Tag: Philosophy

Vaclav Havel’s Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

In 1994, shortly after becoming President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel travelled to the USA and delivered an address in Philadelphia called “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World”. The USSR had recently collapsed and a new form of capitalism was spreading its influence over the world, connecting disparate cultures via fractal conduits of trade and migration. Havel worried that without some new narrative to paper over their differences, this abrupt connection of cultures would lead to conflict. Wars were already sparking in the Middle East and Europe and international diplomacy was difficult. Cooperation required governments to look past their own interests in favour of a more general conception of progress. People needed a unifying ideal to cleave to, which would encourage them to move with one purpose against international problems. It had to be new, because the 20th Century was an age of emancipation where people had begun to recognize the richness of different perspectives; there were protections for indigenous cultures and no single ideology of the time was strong enough to overpower all the others. Organized religion was also declining in the West, where science had replaced metaphysical explanations of natural phenomena and damaged the credibility of the religious enterprise. Havel therefore looked for inspiration in two ideas drawn directly from modern science. He called them “transcendent” in the hope they might provide us with a sense of rootedness in the cosmos and encourage us to see things from a superhuman vantage. Contemplating them would be like turning over a precious jewel in your hand, as facets become alternately reflective and transparent and expose, by turns, the dark interior of the mineral or the refulgent world around it.

The Ideas

“…Because it’s not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.”

Admiral William “Bill” Adama – Battlestar Galactica.

The first of Havel’s transcendent ideas is the Anthropic principle, which was developed originally to help explain a puzzle in cosmology. By the mid-twentieth century, astronomers had discovered that space was accelerating – the universe did not appear to be in a steady state – and they knew that the heavy elements essential to life had been created gradually in stars through a process of nuclear fusion. They also knew that stars have finite lives – that they burn up and out, cooling over time – and their propensity to harbour life in rocky planetary systems diminishes as the universe ages. It follows that carbon-based life forms like humans could not evolve if the universe were significantly older or younger than its present age. Moreover, it suggests that we find ourselves looking out on a cosmos at an auspicious moment1, a kind of island of habitability where conditions are conducive to life.

The Anthropic principle – or the observation selection argument – says it is natural the universe should be the age it is, since if the universe were significantly older or younger there would be no sentient life around to notice. The same argument can be used to explain why the universe’s physical laws appear to be fine-tuned for life. The various forces and species of matter are related in a very particular way. Were the relative strengths of the fundamental forces slightly different, not only would life be prevented from evolving, but there would be myriad other effects: heavy elements would not be able to fuse in the furnaces of the stars, the structure of atoms would dissolve and the universe might expand too fast or collapse too early to allow life to develop.

In summary, the Anthropic principle says that it is necessary that life forms should observe a universe which operates in a state and at a time propitious for life. Havel felt this tautology might accord humanity a special place in the universe. He observed in his Philadelphia address that:

“…from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge.”

In other words: since we are here, privileged to be able to look out at an otherwise sterile cosmos, one might conclude that the purpose of the universe was to produce life on Earth – perhaps, even, to produce humankind2.

It is an arresting thought and like many others I find Havel’s formulation of the Anthropic principle attractive. But there are also some important philosophical objections. By suggesting that the universe was meant to produce human life, Havel follows in a long line of philosophers who try to lend humans a noble position in the hierarchy of things. Strictly speaking, however, one might follow the same line of argument and infer that the purpose of the universe was to create rocks – or puddles. In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams joked that a puddle might look up at the clouds which disburse rain, then at the numerous puddle-shaped depressions in the ground and equally conclude that the benevolent purpose of the universe was to produce puddles.

I can think of a further, more fundamental objection, which is that it makes no sense to define the purpose of everything there is. Teleology makes no sense with respect to everything – only between two or more things. That is why humans invent Gods to lend meaning to everything they can see – but the logic is faulty, for in positing a God, we have ignored the original problem, which was to explain everything instead of just a part of everything. Asking what is the purpose of everything is therefore meaningless. If modern scientific theories are correct, and humans developed naturally out of the interstellar medium, then human purpose can only be understood in terms of the rules that brought them into being and which govern their development. Purpose only makes sense without a maker if you have a mechanism like evolution, where the rules of the biological system determine how the system will play out.

