Nagel or Camus on the Absurd?

Author(s): Jeffrey Gordon

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , Sep., 1984, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Sep.,
1984), pp. 15-28
Published by: International Phenomenological Society

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. XLV, No. i, September i984

Nagel or Camus on the Absurd?

JEFFREY GORDON

Southwest Texas State University

We see ourselves from outside and

all the contingency and specificity
of our aims and pursuits become
clear. Yet when we take this view
and recognize what we do as
arbitrary, it does not disengage us
from life, and there lies our
absurdity
Thomas Nagel

[Man] feels within him his longing

for happiness and for reason. The
absurd is born of this
confrontation between the human
need and the unreasonable silence
of the world.
Albert Camus

The theme of the Absurd, like all great themes in the history of ideas, has
its historical occasion. In the case of the Absurd, it is what Nietzsche's
madman had called "the death of God." Who can read Heidegger's
description of our abandonment in the universe, Camus' depiction of our
confrontation with silence, and Sartre's words about our utter contin-
gency, the absence of justification for our lives, and not hear the reverber-
ations of the fallen God? These existentialist thinkers are responsible for
the prominence of the theme of absurdity, and theirs are the voices of the
desert: their descriptions and judgments would be hardly comprehensible
apart from this landscape of spiritless light. If human existence is now to

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? 15

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be deemed an absurdity, it is because we have learned that the advent of
man is one trivial accident in an endless chaos of accidents, that contrary
to our most cherished hopes, we are small, transient, and alone amid the
indifferent chasms of space. Could it be, however, that the relation
between the theme of the Absurd and its historical occasion, the so-called
"death of God," is wholly contingent? Could it be that since we realize the
absurdity of our lives, we must recognize as well that no God could save us
from it? Could it be that human life would remain absurd even in a land-
scape illuminated by his presence?
I am prompted to raise this question by Thomas Nagel's treatment of
the theme of "The Absurd" in his recent book Mortal Questions.' It is an
essay of considerable philosophical interest, although it may be of greater
interest still to the cultural historian. If the views Nagel expresses have
general currency, they may be taken as a sign of a new stage of our spiri-
tual crisis, the stage in which, weary of our mourning, we try to persuade
ourselves of the insignificance of the mourned. Be this as it may, my focus
here will be exclusively philosophical. I will address myself to two key
arguments in Nagel's essay, and in both cases I will try to show that he is
wrong.
The first of the two issues will concern our very conception of absur-
dity. A child of our age, Nagel is sympathetic with the judgment that
human life is absurd. But he would divorce that judgment from any theis-
tic or atheistic context. In his view, no particular fact about the world is
responsible for the absurdity of the human lot, and no possible fact about
the world could immunize us against it: It is not in a collision between the
world and ourselves, but in ourselves alone that the Absurd has its birth.
Despite the force of what he has to say here, I think he is wrong in this
analysis, and most of what I will say in what follows will be devoted to
showing this.
The second of the two issues I will deal with concerns the question of
how one ought to respond to the Absurd (if human life is indeed absurd).
Eminently modern, Nagel finds Camus' defiant stand both self-pitying
and histrionic. Arguing that Camus' response betrays a sense of self-im-
portance incompatible with the novelist-philosopher's acknowledgment
of our insignificance, Nagel recommends instead that we greet the absur-
dity of our lives with an ironic smile. I think Nagel is wrong in his conten-
tion that Camus' rebellious stance is inconsistent with his (Camus') read-

I Thomas Nagel's essay, "The Absurd," reprinted in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, I979), was first published in the Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 68, No. zo (October I97I).

i6 JEFFREY GORDON

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 ing of the human situation, and this is what I will try to show in the final
section of this paper.

