Thomas Nagel “The Absurd” 1 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Nagel’s Project: •  Nagel’s purpose is not to go directly at the meaning of life. But instead he is looking to analyze why certain kinds of consideraDons seem to support the idea that life is absurd. •  This will include an analysis of what it means for life to be absurd. We already have one sense from Camus. And Nagel’s, as we will see, is closely related. 2 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Nagel’s Project: •  “Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some fell it vividly and conDnually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this convicDon are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?” 3 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Nagel considers some examples of the kinds of consideraDons that are oQen advanced for the absurdity of life. There are two broad categories: –  Our limited Time and Size •  “nothing we do now will maTer in a million years” •  “we are Dny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe” –  Our Mortality interrupts all jusDficatory chains •  “we are going to die” therefore all jusDficaDon for our acDons will die with us. •  Nagel considers each of these in turn and finds each lacking as an argument in support of existenDal absurdity. 4 Nagel “The Absurd” •  “nothing we do now will maTer in a million years” •  Put this in the form of a condiDonal: –  If it is a million years from now then nothing we do will maTer. •  Nagel thinks this implies another condiDonal: –  If it is a million years from now, nothing that happens will maTer now. –  Or –  Nothing that happens a million years from now maTers today. 5 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The wider condiDonal claim then is: –  if nothing that we do now maTers a million years from now, then nothing that happens a million years from now maTers today. •  Should we accept this condi2onal claim? 6 Nagel “The Absurd” •  If we accept the claim, we must also accept the following consequence of it: –  “In parDcular, it does not maTer now that in a million years nothing we do now will maTer.” •  But this claim undermines the existenDal import of the original claim! •  If it doesn’t maTer now, what maTers in a million years, then how can the fact that something won’t maTer in a million years support the idea that life is absurd? It not maTering in a million years doesn’t maTer. So how can it make life absurd? 7 Nagel “The Absurd” •  “Moreover,” Nagel adds, “even if what we did now were going to maTer in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their maTering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they maTered a million years from now?” •  What assump2on is Nagel making here? 8 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Nagel assumes that the only way for something to maTer a million years from now is for it to maTer now. •  “But then to deny that whatever happens now will maTer in a million years is to beg the quesDon against its maTering, period; for in that sense one cannot know that it will not maTer in a million years whether (for example) someone now is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not maTer, period.” 9 Nagel “The Absurd” •  So the argument says that if something were to maTer in a million years, it must maTer now, and if maTering now is not enough to avoid life’s absurdity then how will its maTering in a million years do that? •  So the claim that: •  “nothing we do now will maTer in a million years” •  Cannot support the claim that life is meaningless or absurd. 10 Nagel “The Absurd” •  What about claims about our limited Dme and size? –  “we are Dny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological Dme scale, let alone a cosmic one.” •  The point that Nagel raises here is how not being Dny momentary specks would change things about the absurdity of life? 11 Nagel “The Absurd” •  “suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)?” •  So claims about our Dny size and duraDon cannot support the claim that life is meaningless or absurd. 12 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The next argument for the absurdity of life Nagel considers is the argument from our temporal and causal limitedness. (p. 768) •  The idea is that “one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career—but to what final end?” •  Or more generally “all chains of jusDficaDon must leave off mid‐air (…) All of it is an elaborate journey leading nowhere.” •  The “Why?” game……. 13 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The first response Nagel gives is to quesDon what the problem is with chains of jusDficaDon coming to an end. •  “Chains of jusDficaDon come repeatedly to an end within life, and whether the process as a whole can be jusDfied has no bearing on the finality of these endpoints. No further jusDficaDon is needed to make it reasonable to take an aspirin for a headache, aTend an exhibiDon of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from pueng a hand on a hot stove. No larger context or further purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being pointless.” •  But given that these acts aren’t pointless in the everyday sense, does it follow that they are not pointless in the existen2al sense? 14 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The more thorough and subtle response to the ‘chain of jusDficaDon’ argument is the following: •  According to Nagel, the argument is a “misrepresentaDon of the process of jusDficaDon, the argument makes a vacuous demand. It insists that the reasons available within life are incomplete, but suggests thereby that all reasons that come to an end are incomplete. This makes it impossible to supply any reasons at all.” 15 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Why is it vacuous to claim that all jusDficaDons that come to an end are incomplete? •  Because there is no such thing as a jusDficaDon that does not come to an end! •  “Even if someone wished to supply a further jusDficaDon for pursuing all the things in life that are commonly regarded as self‐jusDfying, that jusDficaDon would have to end somewhere too. If nothing can jusDfy unless it is jusDfied in terms of something outside itself, which is also jusDfied, then an infinite regress results, and no chain of jusDficaDon can be complete.” •  Look closely at this last sentence. 