It is not how
things are in the world that is mystical, but that
it exists. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, prop. 6.44)
Like all philosophers, existentialists are interested in what there is
. That is, they are interested in what there is
in the most general or fundamental sense rather than in drawing up an infinite list of items to be found in the world. Philosophical interest in what there is
– as opposed to what there is on the table or in the basket – is called ontology
. Existentialists are ontologists to such an extent that the technical term for existentialism is phenomenological ontology
.
As we saw in the early chapters of this book, what most existentialists think there is
fundamentally is being-in-itself. Even the nothingness or non-being that existentialists talk so much about does not exist in its own right but only as a relationship
to being-in-itself. Recall that non-being is the negation or denial of being-in-itself and as such is wholly dependent upon being-in-itself. Non-being is a being that borrows all of its being from being-in-itself. Unlike being-in-itself, it is a borrowed, derivative being.
Now, the key thing about being-in-itself that needs to be kept in mind for this chapter on contingency and absurdity is that it is
without having to be. It absolutely is
but nonetheless its being is not necessary. If it was necessary then its existence would be dictated by something more fundamental, dictated by necessity, whereas the thing about being-in-itself is that there is absolutely nothing more fundamental dictating and determining its existence. As a necessity it would have the characteristic of being necessary, but being-in-itself, as said, has no characteristics other than simply being.
To describe being-in-itself is always to describe it in terms of what it does not have. It is, for example, uncreated, unchanging, non-temporal and non-spatial. Creation, change, time and space are all phenomena that exist from the point of view of non-being, from the point of view of consciousness, and do not belong to being-in-itself at all.
So, the being of being-in-itself is unnecessary, superfluous, without reason to be and so on. It is
, yet it need not be. Existentialists refer to this as the contingency
of being-in-itself. In existentialism, as in philosophy generally, contingent
is the opposite of necessary
. That which is contingent is logically unnecessary or accidental, it need not be or be so. To argue that existence is contingent is to argue that it is a grotesque cosmic accident that need not exist yet happens to do so; a de trop
existence that exists for no reason and for no purpose.
Human consciousness is capable of a sickening and terrifying awareness of being submerged in an existence that is absurd, pointless, superfluous and contingent. Sartre calls this sickening and terrifying awareness ‘the Nausea’ – hence the title of his famous novel. Human consciousness is, so to speak, even more contingent than the contingent existence of the universe. In having no being of its own, it exists only as a relation
to contingency, as a mere reflection of something gratuitous. For a person to suffer the Nausea is for her to experience a ghastly state of naked, superfluous existence that not only surrounds her but is her; her mind and her body.
The contingency of existence as a whole implies that each particular thing in existence is contingent; absurd in its strange, ultimately pointless and unaccountable presence. Human activity disguises contingency by imposing meanings and purposes on the world. This is achieved largely by naming and categorising things. In naming something people believe they have made sense of it, ascribed meaning to it, grasped its essential essence, removed the contingency of its raw, nameless existence. But really, does discovering the name of a strange insect or plant, applying word labels that people have invented for these things in the past, make their existence any the less bizarre, accidental and absurd?
We tend not to think of everyday manufactured objects as absurd at all because we are so familiar with them, because we know what they are for
. But just try looking at a table, or a mug, or a lamp, or a seat for what it is in itself, stripped of its name and function. It may take you some time and practice to ‘strip it’, but the claim is that if and when you do strip it, its unaccountable weirdness will freak you out. It certainly freaks out Antoine Roquentin, the central character of Sartre’s novel Nausea
. He even gets to the stage where he desperately and unsuccessfully tries to hang on to the familiar, comforting names of things. While sitting on a bus, he thinks:
This thing on which I’m sitting, on which I leaned my hand just now, is called a seat. They made it on purpose for people to sit on … They carried it here, into this box, and the box is now rolling and jolting along, with its rattling windows, and it’s carrying this red thing inside it. I murmur: ‘It’s a seat,’ rather like an exorcism. But the word remains on my lips, it refuses to settle on the thing. (Nausea
, p. 180)
The truth is that things only have meaning and purpose relative to other things – words immediately link a thing to other things through language – and the whole assemblage only has the relative meaning and purpose that our ultimately pointless human activities give it. Seen for what they are in themselves, apart from the system of instrumentality that defines them or the framework of meanings that explain and justify them, objects are bewildering, peculiar, absurd, even disturbing in their contingency.
Contingency is mysterious and to be aware of contingency is to be aware of the incomprehensible existence of the universe as an utterly mysterious whole; as mystical. Ultimately, it is the very being, the very isness
of existence that existentialists find strange, inexplicable, mysterious, absurd. Following his deeply distressing encounter with the naked existence of a tree root in the park Roquentin writes:
I, a little while ago, experienced the absolute: the absolute or the absurd. That root – there was nothing in relation to which it was not absurd. Oh, how can I put that in words? Absurd: irreducible; nothing – not even a profound, secret aberration of Nature – could explain that. Obviously I didn’t know everything, I hadn’t seen the seed sprout or the tree grow. But faced with that big rugged paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge had any importance; the world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence. (Nausea
, p. 185)
In order to make an important philosophical point, existentialists like to write novels with central characters who dwell obsessively on contingency and live always under the aspect of eternity in a meaningless, absurd universe; characters like Roquentin, or Meursault in Camus’ The Outsider
. Contrary to popular belief however, existentialists do not recommend that real life people should strive to live this way. That way lies madness.
Existentialists, unlike some of the characters they create, like most people most of the time, live and act very much in the world of relative meanings and purposes. Like most people most of the time, they keep their sanity and sense of perspective by directing their attentions to the practical task in hand, to the daily round and so on. Nonetheless, existentialists clearly hold that an occasional or background awareness of contingency and absurdity is vital if a person is to achieve any degree of authenticity and to avoid living a lie.
Existentialist philosophy is characterised by an abiding hatred and distrust of people who seem totally unaware of life’s contingency and absurdity; people who, having once glimpsed life’s contingency and absurdity and been terrified by it, are fleeing from it. In the existentialists’ view, this flight from contingency and absurdity is a typically middle-class trait, the very core of bourgeois mentality.
The fundamental project of such people is to evade their own contingency and that of the world by acting in bad faith. The world, they tell themselves, is not contingent but created
with humankind as its centrepiece. They assume that they have an immortal essence, that their existence is inevitable and that they exist by divine decree rather than by accident. They believe that the moral and social values to which they subscribe are objective, absolute and unquestionable.
Society as it is, as that which, in their view, is grounded in these absolute values, is seen by them to constitute the only possible reality. All they have to do to claim their absolute right to be respected by others and to have the respect of others sustain the illusion of their necessity, is to dutifully fulfil the role prescribed to them by society and identify themselves totally with that role. They learn to see themselves only as other people see them and avoid thinking about themselves in any kind of philosophical way.
Dwelling on the contingency and absurdity of existence, their own and that of the world generally, is strictly off limits for people mired in bad faith. As far as possible, they avoid thinking about anything at all, except at the most humdrum and clichéd level. They stick to small talk and the listing of mundane facts. If the conversation ever threatens to get a bit deep or philosophical they laugh nervously with embarrassment and move swiftly on. Existentialists like to view them as the most absurd thing of all, but of course, the utter contingency of the universe implies that everything is as equally absurd as everything else.