The Age of the Enlightenment, built on the shoulders of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, is heralded as the birth of scientific precedence. The liberation of scientific inquiry and public opinion from the captivity of religious doctrine permitted the exploration of previously unacceptable ideas, which accelerated societal progress. However, it also positioned religion as the antithesis of science, with the two considered mutually exclusive. This rapid social change upturned the inner lives and belief systems of everyday people whose morals, norms, and purposes had been grounded in religion for generations. Thus, along with the triumph of science and freedom came a sense of anomie, or normlessness. Moreover, many of the fundamental questions of human existence no longer had an answer: how did we come to exist? What happens after death? And most importantly: why are we here?
In the absence of religion, philosophers had their work cut out for them. Speaking to the consequences of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche, the father of nihilism, famously wrote in The Gay Science:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us—for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
He forewarns readers of the paradox of freedom: without the constraints of religion, humans can live unashamedly, but lack direction or a unifying moral and social system. Nietzsche argues that nihilism, the belief that meaning is non-existent and cannot be constructed, would be the end result of this existential quandary. But nihilism is the ultimate threat to humanity. Although some human behaviors are instinctual, what makes us “higher animals” is our ability to base our behaviors within a net of meaning that we weave over our social and physical environment, and the things we find salient—what is commonly referred to as “consciousness.” Human beings require meaning. We need to feel as though what we are doing, who we are, and the suffering we endure, is impactful. We need to believe that the social realities we are born into, the moral rules we follow, and the ideologies we believe in are tenable if we are to coexist as a species.
Philosophers have tried to subvert the anarchic problem of nihilism. Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism—the philosophical inquiry into the meaning of human existence—posited that one’s meaning could in fact be constructed, but only by the individual themselves. Rather than the predetermined and indisputable sense of meaning inherent to Christian belief, existentialists believed meaning to be subjective and determined by one’s choices.
Absurdism is another approach to the conundrum of meaning. The most prominent absurdist was Albert Camus, an author, journalist, and philosopher writing on the cusp of the Second World War, an era permeated with existentialist and nihilistic ideas. Absurdism holds that the problem of human existence lies in the conflict between people’s inherent need to seek meaning in their lives and life’s inherent meaninglessness. This ultimately culminates in the absurd: one’s realization of the indifference of the universe towards human life, and the ensuing experiences of anguish, confusion, and anxiety comprising existential dread. What most existential philosophies try to answer is: how does one cope with existential dread?
Camus’ solution lies in Meursault, the protagonist of his Nobel prize winning work The Stranger. Set in sweltering, 1940s French Algiers, the title betrays the theme of the novel, as Meursault is an alien amongst his kind. On the day of his mother’s funeral, he does not shed a tear. The next day, he goes swimming, meets a lover, and enjoys a comedy film. Meursault is never painted as a callous man. Instead, he has an air of guiltlessness and accepts life as it comes at him. He seems to wholeheartedly enjoy physical and sensory experiences: the smell of salt from his girlfriend Marie’s hair, “the smells of summer, the part of town [he] loved, a certain evening sky.” He does not concern himself with the emotional turmoil of others, nor with social conventions. When Marie asks to marry him, he quickly agrees. When asked by the local pimp to help enact physical violence on a cheating lover, he acquiesces. If his passivity is ever questioned, he asserts that “these things don’t really mean anything.” Eventually Meursault shoots a man dead, but has a hard time accepting himself as a criminal, as he does not believe that the consequences of his actions meaningfully reflect on his character. At the trial, all of his characteristically passive behavior is assessed to be that of a cold-blooded, morally depraved man “in whom [one] can distinguish nothing that is not monstrous.”
Meursault embraces the solution to existential dread—the acceptance of life’s absurdity—and chooses to live in spite of it. He is not in denial; Meursault continuously acknowledges that the events of his life don’t really mean anything—yet he is able to die satisfied. In his cell, just before his execution he admits:
“I opened myself up for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. To feel it so like me, so like a brother, in fact, I understood that I had been happy, and I was still happy.”
Today, it is not meaning we search for, but happiness. Westerners are infatuated with the pursuit of happiness, but many psychologists argue that happiness is a momentary reaction to experiences, and what we really crave is satisfaction and fulfilment with our lives. Victor Frankl, a renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, founded logotherapy in the 1930s. It became the first meaning-based psychological therapy and focused on helping patients find purpose in their lives, and is still practiced today. At the same time that Camus was writing about absurdism and urging readers to embrace the meaninglessness of life, Frankl noted that the inability to find meaning, which he called the “existential vacuum,” was prompting an increase in the incidence of mental illness, which he tied to the looming “meaning crisis” threatening society. Frankl’s work was dedicated towards proving that meaning is a fundamental human need. To quote Nietzsche: “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Frankl believed that the three ways to find meaning were finding fulfillment in work; having life-changing experiences such as love; or by the attitude taken when faced with unavoidable suffering.
Meaning has re-emerged in scientific discourse. The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have begun to embrace a more holistic view of human beings, integrating meaning into the picture of human cognition. Meaning exists—if not in the universe, then in our experience of it. Meursault may have felt the indifferent universe to be like a brother, but actual people are not indifferent—this is the reason Meursault is seen as so monstrous. In fact, although Camus tries to convince the reader that Meursault is satisfied with this life, we have an instinctive feeling that such a life is unfulfilling. We must disentangle the nature of living human beings from the nature of the inert and indifferent universe, because meaning is inherently human.
