Absurd lengths

Famous suicides on both yesterday's and tomorrow's dates. George Sanders said he was killing himself because he was bored. Which leads us to this:

Would life be more absurd, or less absurd, if it lasted forever? That is the question that engages Rivka Weinberg (anagram barking review), a professor of philosophy at a college in California, writing in the New York Times. 

Weinberg cites a famous paper written in 1971 by Thomas Nagel, called “The Absurd.” “For suppose we lived forever,” Nagel wrote; “would not a life that is absurd if it lasts 70 years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?”

Well, that depends. First, is life absurd, on the whole? And then, if it is, what makes it so?

Weinberg says that absurdity is “when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purpose or situation as to be ridiculous.” That won’t do for a definition when considering life itself, because we don’t know its “purpose” or our “situation.” We should say that absurdity occurs when something – say, the universe – has no rational relationship to human life. (I say human life because we appear to be the only species that concerns itself with such matters.)

So, looking at our lives against the background of the universe may give rise to a feeling of absurdity. It was this feeling that occurred to the writer Leo Tolstoy, who, as Weinberg notes, put it this way: “Sooner or later there will come diseases and death to my dear ones and to me, and there would be nothing left but stench and worms. All my affairs, no matter what they might be, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself should not exist. So why should I worry about these things?” (But worry about them he did, so much so that he took up a grotesque version of Christianity and became a worry-wart of a different sort and intensity.)
Our “situation” is this: While the universe goes on and on, we are as fireflies on a single summer night.

It is death, in this view, that renders life absurd. We have plans and aspirations, but not the time to carry them out; or even if we realize them, our accomplishments will be forgotten, sooner or later.

If, as Weinberg asks, life is absurd because it is too short, would it be less absurd if it were longer?

The problem, as it just about always happens, comes down to one of semantics – our inability to frame it in agreed-upon terms. What do we mean by more absurd or less absurd? What’s more absurd, a talking duck or a flying alarm clock? Is absurdity a relative concept at all? My own feeling is that absurdity is a constant, and it is only our experience of it that varies.   

The philosopher Schopenhauer said that the fact that we are frequently bored proves that life has no intrinsic value, and for this reason we feel that our very being is absurd. In this case, the length of life does not affect its absurdity. The question then may arise: Does the universe have any intrinsic value?

If we believe that life is absurd, then “The absurdity of human life poses a challenge to its meaning,” Weinberg says. “Absurdity and meaningfulness don’t go together.” (Maybe just from our perspective. Tolstoy, in his pre-religious period, said that “The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge known to man.” Did he mean to imply that there is a meaningful absurdity?)

Weinberg plows ahead: “This (the incompatibility of absurdity and meaning), however, does not mean that if life were not absurd then it would have meaning. Removing the obstacle of absurdity does not entail that meaning rushes in. But if we cannot remove the obstacle of absurdity then it will be hard to conclude that life has meaning or determine what that meaning might be.”

Either that, or embrace the absurd.