Is Life Absurd?
Life is absurd. Do you agree?
In philosophical terms the absurd is a concept that was popularized by Albert Camus. The absurd, as Camus sees it, is the conflict between a human beings’ desire for meaning and the indifferent, rather meaningless universe we live in.
The question of whether or not that’s a conflict is an interesting one to explore. Is it really a conflict? Or are we simply here to create the meaning for ourselves?
It’s important to note that Camus doesn’t believe in a higher power, which limits his ability to begin to explain the point of the human experience. Without a higher power in play, human beings are left to their own devices, like Travis Kelce when Taylor Swift isn’t at his football games. There is no higher purpose to explore, learn, create, or do anything. If you are an existentialist that believes that experience is neutral and has no meaning of its own, as Camus was, then it’s easy to see why he would run into the conflict that he did.
Kierkegaard on the other hand, did believe in a higher power. Where he got stuck was that he couldn’t make his faith fit into the human constructs of things like morality and human logic or judgment. His faith fell outside those things and he believed that his job was simply to take the “absurd leap of faith” as he called it, and believe in his faith above everything else.
Kierkegaard got stuck in the human belief system based on judgment, which is what made life feel absurd to him. Camus had no such belief, and instead felt as though trying to make meaning where none is present, is where the absurdity lies.
I personally believe in the higher power, but I’m not stuck in the human logic and moral belief systems. I see human perception as limited and therefore, frequently incorrect. I don’t believe that human constructs like morals and ethics are true either. I also understand that judgment is a human thing and based on a very limited perception. I instead take a more spiritual approach to life.
Morality and ethics are based on human judgment. If the human judgment is incorrect because the experience is neutral and has no meaning of its own (existentialism), then it follows that morality and ethics are also a little buggy because they are based on faulty human judgment. If the experience is truly neutral then the ideas of fairness, equality, good, bad, right, or wrong are just human perceptions. They aren’t true either.
Spirituality offers us the idea of non-judgment. It offers us the idea that things are the way they are meant to be. It can’t be out of order because there is nothing wrong. All is well. Matt Kahn sometimes says, “if it could have happened any other way it would have”. The experience just is. To apply human constructs like ethics, morality, and judgment to experience creates an unsolvable problem because we can’t change the experience.
Morality and ethics trap us in a judgment of the experience that isn’t true. The experience is neutral. It can’t be morally or ethically wrong and neutral at the same time. Kierkegaard accepted human logic as true and then tried to play with existentialism and absurdity and got stuck. He didn’t see the tug-of-war that he had created for himself.
Camus had no such tug-of-war. There is no higher power. There is no purpose outside of simple existence. Then what? To reconcile it without a higher power we need to invent a reason to exist. Why are we here? It’s an age old question that people have been playing with for lifetimes. Nobody really has an answer because ultimately, while the belief in a higher power tends to resolve the argument, it’s a hard one to prove to somebody that doesn’t believe a higher power exists.
The reason for existence becomes existence. We’re here because we’re here and we have to make that okay. What we do with our lifetime is entirely up to us. We can choose to enjoy it or we can make it difficult for ourselves through how we perceive our experiences.
My theory of experience, whether you believe in a higher power or not, is that the goal is to create a helpful meaning from the experience, no matter how painful we perceive the experience to be. What is the helpful meaning? Anything that doesn’t cause you more pain and offers you tools to manage the next experience better than you did the last one.
There is a silver lining in every single experience and our job is to find that. If we get stuck in faith, morality, ethics, judgment, or how we think it’s supposed to be, we can’t find that silver lining. I think both Camus and Kierkegaard got stuck in the human perspective that they never questioned. Neither questioned whether human logic was actually true. If we allow ourselves to question that, it opens up a whole new space to explore. It makes these philosophical constructs, not only possible, but actually make sense.
Absurdity isn’t really true either. It’s based on human logic that makes the idea of life and experience a conflict of interest for the Universe. But it’s not. The experience is the point. The how it should be is not a universal perspective, it’s a human one. Until we see that, we get stuck in the idea of absurdity.
Love to all.
Della
P.S. I wrote a little short-read that I put in my shop all about absurdity. I talked about more about Camus and also Thomas Nagel. If you’re interested in this topic and more on my perspective of it, hit up my shop at the following link.