Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Absurdity Of Life, Steven Luper

Philosophy Faculty Research

In "The Absurd"¹ Nagel claims that self-conscious human beings are necessarily absurd, so that to escape absurdity while remaining human we would have to cease being self-conscious. fifteen years later, in The View From Nowhere,² he defends the same thesis, supplementing some of his old arguments with a battery of new ones. I want to suggest that Nagel has misdiagnosed, and exaggerated the inescapability of, our absurdity. He does so partly because the grounds on which he bases his conclusion are spurious, and partly because he does not acknowledge the extent to which we can eliminate absurdity …