Havel’s second transcendent idea is the Gaia hypothesis. Introduced in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory says that the Earth is maintained in a state favourable to life by a series of negative feedback loops. The whole of the Earth – atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere – can be viewed as a single, self-regulating system that holds the temperature and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface within limited bounds. The idea was prompted by several observations3: for example, that the biosphere is able to withstand tremendous shocks from volcanic eruption or asteroid impact, that the temperature of the Earth’s surface has been largely constant for billions of years despite increasing solar luminosity and that the atmosphere is maintained within a state of high thermodynamic “disequilibrium”4 (i.e. reactive gases like oxygen and methane are constantly replenished5).

Lovelock illustrated his idea with the Daisyworld model, where a planet is inhabited by two different species of daisy – one white and the other black. Daisyworld is experiencing a period of global warming, caused by the brightening of its parent sun. The white daisies reflect sunlight, cooling the planet, while the black ones absorb sunlight and heat the planet up. Their growth rates are assumed to depend solely on temperature and neither daisy can survive in excessive heat or cold, so the populations reorganize themselves, as the sunlight intensifies, so that the temperature remains comfortable. The daisies are therefore able to stabilize their environment without conscious intention. Lovelock proposed that similar (though much more complex) feedback mechanisms of biology and chemistry have been active on the Earth throughout its history. If there is a significant perturbation in living conditions, then the balance of biological populations will adjust to compensate. Havel put it like this:

“[Gaia] theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth’s surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet – Gaia – named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value – that is, life itself.”

The Point

In his capacity as playwright and politician, Havel was trying to generate a narrative anchor that would inspire people to work for the general good of the planet. In a way, his argument is a humanist response to nihilism. Like Nietzsche, he is striving to impose meaning on a meaningless world. This may sound absurd (it is absurd) but there is nothing strange or laughable about it. Humans are compelled to weave their own struggles into stories so that they can make decisions about the future. We can understand this with an analogy:

Imagine you have designed a species of biological robot whose sole purpose is to pass on its genetic programming to future generations. The robot lives as part of a group in order to increase its chances of survival and procreation and therefore needs to consider its own needs and to weigh them against those of other individuals in the group. Since there is no absolute purpose to their lives beyond the continuation of their genes – and because you cannot hard-code a response to every imaginable crisis – you program the robots to make decisions based on the problems they can see around them. They build these problems into abstract narratives, which place the robots in the context of the problem and shut out all the extraneous noise of the universe. In this way, the tremendous complexity of a real-life problem is reduced to a simple, idealized case. The process is similar to building theoretical models in the sciences.

It seems to me that humans have developed like this and we use narratives like this. When faced with global problems, we invent stories which involve all of humanity in a struggle against those problems. Difficulties arise when other humans (most of us who do not work in international relations) have their own troubles that resonate louder than the global narrative. These might be because day-to-day survival is more important, or simply because an individual cannot picture themselves in a global context and chooses to pursue personal goals instead. Looking at recent progress in tackling climate change, it is clear that we cannot easily make a global narrative more urgent in the mind than a narrative of nationhood, race, or personal gain6. Inventing an inter-planetary or inter-species war would probably be the most expedient way to overcome our differences – something akin to the plot of the Battlestar Galactica television series, Watchmen or The Three Body Problem. The tragedy – if one can call it that – of our isolation is that the only enemies we can find, now, are other humans.

Notes and Further Reading

  1. In this context, “moment” refers to a span of several billion years…! ↩︎
  2. Although the non-avian dinosaurs – whose own evolutionary aspirations were so rudely curtailed at the end of the Cretaceous period – might have something to say about Havel’s anthropocentric philosophy. ↩︎
  3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis ↩︎
  4. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y ↩︎
  5. This can be contrasted with the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, which is static and composed almost exclusively of inert carbon dioxide. ↩︎
  6. J. Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Penguin Books, 2020. ↩︎

Sympathy for the Devil

Araneus diademata on the Camino near Astorga. Taken 28 October 2021 with an Apple iPhone.

Human beings are all biological machines, though our functions are not wholly determined by the reproductive purpose that shaped us. Individually, we are all more or less deficient and more or less unique in our needs. Indeed our “needs” cannot even be comprehensively or objectively defined. Philosophical advice, therefore, can only ever be approximate and good philosophy – like good literature – can be quite general, but never definitive.

+++

Sometimes our spirit is just a “bad kiln” and the whole act of life is a sort of compromise1. But even in this absurd predicament, the human animal can still find moments of clarity – of bliss – that it plucks from diverse sources and holds by way of compensation. Since we are all working with different raw materials, it is instructive to write out your own maxims – as Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations – and return to them regularly. This will serve as a reminder of how to live well and push you closer to the Tao.

