In the 19th and 20th centuries modernity came
into its fullness and with this maturation, the vestiges of the religious worldview began
to fall away revealing a crisis of meaning that we’ve come to call Nihilism. This emergence of Nihilism prompted philosophers
to ask in earnest once again the long-since clichéd philosophical question—what is
the meaning of life? Out of this renewed engagement with meaning
three trends emerged. There was the root problem—Nihilism i.e.
the realisation that there is no objective meaning to our lives. And wrestling with this problem we have two
responses: existentialism and absurdism. In this episode we are going to explore what
Nihilism is and how these two schools of thought have attempted to manage the crisis it represents.
For the religious individual, life has an objective meaning. In the Judaeo-Christian traditions the history
of this world is bookended by God’s creation on one end and Judgement Day with Heaven and
Hell on the other. For the Buddhists and Hindus there is the
story of karma and the endless cycle of birth and rebirths that it results in. The end point in this system is not a Heaven/Hell
dichotomy but liberation known as moksha in Hinduism and Nirvana in Buddhism. In these Eastern and Western systems of belief,
humanity has a privileged place in reality. But as the modernist worldview comes to its
full fruition, it casts off the residual holdovers from the religious mindset and this objective
meaning dissolves. As we develop a better and better model of
reality and no longer need to rely on divinities to provide an explanation of the world, we
begin to jettison these divinities and the beliefs attached to them. As Nietzsche has pointed out, Christianity
prized truthfulness and sharpened this virtue in its adherents only to fall on the very
sword it had honed. In the 19th century modernity lurched into
the secular mode with a number of explosive works. In the 1830s, David Strauss published his
Life of Jesus; this book became a controversial literary phenomenon that eroded the belief
in the Bible as a historical book. 1841 saw the publishing of Ludwig Feuerbach’s
The Essence of Christianity that explored the idea that God was a psychological projection
of humanity. Feuerbach whose name means fire brook was
a major influence on Karl Marx who said that “There is no other road for you to truth
and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire (the Feuerbach).” Following Strauss and Feuerbach the real stake
in the heart of the religious narrative was the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species in 1859. This cultural trend culminated at last in
the catastrophic event that Nietzsche’s Madman talks about in The Gay Science. Nietzsche’s madman like the anecdotal Diogenes
lights a lantern in the bright morning and goes into the marketplace searching for God
only to be mocked by the townsfolk with all the sarcasm of triumphant modernism. And then the madman gives a speech to the
people that echoes God’s speech at the climax of the Book of Job:
“Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire
horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth
from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite
nothing? […] Do we not hear anything yet of the noise
of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers,
comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? This passage from Nietzsche is like the clarion
call of Nihilism. It proclaims the undermining of the objective
values. Backward sideward forward up down all these
are the ways we orient ourselves in the external world. The death of god throws our entire relationship
to reality—our life’s compass—into disarray. To put it more philosophically, God was the
foundation of external values and of objective meaning. Without God, without divinity, the external
world lacks a telos it lacks a purpose and a meaning by which we can orient ourselves. The objective ground of morality and of human
purpose has fallen away and this vacuum is disastrous. And so this is the crisis that Nihilism speaks
to. By fully leaning into the implications of
Biblical criticism and the insights of Copernicus and Newton and later Darwin, reality is no
longer geocentric and anthropocentric, and with the lawful universe that Newton began
to expose and the evolutionary story that Darwin uncovered there is no need for a god
except maybe in the narrow denuded role of Aristotle’s Uncaused Cause or as the animating
spark that set life in motion. The material explanations for the external
world proved far more effective than the religious ones and so these religious stories were condemned
to the trash heap. The trouble was that these dodgy religious
explanations were attached to the grounding of human morality and meaning. The death of god heralded a meaning crisis.
This is the root problem out of which existentialism and absurdism grew. Before we look at the response of each school
it’s worth addressing why there is so much confusion around the difference between existentialism
and absurdism. The trouble lies with the usage of the term
existentialism itself which is used more or less broadly depending on the writer. In some definitions Camus and his Absurdism
are sub-schools of existentialism whereas for others they are completely distinct. Existentialism often includes thinkers in
the 19th century such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who far predate the origination of the term
in the mid-20th century. To complicate matters further you have people
who are often categorised as existentialists such as Heidegger and Camus who publicly declared
that they were not existentialists. And so the exact definition of Existentialism
is a bit nebulous. For the purposes of this episode, Existentialism
is going to centre on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre is the philosopher most synonymous
with existentialism for a number of reasons. He not only defined the term Existentialist
and coined many of its key terms and phrases but he was one of the few philosophers who
self-identified as an existentialist. in tackling the problem of Nihilism and the
absence of objective meaning, Sartre’S existentialist response was to first define what it is to
be human. And this is where his famous phrase of existence
precedes essence comes into play. Essence is a term that goes back to Ancient
Greek philosophy. For Aristotle the essence of a thing is its
defining characteristics. This notion of essence is tied up with the
related idea of telos which is the purpose of a thing; so, the essence of a knife is
to cut, the essence of a cup is to hold liquid, and the essence of a boat is to sail on water. In the classical view of philosophy, the essence
of a thing precedes its existence. If a cup can’t hold liquid it’s not a
cup since it is lacking the aspect that is essential to it. Before the figurative death of God, it would
have been said that our essence precedes our existence. Humans had a specific purpose—for Aristotle
we were essentially rational, for Christians we were a fallen people that must aspire to
salvation. But with Nihilism the bottom fell out of these