I. If there is to be any sort of absurdity, there must be discrepancy, dispro-

portion - between intention and outcome, between pretension and fact,
between aspiration and reality, between subjective assessment and objec-
tive worth. A man struggles desperately to break down a heavy door. But
the house he is trying to enter is enclosed on three sides only; he could sim-
ply have walked in. The situation is absurd. A man who has earned a repu-
tation as a dedicated advocate for the poor looks across his desk at his
newest hapless client. He feels a kind of dizziness. He realizes he has no
personal interest in this man, but that this man is no exception. He recog-
nizes at once that he has felt toward most of his clients a secret contempt,
that he has pursued this career as a means of striking back at an establish-
ment that had spurned him. That vertiginous feeling, comical and crip-
pling, is his sense of the absurdity of his life. Situations may be absurd;
entire lives may be deemed so. Such cases present no conceptual puzzle.
But what would it mean for human life as such to be absurd?
Two kinds of answers are possible. One is Camus'; the other, Nagel's.
"The Absurd," says Camus, "is not in man (if such a metaphor could have
a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together."' "The absur-
dity of our situation," writes Nagel, on the contrary, "derives not from a
collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision
within ourselves." Only one of these men can be right. Why do I say it is
Camus? Let us turn to Nagel's analysis of absurdity as it applies to human
life as such.
z. Nagel reminds us of the "detached amazement" with which we typi-
cally observe an ant engaged in its frantic labor. There is a sobering lesson
in this, and the lesson is central to Nagel's analysis of the absurdity of
human life: we can observe ourselves in the same way. But when we turn
this cold eye toward our own passions, we are not thereby released from
their hold. Our labors humbled under this cool regard, we remain no less
passionately committed to them. This is our condition and our fatality: As
consciousnesses, we are capable of transcending each and all of our
engagements, viewing them sub specie aeternitatis in their remarkable
modesty; but as mere mortals we must remain all the while the devoted
servants of those same ends whose ultimate arbitrariness we so clearly see.

' Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New
York: Vintage Books, I955), p. 2 3.
3 Nagel, Mortal Questions, p. I7.

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? 17

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Our condition and our fatality, this "dragooning of an unconvinced tran-
scendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise
like a human life"4 is what comprises our absurdity.
3. Now given this analysis of the absurdity of human life, it will be clear
why Nagel regards the condition as both timeless and incurable. It is not
that in that detached amazement with which we may view our own lives,
we seek a justification for our efforts which as a matter of contingent fact
the world does not provide. Our absurdity does not arise as the result of
our inability to answer the question, 'Why should I devote myself to this
project rather than to that?' or 'What is the ultimate justification for the
life I have chosen - or for any life I might have chosen in its place?' Our
absurd condition, Nagel tells us, has nothing to do with a quest for
justification. Carried to extremes, such a quest, he writes, would be self-
defeating. If everything is to be justified in terms of something else, we
embark upon a fatal regress. If chains of justification do not come to an
end, then what would it mean to justify something, or to seek its
justification? But again, the absurdity of life has nothing to do with disap
pointment in this quest. Rather, it is the whole of the human struggle, our
earnestness, our zeal, our particular standards of what is worth pursuing,
even our need for justifications that is seen as arbitrary in the global and
dispassionate regard of what Nagel calls "the backward step." Taking
that step, we realize, says Nagel, that none of what we are viewing of the
human scene need be as it is.
It is the view of the cosmic anthropologist. Were we differently con-
structed, our values, our demands would be otherwise - and this with
equal arbitrariness. What may be said of an ant's fervor in trying to lift an
insect's carcass may be said as well of the man or woman trying to create a
work of what they are pleased to call art, and what can be said of them can
be said again of the man who devotes his life to the glory of God. Each of
these activities has its importance only within the narrow, idiosyncratic
compass of the creature in question. Take the backward step and any
human enterprise - however vital, however lofty from our ordinary per-
spective - becomes a curiosity, slightly comical, slightly mad.
The ant struggling up the heap of sand is we, ourselves - only he,
unlike ourselves, pursues his feverish ends without our gift of self-aware-
ness and is thereby saved from being ludicrous. Absurdity, a condition of
man alone, is the necessary price that a striving mortal must pay for a
transcendent consciousness. To remove it would require a radical altera-
tion in the fundamental nature of that being. But nothing that is added or
subtracted from the world can alter this condition in the slightest. If God

