Art and Nihilism
Announcements:
Ask Me Anything Philosophical:Today’s post was inspired by Jason Pettit’s comments on my previous post, Sub Specie Aeternitatis. After many years of writing primarily about photography, hoping to inspire readers to pursue it with more seriousness and creativity, I’d like to extend my range of topics into one of my other passions: philosophy, hoping likewise to inspire more readers to take an interest in it.
So, if you have any questions related to philosophy, please send them over. I have a fairly broad interest in many branches of (mostly Western) philosophy from various periods, schools, movements, and thinkers, so please be as broad or as specific as you wish. (My only caveat: I prefer not to discuss politics or theology here.)After a few years’ break, The Moab Photography Symposium is back for an encore this year, and just a few months away. I’ll be there to deliver the closing presentation, alongside several of my great friends and colleagues who will be presenting and teaching. Claim your spot before they are sold out.I’ve recently had the pleasure of interviewing with Lewis James Phillips and Terry Livesey for their podcast, The Dirty Negative. If you’d like to watch our conversation, it is now available on YouTube and other platforms.
The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Tell people you are interested in philosophy and soon enough one of them will respond jokingly, “So, what is the meaning of life?” Where you go from here depends on how far you want to carry the conversation. If you just want to go on about your day, you may chuckle knowingly and leave it at that. But, if you want to impress your interlocutor with your literary prowess (in addition to your seemingly casual penchant for using words like “interlocutor”), and perhaps draw them into a deeper philosophical exchange, you may instead quote Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
Shakespeare’s use of “signifying” instead of “meaning” is important. When people ask about the meaning of life, they generally don’t inquire about the meaning of the word “life” but about the meaning of the thing referred to—signified—by that word: specifically, whether this thing called life possesses deeper significance or purpose beyond just the mechanisms and qualities separating living things from non-living things. (That, I should add, is a thorny philosophical problem for another day, as there does not seem to be an obvious hard line separating life from non-life.)
To the dismay of some, and despite a plethora of beliefs and intuitions to the contrary, no scientific investigation to date has revealed that such “meaning of life” exists or even can exist objectively in the world. The more we learn about the nature of reality (at least those aspects of reality that present themselves to our senses, instruments, and intellect—the things philosophers refer to as “phenomena”) the more it seems that life in our universe is likely just a byproduct—an epiphenomenon—of the laws of nature evolving in time, making our material existence possible for a limited period before the universe moves on to spend the majority of its existence in states where life as we know it will no longer be possible.
Our universe is (in absolute terms) very young: a mere 13.7 billion years of age. According to prevailing theories about the future evolution of our universe, soon (also in absolute terms) space will expand to such immense extents that the very atoms that now make up material existence—stars, galaxies, planets, life forms, molecules—will break and decay, and their subatomic constituents will spread out over a vast and cold darkness for trillions of years to come, perhaps for eternity. The laws of thermodynamics suggest that energy will become so spread out throughout space that stars will cease to form and to emit light in about 100 trillion years. In about a googol (10100) years, energy will become so spread out that the universe will cool to near absolute zero and no region of it will have sufficient energy to power mechanical processes, including those needed to form and sustain life.
Even in the present time, on a planet teeming with life, after thousands of years of scientific study, we have not found one iota of evidence to suggest that material existence has or strives for any deliberate purpose, let alone a purpose for the phenomenon of life. Meaning does not seem to exist anywhere outside our minds. Put another way, we make meaning out of our knowledge and experiences as conscious beings in the world. When the universe no longer has life, no meaning will exist because there will be nothing capable of making or experiencing meaning. The emergence, existence, and extinction of life—human and other—will ultimately be far less significant an episode in the history of our universe than, say, the eruption and loss of baby teeth is in the life of a person. More succinctly: life can have no meaning in a universe destined to spend most of its existence in lifeless states.
So, why worry about the meaning of life if, so far as we know (or can know), in the grand scheme of things, life is meaningless?
The answer: because, regardless of life’s insignificance in the grand story of the universe, we living beings absolutely can experience and find great significance in the thing signified by the word “meaning.” Put more simply: to a living being, many things—experiences, perceptions, acts, relationships, sensations, knowledge, hopes, beliefs, ethics, aesthetics, emotions—may be profoundly meaningful, even if they do not exist objectively in “the world” and are destined to ultimately fade out of existence, along with life itself. So, while there may be no such thing as a meaning of life, there is absolutely such a thing as meaning in life.
