Micah Tillman

I was talking to one of my students today, and the topic of existential crises (i.e., the experience of meaninglessness, [see Ecclesiastes 1, for example, or any play by Samuel Beckett, or Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl]) came up.

I thought my student was having one, you see.  And I proceeded to explain Camus’ theory of the Absurd to him.

In Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, we learn the following:

(1) To be human is to demand meaning of the world in which we live.

(2) The world is meaningless.

This is the Absurd.

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There are three ways to deal with the Absurd, Camus tells us:

(a) Pretend the world has meaning.

(b) Pretend you don’t need meaning.

(c) Continue to demand meaning while recognizing that the world is meaningless.

Camus argues that we should choose (c).

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I then explained that I have my own theory of the Absurd.

I think Camus is right.  To be human is to demand meaning, and the world is meaningless.  However, Camus missed something important: some things are important.

Though the experience of existential crisis reveals everything to be meaningless, every person has also had equally valid experiences in which some things in the world were unavoidably meaningful.

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It’s dealing with that contradiction that is the true Absurd.

The fact that nothing has meaning, or value, or importance, or significance, or goodness (those terms all mean the same thing, in this context) is just as much a fact as the fact that some things have meaning, or value, or importance, or significance, or goodness.

Solve that contradiction, why dontcha?

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Unlike Camus, I don’t think that we should simply live with the contradiction.

Furthermore, I think the contradiction can be solved without denying either of the contradictory terms.

The solution to my version of the Absurd is based on the following proposition:

The source of value (meaning, importance, etc.) is something beyond the world of everything.

The only way some things can have value when nothing has value is for the source of value to not be a thing — to be beyond the universe (i.e., the totality of things) as a whole — and to inject value into (some) things.

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Things in themselves have no value.  In relation to the source of value, which is not itself a thing, they can have value.

Things are like empty pipes, through which value can flow, if they are properly hooked up to the source.

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I claim this is the only possible solution to my version of the Absurd.

Tags: Absurd, Albert Camus, Beckett, Camus, Ecclesiastes, Existential Crisis, Frankl, Importance, Meaning, Meaningless, Meaninglessness, Myth of Sisyphus, Samuel Beckett, Significance, The Absurd, Value, Viktor Frankl