16 Nagel “The Absurd” •  “ReflecDon on our minuteness and brevity appears to be inDmately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what that connecDon is.” –  We have considered arguments concerning our limited Dme and size: •  “nothing we do now will maTer in a million years” •  “we are Dny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe” –  But these don’t appear to support the idea that life is meaningless or absurd. 17 Nagel “The Absurd” •  We have considered arguments regarding our mortality and its effect on chains of jusDficaDon: •  “we are going to die” therefore all jusDficaDon for our acDons will die with us. •  But these also don’t support the idea that life is meaningless or absurd. •  Therefore: •  “The standard arguments for absurdity appear therefore to fail as arguments. Yet I believe they aTempt to express something that is difficult to state, but fundamentally correct.” 18 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Back to Nagel’s Project: •  “Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some fell it vividly and conDnually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this convicDon are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?” 19 Nagel “The Absurd” •  At this point Nagel considers himself to have successfully argued the first part of the point: the reasons we usually cite for our lives feeling absurd or meaningless can’t possibly jusDfy such a claim. •  The next project is to understand: “Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?” 20 Nagel “The Absurd” •  If we are trying to find out why consideraDons of our small size, brevity, and jusDficatory inadequacies seem to support claims about the absurdity of life perhaps we had beTer step back and ask what we mean by life being absurd! •  What does it mean for something to be absurd? •  “An ordinary life situaDon is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiraDon and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a moDon that has already passed (…) as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.” 21 Nagel “The Absurd” •  But this is ordinary absurdity, surely the absurdity of life is something more profound? •  “If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity, however, it must arise from the percepDon of something universal—some respect in which pretension and reality inevitably clash for us all. This condiDon is supplied, I shall argue, by the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” 22 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Nagel claims that this philosophical absurdity is inevitable. As Nagel points out his claims about absurdity in life require defending on two fronts. 1.  If life is absurd because we take it seriously, and the absurdity is inevitable then that must mean that taking life seriously is inevitable. Is it true that it is impossible not to take life seriously? 2.  If life is absurd because our acDviDes could be considered arbitrary, they are open to doubt, and the absurdity is inevitable, then that must mean that being able to doubt the meaning of our lives, being able to consider them arbitrary, must be inevitable. Is it true that it is impossible not to doubt? 23 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The unavoidability of seriousness: •  “Human life is full of effort, plans, calculaDon, success and failure: we pursue our lives, with varying degrees of sloth or energy. (…) Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his health, his sex life, his emoDonal honesty, his social uDlity, his self‐knowledge, the quality of his Des with family, colleagues, and friends, how well he does at his job, whether he understands the world and what is going on in it. Leading a human life is a full‐Dme occupaDon, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern This fact is so obvious that it is hard to find it extraordinary or important.” 24 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The inevitability of doubt: •  “Yet humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are commiTed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncraDc posiDon, they can view it sub specie aeternita.s—and the view is at once sobering and comical. (…) 25 •  The point here is that as humans we have the mental capacity to take an external, eternal, transcendental view of ourselves. •  In this sense, our percepDon of the absurd resembles epistemological skepDcism. •  “SkepDcism begins when we include ourselves in the world about which we claim knowledge. We noDce that certain types of evidence convince us, that we are content to allow jusDficaDons of belief to come to and end at certain points, that we feel we know many things without knowing or having grounds for believing the denial of others which, if true, would make what we claim to know false.” •  How do we know we are not in the matrix??? •  How do we know it is important in a wide sense that we exist and strive toward our goals? 26 Nagel “The Absurd” •  “Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity: not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact the we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be the persons whose ulDmate concerns are so coolly regarded.” •  “In viewing ourselves from a perspecDve broader than we can occupy in the flesh, we become spectators of our own lives. We cannot do very much as pure spectators of our own lives, so we conDnue to lead them, and devote ourselves to what we are able at the same Dme to view as no more than a curiosity, like the ritual of an alien religion.” 