Hard, Soft and Non-Problems of Absurdity: A Marxian Critique of Thomas Nagel’s Understanding of the Absurd
Hard, Soft and
Non-Problems of Absurdity
A Marxian Critique
of Thomas Nagel’s Understanding of the Absurd
Farid Saberi
Author’s note: This is a working draft.
Please share with me your comments and feedback at this email: fsaberi2@uwo.ca
Contents
Introduction
Section One: Nagel on folk and philosophical absurdity
1-1 folk absurdity: arguments from minuteness
1-2 folk absurdity: arguments from “chain of actions-justification”
1-3 philosophical absurdity
1-4. Solutions for philosophical absurdity
Section Two: Problems of Nagel’s Ironic Absurdism
2-1 Where the folk understanding of absurdity does not fail?
2-2 The failed distinction between conventional and philosophical absurdity
2.3. Hard, Soft and Non-Problem of Absurdity
Section Three: Against Heroism and liberal Irony
Conclusion: Socialist Humor Against Liberal Irony
Introduction
In October 1971, Tom Nagel, one of the most prominent analytical
philosophers of the time, presented a talk in the annual meeting of the American
Philosophical Association titled “The Absurd.” Later, this talk was published in
the Journal of Philosophy as a short
12-page paper. Nagel probably had no idea, when writing the line of his paper,
that more than 50 years later, how much readers of his paper (us) will find his
arguments deeply resonating. Readers rendered desperate and helpless by an
increasingly absurd age and hit by the political and economic crises.
Central to the concept of the Absurd, as Nagel understands it, is a
discrepancy between what we expect from reality and how reality actually behaves. And who can deny that such discrepancies have
become dominant features of our time of protracted economic and political
crisis. We are living in a strange and
weird era. One cannot be sure where to
draw the line between serious and ridiculous aspects of their personal and
social life. The rise of far-right in the West and the assault of populist
bigotry on the political establishment (already corrupted by a liberal elite) in
the absence of a militant labor party, has created grotesque scenes. Words that
Marx used for describing the political upheavals after the second republic
(1848) in France and the rise of Louis Bonaparte (a populist Trump-like figure
of the day) are very apt and resonate with our day and age.
“The
period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying
contradictions ... alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose
first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquility, most
solemn preaching of tranquility in the name of revolution – passions without
truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without
events.” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Ch 3)
Alongside this absurd and contradictory socio-political reality, it
is also hard to not notice the absurdities in our personal lives. The precarious
labor market and increasing redistribution of wealth and income from the public
and lower classes to the elite in neoliberalized capitalism has created a deep
discrepancy between what we expect to be a minimally stable, peaceful, and
fulfilled personal and professional life and what our lives actually go
through. Ridiculous! Absurd! These are phrases that most of us increasingly
find ourselves telling ourselves in the middle of our daily busy lives, and its
daily frustrations and uncertainties.
If there is ever a proper (even urgent) time to think
philosophically and deeply about the concept of the absurd, it is now. In his
paper, Nagel tries something that was not customary for the philosophical
establishment of the day. He used conceptual analysis and other analytical
tools and applied them to uncharted territories for the analytical tradition.
Instead of classical and well-informed metaphysical problems of the anglophone
philosophy (questions of mind, language and free will), he approached the unorthodox
question of “The Absurd.” He criticizes Camus’s understanding of the term and proposes
his own definition and understanding of the term. Using the clear and
argumentative style of analytical philosophers, he makes accessible the crux of
the philosophical problem of the absurdity. This stands in contrast to that
flamboyant literary and phenomenological jargon of some existentialist writers
where lucidity is not always a priority.
My argument here is two-fold. I agree with Nagel that the folk
experience of absurdity and the way this experience is conceptually articulated
(“the standard arguments for absurdity”) is distorted and confused. However, I
argue that his proposed philosophical articulation of the absurd is not
coherent and deprives the folk experience of the absurd from its true and
original crux hidden behind its confused expressions. Here, firstly, I review
the main argument of Nagel’s paper and compare his liberal “ironic view” of
absurdity to Camus’s “heroic view.’ (Sect 1). Then, I highlight some
inconsistencies in his argument and some difficulties in his account (Sect. 2).
Finally, I distinguish between three problems of absurdity (hard, soft, and non-problem) and I will propose a eudemonic approach to absurdity (Sect. 3). I conclude by discussing socialist humor, liberal ironic or heroic attitudes to absurdity (Sect. 3).
