THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE
Steven Luper, Trinity University

In "The Absurd"[i] 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,[ii] 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 by suitably redesigning our plans and modes of justification. Nonetheless, I do not mean to imply that we can easily eliminate absurdity from our lives. Life is not necessarily absurd, but unfortunately, in a world like ours, there are limits to what we can and should do to reduce the absurd elements of our affairs.

The View of the Nowhere Man
"In ordinary life a situation is absurd," Nagel says, "when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed. . . ; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down."[iii] In this passage from "The Absurd" Nagel claims that absurdity is a particularly striking sort of incongruity, and the conception of absurdity he discusses in his book is the same. What sort of discrepancy does Nagel have in mind in calling life absurd? It involves a discrepancy between two points of view that human beings maintain though with difficulty. In both of his essays Nagel runs through several respects in which something he variously calls the "outer perspective" or "objective view" or "external standpoint" or "objective self" clashes with something he variously