+++

James Lovelock proposed that the Earth’s biosphere acts as a single organism to regulate the temperature and habitability of its surface. Tolstoy’s view of history was similar, where individuals – even those with the stature and force of character of a Humboldt or Napoleon – play unwitting roles in a greater, more general flood of human activity, governed by myriad invisible forces. Looking at humanity as a kind of superorganism, we see that the vast majority of people – those who cannot usefully contribute to the fight against global warming, or the relentless exploitation of the world’s resources, or any of the other major threats to civilization – would do better to stop worrying and focus on their life at measurable scales. Attending to tangible, small-scale decisions gives us a sense of personal value and benefits those close to us. You can volunteer in an art or conservation group, get involved in local support groups or school governorships. If more people decide to “sweat the small stuff” and really engage in their immediate environment, we may find that the bigger picture looks after itself. Only when you have mastered the small things that you have real control over should you move onto generalities. As Voltaire famously observed, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

+++

Many of us do not pay sufficient attention to the reality of what our life means to those around us. We fixate on the frightening stories projected by our portable computers and we go to great lengths to isolate ourselves from our surroundings. In Oxford, it is now more common for me to see students running or walking with headphones than without; and fast, efficient vehicular transport is everywhere privileged over the long, meditative dérive. In the past, religions like Christianity would encourage regular self-scrutiny. On a weekly or even daily basis, priests would remind their errant congregations that they were being supervised by an eternal, lidless eye and that their actions would be weighed accordingly. Having lost our belief in the metaphysics of religion, we have thrown out many of the rituals that travelled in tandem, including the useful habit of looking at our actions from “outside”.

The Self has insinuated itself onto the altar recently vacated by God and human interests have been allowed to eclipse all other considerations. We idolize certain characters in literature and art, but rarely think about how people would react if they could watch our own lives, as though we were the hero in a story. Would they admire my strength or wisdom? Would they view my actions with approval? Why not? In trying to answer these questions, we can better appreciate our own significance. You may be shocked to discover – as I was, on reflection – that you are not a particularly good person.

As religion’s hold on young people has waned, other stories have grown in influence, playing on similar themes. Walk into a public viewing of The Return of the King and you will see that the cinema is packed with young men of the most diverse extraction. All will be deeply conversant with the script and the screenplay. Some of them may reach such a pitch of excitement that they quote the script out loud, along with the film; others are absolutely silent, their faces rapt, eyes glittering, as they follow the Madonna-like figure of Liv Tyler and squeeze the hands of their terrestrial girlfriends. Watching these films is a form of communion for these men. They idolize Aragorn and Faramir – noble characters with wide appeal – and their response is subconscious, absolutely religious and animal.

+++

Is there any reason why religious rituals cannot be resurrected for atheists? I would argue that watching a sermon by Rowan Williams or Malcolm Guite is just as valuable for me – a secular atheist – as for a true Christian believer. And reading one of Williams’ essays or poems is just as illuminating, just as moving. It is interesting to wonder why modern attempts by de Botton and Grayling to secularize religious teachings have met with little success. Is it a failure of concept or execution? Could it be bad luck? Perhaps it would be better to just go and skeptically participate in religious services, arm-in-arm with the faithful.

+++

Losing touch with our physical environment makes us vulnerable to errors of judgement. Part of this is linked to our obsessive consumption of digital media, which turns other people into categories and isolated soundbites. If all we have to work with are journalistic reports, then we tend to become interested only in a person’s ideological identity, as McCarthyists, communists and Catholics were in the past. The Twitter user does not debate with humans: they engage in skirmishes with “TERFs”, or “woke” people. But these terms (so often incorrectly applied) are distortions of reality. Bellow observed that people who watch lots of television derive their observations ready-made, packaged by somebody else. This is dangerous for common sense, because it is predicated on the human context, on specificity and texture, which cannot be communicated via newsprint. Common sense develops rather through action and direct enquiry. The loss of this intuitive mode is damaging to thought. Einstein said2: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. I think we see this in the absurd and totally disproportionate vilification of J. K. Rowling. Her views on transgender rights – expressed with the utmost respect and careful moderation of tone3 – are misrepresented by some as a form of physical violence or taken as proof of an irredeemably flawed character. There is much that can (and should) be said about the scape-goating and straw-manning of Rowling, but for now it is interesting simply to note that, had these frothing critics met Rowling before her views on transgender issues became public, they would – unanimously, I am sure – have declared her the very model of a wise and decent person.

