Yes and No - Life is Absurd - Term Paper Example

? AN ANALYSIS: YES AND NO—LIFE IS ABSURD This paper is focused on the article of Michael Smith by way of an assessment of his arguments which counterJoel Feinberg’s antecedent position that (a) it is incoherent to suppose human life as such is absurd and (b) fulfilment can save human life from being tragic. After an assessment, this paper will point out some underlying ideas on which both Smith’s and Feinberg’s differing views are based. A backgrounder Michael Smith is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities whose interests include the philosophy of the mind. His article Is That All There Is poses a question which embodies the position of the philosophical school of Absurdism that man is incapable of ultimately finding inherent meaning to life. In the article, Smith implicitly avows his absurdist philosophy, nothing short of revealing his growing up experience in an undeveloped suburb of Melbourne, Australia’s capital city. Smith’s schooling was not remarkable, except for the intellectual cream of his school’s teaching staff. Mr. Taffe, one of his respected teachers, came prominently in his recollection as the teacher who introduced him to the French language and culture. The opportunities afforded by Mr. Taffe allowed Smith to attend a Waiting for Godot theatre performance. As an adolescent with a malleable mind, Smith felt strongly influenced by the play’s dramatic portrayal of life’s tragic lack of meaning. The play belongs to the genre of the Theatre of the Absurd which portrays horror and tragedy with characters caught up in situations of hopelessness and absurdity. In Smith’s own words, the play impressed on him the “utter pointlessness and tragedy of human existence” (Smith 77). This sense of hopelessness would linger throughout the life of Smith in spite of such wonderful experiences as having a family. Later in his career, Smith would garner career achievements such his being a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. But in spite of his success he says he felt the intellectual “dissonance” in his life, and this prompted his study of Joel Feinberg’s paper “Absurd Self-fulfilment.” Feinberg’s essay Feinberg’s essay was a challenge to Smith’s enduring adolescent dissonance. In his critique, Smith found an ally in Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher widely known in the field of the philosophy of the mind. Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat held a sceptical view of the world, as the mind is obstructed by three barriers to human consciousness-- physical, functional and mental. Smith then expounds his five arguments arguing against Feinberg’s propositions which upheld coherence to human life as such, and the redeeming value of fulfilment to save human life from being tragic: 1. What makes a life absurd? Smiths lays the ground for discussion as he explains Feinberg’s explanation of what is absurd, namely: the irrational/incongruous in things/activities/attitudes of the individual person. For Fienberg, the Absurd can be likened to the mythical Sisyphus who perpetually rolls a rock uphill, the rock rolling down the other side again and again. For Fienberg, there is a spectrum of absurdities from the extreme-intrinsically worthless, to the absurdly trivial, the burdensome-ill-designed, and misfits in terms of pretensions of aspirations. With sweeping insight, Smith viewed Feinberg as positing different levels of absurdity, some more and others lesser the extreme being the thought of life as totally pointless. Smith clarifies that his adolescent dissonance does not redound to absurdity in the extreme case. 2. Can a pointless human life be saved from being tragic by being fulfilled? Smith gave cognizance to Feinberg’s position that human lives can both be pointless to a certain extent and at the same time fulfilled, again to a certain extent. Feinberg’s own definition of fulfilment is “an individual’s having and exercising the capacities that are centrally involved in her being the individual that she is” ( 82). More briefly, these are capacities to bring about something of value, according to individual and distinctive talents and drives. Smith then drives home a point saying that Feinberg’s idea of fulfilment, later to be seen as a saving grace to absurdity, is individual and does not apply to human life as such. However, Smith points out that Feinberg’s premise stands: that while life is indeed pointless, it is open to the saving grace of fulfilment. However, this sense of fulfilment applies only to individual persons, not universally applicable (or “evaluative,” as Smith worded it) for all persons. And so Smith validly concludes that total redemption of life’s pervasive absurdity is not saved. To bolster his point, Smith cites examples of fulfilment which contribute nothing of value: the dramatic irony in Randy Newman’s God’s Song poem which portrays God laughing at man, lowlier than the desert cactus yet so subservient as to pray to him amidst the horror/squalor/filth/misery of life. Praying may seem redemptive, but as Smith views it, man’s resourcefulness is still “base and pathetic.” Instead of a saving grace, the fulfilling capacity in this case has made life worse for the individual. 