Feeling Of Absurd
The Feeling of the Absurd
One book I could read over and over again is My Confession by Tolstoy, one of my favorite writers. To me, he is one of the greatest painters of the human soul who has ever lived. For example, when you read Anna Karenina, each character has such a deep and complex personality and identity. They are fully fleshed out and beautifully and tragically human. They exist, and following their lives captures both your heart and your mind. You are happy with them, you suffer with them.
However, in My Confession, it is not the souls of others that he paints, but his own. He recounts a period, around his fifties, when he was already successful, well known, and a happy husband and father, yet was struggling with one great existential question: the meaning of life. For years, he tried to avoid it, but at some point, everything collapsed.
What captivates me and puzzles me at the same time is that I have never experienced the feeling of absurdity he describes, this melancholy that arises when one realizes life does not have any meaning. When I began to philosophize, I quickly adopted the view that seemed to me the most reasonable and aligned with what we know: we are the product of the blind forces of nature and life in itself has no point. We are here, that is it. Yet this does not bother me, nor does it prevent me from finding life beautiful and fully experiencing the many forms of beauty we can encounter in it. What could be better than enjoying a good time with a friend, being fully absorbed while doing sports or playing video games, or being moved by a movie?
So yes, although I have struggled with mental health in my life, as many others have, it has always been for more social reasons such as family, love, work, friendship, or money. Those are tangible to me, but the idea that life is absurd? Yes, I can live with that, and even find it quite fascinating. As Nagel mentions in his article The Absurd, we must simply recognize the absurd as the natural, and even interesting, manifestation of our most advanced cognitive characteristics. According to his view, the feeling of absurdity arises because we are aware of the seriousness with which we must approach our concerns and efforts to live and survive in this world, and at the same time, we have a brain developed well enough to adopt a transcendent cosmic perspective, according to which our lives appear insignificant.
Yet Tolstoy seems so genuine and authentic when he describes his experience and how he found a solution through faith that it deeply moves me. I am in awe, as my mind needs to stretch to make sense of his incredible existential journey, from an existential crisis I have never experienced to a faith experience I have never known either.
He reports that he began to see birth itself as a farce, realizing that human achievements end up being forgotten, that death erases every individual existence, and that what we do is insignificant in the face of the world: “If not today, then tomorrow, sickness and death will come and they have already come for the people I love, for myself, and nothing will remain except decay and worms. How can a man see this and still live? One can live only while intoxicated with life; but when one sobers up, one cannot help seeing that all this is nothing but a deception, and a stupid deception.”
He uses an Eastern fable to illustrate how he came to see life: a man, pursued by a beast, finds refuge in a well. But at the bottom of the well, a dragon waits to devour him, and he cannot climb back up without being attacked by the beast. Terrified, he clings to a branch growing in the crevices of the well. Yet this branch is being gnawed by two mice, one black and one white, symbolizing day and night, and together, the irreversible passing of time. In this desperate situation, the man notices a few drops of honey hanging from a leaf on the branch. He begins to lick them eagerly, delighting in their sweetness, and for a brief moment forgets the dangers surrounding him.
This fable illustrates the perils of life, the passage of time leading to death, and our ability to disregard it all by living in the present and enjoying the pleasures that come our way. Tolstoy, however, at that point in his life, was no longer able to appreciate what that honey represented to him. He even considers those who hide from the question of the meaning of life as some sort of hedonists with a stupid imagination.
And I will not go through all of his attempts to find a solution to his problem. As I said, he found it through faith. An authentic and genuine faith that I found fascinating: “Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, knowledge that keeps a person from destroying themselves and allows them to live. Faith is the force of life. If a person lives, it is because they believe in something. If they did not believe that life must be lived for a purpose, they would not live. Since they cannot see or comprehend the phantom of the finite, they must believe in the infinite. Without faith, one cannot live.”
There are a myriad of thoughts that cross my mind when I read the masterpiece that My Confession is. Recently, one of them was that we know very little about the actual feeling of absurdity that people may face in their everyday lives. How widespread is it? When it happens, why does it happen? Why is this feeling so hard to bear for some people and so easy for others? So many empirical investigations I would love to undertake.
— Joffrey Fuhrer