Hello people! So here’s a thing I wrote in response to an argument we were discussing in class about Nagel’s idea of absurdity, mainly because it’s a really interesting idea, and we had a really long discussion about it. Don’t read if you don’t want to, blah, blah, blahblahblahblahblah.

The issues regarding meaning and absurdity in our lives are two issues that have developed out of belief—specifically, beliefs regarding humans and their relationship to the rest of the world and universe. Humans naturally look for meaning in their lives and for their roles in the universe. An extreme conception of the meaning a human life can hold is demonstrated  in the argument of a single person bringing an end to the world and all of humanity. However, this quest for meaning is a quest challenged most recently by existential philosophers seeking to demonstrate that meaning—at least meaning that can be understood by humans—does not exist. Thomas Nagel, in his work “The Absurd,” is one such philosopher, wishing to demonstrate that meaning—philosophical meaning, specifically—does not exist in a manner that can be understood by humans.

By first examining Nagel’s view of philosophical absurdity, a brief overview of a common conception of meaning, and then relating both of these viewpoints to the argument that meaning can be found in the life of a person who brings an end to humanity—henceforth called the Mad Scientist Argument—I will demonstrate that when Nagel’s definition of absurdity is applied to the argument, regardless of whether or not we accept that the Mad Scientist’s life impacts things, meaninglessness is eventually the conclusion reached.

In “The Absurd,” Nagel makes a distinction between two different types of absurdity. Peoples’ lives can become absurd temporarily due to their ambitions, circumstances, or relations. This, for Nagel, is what he considers to be ordinary, more situational absurdity—the “conspicuous discrepancies between…aspiration and reality” (Nagel, 718). He cites the example of a person giving a complex speech to support a motion that has already passed.

 Philosophical absurdity, on the other hand, involves a more universal component—recognizing the collision or conflict between how seriously we take our lives and the possibility that everything we hold important (everything that we are serious about) is open to doubt (Nagel, 718). As humans, we are able to operate with these two viewpoints, since we are able to step back reflect on our lives and recognize the possibility that all things we take seriously are arbitrary, and yet we still do take things seriously. According to Nagel, this is what makes life absurd.

Nagel’s take on meaninglessness and absurdity contrasts with another, more popular viewpoint that presents meaningfulness as relative to the entire universe—similar to Nagel—but claiming that meaning can still be found in the form of impact. This idea is a type of meaningfulness-absurdity compatibilism—the idea that if a person were to affect things on a large enough scale, (i.e., something that is larger than themselves), their lives would be deemed meaningful and be free of absurdity, at least on the philosophical level. Nagel himself points to this type of example in “The Absurd.” “Those seeking to supply their lives with meaning,” he states “usually envision a role or function in something larger than themselves” (Nagel, 720). What I am calling the Mad Scientist Argument falls into this realm.

Suppose for the sake of argument that a Mad Scientist launches a rocket directly into the sun and, by doing so, causes the sun to explode. Due to this explosion, the planet and the entire human race is (forever) destroyed. The case made by those who pose similar scenarios to the Mad Scientist Argument is this: the Mad Scientist, by destroying the human race, has impacted the universe as a whole, since the universe is now forever going to be free of the influence of humans. Not only has the Mad Scientist changed the human race (by destroying it, of course), he has also eliminated one of the influences of the universe.

Such extreme individual cases, proponents of this viewpoint argue, are strong arguments for meaning and against absurdity. Despite the fact that the Mad Scientist is just one life, if it is in fact the case that his life gains meaning due to his destruction of the human race—since it is very difficult to claim that the person who destroyed the entire human race has a life devoid of meaning through its impact—then it is a case against complete absurdity.

The question that an example such as the Mad Scientist Argument poses is rather complex: does an individual bringing an end to the human race cause that individual’s life to have meaning? If this idea is explored further, we will see that it leads to an interesting conclusion and, ultimately, leads us back to a discussion of Nagel and his idea of absurdity.

Suppose we are to accept that the Mad Scientist’s life is given meaning when he destroys the human race by launching a rocket into the sun. If we accept this as the case, it follows that the next step would be to find out how the Mad Scientist was able to gain a meaningful life. To do so, we have to take a step back from the given scenario.