3. Is it incoherent to suppose that human life as such is absurd? Fienberg denies the absurdity of human life by itself, arguing that universal absurdity is not intelligible because this leaves no room for the contrary idea of universal non-absurdity. Smith, however, contradicts him as he acknowledged the intelligibility of universal absurdity similar to man’s capacity to aspire to know things beyond his imagining and desiring. As a specific example, Smith cites man’s desiring to know God, even when this object of this desire cannot be empirically proven to be true. 4. Why human life as such might well be Absurd. Smith finds a basis for the absurdity of human life by itself in the concept of the epistemic scepticism of man, as espoused by Nagel. In this concept, man is said to be sceptical about the world and human capacity to know. A similar scepticism was held by David Hume, who challenged not only religion, but also moral judgment, reason, earlier forms of scepticism and the certainty of science itself. Given endemic scepticism, justification of conclusions through inferences cannot be obtained. Beliefs on what is or is not important or meaningful also fall within the purview of endemic scepticism. But now follows the issue of fulfilment saving man from absurd tragedy: Beckett through his play may have made us reflect on absurd situations in life, thus prompting our liberation from absurdity. However, Smith affirms that life is still totally meaningless due to the epistemic circumstance which accrue causing the incoherence of beliefs, lack of confidence and indifference to attaching or not attaching value to anything. Expressed succinctly in Smith’s words, “Our lives are therefore absurd and cosmically so. For no possible human being is in a position to remove uncertainty about the coherence of our evaluative concepts. Every possible human being is therefore in their own way, stuck waiting for Godot” (102). 5. How Are We to Respond to Our Recognition of the Fact That Human Life Is Absurd As Such? Given the absurdity of human life as such, it becomes difficult to make a reasonable response to the tragic hopelessness. Hume himself saw the impossibility of freeing himself from the sceptical uncertainty of knowing, and therefore resorted to free himself from “philosophical melancholy” by relaxing his mind through leisure and sports. Smith, however, is more stoical about the cold/strained/ridiculous speculative bind that affects human lives. Citing Peggy Lee’s rendition of the song Is That All There is, Smith does not advocate unreasoned responses likened to dancing, drinking and having a ball. Instead, he advocates the continued search for life’s meaning, no matter how futile it is, since this is the only alternative left. Summative analysis Michael Smith’s worldwide lectures and numerous works and his winning the American Philosophical Association Book Prize give credence to his expertise in the Philosophy of the Mind. In this article Is That All There Is, he takes the cudgels for Absurdism with valid arguments difficult to contest. He found an ally in Thomas Negel although Negel himself was not spared criticism for “misguided attempt to argue from a perfectly true fact about how one represents the world (Wikipedia). Of course, full understanding of Absurdism as a system of thought can only be obtained by tracing it to Existentialism from which it branched off and to Soren Kierkegaard’s dictum: “While the inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation” (Wikipedia). We observe that Smith draws his arguments on absurdism using own Kierkegaard’s principle of man’s incapacity to find meaning or rational justification in human life. Another person who can draw more light on Absurdism is Albert Camus who first dared to call himself as “Absurdist.” Since his youth, Camus lived in extreme poverty , while he struggled throughout life in inexplicable suffering. Avowing a philosophy of hopelessness, he held that life is absurd and ultimately irrational. Still, Camus was a leading voice in social change in behalf of French workers , and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957) for his Reflexiones Sur la Guillotine, an influential work for human rights. His achievements show that his intellectual absurdism can be overshadowed by one’s finding an alternative to hopelessness, and this is by continuing to live in spite of it-- the Acceptance of the Absurd. Smith tackles Fienberg’s ambivalent absurdism to avow for aburdism of human life as such. Like Camus, he advocates continued search of meaning to life no matter how futile it may be. Smith may have opened wider the cause of Absurdism for contemporary man who needs to accept the absurd while consciously revolting against absurdity, rejecting transcendental hope, and making the present moment worth living. References Absurdism. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism Smith, M. “Is That All There Is?” The Journal of Ethics (2006) 10:75-106 Read More