4 Ibid., p. 22.

I8 JEFFREY GORDON

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exists, for example, and this is occasion for our joy, so much for our pecu-
liar needs and the peculiar source of their gratification. Under that cold
and withering gaze, this fact about our needs and the source of their
fulfillment becomes another arbitrary idiosyncrasy of the human drama.
4. On Nagel's view, then, the absurdity of human life derives from our
capacity to recognize the arbitrariness of our ultimate concerns and our
simultaneous incapacity to relinquish our commitment to them. It is the
collision between these two features of ourselves that constitutes the
Absurd. The world may be altered in any way we wish; our absurdity
would remain. Were one of the two features of ourselves to be otherwise,
however, human life would not be absurd. If human beings never actually
employed their capacity for viewing their lives in their arbitrariness, then
there would be no absurdity. And there would be the same consequence if
human beings were capable of divesting themselves of all ambition
including, of course, the ambition to renounce ambition.
5. Nagel thus commits himself to the paradoxical view that the life of the
person who never perceives the arbitrariness of our human condition is
not absurd. But this must surely seem a very odd result. Surely, we might
be inclined to say, if there is some valid sense in which human life as such is
absurd, it will not be possible to alter this truth merely by failing to have
the requisite insight. We must recall, however, that having a certain sort of
insight, the insight into our arbitrariness, is itself, on Nagel's view, a nec-
essary condition of absurdity. But is it? If all our human commitments are
indeed arbitrary, it would seem that the discrepancy between this fact and
our undaunted devotion to them would be quite sufficient to establish our
absurdity. The man or woman who failed to see the arbitrariness would
exacerbate absurdity by virtue of this blindness, not elude the condition
altogether. If the naked emperor were aware of his nakedness, but felt
compelled to appear thus in public nonetheless, this would surely be
absurd. But he is no less a figure of absurdity when he persists in the belief
that he is clothed.
6. Nagel may object that analyzing absurdity as the incongruity between
our passionate intensity and the actual arbitrariness of our ends would
commit us to saying that the mouse and the ant, too, are absurd, a conse-
quence he would regard as a reductio. But is this so bizarre a thought as
Nagel apparently finds it? When we project human intensity upon these
creatures, this projected fervor in contrast to the modest scope of their
possibilities might well strike us as absurd. And if it still seems peculiar to
ascribe absurdity to such humble beings, it is because we remind ourselves
that these creatures have, in reality, no view of their lives and are thus in
fact incapable of passionate devotion to them. As they do not meet one of

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? I9

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the conditions of this amended concept of absurdity, their lives cannot
properly be described as absurd (though the lives of men still might be).
7. I do not take this to be a crucial criticism of Nagel. If the values and ends
that command our devotion are in fact arbitrary, then it is surely the case
that simultaneously recognizing this fact and being unable to cool one's
devotion would constitute a kind of absurdity. But so would it be an
absurd situation to sustain one's commitments in oblivion to their arbi-
trariness. At worst, Nagel would be guilty of confusing the matter by mis-
placed emphasis: what would really be crucial in establishing the absur-
dity of our condition would not be that we recognize the arbitrariness of
our ends, but that they be arbitrary. Recognized or not, arbitrary ends
pursued with passion spells absurdity.
If there is to be a serious criticism of this conception of the absurdity of
human life, it will have to focus, then, on the claim that human life and all
that concerns us are arbitrary. Let us turn, then, to this key question:
What can the assertion of this arbitrariness mean? It will be my project in
the following section to demonstrate that it cannot mean anything.

II

i. Let us begin by ruling out what Nagel cannot intend by this assertion.
He argues that it is not our inability to justify our ends and values that
constitutes the absurdity of human life. Chains of justification must end,
he writes. If nothing can be justified except in terms of something else, the
demand for justification could never be met and would therefore be vacu-
ous. We need no higher justification, for example, when we change the
direction of our boat to save a drowning man, nor when we remove a
child's hand from a hot stove. I thinkC this insight that there are ends that
do not require justification is essentially correct, though Nagel does not
explore it deeply enough and is at several points guilty of betraying it.5
But what is important at this stage of our inquiry is that if there are ends
that require no justification, as Nagel argues, it cannot be our failure to
justify our ends that constitutes their arbitrariness. Now it may seem that

In Nagel's view, it is one thing to argue for the absurdity of life on the ground that our
projects cannot be justified. The premise here, which rests upon a misconception of
justification, is false (according to Nagel). (See Mortal Questions, pp. IX, I3.) It is quite
another thing, however, to argue that the absurdity of human life derives (in part) from
the fact that the normal standards according to which we justify our projects cannot
themselves be justified. This latter is in fact Nagel's view. (See Mortal Questions, p. I7,
pp. I 8-zo.) But why can't the same objections be made here as were made by Nagel in the
former case? Chains of justification must end. If everything must be justified in terms of
something else, the request for justification would be vacuous. If the first is "a bad argu-
ment," so must be the second.

