Taylor’s idea that people’s lives are meaningful if they do what they love doing as “hopelessly romantic”. I nevertheless believe there is room in philosophical discourse for a position which distinguishes between meaning and fulfilment, and that adopting such a distinction can resolve many of the unsatisfying—and sometimes downright gloomy—conclusions that many absurdist philosophers arrive at.
First, allow me to define a few of the terms that Nagel uses, as well as those that I myself shall be using in this essay. Nagel (1971, p. 718) defines an absurd situation as one that “includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality”. The examples he gives—declaring one’s love to an automated message on the phone, or someone having their trousers falling down while being knighted—convey a sense of bathos. In each of these situations, we are aware that one element is quite grand (declaring love, being knighted), while the other element does something to make the situation seem ridiculous. There is an ironic contrast present in these situations. Similarly, Nagel holds that we take our lives very seriously, which provides an ironic contrast to the ultimate meaningless of whatever we spend our lives doing. This, then, is the essence of absurdism—as Nagel (1971, p. 726) puts it, “the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.”
Let me also take this opportunity to further explain the distinction between meaning and fulfilment that I mentioned earlier. As I see it, a life can be fulfilling without being meaningful. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (n.d.) defines “fulfilling” as “providing happiness and satisfaction”; “meaningful”, on the other hand, is defined as “full of meaning; significant”. We can already see that “fulfilling” necessarily looks inward, towards an individual’s opinions and feelings, whereas “meaningful” arguably looks outward, towards some external authority or arbiter of meaning. As an example of an obviously meaningless life, let us refer to the famous thought experiment of the person that spends all their free time counting the blades of grass in a vast garden. This is a conscious decision on their part: they have considered alternative hobbies and nevertheless know that their passion lies in the art of botanical auditing, however crazy it may seem to the rest of us. But this person’s life would still be fulfilling, provided they genuinely love what they do.
My position here is reminiscent of certain theories of wellbeing—desire theories in particular. This stance is concerned with whether an individual feels subjectively fulfilled, and I make no claim to the contrary. Each person is the best judge of whether their life has been fulfilling; no one else has as comprehensive an understanding of their life, from the everyday minutiae to the once-in-a-lifetime experiences. It would not make sense to deny someone the liberty of evaluating their life on a purely subjective level—certainly nothing worthwhile would be gained by doing so. Of course, we risk straying here into the same debate that surrounds desire theories of wellbeing in moral philosophy: for instance, Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics that desire hinges upon opinion rather than the other way round. As Crisp (2021) paraphrases, “we desire things, such as writing a great novel, because we think those things are independently good; we do not think they are good because they will satisfy our desire for them.” But I do not believe such an objection matters here, because I am not claiming that these things are objectively good or even objectively worthwhile. My claim is simply that an individual’s sincere belief that their life is fulfilling is sufficient for their life to actually be fulfilling. This does not make their life meaningful, but neither does a lack of meaning in their life negate the fulfilment they get from their life, be it spent counting blades of grass or curing cancer. Meaninglessness and fulfilment are by no means mutually exclusive. It is my hope that this will make the conclusion of this essay—that Nagel is largely correct in his assessment of the absurdity of human life—easier to live with.
We have explored my own response to—or more accurately, reworking of—Nagel’s theory. Let us now turn to some of the responses he rejects in his paper. One response I am particularly sympathetic towards (despite its ultimate failure) is to seek meaning by embracing religion. The justification for this response is quite clever: if absurdity stems from the fact that we humans assign a great deal of importance to matters that are in fact trivial or arbitrary, then we can avoid it by assigning a great deal of importance to something deeply significant—a supreme being like God, perhaps, or an all-encompassing force like the Tao. Given conventional beliefs about both of these entities, it would also be possible to argue that we would not, as Nagel claims, have an opportunity to step back and dispassionately look upon the matters with which we concern ourselves; for how does one look objectively at a force or a being that, by its very nature, envelops you entirely?
