The year 2017
was a hard one. Here, in our own country, we faced an economic recession and
political infighting to a level never seen before. Globally, while the world
seem to try and recover economically following the long malaise after the
credit crunch a decade ago, humanity seems to be more disunited than ever
before, with the United States seemingly embracing its President’s approach of
‘America First’ and as such, relinquishing its mantle as ‘Leader of the Free
World’ with its actions. Britain is Brexiting, dividing the European Union, and
more and more countries seem to be disintegrating from within.
As we enter
2018, everyone seems to feel more and more powerless to affect the way the
world is heading, and seem content to wash away in the flood. Yet they are not.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 work, Existentialism,
he examines the human condition in the face of an indifferent world, and
finds that our most important consideration is to realise that we are
individuals – conscious beings independently acting and responsible for those
actions – rather than a category, a label, that they think they fit into in society.
Sartre stated
that a person is defined by their actions, and remains responsible for those
actions – pretending otherwise is acting in bad faith. Every time a person
claims they did something ‘because they
had no choice,’ they are acting in bad faith, and purport to make
themselves a mere object in the world, even though they are a thinking human
being. Every person always has a choice in how they act – they may not have a
good choice, hence the want to make themselves an object at the mercy of the
world and not responsible for their actions, but they nevertheless always have
a choice in their actions.
When applied
against the backdrop of the world, however, we encounter the problem of the
Absurd. The Absurd arises because we as human beings naturally seek an inherent
value and meaning in life, while the universe is in itself meaningless, or
indifferent. Sartre drew upon the works of two other philosophers with
differing opinions on resolving the dilemma of the Absurd, Søren Kierkegaard’s
work The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and
Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942) to show our options when faced with this dilemma.
The first of
three options when, as a person, we face the meaninglessness of the universe
along our own desire to find meaning, is suicide – or escaping existence. This
however, is a false solution – Camus and Kierkegaard considered it non-viable,
with Camus going as far to say that it does not counter the Absurd, and in fact
makes life even more absurd.
Kierkegaard
endorsed the second option – a religious, spiritual or abstract belief in a
transcendent realm, being or idea. This is a solution where you come to the
belief in a reality beyond the Absurd that has meaning – a belief in an
irrational but maybe necessary acceptance in the intangible and empirically
unprovable. Kierkegaard referred to this as a ‘leap of faith’. Camus, however, considered this solution as ‘philosophical suicide’.
Camus chose the
third option – accepting the Absurd and continuing to live in spite of it. By
accepting the Absurd, we, as human beings, can achieve the greatest extent of
our own freedom, by recognizing that we have no constraints and fighting
against the Absurd while we know it to be inescapable. Through doing this,
Camus believed we could construct our own meaning for our lives in the process,
and live as people in the world, and not merely objects to be pushed around by
it.
When we thus take a look at the world around
us, seemingly imposing itself on our consciousness and trying to convince us we
are powerless to affect it, we should remind ourselves that the world is not malevolent
– rather, it is indifferent. More importantly, we are not powerless against it
– we can act, and we have a responsibility to act. We are the actors in the
great play of life that needs to imbue meaning into a meaningless world. And if
my words cannot fully get this message across, perhaps those of Stanley Kubrick
will:
“The very
meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of
course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to
experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as
they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their
consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre,
their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he
sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the
ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can
emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan.
Both because of
and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a
fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure
sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring
and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is
hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this
indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death —
however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can
have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply
our own light.”
No comments:
Post a Comment