20 JEFFREY GORDON

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where it is illegitimate (and not merely futile) to ask for justification, it is
also illegitimate to speak of arbitrariness, but this cannot be Nagel's view.
What, then, can the arbitrariness of our lives and all our ends consist in?
z. It seems to be Nagel's view that our ultimate concerns are arbitrary
because they are subject to a higher order of doubt than the doubt that
impels us to seek justifications. What we take to be important, the ulti-
mate ends and values that provide the basis of our systems of justification,
indeed the very need to justify things may all have been otherwise. We
may have been constituted in such a way that none of this would have
been as it is now, and since there is no necessity to our present human form
of life, our mortal aims and that human form itself are ultimately arbi-
trary.
3. It would be difficult, I think, to quarrel with the view that the advent of
man as the particular, highly idiosyncratic being he is, was not a necessary
event. It is certainly not logically necessary that man exist - in his pres-
ent form or in any other. But surely a thing or event is not arbitrary merely
for lacking logical necessity. It is not logically necessary that amphibians
evolved from fish, that Othello was enraged by reports of Desdemona's
infidelity, that summer succeeds spring. But it would be odd to say on this
account that all these things are arbitrary. It cannot be this sort of
deficiency that Nagel has in mind.
Now, it will also be impossible to demonstrate the necessity of our par-
ticular human existence in any ultimate, non-logical sense. Whatever ends
- earthly or superterrestrial - that may require the existence of the
human race, could prove the necessity of that race only if those ends were
themselves demonstrably necessary to something. Even if it could be
shown, for example, that the existence of the human race with precisely its
present nature were necessary to the perpetuation of the cosmos, how
should we then demonstrate the necessity of that perpetuation? Of course
this same difficulty would attend an attempt to demonstrate the ultimate
(non-logical) necessity of anything. Human existence cannot be shown to
be absolutely necessary, but this is true of humanity in its present form for
the same reason that it would be true of anything whatsoever. If we are to
call the advent of man arbitrary on this account, we shall have to say the
same of everything that is or could be. And since this is so, it is not clear
what state of affairs one can be envisioning when he demands that human
life be necessary. The denial of this sort of necessity to man would thus be
vacuous.
4. Still, it is certainly possible to imagine ourselves differently constituted,
and in such a way that all we presently take so seriously would not have
the slightest importance to us.

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? ZI

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We adhere to [the standards that guide our lives] because of the way we are put together;
what seems to us important or serious or valuable would not seem so if we were differently
consitituted.6

Nagel apparently believes that contemplating this possibility gives sub-

stance to the claim that our present concerns and ends are arbitrary. But
let us consider this possibility in depth.
There are really two possibilities that must be considered. The first is
the possibility of our being constituted in a form so unlike our present one
that our human values and ends would have no meaning to us. The
second is the possibility of our being changed in only one respect: what we
presently take to be important, though still fully comprehensible, would
be a matter of indifference to us.
4a. Turning to the first of these possibilities, let us assume, per impossi-
bile, that we are constituted without physical bodies, so that all our con-
cerns pertaining to the health and protection of the body could not even
emerge. Should the contemplation of this possibility impel the conviction
that our present concerns about our bodies are arbitrary? Should we not
rather say that reflection on this imaginary state is altogether irrelevant to
the question of what ought or ought not to concern us in our present
human state? I might have been a fish or a stone and then have been sub-
limely indifferent to the matters that now preoccupy me. But if contem-
plation of such a transformation is to establish some genuine and strong
sense in which my ultimate concerns are arbitrary - a strong enough
sense to induce in me the conviction that human life as such is absurd - it
will have to be shown how my assuming the point of view of a fish ought
to have the force of calling into question the legitimacy of my concerns as
a man. We may contemplate the possibility of enjoying a form of life so
remote from our present one as to render us incapable of appreciating the
very meaning of our human concerns. But such games of speculation are
finally idle: altogether alien to our condition, these hypothetical modali-
ties cannot possibly establish the arbitrariness of our concerns for the
form of life at issue - i.e., the human one.
4b. Now the second of the two possibilities would amend this alien char-
acter in the beings we might have been. Here we imagine that we have our
present form, but all that appears to us now to be of such importance is
seen from this new point of view to be foolish and trivial. We can certainly
imagine our having been such creatures instead of the creatures we are,
and again, the mere fact that we can is supposed to establish the arbitrari-
ness of our present concerns. But let us consider whether in fact it can do
this.