Section One: Nagel on folk and philosophical
absurdity
1-1 folk absurdity: arguments from minuteness
Standard and folk understanding of the absurdity of the human life,
as Nagel understands it, can be described as arguments from minuteness. Minuteness
is supposed to mean the cosmic insignificance of human personal and social
concerns, aspirations, and struggles. Consider these 3 versions of the argument
from minuteness:
a.
Nothing that we deeply care about,
and we do matter because a million years from now (when even our species is not
around), none of these staff will be relevant or matter.
b.
Nothing that we do matters given how
small and insignificant we are in this incredibly vast universe.
c.
Nothing that we do matters given how
fragile and contingent finite human life is, namely, a life that is always threatened
by the possibility of death.
Nagel, like any other good, dry and prosaic analytical philosopher,
questions the logical entailment of these claims. He argues that whether
something matters or not is independent from contingencies of time, space and
death. In other words, X could matter (or not matter) now and continue to
matter for a certain duration and then stop existing. The fact that a million years
from now, it will not matter, does not logically undermine its significance
today. Likewise, what matters in a million years from now (let’s say for aliens
colonizing earth after our species) does not matter at all now, but this does
not mean that their significance in that future is undermined. Also, if a life
that is finite and short does not matter, extending it will only give us an
infinitely long and meaningless life. Being large or small, short or long lived
does not change the absurdity of life. Human life could be absurd or not, and
these time-space issues will remain orthogonal to its absurdity.
It seems, according to
Nagel, that we can understand and use the concepts like “mattering,” “significance”
and “absurdity” in our ordinary languages in a way that is insensitive to time,
space and finitude of death. So, if the folk expressions of the absurd seem to
treat this concept as if it is highly sensitive to its invariance over time and
space, then these folk usages are not using this concept of ordinary language
consistently. Even though sometimes it is suggested by our language usage that
what matters is what does not vary (across time and space), but the conceptual
capacity of our natural languages enables us to have a concept of what matters,
but more or less varies (Nagel does not dwell on how and why our ordinary
language has this conceptual capacity for registering what matters but varies.
This is an important point that I will turn to in the Sect. 2)
1-2 folk absurdity: arguments from “chain of
actions-justification”
Another inconsistent folk argument for absurdity could be described
as “the argument from long chain of actions.” This argument could be
articulated in the following way:
1.
Whatever we are, a chain of actions where
each action is justified as a tool to get to the next action, and the whole chain
of actions is justifiable because of the goal that it wants to achieve.
2.
Human life is composed of a set of
such short or domain-specific chains of actions justified with short-term and
domain-specific goals.
3.
For human life to not be absurd, all
these short chains should be organized into a single long chain with a final
goal unifying all the life.
4.
There is no ultimate goal to human
life that is valuable in itself and does not need a justification by another
goal.
Ø
Human life is absurd.
Nagel takes issue with the third premise of this argument. He
questions whether we really need to understand all of the short chains and
short-term goals as justifiable and meaningful within the single long chain of
the life. He mentions some short-term goals and actions that are self-justifying
and do not need to be situated in their place within the grand long chain to be
justified. For example, saving a kid from being burned on the stove, taking
aspirin for a headache, or going to an exhibition are just short-term
self-justifying goals without need for a larger context and purpose. Nagel argues that even if we want to locate
these short chains within a relatively longer one, we still need to posit some relatively
long-term goals as self-justifying, otherwise we will face infinite regress,
and people will never be motivated enough to engage in life. For Nagel, the
very fact that this set of short self-justifying chains exist shows that there
is no need for a single long chain for human life to be meaningful.
1-3 philosophical absurdity
Now, those of us who want life to not be absurd might tell
themselves: “finally, yes, life is meaningful, thank you Mr. Nagel!” Nagel’s
response to such cheerful reaction would have probably been this “Not so fast.”
It is true that life is not absurd because of the reasons that folk arguments believe,
however, it is absurd for other philosophical reasons. He introduces two sets
of reasons for the absurdity of life: 1) conventional reasons for absurdity of
some lives, 2) universal reasons for philosophical absurdity of all human life.
In the first case, there are some contingent and unfortunate events that take
away some goals or the possibility of reaching some goals in our personal projects
and make our lives temporarily or permanently. For example, a superstar
football player or wrestler becomes cripples and lose the chance of
participating in activity which they draw a lot of meaning and motivation from.
In the latter, however, no unfortunate accident needs to happen in life.
