Can Life be Meaningless but not Absurd?

Thomas Nagel suggests as much at the end of Chapter 10, "The Meaning of Life," of his little introductory text, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford UP, 1987):

If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously.  On the other hand, if we can't help taking ourselves so seriously, perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous.  Life may be not only meaningless, but absurd. (101)

Did you catch the allusion to Longfellow?  It is to the second stanza of "A Psalm of LIfe":

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Now one might naturally think that life is meaningless if and only if life is absurd, that in this context 'meaningless' and 'absurd' are equivalent expressions.  The Nagel quotation, however, suggests that the equivalence fails.  While an absurd life is a meaningless life, a meaningless life needn't be absurd.

But how?  How can a life be meaningless but not absurd? 

I

Well, suppose your life (and everyone's life) is objectively meaningless, objectively without point or purpose.  That does not translate into the "philosophical sense of absurdity"  (phrase from Nagel's 1971 article) unless one takes one's life seriously.  To take one's life seriously, Nagel suggests, is to aim at more than comfort and survival.  It is to dedicate oneself to something important, "not just important to you, but important in some larger sense: important, period." (101) The problem, as we have seen from earlier discussions, is that seriousness collides with the view from nowhere.  Viewing my life from the outside tends to drain it of seriousness.  The sense of absurdity arises when "the incurable tendency to take ourselves seriously" comes into conflict with the view "from the outside." The serious appears gratuitous under the aspect of eternity.

To avoid absurdity, then, we must stop taking our lives seriously.  Nagel's message, at least in his little 1987 text, seems to be that our lives are objectively meaningless whether or not we take ourselves seriously.  If we take ourselves seriously, then our lives are both meaningless and absurd.  If we stop taking our lives seriously, then our lives will be meaningless but not absurd.

We ought to distinguish two problems:

P1.  How are we to deal with the objective meaninglessness of human existence?

P2.  How are we to deal with the absurdity of human existence?

Nagel seems to be saying that we solve the first problem by simply accepting objective meaninglessness, and that we solve the second by taking short views and not worrying about the point or pointlessness of one's life as a whole: "The trick is to keep your eye's on what's in front of you, and allow justifications to come to an end within your life, and inside the lives of others to whom you are connected." (100)

Objective meaninglessness is not up to us: it is a given.  Absurdity, which for Nagel is indistinguishable from the sense of absurdity, is up to us: we can mitigate it by taking short views even if we cannot entirely eliminate it.

So absurdity is not much of a problem for Nagel. It certainly does not call for suicide or for existentialist heroics of the Camusian sort whereby man shakes his fist in defiance at the unintelligible and heartless universe.  Irony, Nagel tells us, is the proper response.

II

But is human existence objectively absurd?  Problem (P1) above presupposes that it is.  But is it?  Nagel gives an argument in WDIAM that we ought to examine.  Please note that he is is arguing, not from the sense of absurdity as he describes it, but from objective considerations.  Note also that his argument seems to contradict his rejection of the "chains of justification" argument he examines near the beginning of the 1971 article. (MQ, p. 12) The WDIAM argument seems to be the following.

1. If x has meaning, then x is a proper part of a whole within which it has its meaning.  Thus the particular activities and projects of my life have their existential meaning within the whole of my life.  Therefore

2. My life as a whole has meaning only if there is a wider whole within which my life as a whole has meaning.  Such a wider context might be my family, my profession, a political movement.

3. But each such wider context can be viewed from outside and questioned as to its meaning.  This includes the ultimate context if there is one, for example, God's plan for humanity.  Therefore

4. The ultimate context, if there is one, must be meaningless.  This is because nothing has meaning apart from a context, and no context is immune from questioning as to its point or purpose.  Therefore

5. Since the ultimate context must be meaningless, my life as a whole must be ultimately meaningless, whatever proximate meaning it may have for my family, my profession, the party, etc.

By way of illustration, consider the catechism answer to the question of the purpose of human existence: Our purpose is to love and serve God in this world and be happy with him forever in the next.  In Thomistic terms, the purpose of life is to achieve the visio beata, the Beatific Vision. 

Now should anyone who accepts this Thomistic answer be troubled by Nagel's argument?  He needn't be.  For the argument rests on a questionable assumption, namely, that no context is the source of its own meaningfulness.  Now that is true of all sub-ultimate contexts, but why should it be true of the ultimate context?

What is the point of the Beatific Vision? That is like asking, What caused God?  God is causa sui, a necessary being.  He is self-existent.  Similarly, the Beatific Vision is self-intelligible, self-purposive, self-significant. The buck stops there.

Of course, given the nature of our consciousness with its in-built duality of subjective and objective modes of consideration, we can question the point of the BV (or the VB if you prefer).  But we have no reason to think that this questioning by us reveals anything objective about the VB.  Similarly, one can question whether God exists and why God exists, but that does not show that there is a real distinction in him between essence and existence.

The fact that I can think of God as nonexistent does not show that God is not a necessary being.  The fact that I can wonder about the point of the ultimate context does not show that the ultimate context is without point, that it is not self-intelligible, self-purposive, and self-significant.

The sense of the absurd will always be with us in this life.  But the sense of the absurd does not entail objective or absolute absurdity.  Life can be absurd without being meaningless, just as it can be meaningless without being absurd.

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses

Senses of 'Absurd' and the Difference between Nagel-Absurdity and Absolute Absurdity

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview

What is Reason? How Did it Arise? Nagel and Non-Intentional Teleology

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Plantinga Reviews Nagel

Comments

[Purposedeficient.wordpress.com]

Do you think taking the short view of things would lead one towards a more hedonistic lifestyle?

If you as a practicing philosopher were to agree with Nagel, that life is absurd and the short view of life's concerns is better, would that make you more inclined to spend the evening sipping whiskey (or whatever takes your fancy for a pleasurable pastime) rather than writing blog posts and reading journals?

[Bill Vallicella]

It might, but it needn't.

If I agreed with Nagel I would be no more inclined to spend my evenings with whisky than he does. For him and me the satisfactions of doing philosophy trump those of the more crassly hedonistic sort.

[Elliott]

Bill,

Thanks for another meaty post. I agree that premise 4 questionably assumes that nothing is the source of its own meaningfulness. But both premises 3 and 4 seem problematic. Your statement that “the fact that I can wonder about the point of the ultimate context does not show that the ultimate context is without point” seems right to me.

One can wonder and philosophize about the meaning of human life. However, to justify the assertions in 3 and 4, one needs sufficient understanding of ultimate matters. But we lack such understanding, so the assertions are unjustified. The fact that we can view and question from outside doesn’t mean that we can adequately do so. Justification requires more: one would need to view and question from outside with an understanding commensurate with being outside. But human beings cannot do this, at least not in this life. We can take the outside view, but it is nebulous because we are (at least partly) existentially inside. To cite Plato and St. Paul, we see “through a glass darkly.” As such, 3 and 4 seem unjustified.

Is simply viewing from outside enough to justify 3 and 4? Or is more required?

[Bill V.]

You're welcome., Elliot. Sorry I can't respond to all your comments.

(4) is not a premise but a subconclusion. The premises are (1) and (3).

>>Is simply viewing from outside enough to justify 3 and 4?<<

No.

I think we basically agree.