6 Nagel, pp. I 7, i 8.

22 JEFFREY GORDON

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 Imagine that we are beings in every respect like ourselves except in
respect to values. Now there are mutants among us who believe it is of
great importance that human beings be treated justly. But we, in our
greater wisdom, know justice to be of no importance, a foolish and senti-
mental ideal. Can this fiction reveal to us the arbitrariness of our con-
cerns? Surely not. In order for such an exercise to do this, we would have
to be convinced that the values of this projected consciousness were as
valid as our own. But we should never be convinced of this so long as this
projected consciousness renounced precisely what was sacred to us.
It is not enough that we be able to imagine a being differently consti-
tuted from ourselves in order to call our own moral constitution into
question; it is necessary that we be convinced that the alteration would
leave us no worse off. But it is impossible for us to believe this about a
consciousness that would systematically reject all our ultimate concerns,
and so this second possibility must, like the first one, fail to establish the
arbitrariness of those concerns.
5. It is easy to exaggerate the ease with which we may call all mortal values
into question, and it is this fact, I think, that gives Nagel's analysis its ini-
tial plausibility. Much of what we do in our day-by-day existence is aimed
at the perpetuation of that existence: we earn money, buy food and cloth-
ing, visit the doctor, take the car to be repaired, and so on. If we come to
question the chief projects in our lives, the ends and purposes we have
chosen and which all these mundane activities serve to sustain and
advance, we may well come to view these subsidiary activities, which peo-
ple the landscape of our daily lives, as ludicrous, both frantic and empty.
As the goals we have chosen now appear to us to be vacuous, so does the
life that supports these goals seem comical and pointless. The ant
straining to lift the insect's carcass seems to us, in such a state, an apt met
aphor for our lives, since it presses on in utter oblivion to the profound
insignificance of its toil. Our daily agitation could have been sustained, we
might thus become convinced, only so long as we remained enclosed
within it, only so long as we failed to perceive its utter emptiness. As many
of us moderns suffer from precisely this sense of anomie, the assertion that
all human values are ultimately dubitable may elicit our ready assent.
But this would be an argument for the absurdity of human life as such
only if this disaffection with human ends were somehow inevitable, and
properly so, only if all ultimate human concerns were indeed vulnerable to
this crippling doubt. But all ultimate human concerns is a very large 'all,'
and when we consider just what it will have to include, we may wish to
reconsider. We would have to say that it is ultimately dubitable whether
children ought to be protected from fire, that it is ultimately dubitable

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? z3

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whether justice is preferable to tyranny, that it is ultimately dubitable
whether it is important that on some few occasions, human beings tran-
scend their cumulative anguish to perform acts of stunning courage. We
can conceive a point of view from which all this will appear ludicrous, but
we will judge that point of view and not these ideals to be both bizarre and
perverse.
6. All human concerns are ultimately dubitable, we moderns cluck
assuredly: since we do not know the ultimate destiny of man, who is to say
that human life itself is of any importance? But there are two powerful
rejoinders to this line. First, as the importance of things is ordinarily deter-
mined by reference to purposes in this world, the proponent of this skep-
ticism will have to stipulate a new sense of importance in order to question
the importance of human life as such, and it is not clear what this sense ca
be. Second, contrary to the presupposition of this line, our ascriptions of
importance to things are not necessarily contingent upon their ultimate
outcome. We can imagine, for example, a civilization destroyed without a
trace by fire. We would not say on this account that it was of no impor-
tance that great art was produced there or that it was of no importance
that the citizenry comported themselves toward one another with
extraordinary humaneness. If the merely earthly outcome of things is no
of decisive significance in our judgments of their importance, why should
any superterrestrial outcome of human acts be any more crucial to these
judgments?
The issue here has nothing to do with the ultimate destiny of man here
on earth or with the fate that awaits him when he completes his earthly
sojourn. The question is whether given human life as we know it, it is bet-
ter that human beings act with courage or with cowardice, in justice or in
spite, whether they comport themselves with generosity of spirit or with
niggling circumspection. In a world such as this one, we should say, peo-
pled by beings such as we ourselves, certain concerns remain unassailably
valid, and this will be evident to any conceivable consciousness whose
judgment we can respect.
7. Nagel is right, I think, to reject the argument that human life as such is
absurd because we cannot justify our choices. Do we ever so doubt, for
example, the importance of the lives of those we love as to require some
higher validation of our judgment? Even if we did, as Nagel points out, the
need could not be satisfied: no validation could be high enough; all candi-
dates in their turn would be vulnerable to the same kind of doubt. But it is
not on the basis of this infinite regress that this argument for absurdity
ought to be rejected, since the very fact that such a quest for justification
must prove endless might itself, after all, comprise our absurdity - were

