Meaning and absurdity

What it is

Whether life has meaning, and if so what kind.

Almost all the confusion here comes from running two different questions together, and separating them does more work than any answer to either.

Cosmic meaning asks whether human life has a purpose assigned from outside it — whether the universe intends anything by us. This is the question religion has traditionally answered yes to, and the one that looks bleak if the answer is no.

Meaning in a life asks whether a particular life is worth living from the inside: whether it contains things worth caring about, work worth doing, people worth loving. This question is open regardless of how the first one is answered, and it is almost always the one that people are actually asking when they say they are looking for meaning.

The absurd is a third thing, and Camus was precise about it. It is not the claim that life is meaningless. It is the collision between the human demand for meaning and a universe that returns no answer. Absurdity lives in the relationship, not in either party — which is why it cannot be resolved by discovering a fact.

Where it came from

Ecclesiastes got there first, and remains startling. Its refrain, usually translated "vanity of vanities", is hevel — vapour, breath, something that cannot be held. A wisdom book inside scripture concludes that toil is a chasing after wind, that the wise die as the fool does, and recommends eating your bread and doing your work anyway.

Schopenhauer gave pessimism its systematic form. Kierkegaard set faith against despair. Nietzsche diagnosed the loss of the shared horizon — the death of God as a cultural event whose consequences had not yet been felt — and argued that the danger was not atheism but nihilism, the collapse of any reason to prefer one thing to another.

Camus took up the problem directly in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), opening with the claim that suicide is the only serious philosophical question. His answer is neither hope nor resignation but revolt: live in full consciousness of the absurd, refuse both despair and the consoling leap. The last line — that one must imagine Sisyphus happy — is quoted so often that it has almost stopped meaning anything, which is a shame, because the argument leading to it is careful.

Thomas Nagel added a sharper account in "The Absurd" (1971). The absurd arises from a specifically human capacity: we can step back and view our own lives from outside, and from that vantage nothing we care about looks justified. But the stepping back does not stop us caring. We are creatures who can see our own seriousness as arbitrary and remain serious anyway. Nagel's recommendation is irony rather than heroism, which is less stirring than Camus and probably more livable.

Susan Wolf offered the most useful contemporary account in Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010): meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness — when you are gripped by something that is independently worth being gripped by. Neither half suffices. Passionate engagement with something worthless does not produce a meaningful life; dutiful engagement with something worthy but which leaves you cold does not either.

How it is used

This is not a topic that sits alongside the rest of this site. For a great many people it is the engine underneath the whole search — the reason someone starts reading about Buddhism at forty-five having never thought about it at twenty-five. The metaphysical questions are often downstream of a practical one that arrived without warning.

It is worth being honest that traditions supply meaning in at least three different ways, and they are separable: a cosmic story that makes suffering intelligible, a community that shows up, and a practice that occupies the body and structures time. People sometimes arrive for the first and stay for the other two.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the cosmic and personal questions are genuinely distinct, and that this is the most useful thing philosophy has contributed here. A great deal of despair conflates them — concluding that because the universe assigns no purpose, nothing in a life can matter. That inference does not go through, and noticing it is not a consolation prize.

We can say meaning appears to be something people find in engagement rather than in conclusions. This is one of the few places where the empirical literature and the philosophical accounts point the same way: absorption in work, in craft, in care for particular others, and in things that outlast you.

We cannot say whether there is cosmic meaning. That question is exactly as open as the rest of this section, and no argument here settles it.

What we can say — and it belongs on a site about seeking — is that the two questions have different urgencies. The cosmic one may never be answered. The other is answerable, is answered by what a person actually does, and does not wait.

Further reading

• Ecclesiastes — short, ancient, and more unsparing than most modern treatments.
• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
• Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd" (1971) — ten pages, free online, and the clearest statement of the problem in English.
• Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) — the most practically useful of the contemporary accounts.