The Difference Between Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism
Three different ways of approaching the lack of intrinsic meaning.
By Daniel Miessler in Philosophy
First of all, after you read the points being made by him, by me try to reconfigure them into the world that we live in today. The world of the coronavirus…
Of course assessments of this sort merely presume it must be the case because one cannot imagine a truly rational and intelligent person adopting a spiritual path other than as the embodiment of an inauthentic life.
As though your own assessment of the truth here is correct axiomatically. Why? Because your conclusion follows “by definition” from your premises. And there is often no attempt to actually demonstrate that this is the case other than by shifting the burden to the religionists to produce their God or spiritual font.
On the other hand, who is kidding whom. There are almost certainly any number of people who either have faith in a spiritual path because they have been indoctrinated by others all their lives to believe what they do, or because when push comes to shove they believe only what they want to be true because, psychologically, the belief in and of itself allows them to sustain at least some peace of mind.
Only, once again, how can anyone really know for sure what it is that another thinks about in regard to these things…or why and how they came to. There is only extrapolating from your own experiences or measuring the distance between what they claim to believe and what they can demonstrate is true.
No, absurdism revolves around making certain assumptions about human limitations based on the initial assumption that this revolves around having taken an intellectual leap of faith to an essentially meaningless world. A world in which the “search for meaning” is passed on to those who don’t think about meaning in the same the way that the absurdist does.
And what’s crucial is that the absurdists are still liable to go down any number of paths rooted in dasein. They might become hedonists or libertines or epicures or narcissists or sociopaths. There isn’t a behavior around that can’t be rationalized given the assumption there is nothing that meaning itself can be traced back to but that which you have come to ascribe it to.
Thus the “meaning” that is extracted from the universe is based entirely on whatever it is that you have “tricked” yourself into thinking that the universe is.