z4 JEFFREY GORDON

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we with good reason to be committed to the quest in the first place. The
fact that we cannot succeed in the quest cannot itself establish the illegiti-
macy of our embarking on it. The real reason this argument ought to be
rejected is that certain of our commitments are not so tentative as the
argument requires. It is not as though we suffer such vexing doubt about
the value of truth, beauty, friendship, and love that we can reasonably
deem our lives ludicrous so long as these ends do not receive some impos-
sible ultimate confirmation.
In trying to define the absurdity of human life, we cannot be content to
base our case on logical possibilities. It is logically possible, for example,
to doubt the importance of friendship, but this is not a doubt we can seri-
ously entertain. An agonized need to validate the value of friendship
would be a much better candidate for absurdity than is our logically dubi-
table commitment to it.

III

If it is neither a failure to justify our ultimate concerns nor their putative

arbitrariness that establishes the absurdity of the human condition, do we
arrive at the serene conclusion that no sense at all can be made of this
ascription, that contrary to much contemporary wisdom, human life can-
not be absurd?
I do not think this sanguine conclusion is justified. If, then, there is some
sense in which human life as such may be absurd, what can this sense be?
Here we will discover, I think, that Camus was right: that the conditions
for the emergence of the absurd are not in man alone, but in man and
world.
i. We have seen that the ant can provide an appropriate metaphor for the
absurdity of certain individual lives, those that have lost their sense of
purpose. One who suffers from this condition might watch these tireless
creatures with sullen recognition: these ants are myself before my enlight-
enment, so preoccupied with the frenzied mechanics of my life as to raise
no question of its aim. But perhaps Nagel was right to believe that our
detached and amazed observation of the ant can illuminate the absurdity
of all our lives, of the human condition as such.
In certain moods, the object of our somber amusement will not be the
ant's enormous energies alone; we will also be amused by its perfect indif-
ference to the fact of our spectatorship. These ants have as much concern
for our presence as for the cycles of the stars. The remarkable toil of this
creature at my feet persists in sublime oblivion to the larger order that sur-
rounds it and of which it is so inconsequential a part. But its passions
remain mercifully the passions of an ant, never directed to anything
beyond its humble terrestrial confines. With us human beings, however, it

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? Z5

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is otherwise. Capable of feelings that embrace all mankind, the world, all
the Cosmos, we crave contact with the Whole, with all the time unfurling
before us, with all the space of the galaxies; and though this is not a con-
stant craving, the most profoundly moving moments of our lives - what-
ever their earthly occasion - are marked by this nostalgia for the infinite.
This contrast between the ant and ourselves is what astounds us in our
reflective observation. At the same time, however, we are afflicted by the
fear that the contrast may apply to aspiration only, that there is no con-
trast to be drawn between our respective realities, that as the labors of the
ant are indifferent to us, so our grave passions are diffused and lost in the
enormous indifference of the universe. And these are the circumstances in
which we may deem human life as such to be a futile enterprise, a ludi-
crous condition, a mad and grotesque joke. Creatures whose transcen-
dent passions are greeted with silence: if these are indeed the facts of the
matter, the lot of humankind is the Absurd.
z. One is entitled to choose one's own metaphors for absurdity. Our con-
temporary poets can be very helpful here. Borrowing an image from
Nagel, I have only been trying to understand what we may learn about the
Absurd from our observation of the ant, and it may be well to set that les-
son out again as clearly as possible.
It is not that our observation of the ant must bring us to doubt the
significance of our projects in any context larger than the human scene. To
determine the significance of distinctly human projects, precisely the
human scene is the only relevant standpoint. Nor do we think the lowly
ant ought to be doing something else, and hence wonder whether our
estate, too, would be improved were we to be living radically different
lives. We may well believe that if the ant had the slightest cognizance of its
situation, it would be overwhelmed with a sense of the pointless tedium of
its existence. But this is only to say that an ant with human thoughts could
not endure the drudgery of anthood, and nothing at all follows from this
about the pointlessness of our own projects, which are not, after all (not
necessarily), comparable to those of the ant.
The analogy with the ant will illuminate the absurdity of our situation
in virtue of a stark contrast between that creature and ourselves and our
fear that this contrast may conceal a deeper similarity. The home of the
ant is of modest proportions. It extends precisely as far as the bounds of its
thought, and these are very humble. The sum of humankind also extends
to the horizon of its power to conceive, but this, alas, is not humble, and so
the home of man is grand and immoderate. Man lives not only on this
earth, but in the staggering Cosmos. And the question he must ask of this
inevitable home he has in virtue of his power to conceive it is whether it is