Meaning in life is no small thing. In fact, the presence or absence of meaning in life is known from studies in psychology to be correlated with physical and emotional well-being. Indeed, to some people, in some extreme cases, meaning in life may even hold the top position among factors that make their lives worth living.
What may not be obvious about the distinction between meaning of life and meaning in life is that the latter comes with an important implication, which is this: since the world doesn’t possess objective meaning for us to find and thus doesn’t impose any meaning on us, we are (at least to a degree) free to choose for ourselves what to regard as meaningful: to form our values and goals according to what we consider to be important and worthy, and strive to live according to these values with the overarching goal of maximizing meaningfulness and its benefits.
So, the answer to “what is the meaning of life?” is this: there is no such thing as a meaning of life. There are only, for each of us, according to our own self-chosen values, things that may make our lives feel meaningful.
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Nihil is a Latin term meaning “nothing,” hence the term nihilism referring to an ideology of nothingness—more accurately, an ideology founded on the assumption that life means nothing (which is not the same as saying that a life can’t be meaningful to the person living it).
If you intuitively consider nihilism to be a “bad thing,” you are certainly not alone (and not entirely wrong). Still, it’s worth pointing out that the statement “nihilism is bad” doesn’t refute nihilism (i.e., it doesn’t offer an argument for the existence of objective meaning, or evidence for it). Saying that a thing is “good” or “bad” (or “better” or “worse” than another thing) is, in philosophical terms, making a normative (i.e., value-based) judgment about this thing. (In this case, an ethical judgment, which, like all ethical judgments, is by nature a matter of subjective opinion rather than objective truth—yet another philosophical problem for another day).
This is where we run into a problem: what does it mean to say that something which—as far as we know—is true (i.e., that life has no universal, objective, discoverable meaning) is also bad. Does it mean we’ll we be better off denying the truth or pretending not to know it? Thankfully, this question is easily resolved if we withhold judgment and ask instead why nihilism is bad, or, better yet, when is nihilism bad?
Consider these two statements: 1) life has no meaning, therefore I should not care about anything, not bother striving for anything, and not invest effort in anything beyond the minimum necessary to meet my basic needs and gain me hedonic pleasures; 2) life has no objective meaning but it can still feel meaningful, which is known to be positively correlated with physical and emotional well-being, therefore I should make it my goal to find things that amplify my feeling of meaningfulness: care deeply about things that feel is important, strive for what I believe to be right and morally just, study, experience, and investigate anything that might make my life more interesting.
Both statements take the truth of nihilism (in the sense of life having no objective meaning) as their foundation, but while the first may indeed be plausibly considered as “bad” in the sense of having little or no positive affect, it’s hard to say the same about the second.
The idea that we should strive to make our lives subjectively meaningful despite there being no evidence of an objective meaning for life, is a core tenet of existential philosophy. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it very bluntly: “life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning.”
The tension between the human capacity and inborn need for meaning, and the apparent lack of objective meaning we may hope to find in the world, is what Albert Camus characterized as the “absurdity” of human life. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote, “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Expressing his frustration with this absurdity, Camus wrote:
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.
My favorite summary of the absurd condition comes from an off-hand remark by the writer Charles Bowden. I doubt he even gave it much thought as he was rattling off a train of thought in response to an interview question, but something he said seemed so poignant to me that I had to write it down immediately and have quoted it to others many times since. He said, “Anybody can prove the world’s pointless. But so what? You’re in it.”
What do you do when you find yourself craving meaning in a pointless world—what existentialists refer to as “thrownness”: finding yourself thrown into a meaningless world, having had no choice in the matter, to make something of your living experience? You make your own meaning. As the painter Francis Bacon put it, “You must understand, life is nothing unless you make something of it.”
This is where nihilism meets art. Art can be many things. Among the most powerful and important of these things is making meaning. As psychologist Eric Maisel put it, “In the act of creation, they [creators] lay a veneer of meaning over meaninglessness and sometimes produce work that helps others maintain meaning. This is why creating is such a crucial activity in the life of a creator: It is one of the ways, and often the most important way, that she manages to make life feel meaningful.”
