What is Existentialism? Part II: Absurdity

We have established already that one central element of existentialism is that we, as individuals, are trapped in our own subjectivity. Our conscious existence is always positional, in the sense that we always occupy a set position of reference (our own experience), and it is the only perspective we can ever truly have. We cannot escape our subjectivity.

Yet existentialism is not infamous for its epistemic concerns regarding subjectivity; it is not even alone in those regards. Rather, existentialism is notorious for its other interest. Namely, it has a reputation for being obsessed with morbid subjects, like despair, death, anxiety, and absurdity.

While all of those are juicy subjects, lets select just one and look at it in a bit more detail. I would like (as the title probably suggested) to take a closer look at absurdity and see in what ways it affects our lives and why it is a viable topic for philosophy.

What is absurdity?

Absurdity simply means the quality of being ridiculous or unreasonable. The existential usage of the term does not differ much from its ordinary usage - the absurd is that which exists and persists despite our reason and regardless of our rational attempts at explanation and understanding.

When we say of someone's actions that they are "absurd" we tend to mean that they are acting unreasonably; that is, action without sufficiently justifying reasons. If someone hurls a brick through a restaurant window because their soup was cold, we call their behavior "absurd" because it so clearly doesn't fit the given reasons and thus is not justified. It doesn't follow rationally from what happened. But if someone hurls a brick through a window because the building was on fire and the door was blocked, then we wouldn't say their behavior was absurd because it would be justified and fit into the overall context of the situation.

But that is absurdity applied to local events. They are local in terms of both space and time. Dealing with a restaurant, soup, and fire evacuation involves responding to things that have happened in the near past and which pertain to the near future. What happens if we expand our consideration out a bit further? Say, to include all of time and existence?

Absurdity, the Universe, and Teleology

A teleology is a reason why; an answer to the question as to why an event has occurred. Specifically it is an answer to "why" that looks at the purposes of events rather than brute material causes. A rock rolling down a hill due to blind, purposeless physics lacks a reason in the teleological sense. It's motion has no ultimate purpose or aim; it simply is. But a rock that was pushed down a hill by people defending a castle at the top of the hill has a telos (purpose), and that is to crush attackers.

Philosophers have thought about the teleology of existence itself for a long time. Some have hypothesized that the universe was created by some entity that has a reason for making it; a God who has a its own purpose for the universe. Others think that the universe is God, and that its purpose is in its own self-realization over the course of eons.

Existentialists like myself do not accept either of those answers. I think that it is rather clear from its vast emptiness, lack of living conditions, and crushing silence that the universe is not the clock-work creation of an entity with a purpose. At least, nothing with a purpose as we could understand the term. When I look at the universe (and even our own little planet) I see pointless forces crashing up against each other. To me, the whole thing seems empty; devoid of any gods or ultimate purposes.

Existentialism (as a whole) tends to be atheistic, though this is not necessarily the case. For most existentialists - like me - the world is atheistic: godless and thus without ultimate purpose imbued by any sort of intelligent creator.

So the universe as a whole has no answer to the "why" question. We can find local causes that are explained by ordinary physical laws (although "local" takes on new meanings when dealing with things on a galactic scale of size, distance, and time). But if we trace the "why" back far enough, we confront the bare reality of Being. No reason is given, no answer is offered up to our question. We are left in a universe that has no reason behind its existence, no purpose for which it is all happening.

Thus lacking in reasoned purpose, the universe as a whole is absurd.

Personal Absurdity: Goals, Politics, and Birth

So on the broadest possible levels of analysis, things like "purpose" and "meaning" seem to break apart. The universe is without justification or purpose, and is thus absurd.

But what about our local world? Our countries and communities and even our own individual lives? Here we can set reasons for our behavior that frame it and give it context, and thus also give it meaning. I can, for example, set out to become an author. If I decide to do this, then I would have a goal that extended out into the future: to be an author. That goal would order my existence, implying certain things I should do (like structure a writing time every day) and certain things I should not do (like throw away all my writing materials or procrastinate). With a goal set, the world snaps into rational order and meaning emerges.

But the moment I set a meaning for myself, I make also a guarantee of its dissolution. If I hold fast to my goal and achieve it, then in that moment of triumph the goal is itself obliterated and I am once again meaningless. I have to start all over with a new goal.

Of course, more often than not we do not reach our goals. We get tired, and we give up. We procrastinate forever and run out of time. We get distracted and forget all about our goals. For a million different reasons, we often set more goals than we actually accomplish.

This situation leaves us stranded in absurdity. Lacking goals, our existence lacks purpose; lacking purpose, our existence lacks meaning; lacking meaning, our existence is absurd. We hop in and out of absurdity because we inhabit a world were meaning and justification for our action pops in and out of being with the arising and departure of our goals and aims.

This situation is magnified when we exit the personal realm and enter communities and politics. As groups (be it two people or two million) we can collectively set meanings by setting goals for our society or community. Just as with personal goals, these goals resolve the world into meaningful steps and thus justify our actions.