27 •  ”What sustains us (…) is not reason for jusDficaDon, but something more basic than that—for we go on in the same way even aQer we are convinced that the reasons have given out.” •  Hume makes the point about the inevitability of taking life seriously even aQer fundamental philosophical doubts have raised their ugly head in a famous passage from “A TreaDse of Human Nature.” Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocaDon, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when aQer three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculaDons, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and rediculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther” 28 Nagel “The Absurd” •  So the absurdity is inevitable because we are inevitably serious about our own lives and we are also led to view that same life from an external, eternal (sub specie aeternita.s) viewpoint from which it seems no more profound than an ant crawling up an anthill. •  “This explains why the sense of absurdity finds its natural expression in those bad arguments with which the discussion began. References to our small size and short lifespan and to the fact the all of mankind will eventually vanish without a trace are metaphors for the backward step which permits us to regard ourselves from without and to find the parDcular form of our lives curious and slightly surprising. By feigning a nebula’s eye view, we illustrate the capacity to see our selves without presupposiDons, as arbitrary, idiosyncraDc, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life.” 29 Nagel “The Absurd” •  The next quesDon Nagel asks is whether this fate is one that it is possible or desirable to avoid. •  He makes the point that a mouse’s life is not absurd, but this is only because the mouse lacks the “self‐consciousness and self‐transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse.” •  I presume that none of us would give up our higher conscious funcDons in order to be oblivious, but not absurd, like the mouse. 30 Nagel “The Absurd” •  Despite our capacity for it, is there perhaps some way for us to avoid making the transcendental step? Nagel points out that this would not be possible of our own voliDon, we cannot willingly avoid the recogniDon of the absurd. •  “The only way to avoid the relevant self‐
consciousness would be either never to aTain it or to forget it—neither of which can be achieved by will.” 31 Nagel “The Absurd” •  So we cannot avoid the transcendental view, but can we instead avoid the mundane life that the view makes so absurd? Could one “abandon one’s earthly, individual, human life(?)” and idenDfy exclusively with the transcendent viewpoint? As Nagel points out, this seems to be the purpose of certain Oriental religions. Is nirvana an escape from absurdity? •  Nagel does not believe so. He points out that in order to put in effort to become unworldly (perhaps by becoming a recluse in a cave) one must take oneself very seriously as an individual. One must be “willing to take considerable trouble to avoid being creaturely and absurd. Thus one may undermine the aim of unworldliness by pursuing it too vigorously.” 32 Nagel “The Absurd” •  But perhaps there is another way to avoid the absurdity. •  Could one neither get caught up in earthly concerns, nor strive toward the transcendent? Could one simply allow one’s “individual, animal nature to driQ and respond to impulse, without making the pursuit of his needs a central conscious aim(?)” •  This strategy is akin to the approach of a famous Greek skepDc to epistemological skepDcism. Pyrrho concluded that no beliefs were jusDfied so one should suspend belief about everything. There are a number of apocryphal stories about him walking straight into ditches the existence of which he had suspended belief about. 33 •  Nagel is willing to admit that an aimlessly driQing impulse driven life is perhaps less philosophically absurd than most. But he points out that this is not because the driQer has found meaning where others only have failed to, he has simply given up on the idea of meaning. •  The driQer’s transcendent consciousness has not been “dragooned into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” And it is therefore not absurd, but it also doesn’t seem worth living. Transcendent: Abstract and non‐spaDotemporal Immanent: Concrete and located in space‐Dme. 34 Nagel “The Absurd” •  So if we want to live human lives at all, the absurdity of that life seems to come as unavoidable baggage. •  Camus sees this as a problem which requires a soluDon. His soluDon is scorn. The idea being that “this will not make our lives un‐absurd, but it will lend them a certain nobility.” •  Nagel fails to see the draw of this soluDon. “This seems to me romanDc and slightly self‐pitying. Our absurdity warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.” 35 •  Instead Nagel wants to say that the absurdity of our lives is not a problem in search of a soluDon. Instead he sees it as one of the more interesDng features of our lives. “I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestaDon of our most advanced and interesDng characterisDcs. (…) If the sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situaDon (even though the situaDon is not absurd unDl the percepDon arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? (…) Such dramaDcs, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situaDon. If sub specie aeternita.s there is not reason to believe that anything maTers, then that does not maTer either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism and despair.” 36