Meaning Of Life In The Absurd By Thomas Nagel

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is filled to the brim with rhetorical devices from all three sections of the text. Particularly in his section about logotherapy, Frankl’s practice to find an individual’s meaning of life, he explores the three main meanings of life: accomplishment, love, and suffering. This area uses a plethora of comparison, such as parallelism and metaphor. Recurring themes are used to draw back to Frankl’s three life meanings, like word repetition and alliteration. Frankl’s use of rhetorical devices allows his audience to focus on their individual possibilities and incorporate his ideology into society.

On the topic of the existence of God, Ernest Nagel and Richard Swinburne have construct arguments that challenge one another. In Nagel’s article, “Does God Exist?” he argues that if God is all-powerful, omniscient, and benevolent; he would know when evil occurs and has the power to prevent it. Because evil occurs, God does not exist. This is the problem of evil. Challenging Nagel, the article by Swinburne, “Why God Allows Evil,” argues that God has the right to allow moral and natural evils to occur because those evils reap greater goods that make the lives of human-beings meaningful. He extends his argument to the idea that God seeks to provide human beings with goods such as freewill and responsibility of not only ourselves, but of the world and others. While Nagel utilizes the problem of evil as an objection to the existence of God, Swinburne employs it to show that God allows evil to occur to provide human beings with goods that go beyond moments of pleasure and joys of happiness.

In the article “Absurd Self-Fulfillment,” Feinberg offers his readers a close up examination of absurdity, self-fulfillment, and tries to show that every human life may contain some degree of each. He discusses how Richard Taylor, Albert Camus, and Thomas Nagel, each portray that there is indeed absurdity in all human beings, through the use of their own special qualifications. Taylor and Camus both conclude that there is no meaning to anything we do, and that the human condition is pointless and meaningless. They believe that absurd humans do whatever makes them happy, but before realizing the absurd, one is a slave of their own future goals. However, Nagel claims that absurdity results from the irresolvable clash between the importance people attach their lives too, and their capability of viewing themselves from a detached and impersonal perspective. Feinberg eventually adopts Nagel’s explanation of absurdity. Feinberg’s concept of self-fulfillment can be understood in the sense of doing what one is genetically inclined to do, which includes both one’s generic

Different ways of abstracting the absurd will unsurprisingly induce altered proposals about how we might go about challenging it. Nagel states that the absurd arises exclusively within the cognizant mind of a person, and he all but associates it with epistemological skepticism. However, as previously contended, Nagel apparently fails to distinguish the metaphysical requirements that

In his paper Nagel argues that rights are not merely self-evident and therefore do require some good arguments to ground them. He aims to establish that rights are justified by the status theory. We will come to see what he means by this later on. What primarily concerns Nagel is whether vastly different rights, for instance, one’s right to view and rent pornography and one’s freedom of association in political matters, can be connected in any meaningful way. His

As stated before, Taylor believes that our lives are somewhat meaningless when looking at it superficially. To adequately portray this idea, Taylor first defines the word meaningless by analyzing various scenarios that produce nothing in sense of accomplishments. The first example Taylor examines is the ancient myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus betrayed the gods by sharing holy information with the mortals, for this he was sentenced to push a rock up a hill just to let it roll down for him to push it up again; a cycle that was to be done for all eternity empty of any achievement. This pointless cycle that amounts to nothing is what Taylor defines as meaningless. “Now in this we have the picture of meaningless, pointless toil, of a meaningless existence that is absolutely never redeemed.” (Taylor 475) Taylor compares this

Probably one of the greatest questions of the 19th century comes directly from John Gardner’s novel Grendel. Given a world with no inherent meaning, how should one live his or her life? Grendel lives in a world that he is not supposed to be in, acting out on emotion. Grendel represents the animalistic traits of humans. His actions are primitive and based around society’s acceptance throughout the novel. Grendel portrays a ridiculous character that is convinced we are born a certain way, and no matter how badly it will never change.