z6 JEFFREY GORDON

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hospitable to him, whether it is infused with care for his anguish, or
whether, like himself in his observation of the ant, it views him with dis-
passionate amusement, or worse, has no view of him at all.
It is not that earthly chains of justification leave off in mid-air and must
be completed in a higher realm in order that human life have meaning. It is
rather in virtue of a wholly different need than a need for validation of the
importance of our concerns that the sense of the absurd may emerge. For
we have in addition to our worldly aspirations, aspirations of a transcen-
dent order, and if the world is simply dumb to such needs, our condition is
surely ludicrous. An earnest seeker flitting in a void, our condition would
comprise the Absurd.

IV

I want to turn now to the question of how we ought to respond to the

absurdity of human life (if indeed human life is absurd). More specifically,
I want to consider whether Camus' heroic response is defensibly appro-
priate, or whether, as Nagel argues, heroism and bravery are inconsistent
with an acknowledgment of the absurdity of our condition. As with the
question whether the Absurd derives from a collision within man himself
or from a collision between man and world, on this matter, too, I will
defend Camus.
i. It is clear that Camus does indeed intend to present Sisyphus as a noble
figure, even an heroic one. His heroism consists in his lucidly confronting
his absurd situation, with neither complaint nor hope, in his testifying to
the strength of human beings to face the most dispiriting of truths without
cracking. Nagel faults Camus for not appreciating the "cosmic unimpor-
tance" of our situation. By "cosmic unimportance" Nagel presumably
means the insignificance of anything we do or suffer or of any stand we
take from the perspective of some quite remote point in the Cosmos. But
Nagel has not demonstrated this unimportance. Nor has he explained
what it would mean for anything to have cosmic importance, nor why our
failure to meet these conditions - whatever they may be - precludes the
possibility of our confronting this fact with nobility or heroism.
z. If Nagel's charge of inconsistency has any initial plausibility, it will
derive from our inclination to accept his unspoken assumption here: that
only important states of affairs can be the occasion of heroism. We will
say of a man who risks his life for a trivial end that he is less a hero than a
fool, so we will concede to Nagel that there is indeed a conceptual link
between the importance of our aims and the possibility of our acting hero-
ically. Shall we say, however, that no act is noble, no act courageous
unless the state of affairs in face of which one acts has ramifications

NAGEL OR CAMUS ON THE ABSURD? z7

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throughout the Cosmos? And if so, what sort of ramifications must these
be?
3. When we move far from home or make some other sweeping change in
our life circumstances, details of the previous setting that had been so cru-
cial are suddenly of much less importance to us. This experience may fos-
ter the belief that were we to travel to a point in the universe far removed
from the entire human scene, we should regard the collective travail of
humanity with serene dispassion. But this serenity does not demonstrate
the unimportance of that travail any more than our no longer being
caught up in the issues of the old environment demonstrates the triviality
of those issues. No longer in a position to be affected by those issues, we
are at the same time no longer in a position to appreciate their
significance. Analogously, the cosmic perspective is the very worst one
might adopt if we wish to comprehend the significance of facts in the
human world, for that significance can present itself only in human terms,
precisely the terms that are left behind in our ascendance to the cosmic
perspective. The loftiness of the cosmic view of man is the flattering name
for its blindness.
4. If human life is indeed absurd, it would be difficult to imagine a more
important fact about it. Whatever view we might project upon the stars, it
would be a fact that we humans, for whom alone it would be relevant,
could not but find deeply dispiriting. But any situation that may reason-
ably occasion despair provides also a legitimate opportunity for courage.
And so Sisyphus may persist in his heroic defiance without apology to
Nagel - renouncing neither the lucidity that enables him to see the hope-
lessness of his situation, nor the eminently mortal passion that forbids him
to deny its force.

Z8 JEFFREY GORDON

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