Yes, the Mad Scientist’s life was given its ultimate meaning when he destroyed the human race, but the question must be asked: would the Mad Scientist’s life still have gained meaning if the influences in his life had led him down another path? Perhaps his major professor at MIT dissuaded him from working for NASA, or his parents refused to support him during college and he had to drop out due to money issues. Suppose his great-grandparents had decided to remain in Europe instead of traveling to the United States, or suppose that he had had an older brother who persuaded him to go into business instead of science. Going even further back, suppose certain metal alloys had never been invented, making it impossible to even construct rockets capable of withstanding the heat needed to launch them into space, or suppose that certain political conflicts had delayed the advancement of science, causing rockets to not even be a feasible scientific effort during the lifetime of the Mad Scientist.

In other words, there are people in the Mad Scientist’s past who, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, influenced his ultimate position and made it possible for him to even be capable of launching a rocket into the sun and destroying the human race. Thus, if we deem the Mad Scientist’s life meaningful through the impact it had on the universe, we must deem every life that proceeded and affected him (all the lives that impacted him), causing him to be the person he was, meaningful as well. We cannot assign meaning to the Mad Scientist’s life without also assigning meaning to the lives of all that impacted him and shaped him into the rocket-launching Mad Scientist that decided to destroy the human race.

This argument demonstrates that once meaningfulness is assigned to the Mad Scientist, there is no non-arbitrary point at which we can cease assigning meaning to the lives of those who impacted him. However, this point is taken from a somewhat different angle when the Mad Scientist Argument is examined from Nagel’s viewpoint.

It is my opinion that, if this argument were to be analyzed by Nagel, it would still fail to be an adequate argument against absurdity. Following up on his acknowledgment that a common method of seeking meaning for one’s life is to view one’s role in something larger than one’s self (Nagel, 720), he points out an important condition: if we are to seek meaning in a larger enterprise, the meaning must still come back to something we are able to understand—lacking any understanding of the larger enterprise negates any possible meaning we may be able to derive from it. As he puts it, “its [the meaning’s] significance must come back to what we can understand, or it will not even appear to give us what we are seeking” (Nagel, 721). 

If we are to accept that the Mad Scientist’s life has meaning, we also have to accept that this meaning arises from the circumstances that put him in the position to end the world. Therefore, according to the idea of meaningfulness, everything that influenced the scientist would have to be assigned meaning (as would everything that influenced them to put them in a place to influence the scientist, and so on).

This is the point to which Nagel would respond. In order to assign meaning to the Mad Scientist and to all who, in one way or another, impacted him, we would have to take these impacts and their ramifications seriously in order to understand them. However, since the impact from person to person—for each person leading up to those directly influencing the Mad Scientist—is so hard to find and so complicated (for example, how do whether or not the scientist’s first grade teacher’s choice of having the children focus more on art than math impacted the scientist in the end?), there is no way to understand it, and therefore, we really can’t derive any meaning from it.

One possible objection to this analysis involves the idea that Nagel’s definition of understanding does not have to be so stringent—that is, it is not necessary for us to completely understand every impact every person has on the Mad Scientist in order to gain a general understanding of the causal events (and their meanings) that led the Mad Scientist to the point where he destroyed the human race (thus giving his own life meaning). It is my opinion that Nagel would counter this argument by claiming that our seriousness in our attempts to discover the meanings in the Mad Scientist’s life and the lives of all who impacted him is in direct conflict with his idea that these things we take seriously are entirely arbitrary—in other words, the argument would still lead us to the conclusion of absurdity, regardless of whether or not we initially accepted that the Mad Scientist’s life had meaning.

What I’ve attempted to show in this essay is the fact that even with an example as extreme as the Mad Scientist argument, it can be demonstrated, using Nagel’s definition of philosophical absurdity, that we can still be led to the conclusion of absurdity. Even if we are to accept the idea that our lives have meaning, we are led, through our serious attempts to discover this meaning, to the conflict Nagel points out between the seriousness of our lives and the arbitrariness of the things we take seriously. This, to him, is absurdity.

Reference: Nagel, T. (1971, December). The absurd. The Journal of Philosophy, 716-727.