THOMAS NAGEL THE ABSURD ABSURD ARGUMENTS As Nagel

THOMAS NAGEL THE ABSURD

ABSURD ARGUMENTS • As Nagel says, many people follow Albert Camus and say that our lives are absurd, at least some of the time. • Yet why? – Will what we do matter in a million years? – But in terms of the universe as a whole, we here on earth are so small. In the universe, we can feel insignificant – Do not all justifications end? • But these arguments, Nagel says, are not any good • Still, our lives are absurd.

WHAT MAKES LIFE ABSURD • So, what makes life absurd? • As Nagel says, it is that – …it must arise from the perception of something universal, in which pretension and reality clash for us all. This condition is between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of taking what we regard seriously as arbitrary • But we ignore these doubts. • And, we continue to maintain the same amount of seriousness despite them.

SERIOUSLY? • As Nagel says, we take our lives seriously much of the time. • Yet what is it to take life seriously? – …whether we are concerned primary with fame, pleasure, luxury, triumph, beauty, justice, knowledge, salvation, or mere survival. If we take other people seriously and devote ourselves to them, that only multiplies the problem…life is filled with effort, plans, calculation, success and failure: we pursue our lives, with varying degrees of sloth and energy. • So human life, it turns out, is a full time occupation. • Even if we did not want to take our lives seriously, we would not be able to help it.

STEP BACK • As Nagel says, absurdity arises from stepping back from our own concerns. • When we do, we feel absurd. – We step back to find the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, and we would not know how to defend. • Even if we try to hide behind causes or religion, we need not choose them. • Why take your favorite cause so seriously, after all

THE IRONY OF IT ALL • As Nagel admits, it is not as though our stepping back is not some other, positive viewpoint on different options. • Instead, we know that we cannot evaluate our basic concerns. – When we return to our lives, as we must, our seriousness is laced with irony. No that irony enables us to escape the absurd. • Still, as Nagel says, for most purposes, this is no matter. • What sustains us, he says, is not our reasons, justifications, but rather something more basic, which is our need to live.

CONCLUSION • Nagel concludes that absurdity is our perception that what take seriously cannot be justified. • Still, he says that this is no big deal. – If the sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation, then what reason can we have to resent or escape it. It need not be a matter of agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke any defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave. Such dramatics betray a failure to appreciate the unimportance of the situation. • So we are contingent beings, and have our limits. • As Nagel sees this, it allows us to create our own contingent meanings of life, and so be satisfied just them.