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.
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)
Philip Bradford 