Rather, one’s life is philosophically absurd by virtue of being a human and
participating in the universal human condition. Nagel is dismissive of the
conventional absurdity and thinks that there is nothing philosophical
interesting about it (we will come back to this point in Sect 2). Instead, he
focuses on the philosophical universal absurdity of human life. He proposes his
formulation of philosophical absurdity, his solution for it, and compares it
with Camus’s formulation and solution in his The Myth of Sisyphus.
Nagel starts from the fact that in ordinary language we normally
call situations absurd that there is a discrepancy between our aspirations and
expectations and the reality. We fight these situations by either changing our
expectations, changing the reality, or removing ourselves from that situation. These
situations in life are situations of conventional absurdity and even if we
cannot remove ourselves from it, we can imagine ways to do that even though we
do not have access to those ways for some reasons. Universal absurdity, on the
other hand, is not the absurdity of specific situations, rather, the general inescapable
absurdity of the whole human life and the discrepancy between our expectations
and the reality of life is necessary.
Nagel thinks that Camus's articulation of the absurdity is not
universal and philosophical enough, and it still has some elements of
conventional absurdity. Camus is understood to claim that human life is absurd
because (for some reason) the world always fails to meet our demands and there
will always be a discrepancy between what humans (individually and
collectively) strive for and what they can achieve (that is a frustrating failure). Nagel thinks that this is still too
optimistic because it is still possible to imagine a conceivable world where
the world does not fail to meet our demands. Nagel's articulation of the
absurdity is much more pessimistic. Under his formulation, there is no conceivable
world (no matter how ideal it is) where human life is not philosophically
absurd, as long as human cognitive capacities remain the same in that world.
For Nagel, universal absurdity lies between two inseparable
cognitive attitudes that humans are endowed with. On the one hand, our tendency
to take our lives and our decisions seriously (“inevitability of the
seriousness”). On the other hand, our perceptual and reflective possibility to
take a step back and see those goals that we strive for and make our lives
meaningful are both arbitrary and epistemically ungrounded and open to doubt
(inevitability of reflective detachment).
Let’s start from the inevitability of seriousness. Nagel argues
that human affairs are principally in such a way that by the virtue of making a
choice, we already have to take up some degree of seriousness and take
ourselves and those things seriously. In dealing with life, we have to always
put in some energy, attention, and make meaningful choices, and hence become
attached to our lives as a serious matter.
On the other hand, we have the possibility of taking a reflective
detachment stand toward life. In taking this step, we see how final goals and
justifications that we hold dear are arbitrary, that is, had we been born in a
different situation (time and place) and faced a different set of events in
life, we would not have taken these things seriously, cared about them, or even
be aware of them. Also, we can see the fact that we find these goals reasonable
is not because of absolute certainty, rather, because we have found it
convincing to stop the process of inquiry at a certain point. We just considered
X to be a self-justifying goal for our life, not because X is fundamentally
self-justifying and one cannot question what justifies X itself, rather because
we just decided to stop at that point and not go further. Moreover, we cannot give
this reflective detachment and its doubts back. If we experience it just once
(and as an inherently human cognitive attitude, we will experience it sooner
than later), then even if we consciously decide to avoid it, we are still aware
of it and we can still see our rational for avoiding it is an arbitrary and
epistemically ungrounded decision. It is not up to will to avoid the reflective
detachment stance.
Still, despite these inevitable self-doubting reflective moments, we
have to go back to the inevitable seriousness of life. We know that these
things in life that we take seriously are not really serious, but we still have
to take them seriously. This contradictory situation is the inevitable universal
absurdity of human life. You do not have to go a million in the future or
another coroner of this vast cosmos to see the absurdity of human life. It is
enough to reflect on our cognitive attitudes and see the insignificance and
absurdity of human life. Unlike Comus, for Nagel the collision that brings
about absurdity is within us and not between the world and our expectations.
1-4. Solutions for philosophical absurdity
At the end of his paper, Nagel considers different solutions for
the painful and sobering experience of realizing and being aware of the universal
absurdity of human life. Escaping this experience is a non-starter because one
cannot intentionally and willfully avoid doubting and deceive oneself. Another
way is to avoid taking life seriously like an oriental religion, but that is
still taking oneself seriously (putting effort and energy into asceticism) and
hence a self-defeating strategy.
Camus also condemns escapism. He holds the solution is to
acknowledge the absurdity and failure of human life, but still affirm defiance
in the face of this fate. This, supposedly, gives us certain nobility and
authenticity. This, for Nagel, is too romantic and self-pitying and not at all
relevant reaction. As he puts it, there is no need to “evoke a defiant contempt
of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried
on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation.”
