This is the reality that we cannot deny. It is about as accurate and honest and raw as we can get. But this gives us such existential angst that it is almost impossible to live in the face of death without working some existential magic, a human construct to believe in. This is our concrete dilemma. We know that none of us gets out of this thing alive. But there is also the abstract dilemma of creating meaning in the face of impending death.
MEANING. And as we consider our demise, we realize we cannot live life this way without creating some sort of meaning and purpose in spite of death knocking at our door every minute of every day throughout a lifetime. And that brings us to our ability to create meaning out of virtually nothing. We are story-telling beasts and we use this ability to give meaning and purpose, destruction and war. We create or adopt stories in our heads, myths, that give us a grounding upon which to build our lives. In the story we choose our truth, our reality. We often call this story adoption our foundation upon which we build our house on rock or solid ground rather than sand or shifting, unstable ground. Meaning can only come from the stories we are told and then, in turn, we tell ourselves, and choose to believe. Each day of our lives the religions of the world and life itself demands that we choose the meaning and purpose that will direct our lives and give meaning to our death.
Like a moth to the flame, we must choose how close to reality our stories come. We can create meaning from a story that is not true at all but is a story that has been handed down through generations without any verification and any concrete connection to reality. These stories are our buffer keeping us from being burned by the raw reality of life, which is death.
Or we can create meaning from a story that is as close to reality as we can get without getting mortally burned. This is the nature of the human condition, the nature of the myth, and the nature of language and thought. Can we face the reality of the absurdity of life, or must we mediate reality with make-believe human constructs... stories in the head?
My raison d’etre and my reason for writing are to live as close to the flame of reality as I can and yet stay alive. This I must do. This is something that I cannot not do. In this blog post, I am exploring for my own understanding and meaning the philosophy of The Absurd, which seems to me to be as close to reality as I can get (so far at least).
In my experience, I’ve gradually come closer to understanding reality as it is and at the same time I’ve gradually unearthed a multitude of myths that I have been clinging to. Most of them are abstract, based on a divine response of invisibility and silence, or simply not verifiable because of the nature of time, language, and thought. As I have spent hours, days, and years of my life examining each of these stories that at times have been life-giving, I’ve found that I have to make a choice that I have resisted for a very long time. Even though these stories are each coming up empty, I knew that I wanted them and needed them to be true ever since I can remember. But the cognitive dissonance has been growing, at times exponentially, to the point where something has to break. Either I let go of some dogma that has been propping up my stories and myths or I hang on for dear life, convincing myself that I cannot survive without my pet micro and macro narratives that I considered foundational for me. But what I have found is that along with this cognitive dissonance (see endnotes) came an existential crisis (see endnotes) that I could no longer tolerate and live with. Integrity, honesty, and authenticity are far too important to me. I finally was able to let go, one by one, and face life head on. No buffers or cushions or helmets. Just straight up “Life as it is”. I was finally able to ask, “What’s up doc?” and tell myself, “Give it to me straight, doc.” No more candy-coated answers or rose colored glasses. “Serve it to me neat.” I had to conclude that I can no longer in good conscience commit to any religions or systematic theologies because they are nothing more than human constructs that keep changing with the human condition over centuries. They are other people’s stories and answers, not mine. I became tired of being a second hand person. (see below)
I could no longer continue through life pretending to believe the stories. First, the concept that death is not just a speed bump on the way to heaven somewhere, but that death is a dead end that I would not survive; that I could not circumvent, and beyond which I could not know. And then I had to tackle all of the terror management techniques and tactics I had been using on the life/death problem and ultimately on myself for so long.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard longed for a life that we could live for and die for. But since he could not find that inherent in life, then we must turn to systems of faith and religion in order to adopt something that offers meaning in life, whether or not it is true. In other words, religion is an external way of imposing meaning and purpose on life.
It works simply because we choose to believe it.
It works by creating reality in our head.
It works by taking a leap of faith.
It is magical thinking that tricks us into believing.
But religion is no more than a story in my head.
And some people are ok with that.
For some people, this is all they need to end their existential angst.
I think that an aspect of The Absurd is that the final question we must ask ourselves is “Can I live with my adopted story?” Will I live with it or must I die? We must face the reality that the only thing we have that saves us from death is life itself which is temporary, sort of an ultimate paradox.
BUT… Camus says that this is nothing more than philosophical suicide.
We can choose death through suicide or we can choose to live while dead by giving in to the tyranny of an external belief, hence choosing philosophical suicide.
Reason has its limits and that which is beyond our understanding is inscrutable.
Even if the universe had some sort of meaning that goes beyond it,
we simply don’t know and can’t know it. And the universe is not capable of revealing it to mankind at this time.
I don’t want to fool myself anymore. The only honest conclusion we can make about the universe is that it is meaningless, there are no universal values, there is no divine plan, there is no divine, everything happens randomly; as far as we can know and see. None of this is implicit in this universe and therefore cannot be explicitly revealed. Or if not randomly, then it is there for itself. The universe has just the right amount of order and intelligence (an inner knowing) to sustain itself but not enough to sustain my need to know what it is all about. In other words, the universe is self-centered, not human-centered; which is in diametric opposition to what religions would like us to believe by speaking for the universe.