Sympathy is easy when you live online: you can virtue signal with black squares or little rainbows whilst having no genuine feeling for anyone who disagrees with you, or for the person down the road with a distasteful opinion and a life loaded with extenuating circumstances. For good evolutionary reasons, most of us are generous to people we know, or to strangers that do not threaten us. Most people also harbour exaggerated opinions which can be massaged into softer, less virulent forms through conversation. This is not evident if you have never spoken to a stranger, or spend all of your time listening to podcasts.

If all you can see of a person is 280 characters, then your opinion of them is necessarily reductive. Without serious conscious effort, your brain will extrapolate that person’s entire character from one comment on a single issue. You will become a snob, in other words. And because their comments live on in cold characters immutable, you cannot assess the person’s level of conviction. You do not know if they have changed their mind, you cannot catch their ironic smile, or the spark of humour dancing behind their eyes – all these details that are automatically and subconsciously interpreted during a conversation, which we use to inform our emotional response. Presumably this is why, in an era of near-ubiquitous video conferencing, government diplomacy is still conducted in person.

The greatness (and goodness) of individual men and women is a fairly static quantity when averaged across time and culture. In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s eponymous hero unashamedly places the brilliant, crippled Jewish property magnate William Einhorn in the same league as Caesar, Machiavelli and Ulysses. Augie says:

“It was him that I knew and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share of grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale king’s, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods… then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names.”

If your point of departure is that your interlocutor is stupid or evil then you will understand nothing about your point of view or theirs. Why? Because if you assume that their opinion is a natural concomitant of faulty brain chemistry, then nothing can reasonably be done about it. Chances are that you will go further and illogically assume that their stupidity/iniquity proves you are correct. Suppose instead that this person is averagely good or averagely reasonable and you will find they generally have a good reason for holding the opinions they do. This is because we are like machines – we have errors of input and errors of computation – and like all things we obey laws of averages. Chomsky has brought up the same point in the context of scientific enquiry4. He observes that finding the right question is equivalent to finding a fruitful way of looking at a problem, which means that finding the right question takes you a long way on the journey towards a solution. The crucial point is to look at some physical phenomenon and not just assume that it is obvious. Deciding that an apple falling from a tree is a surprising fact rather than an inevitability may lead you down a path of inquiry that eventuates in new knowledge.

+++

Machines are fallible. Humans are fallible. When making a decision about what to think or do, we carefully weigh our personal experiences against the opinions of others. There is no absolutely general way of doing this, which is probably why the faculty never evolved.

+++

In politics, straying too far from the middle – in any direction – always leads to ideological inconsistency and disaster. Why? Perhaps because our human needs are in conflict with one another5. Perhaps also because rules of government must function on average to be successful. Our needs and desires sit on scales that we measure against the reality of our own lives. In politics as in literature, we use our own experience as a yardstick. We want autonomy, but not too much. We want support, but excessive support is impractical and counter-productive. Rules are developed (ostensibly, at least) so that a maximum of people experience a minimum of discomfort.

Now this “middle path” of politics may seem a rather insipid, toothless goal to strive for: we all know that we should tolerate others, try to question our own opinions, maintain a degree of skepticism… But it isn’t really, because many of us do not truly apprehend it, nor do we always vote for it. There is a world of difference between knowing and understanding. Ethical ideals must be weighed against the exigencies of life and experience is needed to harden knowledge into understanding. We are all of us like the birds in Attar’s story, who travel in search of their King, the Simurgh, whose name means thirty birds. Borges describes how a host of bird-pilgrims journeys through seven valleys or seas on their way to the Simurgh’s castle6: “the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation.”. Most of the pilgrims desert or succumb to the rigours of the journey. In the end, however:

“Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.”