(Nagel 1971, 727).
Instead of Camus’ heroism, Nagel resorts to good old liberal
doctrine of intellectual humility and reasonable pluralism and doubt. He argues
that there is no reason to consider our experience of absurdity as a painful
experience. It is one of the most human
things about us to “transcend ourselves in thoughts.” Absurdity, as part of the
human condition, helps us to understand our true situation and be modest in our
claims and aspiration. Like a good old classical liberal, Nagel argues that
absurdity gives us the chance to be ironic, that is, to not take ourselves and
ideas too seriously, accept our limitations and live ironically.
Now, before turning to criticisms of Nagel's argument, let’s unpack
what his ironic solution would look like in real life examples. Consider some
people who have chosen a single unifying self-justifying goal for their lives (some
of his examples are the progress of history, serving society, science, or participating
in the glory of god). Now, to be ironic is to acknowledge the absurdity of
these “noble” goals like the goals of our personal project. For Nagel, this
does not mean to refute or put aside these goals. Rather, to know that they are
arbitrary, groundless and only significant under the limitation of human
conditions. These goals could exist independently of humans and could be
significant independent of humans. Nagel is not committed to refute this
possibility in his argument. Rather, if these goals are going to be meaningful,
they should be understood within the domains of human understanding and
cognitive capacity. As soon as the human understanding gets involved, the
inevitable cognitive attitudes of seriousness and self-doubt will come into
play. Therefore, we cannot treat them as ultimate and safe sources of meaning
and motivations. Rather, we have to take an ironic stance toward them. In other
words, for Nagel, even if God, or any other higher being or goal exists, and
even if that higher being is the source of significance and meaning in itself,
it will not change the universal absurdity of human life. We cannot be sure
that they are more than arbitrary postulations, really exist, and that these
higher sources of significance and meaning still have to be understood through
the limitation of human cognition and situation. We still have chosen these
higher or noble goals through an arbitrary and epistemically ungrounded
process.
Section Two: Problems of Nagel’s Ironic Absurdism
To recap, we know Nagel’s position on the inevitable absurdity of
human life. Arguments from minuteness and from the long chain of
action-justifications fail. Variability and finitude across time and space is
orthogonal to the significance of human enterprise. Short-term self-justifying
goals and chains of action exist, and their justification is as arbitrary as
the justification of the so-called noble and unifying goal. Moreover,
philosophical absurdity has nothing to do with conventional absurdities of
contingent everyday life. Philosophical absurdity is inevitable and should be
approached by an ironic attitude.
Now, in this section I will take issue with two aspects of his
argument. Firstly, I will argue that his treatment of folk absurdity is too
dismissive. Folk or standard articulation of absurdity might be distorted and
eternalize a reformable form of absurdity, but it could also allude to a
genuine problem. Secondly, I will take issue with his distinction between
philosophical and conventional absurdity. Finally, drawing on David Chalmers'
famous distinction between hard and soft problem of mind, I distinguish between
three problems of absurdity. Hard problem, soft problem and non-problem of absurdity.
I will discuss each of them during the course of criticizing Nagel’s argument.
2-1 Where the folk understanding of absurdity does
not fail?
Nagel argues that the argument from minuteness fails because things
can matter independently of time and space. I agree with this judgment.
However, I think it is also important to note that the fact that we can use
this concept in this way is not just a naturally given fact of language. One
could easily imagine language and cultures where things matter only because
they make sense in a divine design of time, space, and after-life. In fact, in most
human cultures before the modern times and industrialization, for something to
matter or have significance, it should be related to divinity, eternity, and
spirituality in one or another way. Just one example will suffice to hammer
this point home. Even in contemporary Arabic and Persian language, the terms
used for truth and meaning (Haqiqat [حقیقت] and Ma'na [معنا]) are strongly
associated with and understood in terms of divinity and spirituality (Haq [حق] and Ma'naviyat [معنویت]). The fact that Modern
speakers of these languages, most other human languages, can understand
significance and mattering independent of eternal and invariant meaning is the
result of the fall of the pre-modern political and economic system and rise of
new societies with new class composition and social dynamics. In other words, the
modern linguistic usage of the terms “significance” and “meaningful” are the
result of a culture shaped by the industrial revolutions, political revolutions
and new relations of production, new legal and political arrangements that
allowed for new forms of individuality and autonomy in constructing personal
and collective identities.
