Why Life Feels Absurd

Reading and reflecting on Thomas Nagel's 1971 paper "The Absurd" and how it relates to faith.

New York Movie (1939) by Edward Hopper

In college, a few of my classmates and I asked our philosophy of economics professor for his favorite philosophy papers—among others, he listed Pierre Duhem’s “Physical Theory and Experiment,” Thomas Nagel’s “The Absurd,” John D. Norton’s “Causation as Folk Science,” and Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know”—and they’ve all been great reads.

Today, I’ll focus on philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1971 paper “The Absurd,” summarizing its main arguments and why I find it so interesting. Nagel argues that life’s absurdity is a result not of our powerlessness but of our ability to reflect and doubt. Understanding this, I argue we should embrace faith in the face of absurdity instead of conceding defeat to purposelessness.

Inadequate Explanations

“The Absurd” starts with a problem: “Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd.”

The “standard arguments” used to explain life’s absurdity include the following:

• “Nothing we do now will matter in a million years.”

• “Our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one.”

• We’re so small compared to the size of the universe.

• Our lives are ultimately purposeless because eventually we all die.

Nagel shows the inadequacy of these arguments in turn. His responses are both thoughtful and confusingly logical. To give a sense of his style, let’s examine his response to the first argument. The argument claims life is absurd because “nothing we do now will matter in a million years.” Nagel writes:

Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years is to beg the question against its mattering, period.

In other words, the claim (“life is absurd”) only follows from the data (“nothing we do will matter in a million years”) with the assumption of an implied logical statement: “[an action’s] mattering in a million years [depends] on its mattering, period.” So the first argument has this form:

• Data: Nothing we do now will matter in a million years.

• Warrant [implied]: Actions only matter if they matter in a million years.

• Claim: Our actions don’t matter/life is absurd.

If we believe both the data and the warrant, then the claim follows by logical syllogism.

However, if we believe this implied warrant, then believing the data—that nothing we do now will matter in a million years—assumes the conclusion (or “[begs] the question”), a logical fallacy. This fallacy renders the argument invalid. Nagel proceeds to dismantle the other standard arguments given in defense of life’s absurdity in similar fashion before offering his own explanation.

Nagel’s Explanation

Nagel claims that life feels absurd because of “the collision between 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.” Moreover, every single person is able to feel life’s absurdity because this “collision” between certain action and uncertain belief is unavoidable.

Nagel claims that living requires deciding, writing: “We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others.” Our lives therefore require us to act upon our beliefs. To give a basic example, even if a student doesn’t know what major to choose in college, that student will have to choose one or skip college altogether.

On the other hand, there is no way to have completely certain beliefs. Nagel writes:

Yet 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. . . . We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question.

These “responses and habits” that we adhere to—which I would say we have “faith” in—are the source of life’s absurdity. We act upon them with certainty but struggle to defend them. And as long as we hold beliefs like these that we can question, life will continue to feel absurd.

Absurdity Is Inevitable

If the collision between the seriousness of our lives and our ability to doubt our beliefs causes life’s absurdity, we’re left with a few possible responses.

We could attempt to eliminate all the undefendable “responses and habits” that we adhere to and live only on the basis of defensible ideas. I think this option is doomed to fail, as it’s impossible to execute. All value statements must be defended either by circularity or with reference to another value statement. If I value remaining alive, for example, it’s either because I value being alive for its own sake (a circular defense) or because I value remaining alive as it serves my other values. If the latter, we’ll inevitably find some foundational values that require circular defenses when we turn to examine my other values.

Alternatively, we could resign ourselves to life’s absurdity, claiming that nothing matters, life is purposeless, and everything is arbitrary. Our ability to doubt the justifications of our actions means that we can never be on epistemologically solid ground. And if we can’t have perfectly solid footing for our thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about the world, why should we bother looking for any justification or logic at all? I think this is another poor option, though I certainly would struggle to explain why without resting on some circular footing.

Finally, we could live and act on the basis of values that we have faith in, knowing that life will still feel absurd when we reflect. We will always be able to doubt the things we believe in, but our ability to doubt doesn’t mean that our values are arbitrary or meaningless.

To live this final option out, I’m forced to grapple with the fact that there’s likely something beyond logic at work when I choose what to value. Putting faith in a set of beliefs that I can’t logically defend without circularity requires a leap: a leap from the quantitative to the qualitative, or a “leap of faith.” Despite this leap, I’m happy to choose faith when the alternative is resigning myself to life’s purposelessness.