It is important to emphasize that art, like life, is not meaningful in itself. Merely making or beholding art is no guarantee that you will gain meaning from art. To gain meaning from art requires a deliberate conscious effort to make the experience of engaging with art—whether as a creator or as a spectator—meaningful. This is by far not the default way most people approach art.
In my decades of teaching and working with photographers, I have seen many who seek no greater purpose in their work than traveling to photogenic locations to capture pleasing images, perhaps somewhat inspired by the experience but almost never to such states as awe, reverence, or flow. Even in places of rare beauty, facing great feats of nature or human drama, most have no deeper interest in their subjects, in elevating the quality of their own experience, or in pursuing any purpose beyond just coming away with a “good shot.”
I have also seen painters working on commission to produce generic portraits, renditions of bucolic scenes designed to appeal to tourists, or abstract pieces made to fit into or augment a home decor. I have seen potters in a factory producing beautiful vessels in cold, assembly-line fashion. In the same vein, Hermann Hesse had this to say about poets of his day:
Because ‘beautiful’ poems make the poet beloved, a great quantity of poems come into the world that attempt nothing except to be beautiful, that pay no heed to the original primitive, holy, innocent function of poetry. These poems from the very start are made for others, for hearers, for readers. They are no longer dreams or dance steps or outcries of the soul, reactions to experience, stammered wish-images or magic formulas, gestures of a wise man or grimaces of a madman-they are simply planned productions, fabrications, pralines for the public. They have been made for distribution and sale and they serve to amuse or inspire or distract their buyers. So just this sort of poem finds approval. One does not have to project oneself seriously and lovingly into such poems, one is not tormented or shaken by them, rather one sways comfortably and pleasurably in time to their pretty, regular rhythms.
All these examples describe art made to impress others, to sell to others, to gain the approval of others. Too few artists by comparison create art with the goal of enriching their lives with meaning. Meaning may be found—by anyone, including professionals who earn their living in art—in the process of conceiving art, learning about art, making art, presenting art, and beholding the art of others. But meaning doesn’t “just happen.” It must be sought deliberately and it requires conscious investment of emotions, thought, time, and labor beyond just those needed to produce a finished piece.
I consider it unfortunate that the motives of pleasing, impressing, communing with and selling art to others—while undoubtedly valuable—are yet so powerful as to crowd out the meaning-making motive for most artists entirely. Unfortunate because, in my experience, the rewards to be had by seeking meaning and elevated states of mind in the experiences of contemplating, making, and beholding art eclipse—by a great margin—the sum of all other rewards to be found in art.
If making and experiencing art was not a source of meaning for me, I would not be an artist. But art for me doesn’t stand alone as a way of making meaning. I work in places and situations that inspire in me feelings like awe, reverence, and flow. I deliberately avoid work that requires me to rush or to worry about productivity or salability. I will not make a photograph or engage in creative writing unless I feel those elevated states, the desire to create, the significance—if only to me—of what I am doing, with the knowledge that the time and effort I invest in my work would likely not yield me greater rewards if I instead used in other ways.
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Anticipating the question of what I mean by “meaning,” I have a simple answer: something is meaningful if it feels meaningful. It doesn’t matter in the least whether others will find the same things as you to be meaningful. It doesn’t matter in the least what others expect you to find meaningful if you don’t. It either feels meaningful or it doesn’t. Likewise, something is important if it feels important, rewarding if it feels rewarding, and interesting if it feels interesting. None of these things are found objectively in “the world,” nor can they be imposed on you by fiat.
Other people may expect you to respect and to treat some things as important and meaningful even if they don’t feel that way to you, and it may well be in your interest to comply for the sake of maintaining good relationships and a desirable social order. But keep in mind that you don’t have to go beyond that: that you are always free, at least to some degree, to choose for yourself what is meaningful in your own life and work, and to seek opportunities to depart from and transcend other people’s expectations and the objective meaninglessness of the world so you can claim more of your time and resources toward making your own life as meaningful as it can be, according to your own sensibilities and values. This includes choosing the most meaningful ways to create your own art and to engage with other people’s art.
Nihilism and art are, in this sense, not opposites forces but complementary forces in the pursuit of freedom: one frees you from having to seek or comply with meanings outside yourself, the other frees you to make meaning of your own rather than succumb to despair in futile pursuit of meaning in an objectively meaningless world.
Camus, again:
Our aim is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it.
…
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.