Now, this historical-linguistic fact about concepts of significance
and meaningfulness is important because it shows that there is no general
logical or conceptual necessary truth about what is the right way to use a
concept and what is the right intuition to have about the correct usage of a
concept in our ordinary languages. This resonates with Nagel’s own point about
how we arbitrarily decide to stop the process of inquiry and take the certain
statement as necessary true. Here, Nagel takes his intuitions about correct
usage of these terms as primary and given. Now, this means that pre-modern
thinkers and poets who have contemplated about the absurdity through themes of
the argument from minuteness were not just dumb. It is not too hard to figure
out some relation of logical entailment. It would have been easy for them to
see that there is no logical entailment between minuteness of something in the
scale of time and space and its significance, had they had our modern
conceptual and linguistic framework. One of these pre-modern thinkers who is well-known
for his uncompromising philosophical short poems about the absurdity of human
life is the Medieval Persian thinker and poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). Khayyam
was a great mathematician, logician, scientist and astronomer of his age. He
also left a collection of short poems (called Rubaiyat or quatrains) which is
unique in the literary history of Iran and the world in that it is dedicated uncompromisingly
to deep reflections on the absurdity of human life. It is not at all an
explanation to think that Khayyam just did not notice a simple relation of
logical-conceptual entailment as highlighted by Nagel. It is obvious to explain
this difference in judgment between Khayyam and Nagel based on their belonging
to different linguistic communities with different conceptual frameworks or
rules of using certain terms, life meaning, and absurdity. We are living in the
modern age, like Nagel, and hence we can have a concept of meaning and
absurdity that Khayyam and his contemporaries could not have. However, this
does not mean that they were wrong, and the standard or folk understanding of absurdity
(as expressed in Khayyam) fails. Rather, Khayyam’s specific linguistic and
conceptual tradition could have enabled him to understand some other aspect of absurdity
that is not easily accessible to our modern sensibility. I will come back to
this point at the end of this section where I discuss the hard problem of
absurdity.[1]
So folk argument form minuteness does not simply fail, as Nagel
argues. Now turn to his discussion of the argument from long chain of
action-justification. Again, I agree with him that in the modern cultures and
languages we have the conceptual capacity to talk about certain self-justifying
goals and short chains of action. However, this is a truism. What really brings
about ordinary people’s frustration, disorientation and feeling absurd is not
that they cannot find a set of self-justifying goals. Instead, how they decide and
justify (individually or collectively) those goals and how these decision shape
their social life is the real source of modern absurdity. As Aristotle has
pointed out in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, humans use
actions and things as a mean for a higher good, and the candidate for this
higher good could be different things. One candidate seems to favor the most is
the eudaimonic life realized through polis, that is, a flourished
and just political life of society. In this political life, people can collectively
and collaboratively think about, justify, and organize their short-chain and
long-chain goals of their personal and social life. In this way, they can be more
sure that where they decide to stop at a certain goal and consider it as
self-justifying in the short or long-term, this decision is justified through the
collaborative rationality of the political community, and it does not contradict
and badly influence other people’s ability to have flourished meaningful life.
Now, Marx is a diehard Aristotelian in this regard. He remarks in his Grundrisse (1973
[1858]) that, “the human being is in the most literal sense a
zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society.” Production by an isolated
individual outside society “is as much of an absurdity as the development of
language without human beings living together and talking to each other. (Marx
1973, 84) Moreover, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1848,
he deals with the main problem with capitalism, alienation and devaluation of
the meaning of life. Marx argues that the estrangement of life activity and
estrangement from species changes for humans:
[…] the life of the species into a means of
individual life. First, it estranges the life of the species and individual
life, and secondly, it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose
of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.
(Collected Work, vol 3, 276)
the separation is between “individual life” and the collective
“life of the species”, leading to the repression of human life's
potentialities. This leads to the dominance of an “abstract form of individual
life” (unbridled egoism) over the collective aspect of life. Hence the
collective aspect of life would be degraded and treated just as means for the
egoist individual life. While the right and balanced relationship between these
two aspects would be when, “in the place of the old bourgeois society with its
classes and its class antagonisms, there will be an association in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
(Collected Work, vol 6, 506)
This aspect of the problem, that is, the social roots of modern
nihilism and absurdism, totally escapes Nagel’s understanding of the absurdity.
It is true that folk expression of absurdity of life is not always aware of its
socially mediated roots. These expressions might mystify and eternalize
absurdity as something unchangeable. For example, consider someone who thinks
becoming a successful and wealthy banker is the ultimate goal in life, and then
at moments of weakness they contemplate on how arbitrary and absurd this
self-justifying goal is. This experience of absurdity is socially mediated.