illusions and what was revealed is that there is no objective meaning. There is no purpose that exists that is greater
than humanity. And so we are faced with a void of meaning. We live in a meaningless universe and so how
do we define what we are? What is the essence of being human? For Sartre, the essence is defined by our
existence, what we essentially are is what we do, how we act in the world. As he puts it in Existentialism is a Humanism:
“man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself ”
He says that “there is no human nature since there is
no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself
to be, but also that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only
after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man
is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of Existentialism”
So faced with the void of meaninglessness that nihilism presents, the existentialist
answer is that we must create our own meaning through our actions. There is no objective meaning and so we create
our own by the way we live our lives. That is the existentialist answer to the problem
of nihilism. The Absurd is an idea that we find in Kierkegaard
but is fully developed into a philosophy by Albert Camus in his book length essay The
Myth of Sisyphus. Absurdism is his response to the problem of
nihilism. He opens The Myth of Sisyphus with one of
the most iconic lines in the history of philosophy: “There is but one truly serious philosophical
problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living
amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” In facing into the problem of Nihilism, we
are asking whether the lack of objective purpose means that life is not worth living. The Absurd is key to Camus’s framing of
the question. The Absurd is the meeting between two things:
the cold apathetic and meaningless objective reality on the one hand and humanity’s inherent
drive for meaning on the other. The Absurd arises from the meeting of our
hunger for meaning with a universe that is meaningless. It is the tension between this drive for meaning
and the impossibility of satisfying it. We are all immersed in this absurd tension
and according to Camus we have three alternatives for dealing with this problem:
The first option is to commit suicide. If life has no meaning then why keep living? Camus finds this option unsatisfactory. He points out that there is no more meaning
in death than there is in life and that it simply evades the problem. The second option is to take a leap of faith—to
believe in some doctrine or ideology that tells us there is a meaning we must have faith
in. This can be a religion like Christianity or
an ideology like Marxism. We swallow a pill of bullshit and in return
we get reprieve from the Absurd. Camus terms this option philosophical suicide. Camus finds these two options insincere and
so he proposes a third option—to embrace the insatiable tension, to embrace the Absurd,
to lean into it. This third option is Absurdism. Absurdism is a rebellion against meaninglessness. We do not escape from the absurd through death
or philosophical suicide. We meet the absurd as it is without escape
and with integrity and we maintain the tension of the absurd in us without turning away. He incites us to a life without consolation—a
life characterised by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its own mortality
and its limits. Camus looks at the existentialists and rejects
what he ultimately sees as their escapism and irrationality, saying that
“they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them”
(MS, 24). Absurdism means holding aloof of the temptation
to create meaning or to buy into some meaning. The Absurdist rebels against this false satisfaction
of our hunger for meaning. Instead Camus says that we must hold the tension,
hold the space of Absurd meaninglessness. As he puts it:
“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your
very existence is an act of rebellion.” Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism is best
captured in an image—that of the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the founder of the Greek city
of Corinth. He was known to be the craftiest of all humans
and craftier than Zeus himself. When he was sent to the underworld he managed
to trick his way out. In some stories he tricks Thanatos, in other
stories Hades and in other stories Persephone. He escapes and returns to the Earth and revels
in the pleasure of the world before eventually being returned to the Underworld where he
is punished to roll a boulder up a hill and watch it roll back down again at which point
he returns to the bottom of the hill and repeats the process quite literally ad infinitum. There’s three reasons why Sisyphus is Camus’s
icon of Absurdism. There’s his love of life seen by his cheating
his way out of the underworld and returning to enjoy the pleasures of the world once again
which is strongly antithetical to the life-denying brand of Nihilism. A second reason is Sisyphus’s punishment—the
absurdity of rolling a rock up a hill only to see it roll back down again and being forced
every time to roll it back up again knowing the inevitable outcome. Sisyphus is stuck in an eternal cycle of absurdity. The third reason Sisyphus is Camus’s embodiment
of Absurdism is that he is a rebel. He outwits death and the gods to return to
life. He rebels against the fundamental order of
things he rebels against the gods. All of these points come together in Camus’s
great line that closes out his book: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that
negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master
seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake
of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is
enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. —Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
And so Absurdism is not about finding a meaning to life but about rebelling against the absurdity
of life, it’s about standing aloof of the demand to find a meaning, rebelling against
the absurd game itself and affirming life for what it is. It is to struggle with integrity because this
struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. Faced with the crisis of meaninglessness that
Nihilism presents, the Absurdist doesn’t throw a tantrum and kill themselves, the Absurdist
doesn’t grab on to the nearest life raft and commit philosophical suicide. The Absurdist affirms the struggle and enjoys
life for what it is. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. So to summarise: Nihilism is the realisation
that there is no objective meaning. Existentialism answers this by saying that
it is possible to create our own meaning through the choices we make in our lives. Absurdism on the other hand says that we shouldn’t
seek to create our own meaning but we should stare into the face of the Absurd and rebel
against this meaninglessness. That’s everything that I wanted to cover
on this episode of the living philosophy. If you’ve enjoyed it please subscribe if
you haven’t already. If you have any thoughts comments or insights
I’d love to hear from you down in the comments otherwise I shall see you next time thanks
for watching.