QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?The absurd comes from stepping back, not from the shortness of life
Does life have a meaning?The absurd

The absurd comes from stepping back, not from the shortness of life

Nagel on the absurd (irony rather than heroism)

Thomas Nagel born 1937Consciousness is a subjective point of view that physics does not describe: our idea of nature must be widened.
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What it claims

Life is absurd because these two unavoidable viewpoints collide in us, and not because it is short or small. The right response is to approach this absurdity with irony, rather than with heroism or despair.

Why

Absurdity comes from the clash between our unavoidable seriousness and an outside view from which it seems arbitrary.

In short

"The absurd comes from stepping back, not from the shortness of life" is an argument by Thomas Nagel (Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd", Journal of Philosophy, 1971) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: the absurd). Its claim: Life is absurd because these two unavoidable viewpoints collide in us, and not because it is short or small. The right response is to approach this absurdity with irony, rather than with heroism or despair. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd", Journal of Philosophy, 1971
Valid with an implicit premise

When we say that life is absurd, we often give two reasons: we are tiny in the universe, and we live a very short time. Nagel thinks these reasons fail: if we lived forever, or if we were huge, life would be no less absurd. For him, the absurd comes from a conflict within us. On one side, we take our lives very seriously, since one cannot live without making choices. On the other, we can always step back and see all this as arbitrary. Both viewpoints are unavoidable and they collide. His conclusion is surprising: it is not a drama. The right response is neither despair nor heroism (as in Camus), but irony.

P1The smallness and shortness of our lives cannot be what makes them absurd: an eternal life, or a huge being, would be no less absurd.
P2We cannot live a human life without energy, attention and choices that show we take some things more seriously than others.
P3We always have available a point of view outside our lives, from which this seriousness appears gratuitous, and the doubt it brings cannot be settled.
P4 · implicit premiseA situation is absurd when it sets a pretension against reality. If the philosophical sense of absurdity is justified, it therefore comes from a conflict of this kind that exists in everyone.
Therefore life is absurd because these two unavoidable viewpoints collide in us, and not because it is short or small. The right response is to approach this absurdity with irony, rather than with heroism or despair.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where we are serious, where we can step back, and where life is nonetheless not absurd: for example if the step back showed only differences of viewpoint, with no pretension contradicted.
Valid with P4. Nagel reaches it by elimination: he first shows that the usual reasons (size, duration) fail, then looks for a universal source of conflict. Without P4, one can grant that seriousness and stepping back are both unavoidable without that being enough to make life absurd: a conflict is absurd only if one admits that it sets a pretension against reality. The part about irony is advice that Nagel adds: it does not follow from the premises, it depends on his judgment that the step back tells us nothing important.
Analogy. Someone carefully prepares a meal for guests, and in the middle of the kitchen suddenly sees himself from outside, like an ant fussing about. He cannot stop cooking, nor forget what he saw. He smiles at himself and goes on: this is the irony Nagel recommends.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (before Nagel, who criticises him) 1942 · attacks the conclusion

Sisyphus, the absurd hero, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition, and this very lucidity crowns his victory: "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." The right attitude is therefore not calm irony, but lucid revolt.

Nagel replies
Nagel, "The Absurd" (1971), section VII
Nagel cites this passage of Camus in a note and judges it "romantic and slightly self-pitying". For him, our absurdity warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus could not answer Nagel: he died in 1960. One can imagine his answer from his text: for him revolt is a consequence of lucidity, along with freedom and passion, and not a theatrical gesture (see the argument camus-absurde-refus-suicide). Nagel thinks on the contrary that defiance betrays "a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation". Both agree that there is no given meaning; they differ on the tone to take before this finding.
O
Objection from the believer: a meaning given by God attacks premise 3

Nagel's step back assumes that any larger purpose can be doubted. But if God exists, my role in his plan is not a meaning I invent: it is given from outside, and it ends the doubt. The believer would thus escape the absurd, like people who put themselves in the service of something greater than themselves.

Nagel replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Nagel, "The Absurd" (1971), section III
Nagel answers that doubt applies to the highest cause too: one can step back "also" from the progress of human history, of science, the success of a society, or the kingdom, power and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.
The debate goes on (our summary) Nagel does not say that God does not exist: he says a larger purpose does not settle the question of meaning, since one can also ask what justifies that purpose. For the believer, God is not one purpose among others but the ground of all reasons, and the question "why God?" makes no sense. For Nagel, to justify is to stop when one needs no more reasons, and that stopping point remains ours. The debate is about the nature of this stopping point and it remains open.