Nagel “The Absurd”

1. Nagel “The Absurd” What is the explanation for why life is absurd?

2. Standard arguments to explain absurdity fail • Example: “We are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute.” • Nagel: Our lives would be absurd if we were eternal and/or filled the universe with our hugeness. • Is he right about this? Would our lives be just as absurd if we lived forever?

3. Justification • To justify is to give a reason for. • Nagel says “another inadequate argument is that because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air…” (144) • N. says we can reply to this by noting that chains of justification come to an end. “No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove.” These actions are self justifying and not pointless. • Things don’t have to be justified by an ultimate end. (p. 144) • But many people say that for life to have meaning, we need an ultimate purpose. Is there anything to that argument?

4. What the standard arguments are trying to show • What makes a situation absurd=“when it includes a conspicuous disrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed…you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded announcmenet….” • There is a type of ‘local’ absurdity which we can change by altering our expectations or situation. • However, there is a universal absurdity “in which pretension and reality inevitably clash for us all.” • “This condition is supplied…by the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary or open to doubt.” (145)

5. Why is everything arbitrary and open to doubt?

6. Why do we have to take our lives seriously?

7. Nagel’s answer • Seriousness is unavoidable. Doubt is inescapable. (145) • We don’t have to have grand sweeping plans (fame, triumph) to take our selves seriously. • We have to choose plan, figure out our priorities, decide what kind of person to be, and think about how our life is going overall. We normally stop and reflect on our life as a whole once in a while—why we “go on being salesmen or academics or taxi drivers….” (146) • We are very dedicated to ironing out the details sweating over “appearance…sex life…emotional honesty..social utility…self-knowledge…quality of ties…” • Is this true. Do we have to have “decades of ‘intense concern’ about our lives?

8. Self-reflection • “…humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand…” (146) • Nozick says that when we do this, we realize our lives are absurd because we realize what we do is arbitrary. • Is this true?

9. Escape from absurdity? • Suppose we try to find a larger ultimate purpose, e.g., “service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advance of science, or relation and the glory of God.” (147) • Why doesn’t that work according to Nagel?

10. The larger purpose doesn’t work • The reason it doesn’t work is partly that the larger purpose must be significant in a way that we understand (or is self justifying). • Being food for another species is a larger purpose but doesn’t make life less absurd because we wouldn’t know what their significance. • “…any such larger purpose can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be…” (147)

11. Epistemological Skepticism • An epistemological skeptic doubts whether we can have knowledge. • One definition of knowledge is justified true belief. • The main worry Nagel raises is about the justification of our knowledge. • “…I know that I am looking at a piece of paper, although I have no adequate grounds to claim I know that I am not dreaming; and if I am dreaming then I am not looking at a piece of paper…” (149) • Our justification for our belief that p exists is sense perception. But we use sense perception to justify sense perception. And so our argument is circular.

12. The parallel between ES and absurdity • In both cases we have doubts and can’t get beyond the doubts but we end up falling back on our ordinary beliefs and practices. • “We then return to our lives, as we must, but our seriousness is laced with irony. Not that irony enables us to escape the absurd...” (150)

13. The mouse example • Why is the life of a mouse not absurd?” A mouse “is not absurd, because he lacks the capacities for self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse…” (151)

14. Can we escape the absurd? • We could try to lead a life totally identified “with that universal viewpoint from which human life seems arbitrary and trivial…” (151) • Or: We could try to “drift and respond to impulse without making the pursuit of…needs a central conscious aim…” But this would involve dissociation and wouldn’t make life meaningful. • We could try suicide (see Camus). • Camus says we should respond to absurdity with defiance or scorn. Nagel says this is “romantic and slightly self-pitying…We can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair…” (152)