The universe’s response to the human cry for meaning is silence. This is what Camus would call The Absurd. We keep trying to make something more out of this universe, to remake it according to our image and our desires, but as we think we grasp it, it slips through our fingers. We keep doing this because we want to be more than we are. That’s why we create gods; to extend human significance and existence into eternity, even though we have no evidence. Except that the gods said so, which we don’t have evidence of either.
What is our response to living life on a human rat wheel, constantly exhausting ourselves while going nowhere? Do we give up in despair? Or do we arise in insurgency against the power of death and The Absurd over us? Not at all like we were told all of our lives, “Death has been conquered” by our preferred religious system and savior, and yet I die. This is simply another story without evidence; magical thinking and trickery. Rather how can I face death and The Absurd in every moment of every day and stand firm while creating meaning here and now?
Trying to find answers to these questions in an irrational and silent world is absurd.
But the question can’t be negated. And we are left responsible for our own meaning and purpose.
So we keep trying: religion, social systems like Naziism and a master race like white supremacy, or karma. Controlling things or people. Buying things or people, cars or houses. Accumulation of commodities or money, education or knowledge. A spouse, family, and kids can be used to distract us from the inevitability of death and The Absurd. The most common way of committing philosophical suicide is through elusion. Elusion via Illusion. Career and advancement; climbing the corporate ladder. Collector of beautiful or unique things. Sports and all kinds of entertainment. And yet, at death, what are we grateful for? For me, it is living without appeal in fearlessness, gentleness, compassion, and empathy, as I make a difference in the lives of all those I encounter.
Philosophical or Figurative Suicide can be unconscious or “tacit and without awareness or attention.” Here are some very good examples that took years for me to become aware of. Gradually, I have been rooting out these deeply held habitual practices and beliefs.
by allowing Cultural Conditioning to control us as we become automatons; a form of brainwashing unawares.
“In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking becomes mechanical, our responses automatic. We can observe this very easily in ourselves.”
“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.” (Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known)
Our cultural conditioning (religion, politics, values, beliefs, etc) can often be quickly ascertained by our zipcode. We become second hand humans without even realizing it. This is a form of philosophical, figurative suicide.
Philosophical Suicide: rationalizing things as Absolute Necessity
Bohm is a renowned physicist that spent much of his later days researching and exploring thought, dialogue, and language using the scientific method along with dialoguing with some of the greatest minds of that time, Albert Einstein and Krishnamurti and many others. In his book, Thought as a System, he explores the way thought often has a mind of its own, running rampant through your tulip garden of the mind and all over your quiet or peace or sleep. It literally takes a collective voice of its own in dialogue also, which makes it a powerful tool for bringing people together to solve some of the world’s great problems using the collective thought of the group. Below is a very basic idea that is often “tacit and without awareness or attention.” One of the ways to unravel the knots that thought leaves us in is to start observing the knots and seeing what caused them. The concept of “absolute necessity” is a mental defense mechanism, a way for thought to protect its own ideas from being challenged or questioned, sort of a survival or sustainability skill. It is as if this is a defense mechanism of thought itself, outside of the person’s will or awareness or consciousness.
“When a given principle is regarded as universally valid, it means that it is taken as absolutely necessary. In other words, things cannot be otherwise, under any circumstances whatsoever. Absolute necessity means ‘never to yield.’ To have something in the generative order that can never give way, no matter what happens, is to put an absolute restriction of free play of mind, and thus, to introduce a corresponding block to creativity that is very difficult to move.”
“Over a limited period of time, certain values, assumptions, and principles may usefully be regarded as necessary. They are relatively constant, although they should always be open to change when evidence for the necessity of the latter is perceived. The major problem arises, however, when it is assumed, usually tacitly and without awareness and attention, that these values, assumptions, and principles have to be absolutely fixed, because they are taken as necessary for the survival and health of the society and for all that its members hold to be dear.” (David Bohm and David Peat, “Science, Order, and Creativity,” pp. 238-239)
The thing that Bohm says is that it is important for us to observe our own thinking processes, he calls it proprioception of thought. Just like in the body proprioception is used for balance, coordination, and sensing where it is in space and time, so we need a practice and process so that we can learn to observe our own thought. So often, it is doing what it is meant for, like solving problems, but often it also hijacks us. Meditation, done in certain ways, can help with this.
Philosophical Suicide: A Fascism of the Heart and Mind
“I also failed to learn that I have within myself a certain ‘fascism of the heart.’ When the difference between you and me gets too great, when your version of what is good or true or beautiful becomes too threatening to mine, I will find some way to kill you. I won’t do it with a bullet or a gas chamber. But I will do it with a label, a dismissive name, any way of rendering you irrelevant to my life in order to reduce the tension between your view of reality and mine.” http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200707/backpage.cfm
Above, Parker Palmer describes a fascism of the heart and describes this much better than I could. If we take this description and apply it to aspects of life as a parallel to philosophical suicide. I’ll list the ones that come to mind without going into each one. It doesn’t take much processing to see how the following fall into this trap of this tyranny of thought.