They have set this goal without the collective rationality of the political
community, and following it leads to deprivation of others from their
life-chances and flourishing. Setting and individualistic goal for life in an
isolated way (unbridled egoism) and the vices and estrangement from others that
it brings about devalue and degrade human life for this banker and other
people. It limits the capacity of humans for social rationality and social decision-making.
Capitalism is a machine of absurdity and nihilism for Marx because it gives the
“abstract individuality” of people like the banker in our example, to shape the
social life in a significant way.
As we will see, Nagel’s
negligence of the socially mediated roots of folk absurdity or nihilism has
important and problematic implications for his own philosophical formulation of
absurdity.
2-2 The failed distinction between conventional
and philosophical absurdity
Nagel draws a distinction between conventional and
philosophical-universal absurdity. The former happens for contingent reasons
and can make our life absurd temporarily or permanently. Still, it is
conceivable to imagine a world where that conventional absurdity does not hold.
In contrast, philosophical absurdity is universal and cannot be removed from
the human condition. Nagel thinks that the former is not a real philosophical problem
and the universal absurdity is the only philosophically interesting problem.
If we bring into the picture the socially mediated roots of
absurdity, this distinction falls apart. Conventional absurdity has two
problems. It conflates sadness and disappointment with the experience of
absurdity. Remember the example of the superstar athlete who becomes crippled.
They might feel deeply sad about the loss. But in a fair and flourishing society,
they have enough support to not feel isolated, connect with other humans, and
flourish new talents and capacities in their life (painting or music for
example). In any case, in Marx’s humanistic picture of a just and flourishing
society, humans do not follow their interests and talents one dimensionally,
rather they stay multi-dimensional.
So what Nagel calls conventional absurdity is not at all absurdity
unless it is mediated by a social world that represses human capacity for
sociality, rationality and harmonic personal and public flourishment. Moreover,
what Nagel calls philosophical and universal absurdity is not inevitable absurdity
at all. Our justification for short-term and long-term self-justifying goals
and how they can be harmonized together will be arbitrary and doubtful if it is
carried out in an isolated and individualistic way. In contrast, if our
justifications are mediated and harmonized through the process of the
collective deliberation of the political community. This does not give ultimate
non-arbitrary justifications, but it gives us ones that are mediated and shaped
through the process of social rationality. From experience we can tell that
humans feel more certain and stratified with these types of rationality. For
example, Helen Longino, feminist philosopher of science, in her The Fate of
Knowledge, argues that the objectivity and non-arbitrariness of our
scientific knowledge is achieved through a social process of collective
knowledge production and collective justification in equal and well-structured
scientific communities. As a result, scientists do not need to go through
existential crisis about the certainty and justifiability of their knowledge. Instead,
they are sure that their knowledge is certain as much as socially mediated human
certainty can achieve. Similarly, members of Marx’s humanist eudemonic
political community could be certain that their posited self-justifying goals
are not ad-hoc and arbitrary as much as socially mediated justification and
rationality can achieve. Humans have a better time sitting with this type of
certainty and do not freak out at the prospect of possible collective revisions
and reconsiderations. Nagel’s picture assumes (for no good reason) the
impossibility of human social rationality on self-justifying goals and
harmonizing them within the boundaries of reasonable pluralism. This political
community, unlike a Rawlsian liberal political community, does not give rise to
an anti-perfectionist state that avoids any doctrine of good life. Instead, it allows
for minimal agreement on substantive issues like regard for human sociality,
democratic reasoning of allocation of social wealth and productive forces
beyond the tyranny of exploitative private control over the socially produced
wealth.
To recap this part of the argument, what Nagel calls philosophical absurdity
could be a non-problem (in a eudemonic society) and soft reformable problem (in
a capitalist society). And what he calls conventional absurdity could be a soft
problem or sometimes a hard problem (as I will discuss in the next section).
2.3. Hard, Soft and Non-Problem of Absurdity
As argued above, Nagel’s universal and philosophical absurdity emanating
from our reflection on the arbitrariness of our decision about self-justifying
goals is a non-problem or at best a soft and socially reformable problem of
absurdity. Humans (especially in modern cultures) do not find it worrisome if
their justifications in scientific and political communities are not absolute
but socially mediated. On the other hand, what Nagel calls conventional
absurdity is a soft problem of absurdity. Finally, what Nagel calls incoherent folk
absurdism could actually be understood to be alluding to a hard problem of
absurdity or what I call Khayyam’s problem of absurdity.