+++

Footnotes and References

  1. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Penguin Modern Classics (2001) ↩︎
  2. James Lovelock and Bryan Appleyard, Novacene, Allen Lane, pp. 20 (2019) ↩︎
  3. J. K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, http://www.jkrowling.com [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ ↩︎
  4. Noam Chomsky, Asking the right questions, YouTube [Last Accessed: May 2024] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGs-4h0wQj4&list=LL&index=2&t=2231s ↩︎
  5. I will discuss this point further in my next article, Prisoners of Progress, which examines our relationship to technology. ↩︎
  6. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Vintage, pp. 130-131 (2002) ↩︎

Le Chemin de Saint-Jacques: From Angst to Ataraxia

Old Adonis. Itero de la Vega, October 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

Life is a dream of significance. Under the normal conditions of work, provided the pay is not too low, the job not too arduous or self-evidently fatuous, our daily routine assumes a grand psychological importance. This importance is necessary to continue functioning in society. If you start to lose interest in your work and the work is intellectually demanding, your health will suffer and neurosis may turn to nervous collapse. The ultimate meaninglessness of everything is only apprehended – indeed, is only important – when an external event forces us to wake up from our collective hypnosis; when the fire gutters and the shadows on the wall suddenly assume an inhuman aspect.

A pilgrim is created when somebody has, in a certain sense, seen the candle flicker in the magic lantern. When I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago in the autumn of 2021, I had just finished my PhD and a short post-doctoral position. After years of study, my conditions of life were changing and my way of looking at life was changing as well. I walked because I wanted answers to certain insoluble questions – not because I wanted to do glory to God. This was also true of many of my fellow pilgrims. It was remarkably rare to see someone who was walking purely as a gesture of obeisance. Only once did I cross paths with someone I felt might have walked solely out of deference to God: a man who, when he arrived in the square at the foot of the cathedral of Santiago, gave a great shout and dropped to his knees, his cheeks rimed with tears, and provided the crowd of tourists and pilgrims with something original to add to their Instagram accounts. For the majority of serious long-distance pilgrims, however – whether they were religious, soi-disant “spiritual” or secular – their real motivation for walking was anxiety. This anxiety was a psychological reaction to the fundamental indifference of the world to our desires – the absurdity of the human condition. Properly expressed, existential angst is an appreciation of l’absurdité du monde.

The absurdity of the human condition can be glimpsed following a single profound event or gradual accumulation of experiences. Whether the person is trying to make an important decision or process some past trauma, engaging with their anxiety on an intellectual level will require them to answer specific questions about their life. Among the pilgrims I met on the road to Santiago, questions about love or work or death were the most common. And though everyone walks with their own precious cache of personal questions, most were united by a single quality that I call “ill-posedness”. An ill-posed question can be grammatically articulated but contains no objective meaning. Questions of this sort are impossible to attack intellectually – only emotionally. Examples of some ill-posed questions are: What is the sound of green? What lies north of the north pole? What is the meaning of life? What should I do now my husband is dead? Or even the transparently self-defeating: What made everything that exists? Some of these questions can be made meaningful with a small qualification, such as “What should I do to be happy?”. Others are irredeemably fallacious.

A pilgrim’s response to an existential question can be religious, mystical, philosophical, or some heretical combination of the three. But whichever approach they take, by walking the road to Santiago they are accepting that they have failed to find an answer by conventional means. A rearrangement of perspective is required, so they choose the freedom of a fixed routine where all supplementary problems are subordinated to walking, shelter and sustenance. If the pilgrim is religious, their existential problem is recast as a question of Faith and they walk in the hope that they will find consolation in the power of a loving God. Of course if you are not religious then you are measuring your anxiety against the fundamental indifference of the Universe. Fear demands consolation and atheism is psychologically unsatisfying unless you feel in control of yourself or your life. You may even understand that the questions you want answers to are not meaningful. Rather than attempt the impossible task of answering existential questions directly, we can discuss the psychological experience of absurdity and point to a way – the only generally-applicable way – to escape existential anxiety.

