Humanism + Absurdism

A few random thoughts:

-People who live in Nashville should be called Nashvillains. With that spelling.

-GTA is coming out for Nintendo DS. I may buy one now. Dammit.

-Monkeys and money. Fascinating.

-I just watched Larry Clark's "Kids" and I have to admit I'm very very conflicted on it. I thought there were a number of things it did very well, but I think it was a nihilist film to its core. It tried to show exactly how brutal things could be by dramatizing the hell out of it-I have no doubt that most of those things have happened before, but for all of them to happen to a bunch of 14 year olds in one day is too much. It certainly wasn't realistic and it was unnecessarily dark if you ask me. All the underage sex was actually kind of creepy. That said, it was still pretty well done, an epic morality tale of sorts by showing you exactly what being that fucked up gets you. The only adult in the whole film really was a cabbie who talked about how to be happy. That doesn't really help with an AIDS test. I bought it for like $4 at Best Buy and now feel kind of ripped. Even though I liked the movie (probably), I wanted its brutality to be over quickly and was counting down the minutes until it was over. I'll never watch this movie again. It will probably haunt me anyway.

-Humanism and absurdism- are they compatible? I bring this up because I definitely considered myself both and I just finished reading "Nausea" by Sartre and the conflict came up. Roquentin, the books narrator, struggles with an absurd universe devoid of meaning. He struggles with the idea that there is no divine source of meaning in human life and that life is just a gift that is given without reason that one must accept and choose to enjoy. Similar to Camus, he comes to the conclusion through his narrator that one must enjoy our fate, as meaningless as it may be. In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus likens our struggle to that of Sisyphus and says the ultimate question we face is why not commit suicide? Ultimately, even though our lives are meaningless, futile, and take the form of Sisyphus, we must embrace them for what they are. Camus asserts that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I don't have a problem with any of this, I really do think that I am an absurdist at this point (although I refuse to commit to anything forever).

Here's where it gets tricky: I am also a strong humanist and moralist and believe in right and wrong. Is that incompatible with an absurd universe? I don't necessarily believe it is. In "Nausea," Roquentin's most laughable foil is the Autodidact, a ridiculous humanist who's reading the library alphabetically and molests children. There's no doubt that Roquentin believes that the absurd precludes an embrace of humanism. But let's think about it for a second, what are the implications that would contradict one another? From a positive liberty standpoint, there's no doubt that the absurd is freeing for humans to create, to excel, and to expand without limits. For a thinker like Nietzsche, it would free his ubermensch to become free spirits, create their own values, and exercise their will to power. In his eyes, the church is the ascetic ideal that drags all men down to the herd, restricts what men naturally want to do, etc. So getting rid of that artificial obligation would free men to live up to their potential.

On the other side, where does morality come in? What is the source of negative liberty? The protections that men enjoy today, especially in the West, come at great debt to Christianity. Although the herd mentality represses us, it is a significant part of the doctrine that all men are created equal and the church has been a major player in the human rights movement, directly and indirectly. Rick brought up a great point that law can be effective without such a basis, citing Roman law or British common law. And that's fine, from a legalistic or lawyerly perspective, but I want to get philosophical on it. Pragmatically, he's certainly right. The United States might as well be entirely secular in the way the Supreme Court interprets things, but that's not a philosophical response. Philosophically, to believe in a universe that is devoid of meaning and human life without an inherent one, you must believe that there are commonalities to human experience that can establish universals within humanity that serve as right or wrong. For instance, genocide is wrong, torture is wrong, murder is wrong, theft is wrong, etc. These are simple ideas and on the extreme end of that thought, but certainly comprise the most compelling examples of commonalities that I can think of. You could buy Levinas's argument about the face of the other in "Ethics and Infinity" or subscribe to cosmopolitanism and that might lead you there. But, in the end, you have to think that we can draw a line between nihilism and metaphysics that isn't completely arbitrary. You have to believe that as we better understand our universe and learn from our collective experience as human beings, we can reasonably divine what that line may be. By rising above our subjectivity (although we never can do so completely), we can see the common ground and a more objective reality than the one peddled to us by our cultural biases. I'm not saying there's a definitive objectivity or a final line that can be drawn in the sand, but I think that the philosophical leap of faith that one has to take is that there is that common ground somewhere. Otherwise one must resign oneself to relativism, which is essentially a cleaner name for nihilism. If you are a relativist, you don't really have the right to intercede or impose a morality.


I don't think they are incompatible, but it's certainly a tough question to definitively answer.