Thomas Nagel Absurd

The argument I will attempt to reinforce in this paper is one of the main arguments in Thomas Nagel’s The Absurd. This argument is located in the fourth paragraph of the second section of the essay (pp. 661). The argument, at its most basic, can be presented as such: Our lives are absurd if we have doubts that cannot possibly be settled about the seriousness with which we take our lives. We take our lives very seriously and make choices that show that we take some things more seriously than others. However, we are able to view our lives sub specie aeternitatis, a point of view outside of our lives, which enables us to call every aspect of our lives into doubt. This allows us to doubt the seriousness with which we take our lives. Therefore,

More specifically, life is absurd if we can sense a property about our universe and still not understand it. This is especially true of infinity, a property which humans seem to be able to naturally sense, but still not understand. To quote theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin, “No infinity has ever been observed in nature. Nor is infinity tolerated in a scientific theory – except we keep assuming the universe itself is infinite.” The absurdity that this inescapable ignorance causes can be fully experienced when we try to step back to a broad perspective and find a greater purpose to our lives and pursuits, or a “justification” as Nagel calls it. Nagel’s take on the absurdity that arises when evaluating our lives from a broad perspective is that it comes from our infinite ability to doubt. I think, however, that the problem arises not from the infinite doubts, but from our finite ability to resolve these doubts that comes from our inability to totally understand infinity. If we could adequately process the true nature of infinity we would have no reason to feel strange when considering our lives sub specie aeternitatis. It would allow us to accept Nagel’s problem of the infinite chain of justification as a resolution rather than a dead

Nagel says that the world is not at fault for failing to give us meaning because there isn’t “any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettleable doubts could not arise.” Even if we lived in a utopia where everything always went our way we would still have the capacity to view ourselves from an outside perspective and we would still come back with more questions than answers. In this way, even if we were able to understand infinity in rational terms, we would still have to return to our finite lives after this consideration, and there is no logical reason to think we would be any more satisfied than we are