I am of the opinion that Nagel dismisses the religious argument a little too quickly, even if he does succeed in debunking that objection in the end. He tells a story (1971, p. 721) about humans discovering one day that they have, in fact, been bred by animal farmers specifically for the purpose of feeding creatures that consume human flesh. Even in such a scenario, Nagel claims, human lives would not be meaningful for us, because “a role in some larger enterprise cannot confer significance unless that enterprise is itself significant. And its significance must come back to what we can understand, or it will not even appear to give us what we are seeking.” In other words, we would not consider our role as a food source particularly meaningful because (A), we are unable to fully grasp the significance of the beings that would eat us, and (B), we are unable to fully grasp how our role as a food source would make our lives significant to us (rather than just the creatures that desire our flesh).
If this is intended to be an analogy for how religion cannot provide us with an inoculation against absurdism, I do not think it is a particularly successful one. It misrepresents conventional notions about the relationship between humanity and divinity. It seems more plausible, supposing there is an omnibenevolent God (as many religions believe), that they placed us on Earth for our own sake rather than for theirs (or for a race of hungry aliens). And if we instead choose to believe in a less personal God, or in an impersonal—yet still omnipresent—force of some kind, then it seems even more implausible that we are merely pawns in some incomprehensible scheme. Viewed in isolation, (B) above is acceptable, but there are more grounds on which one could conceivably object to (A): namely that the importance of being able to understand these beings does not immediately seem obvious. How would being able to comprehend these creatures make our own lives more meaningful? Nevertheless, Nagel (1971, p. 721) is right to point out that “justifications come to an end when we are content to have them end—when we do not find it necessary to look any further.” If we can simply decide upon a whim to stop looking for something that makes our life meaningful and we can just claim to have been satisfied, what is to stop us from doing that with any other facet of our lives? That is to say, why do we have to bring God into this at all? We could stop looking for justifications much sooner: why not say that the person counting grass from earlier has discovered the meaning of life? As Nagel (1971, p. 721) puts it, “any such larger purpose [like God] can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be, and for the same reasons.” When it comes to the meaning of life, there is no more justification for praising God than there is for counting blades of grass.
And so we turn to another attempt to grapple with the absurdity of life. This time, there is no denial; but in its place, we find indignation. Albert Camus (1991, p. 54) joins Nagel in rejecting suicide—the former calls it “acceptance [of the absurd] at its extreme” as opposed to a genuine revolt against absurdism. For Camus, there is no majesty in suicide, but by remaining conscious of life’s absurdity and revolting against it, we can reclaim our pride over the course of our life. For his part, Nagel (1971, pp. 726–727) rejects suicide not because we can reclaim our pride, but because “Our absurdity warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.” Indeed, Camus’s response to the problem of absurdity does not seem to achieve very much at all: one is still forced to live an absurd life even if we follow his advice to the letter.
If Nagel’s response is akin to a shrug, and Camus’s is akin to shaking his fist at the heavens, my response is to smile, or even to laugh. Nagel is right: there is an inescapable irony inherent in our existence. The seriousness we grant facets of our life is at odds with its ultimate meaninglessness. But it is in realising the meaninglessness of life that we are liberated. Only when we have eschewed external notions of meaning can we concentrate solely on making our life fulfilling. As it was put in a surprisingly profound episode of Angel (2001), “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” This line eloquently captures the essence of my distinction between fulfilment and meaning. If there really is no grand, overarching meaning—or even a meaning we can create for ourselves, given the inherently arbitrary nature of such an ad-hoc meaning—then we are free to spend our lives doing what brings us happiness. Paradoxically, our actions become far more significant if we acknowledge the meaningless of life and live it nonetheless: doing good without a reason, dancing without a cause, loving without an end.
Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books.
Crisp, Roger. 2021. “Well-Being.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.
Martin, Raymond. 1993. “A Fast Car and a Good Woman”. In The Experience of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, edited by Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, 556–562. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Merriam-Webster. n.d. “Meaningful”. In Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary. Accessed 31st May 2022.
Nagel, Thomas. 1971. “The Absurd”. The Journal of Philosophy 68 (20): 716–727.
Wright, Thomas J., dir. Angel. 2001. Season 2, episode 16, “Epiphany”. Aired 27th February 2001, on the WB Television Network.