Politics: Nationalism, Fascism, Tyranny, Totalitarianism, Dictatorship, Authoritarianism
Religion: Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, Shiree law, Christian nationalism
Social Interaction: bullying, domination / oppression, superiority, being right
So is suicide the only rational response to absurdity?
If we face life honestly, we can let go of all illusions and live each moment, creating our own meaning from our experiences.
Even though we know that life is absurd, we should not accept it. We should revolt against it. The only way to be free in a context of unfreedom is rebellion using the power that we have; thought and action.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” (Albert Camus)
"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." (Charles Bukowski)
The absurd hero lives life to the fullest in the face of life’s absurdity.
“Hence what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.”
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
Living without appeal.
Myth of Sisyphus. Pushing that rock up the hill is so meaningless and absurd that supposedly there is no creating meaning. But that is the key to living without appeal. It is not necessary that our actions lead to something later. The meaning lies in the act itself moment by moment. This is sufficient to be content in a hopeless life. We can think that there is nothing more futile than pushing a rock up a hill. But what if we can learn to see it differently, The gods based their punishment on the belief that there is nothing more futile than endless labor. But what if Sisyphus decides to find happiness in this endless exercise? What if he refuses to bow before such despair? Because is there anything more rebellious than actually finding joy in what is supposed to be our endless punishment.
“When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man” (The Rebel, Albert Camus, p 25)
Despite his intentions, Camus cannot avoid asserting what he believes to be an objective truth: “We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart” (MS, 18). Turning to experiences that are seemingly obvious to large numbers of people who share the absurd sensibility, he declares sweepingly: “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said” (MS, 21). Our efforts to know are driven by a nostalgia for unity, and there is an inescapable “hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know” (Myth of Sisyphus, p 18).
As Camus now presents his own version of the experience, “the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm …” (MS, 12–3). As this continues, one slowly becomes fully conscious and senses the absurd.
Here Camus pits himself against science and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational analysis: “That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh” (MS, 21).
For the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus, however, “Should I kill myself?” is the essential philosophical question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.
As he says in The Rebel, “the absurd is an experience that must be lived through …”
But he rejects what he sees as their ultimate escapism and irrationality, claiming 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).
Camus, on the contrary, builds an entire worldview on his central assumption that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationship between humans and their world (Aronson 2013). He postulates an inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wild longing for clarity” (MS, 21) and the “unreasonable silence of the world” (MS, 28).
After the rock comes tumbling down, confirming the ultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after it once again. This “is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock” (MS, 121). Why use the words “superior” and “stronger” when he has no hope of succeeding the next time? Paradoxically, it is because a sense of tragedy “crowns his victory.” “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent” (MS, 121). Tragic consciousness is the conclusion of “absurd reasoning”: living fully aware of the bitterness of our being and consciously facing our fate.
Living without Excuse or Blame
Living without appeal is living without excuse or blame, without illusion or pretense; taking total responsibility for our one amazing life. No one to bail us out. No one to save us. No one to tell us what to think, what to do, what to believe. No one else’s agenda or meaning or purpose.
What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus’s answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials, life’s pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits. Sisyphus accepts and embraces living with death without the possibility of appealing to God. “All Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing” (MS, 123).
Lucidly living the human condition, Sisyphus “knows himself to be the master of his days.” By becoming conscious of it, Camus is saying, he takes ownership of it. In this sense, Sisyphus reshapes his fate into a condition of “wholly human origin.” “Wholly” may be an exaggeration, because after all, death is “inevitable and despicable,” but by acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously lives out what has been imposed on him, thus making it into his own end.
The Myth of Sisyphus is far from having a skeptical conclusion. In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” (MS, 122). It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fully alive.
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (MS, 123).
The Absurd: Its Unique Beauty and Its Total Freedom
At first, I believed that The Absurd is a total loss of control; another form of oppression that inevitably causes depression. But I find that instead it is very freeing and empowering, and has become primarily a source of joy. Despair is when we are oppressed and depressed and so feel trapped with no way out. But Camus leaves a very clear and inevitable way out to the hero of The Absurd. We laugh in the face of The Absurd knowing it has no dominion over us. Death comes and death goes; all a part of the circle of life. What I find most freeing is that I no longer have to follow some external meaning and purpose for someone else from someone else. What I must be and become is something so utterly original that no other can follow. The mold has been used and then broken leaving each and every other person to begin again in their totally unique way. What beauty. What creativity. What diversity. So many paths possible and yet simply one chosen by this solitary man in this unique time for a purpose that no one else can even imagine.
This exploration of raw truth leaves me exactly where I already was but with more strength and clarity. I’ve known for the past 10 years that meaning and purpose and all truth do not and cannot come from an external source. It cannot be secondhand. For each of us, it must be original. It must originate internally. Otherwise, I am a copy. Otherwise, I have abnegated my life to another. Otherwise, my life is not mine.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver)
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance
The meaning and purpose of living is to live
Let’s not miss the point…
“When … you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.” (Alan Watts, from ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’)
Life is a Dance
https://youtu.be/29atSZKbmS4