The author brilliantly uses contrasting examples of what meaning is not to extract her argument on how to obtain meaning in a life. Her first example involves someone who spends day and night watching television and drinking beer. While those two activities in themselves aren’t bad, the fact that this person is living in “hazy passivity…/…unconnected to anyone or anything, going nowhere, achieving nothing,” is certainly not a life of meaning; and she refers to this as

So Nihilism’s problem for me is that it creates an objective world view of meaninglessness that is supposed to strip all meaning from everything and everyone, but it fails to address the fact that people are still evidently living life with a purpose, and however meaningless that subjective meaning might be, it no one has the authority to argue that it negates the meaning it has for the individual who still lives life. So Nihilism for me is ironically void of meaning to people who still live life with meaning though their subjective perspectives, and in turn for becomes a problematic philosophy because it does not convey utter meaninglessness to everyone as it suggests it should. With Nietzsche’s purposed problem of a chaotic and standstill meaningless world that he suggests Nihilism creates, is what existentialism answers, existentialist agree with the meaninglessness of the world that Nihilism suggests, however they differ in the sense that existentialism then argues that because live has no intrinsic meaning. It is now up to the choices and actions of the individual that creates subjective meaning, and in turn creates a purposeful life for the individual. I think this does in fact solve the problem that Nihilism established by voiding intrinsic meaning, because it is the fact that a meaningless world causes a problem for individuals to

Hegel’s critique of Kant’s philosophy is quite prevalent throughout the unfolding of Hegel’s own dialectical philosophy. Several of Hegel’s critiques of Kant’s work can especially be seen in one of his earlier works, “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” This is particularly established once Hegel begins to undertake the developing of Spirit within his Phenomenology. Here, Hegel makes several attacks on Kantian philosophy principles, and at some of the foundations of Kant’s use of pure reason in philosophy. There are several passages within the section where Hegel gives criticism of Kant’s work; critiques that strike at the very heart of what Hegel himself is trying to elucidate through his own dialectic, while discounting one of the greatest German philosophers.

In “Mortal Questions," Thomas Nagel attempts to show that some human experiences are completely beyond understanding. Nagel attempts to justify that even though your life has ends, the choices one makes will not influence the end result. Nagel first clarifies his position by defining a few terms. Agent, as Nagel describes it, is defined as being in control of one’s life. Nagel states that end results are influenced by a combination of factors and that it is not in the agent’s control. In this paper, I will describe Nagels reasoning for believing that one cannot control their ends and fates. Fate is the event beyond a person’s control. Then, I will provide two reasons to object that the idea that one’s actions do not influence the end results is false.

As presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of Life is to free itself from confinement "in-itself" and to become "for-itself." Not only does Hegel place this unfolding of Life at the very beginning of the dialectical development of self-consciousness, but he characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life and points to the advancement of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as the development of Life becoming "for-itself." This paper seeks to delineate this often overlooked thread of dialectical insight as it unfolds in the Master/Slave dialectic. Hegel articulates a vision of the place of human self-consciousness in the process of Life as a whole and throws light on the role of death as an essential

Nagel believes that human life is inherently absurd because all human beings live their lives with seriousness despite inevitable doubts that any of our actions matter. Despite existential suspicion, we have no choice but to continue living as normal. In order to explain this view it is first necessary to define the term “absurd”, as well as what it means to live life seriously, and what it means to doubt life’s importance. Finally, assuming that Nagel is correct in his view that life is absurd, I will explore what implications follow about life’s meaning and value in general.

Rethinking what we have been programmed to believe is what Nagel encourages us to do, making us wonder if what we have believed to be true is real. I often think about the meaning of life and the course life events are playing out; are people reacting to what is they believe to be true or is it reality. Nagel invites us to explore the mind and brain in order to find the answer for ourselves.

Nagel’s argument is harder to refute, owing to its lack of definitive conclusion. Nevertheless, its effectiveness remains debateable. It is interesting that he embraces the incomprehensibility of