Un Cheval dans la Salle de Bains

Absurdity can be defined as the discontinuity between human desire and reality. It is perceived when the world contradicts your expectations in an illuminating way, engendering an appreciation of the meaninglessness of everything, of your own loneliness, of the universe’s ultimate indifference. One might say that a person feels absurd when they understand that their opinion is irrelevant to the global functioning of the Universe. The clouds in the sky and the currents of the great oceans do not conspire to please you; if you are struck by a train the steel does not yield sympathetically on impact. Even in the 21st Century, it is frighteningly common to die without knowing great love or receiving profound inspiration. All these facts are self-evident but difficult to understand without a certain quality of perspective. It is moreover curious that this sense of absurdity can be a source of wonder or sorrow depending on context. The sense of personal insignificance that strikes you at the summit of a mountain, or when looking into the eyes of a wild animal, has the same root as your reaction to being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Since absurdity arises out of the relationship between human expectations and a real event, the experience of absurdity will occur differently for different people. It can strike in the most mundane setting: an ordinary-looking bin is fixed to a lamp-post, but as you pass you see that the interior is burnt out and filled with ribbons of melted plastic like wet viscera; or a man dressed in clean, fashionable clothes suddenly halts by the side of the road, prostrates himself and opens his palms to beg. There is a brief moment of dislocation, when your mind rushes to assimilate the unexpected. One can also imagine really exceptional experiences that permanently disturb your mental picture of reality. The banal horror of war reverberated through 20th Western literature in the works of Céline, Orwell, Vonnegut, Heller and Ballard. Though they responded sometimes in very different ways, these authors all saw the baffling, super-human indifference of the world to suffering. In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams took the idea of a super-human perspective to its ridiculous limit when he imagined a machine that allows you to briefly appreciate your own size relative to that of the entire Universe. Invented by Trin Tragula to annoy his hectoring wife, the Total Perspective Vortex affords the user an all-too-realistic “sense of proportion”. Though the shock of comprehension annihilated his poor wife’s mind, Tragula found consolation in having proved that “if life was going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it could not afford to have was a sense of proportion” [1].

Absurdity is likewise apparent in social contrasts. Consider the juxtaposition of a young girl absorbed in her smartphone, an atavistic smile curling at the edges of her glossy lips, while a stream of young African men cycle past who are forced to work for delivery companies for lack of papers. Then there is me, holding an umbrella, watching an elderly refugee as she shelters under an awning in the pouring rain. Her nose and mouth are covered by a surgical mask and she is rocking mechanically from side to side – either to comfort herself, or perhaps in a spasm of boredom. In the five metres that separate me from this woman is captured all the hypocrisy of humanity and all the indifference of the Universe.

There is the sick man denied health, the curious woman denied understanding and unification, Sisyphus with his rock… These unfortunates all live with frustrated desires and are daily confronted with the absurd.

Absurdity can also be found in Sartre’s nauseating tree root, or any other object, properly considered. The only requirement is that the thing appear sufficiently super-human. Go for a walk in the countryside at night and turn your gaze to the moon. Look at it as dispassionately as you can – not as a bright coin, a symbol, or a character in a story. You will see how utterly impersonal and indifferent it is. Camus describes the image of a man speaking inside a telephone box. You can see him gesticulating behind the glass, his mouth working silently and animatedly, and the incongruity of the image provokes you to wonder: Who is this man? What does he live for? In a way, he allows you a glimpse of yourself from above. Your own absurdity is reflected in him. The simplicity of your shared desires and their inherent contradictions, their incredible smallness.

The Response

Having woken up to the absurdity of the world, you may be tempted to ask: how should I respond to it? We have mentioned the pilgrims already, who try to walk themselves out of neurosis and then (if they are successful) enter back into society. If you lose hope but retain desire then you may be deranged by the “cruel” indifference of the world. You can dedicate yourself to an imagined all-powerful parent-figure, a principle or abstraction. Finally, you can attempt to accept absurdity with equanimity. This last, philosophical approach is infinitely more interesting than the religious response because it does not require you to wrap your brain around a Möbius loop of false metaphysics or adhere to a corpus of outdated ethics. Philosophical progress can be analyzed. You know your approach is correct if you converge on the essential truths that the more enlightened practitioners of the world’s great religions and philosophies have created. These truths are old and well-documented. It is no coincidence that the Stoics, Buddhists, Sufis, Hindus, Quakers, Taoists, Bokononists (and so on ad nauseum) are all ultimately searching for an island of emotional stability, or ataraxia1. If absurdity arises out of a discontinuity between reality and human expectations, our only hope is to adjust our expectations – to weaken desire but retain hope. This in the knowledge that even the most exceptional Stoic life is absurd, since humans are biological creatures and an elevated state of consciousness cannot be permanent in a world where people can be tortured on a spiked chair. In this way, eyes fixed cheerfully on the undulating road in front of them, a good philosopher asymptotes towards the limit of Enlightenment.

Lenticular clouds between Brazuelo and Ponferrada, October 2021. Taken with Apple iPhone.

1All great religious thinkers gravitate towards the same ideas because the human condition hasn’t changed and won’t change while we remain biologically human. Ataraxia is the only spiritual goal that can be generally applied and therefore is the only quest suitable for a world religion.

[1] Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Pan Books (1980)