However, history and current experience teach us that political and communal meaning is fickle. The environment is always changing, which means today's political goal may be tomorrow's folly, in which case we have to start all over again with working out new political goals. Setting and keeping goals for one's self is hard enough, but trying to set goals for many people is dizzyingly difficult. And, of course, we can never reach a state of being "finished" in politics. Our world will keep on changing and thus our political aims keep shifting, collapsing, re-forming, and shifting again.

Also, we well know that just because a political aim is set it is not suddenly rational. Right now, some are pursuing political aims that are decidedly irrational, but they are pursuing them anyway for stunted, short-sighted, local psychological reasons. Brazil's recently elected demagogue Jair Bolsonoro and his followers, for instance, are ideologically determined to open the rain forests up for unfettered industrial development despite the fact that this is a devastating blow to the planet's climatological health. A planet that - obviously - Bolsonaro and his followers are also stuck on with the rest of us. I think that this is plainly irrational and, thus, absurd.

In the chaotic land of shifting politics, we again confront absurdity.

Finally, even our own births are haunted by absurdity. Of course none of us exist for our own reasons. We were brought into being at the whims of others (if we were planned at all), and we have no say in the nature or time of our beginning. And even if our parents planned on having us, it was still a crap shoot as to which precise sperm and egg combination was going to make it, not to mention the question as to why they desired to have us. Maybe they really wanted a child, or maybe they were just going along with societal expectations. At any rate, our reason for being has nothing to do with us. From a personal view, then, my own origin lies beyond any justification I could give it, and is thus rooted in absurdity.

One might argue that we can make our life into something of our own choosing at a point later in our existence. As we age and grow, we gain the material and cognitive ability to change our life to a certain extent. We can choose what we study, choose who we associate with, and choose how we spend our time working and what hobbies we pursue.

But how much choice do we have, really?

If I am born to a family that values education, grow up in an area where my parents are able to earn enough money to send me to college, and have a brain that is able to focus and retain information efficiently, then is my choice to go to college or is it me following a certain social and familial path? If while I'm at college I get a degree in an intellectual field (like law, science, or philosophy) really that surprising if I was always a cerebrally-inclined student? Is it my choice, or am I choosing to do what I was already disposed to do?

Between nature and nurture, where do I fit in?

As Heidegger put it, we are each "thrown" into Being. We don't just pop into existence fully formed and ready to rationally analyze it or make our own choices. We are hurled into existence, and we tumble through it gathering up debris (like little bits of ideology or information) along the way. At some vague point, we sort of take the wheel and direct this tumbling forwards.

So even my very being is steeped in absurdity. I'm born for reasons that have nothing to do with me - the actual me - and I have to figure it out along the way. By the time I'm old enough to start seriously considering my existence, I'm already thoroughly steeped in it and can never get outside of it to get an objective view or any objective answers.

So why philosophize about absurdity?

There are two primary reasons that I think we ought to take absurdity seriously and why it ought to play a role in any serious philosophy.

First, I think that if we are philosophizing to get at the truth, then we have to accept absurdity as being a true aspect of existence. A lot of philosophers have bent over backwards in attempts to justify every single facet of existence in a rational framework. The results of such efforts are very vague philosophies, which have a "stale air" about them. They do not pertain to life, and they don't offer much in the way of help regarding how one ought to live. Their abstractions and (to put it mildly) stretched reasoning make their final answers nothing like what real human beings need down here on the ground.

So if we as philosophers want to clear our heads and get a good view of the world (as much as either is possible) then it seems we ought to embrace absurdity. Don't waste time and mental effort trying to concoct a rational, morally grounded system to explain why the universe exists or why an individual person exists. Accept these as blunt, and absurd, facts and move forward. Begin philosophy where life itself begins, which is in the tangle of our already-absurd lived experiences.

The second reason I think we ought to embrace absurdity is personal and political. First, I find it liberating to realize that there is no plan which guided my existence, or which guarantees how it is going to play out. It is dizzying, but liberating, to realize the full weight of responsibility I have for my my existence.

But this personal sense of revelation has a political implication in that it can inoculate us against authoritarianism.

Authoritarians are fundamentally weak-willed in part because of their inability to see themselves as absurd products of an absurd universe. They simply cannot handle such a situation, so they turn to sweeping, grand narratives that try to rationally justify everything. Such a comforting belief system allows them to pretend that their lot in life should be better than it is. It implies that someone or something is standing in the way, preventing this "should" from coming about, and that is the hook that allows totalitarians to take control of a person's life. Totalitarians always appeal to weak-willed people who would rather the sanctimonious feeling of a destiny denied rather than facing the hard truth of personal responsibility for how their lives turn out.

The full political and personal ramifications of either absurdity or a rigid structure are too much to play out here, at the end of this small essay. Rather, I wish to leave it with what I have said and to simply state that in an age where people feel adrift and in which authoritarianism is on the rise, we perhaps ought to get comfortable with the idea of absurdity. It is the only way I can foresee someone gaining the strength to face such times.