Nagel is not coherent about this hard problem. At the beginning of
the paper, where he is refuting the standard and folk arguments for absurdity
(argument from minuteness), he holds that cosmic insignificance is not a
problem for the human project of following meaningful goals in their lives.
However, by the end of the paper, where he is rejecting Camus’ heroic contempt
solution, he brings back the notion of cosmic insignificance and argues that
such dramatics is meaningless in the face of our cosmic insignificance. While
he argued earlier that the real universal absurdity is an internal collision
and has nothing to do with our cosmic insignificance.
As I understand it, Khayyam’s hard problem of absurdity (coming
from our cosmic insignificance) is not answerable through pointing out a simple
fact about logical entailment (as Nagel thinks). Rather, given how we use our
language, it could be not only a real but hard problem. In our modern languages,
we have the conceptual capacity to talk about the significance of our projects
regardless of how fragile and small they are. Still, it is conceivable for us
to use the terms significance and meaningfulness in a way that they imply an
expectation. An expectation that what we find just, virtuous, and flourishing social
human life resonates with nature and the universe. That is, it is harmonic and
protected and will not be disrupted by mere accidents (the notorious example of
an asteroid hitting the earth). This hope is a legitimate hope. However, we can
never be sure that this hope will be realized.
Hard problem of absurdity is not as much a problem as a source of
inspiration and reflection. It is the understanding that even if we feel
satisfied in socially eudemonic and flourishing life, we are still very fragile
and finite in cosmic terms. This awareness of finality and fragility is not an
obstacle in the way of our social process of justification of noble goals and
following them. Rather, it will inform this process. We should understand and
follow these self-justifying and satisfying goals with humility and awareness
of our fragility as individuals and as an animal species.
In this sense, Khayyam’s absurdity is not a source of distress. We
could still have a meaningful personal and social eudemonic life even if an
asteroid hit the earth and destroyed that eudemonic society forever. The
meaningfulness of that life will not be perished by its cosmic insignificance.
Khayyam’s absurdity is not a universal acid to threaten everything. Instead of a
source for distress, it is a source for wonder, humility and acceptance of
human fragility.
Section Three: Against Heroism and liberal Irony
If my assessments are correct. We should not waste our time with
the non-problem of absurdity. We should accept but not feel distressed by the
hard problem of absurdity. Then, it follows that the main problem of absurdity
that faces us is the soft problem, that is, moving toward a society that allows
for eudemonic social life. Given this picture, I will conclude by assessing
different solutions to the problem of absurdity and offer my own solution to
the soft problem of absurdity that I call socialist humor in comparison to
Nagel’s liberal ironic attitude.
Given the picture that I have drawn, Camus' treatment of absurdity
is much closer to the reality of how actual people experience socially mediated
absurdities than that of Nagel. Nagel takes absurdity and internalizes in a way
that is not a collision between human hopes and the world, but an unchangeable
internal collision. However, for Camus absurdity is still a between humans and
the world. Still, Camus ends up eternalizing this collision as something
irremediable. As if the world is just naturally hostile to human meaningful
projects. However, it must be clear by now that this neglects the social roots
of absurdities in class societies, especially in capitalist societies dominated
by alienation and unbridled egoism and impoverished deliberative rationality.
If there is no eternalized
absurdity (as Nagel or Camus understand it, then there is no need for their
solutions (heroic contempt or ironic acceptance). What we need instead is an optimistic
and militant ethos to fight back against the social arrangements that make our
lives absurd and not worth living. We need a militant ethos to change it
collectively and bring about an eudaimonic life through the resistance of the
oppressed. One does not have to answer the substantive questions facing
eudemonic political community to achieve such a community. Rather, one has to remove
capitalist and class relation barriers on this collective deliberation.
Under my view, fighting
fascism and the ideology of hatred, where there is the threat of it, is always
the most meaningful thing that one can do with their life. There is no way in
which one can take an ironic stand toward its fight against fascism. In his
famous Novel, Under Western Eyes (1911), Joseph Conrad put these warning words
in the mouth of one of his characters:
“Remember,
Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the
negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all
action.” (Konrad 1911, p 183)
Here, Conrad, like Nagel, is reminding us of the dangers of taking
oneself too seriously and the benefits of having an ironic sense. As I mentioned
earlier, fighting for eudemonic life does not involve having a strong
substantive view about the meaning of life. Instead, it involves participating
in collective and democratic struggle against the exploitative and class
relations that take away the possibility of collective deliberation about self-justifying
goals. This warning of Konrad and Nagel comes from a place of liberal pessimism
and apologism for capitalism than an acclaimed place of wisdom. Revolutionary
men and women who are fighting oppression and deprivation of their lives have
every right to not have a sense of ironic self-doubt. This is a misplaced
warning. There is not that much discrepancy between the danger of revolutionary
falling for bigotry (limiting social and collaborative reasoning) and the
apologist of the status quo (liberal or conservative) to fall for bigoted and
arrogant ironic attitude.
Conclusion: Socialist Humor Against Liberal Irony
Let me conclude by shortly discussing what complicates my picture
of collective fighting against what makes our lives absurd and alienated. My
proposal seems to be pretty straightforward: Don’t mind the non-problem and the
hard problem of absurdity, let’s fight the social roots of soft absurdities,
that is, what deprives us of the possibility of setting and following self-justifying
goals through social rationality of the political community.
Now, it seems that my proposal implies that in the absence of a
eudemonic social life, one should dedicate one’s life to the long-term goal of
establishing such societies. However, this is only one long-term goal among
others. In the absence of eudemonic societies, people can still lead eudemonic
lives by following self-justifying goals (at least in their personal lives)
that are possibly defendable in the court of a hypothetical rational political
community. For example, consider
scientists who are contributing human knowledge or Doctors Without Borders
while being mindful of not engaging (as much as they could) in exploitative
relationships. There is a limit to how much these personal projects could be
meaningful in the absence of a mutual interplay between flourishing personal
and political aspects of social life. Still, this limit does not change the
fact that these lives are eudemonic.
Given this diversity of forms of leading eudemonic life in the absence
of eudemonic societies, then the question arises. What if I fail in these truly
meaningful projects? What if we do not get a chance or lose our chance to lead one
or another way of leading eudemonic lives like political fight against
capitalism or being a doctor serving your principles?
Are we left with a distressing absurdity? Here is where my concept
of socialist humor comes into play. To explain this attitude, I draw on Oscar
Wilde. In his Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Wilde has this famous line
that is quoted a lot in pop culture.
Lady Windermere. Why do you talk so trivially about
life, then?
Lord Darlington. Because I think that life is far too
important a thing ever to talk seriously about it. [Moves up C.]
Duchess of Berwick. What does he mean? Do, as a
concession to my poor wits, Lord Darlington, just explain to me what you really
mean.
Lord Darlington. [Coming down back of table.] I think I
had better not, Duchess. Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found
out. Good-bye! [Shakes hands with Duchess.] And
now—[goes up stage] Lady Windermere, good-bye. I may come to-night,
mayn’t I? Do let me come.
Life is too important to be taken seriously. Notice that this
remark is at the opposite side of liberal ironic wisdom. There, life and its
goals and hopes are too ad hoc and arbitrary to be taken seriously. Here, the
reason not to take the existing deprived form of life (imposed under capitalism
on individuals) seriously is that life is inherently too important. This is the
insight that I want to highlight. Human experience is a unique and finite experience,
but it is inherently meaningful and could be led in eudemonic ways. However,
under an alienated social life, our lives could be partially influenced by
unjustified idolized goals (seeking money) or it can be too messy for us to wave
its short chains into a single long chain of action-justification. This could
be a distressing form of absurdity. However, a socialist or eudemonic humor faces
this distress with a humorous attitude. Here humor is not laughing at ourselves,
rather laughing at an alienated and deprived social world. It is realizing that
its imposed goals (even though sometimes we have to follow) are not really the
ultimately meaningful goals. It is acknowledging our limited power and fragile
will to lead a eudemonic life under a hostile social world. Our failures in
imposed or genuine projects of seeking goals should not distress us. We still
have a chance of trying again and enjoying an eudemonic life against what the alienated
social relations impose on us as ad hoc and unreflect goals. Holding this
chance and being aware of how important it is (knowing how important human life
is) enables us to not take the imposed arbitrary goals of life under capitalism
seriously.
Farid Saberi
9 March 2025, London, Ontario, Canada
Western University
Rotman Institute of Philosophy.
[1]
Notice that the relativistic conclusion does not directly follow from comparing
two different linguistic and conceptual traditions. One does not have to say
that there is no general fact about absurdity that is shared between Khayyam’s
age and our modern age. Rather, one could equally interpret this as different
sensibilities and abilities to better understand or focus on different aspects
of the problem of absurdity. I will defend this interpretation in this section.
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