Jamil Fatti

Plume is an ongoing body of work started in 2018.

My Paternal Grandfather, Ansu, died when my father was still a baby. Hearing of Ansu when I was a young child, it hurt to realize that one day, my parents and everyone else who was dear to me would die, and it was possible that their death could come unexpectedly early. My parents soothed this fear by reassuring me that there was nothing to worry about — there is a God, and He has promised that with death comes an eternal afterlife. I found comfort in these reassurances, but their solidity was soon compromised; the personal faith in God they instilled in me was eroded by an expanding knowledge of the natural sciences slowly acquired in my youth, with skepticism growing in tandem.

We are born with one foot already in the grave. To simply exist is not enough for many; Generally, people desire for our lives to have meaning and for our existence to feel like it has some sense of significance, which is challenged by impermanence. Death and inevitable erasure remind us of our insignificance and cast the meaning we create for ourselves into question. The state of the world, indeed, “is what it is.” And it will continue to be what it is, regardless of whether we question it. However, for some, it is difficult to come to terms with what this existence is, at least without some qualification or justification. What does one do when there seems to be no such justification to be found?

In a world unraveling from religious faith, uncertainty hovers and can swallow us like a sea mist. However, there is no issue for those who believe in God wholeheartedly and without restraint. They have their life’s meaning and purpose bestowed upon them, and thus the challenges to meaning and purpose raised by existential nihilism are of no real concern to them. For the faithless and those who doubt their faith, the same cannot be said. Plume confronts the questions that remain for those in the latter camp; those who ask “what’s the point in living a life at all when all of this struggle seems so utterly meaningless and this endless suffering so pointless?”

While there is no argument about whether we can create meaning for ourselves, the issue is what value this meaning holds when ultimately, it will be washed away at the time of our death or shortly thereafter. This project explores religion and other ways of coping with existential nihilism, the value of meaning, moral ambiguity, and the limits of perception, with relevant insights from various philosophical and literary perspectives along the way. As we will see, this is an inquiry that humanity has been engaged with for millennia. In this essay, I present and synthesize relevant thought from many different philosophical and literary thinkers from recent Western history, all along the way offering up my own conclusions on the subject for consideration. If we can contend with these issues and find room for acceptance, then ultimately, perhaps there is also a possibility to arrive back at the beginning with newfound hope.

Does everyone know that one day we will die and eventually be completely forgotten? If time is infinite, then it seems inevitable. How do people deal with this fact besides creating a religion or turning to an existing one? What’s the point in building a sandcastle, if it only rises towards the heavens to be washed away before reaching them?

While our consciousness grants us a level of freedom, this same freedom can also be the source of some of our most challenging anxieties. Religion has offered solace in the face of impermanence and the meaninglessness of existence that our finitude may seem to signify. It follows that within the context of a “Godless” world, the search for meaning and purpose becomes an essential conundrum for some.

In a world unraveling from religious faith, uncertainty hovers and can swallow us like a sea mist. However, there is no issue for those who believe in God wholeheartedly and without restraint. They have their life’s meaning and purpose bestowed upon them, and thus the challenges to meaning and purpose raised by existential nihilism are of no real concern to them. For the faithless and those who doubt their faith, the same cannot be said. This essay charts a course for those in the latter camp; those who ask “what’s the point in living a life at all when all of this struggle seems so utterly meaningless and this endless suffering so pointless?”

Among the faithless, there is an argument that humanity invented gods and religions for expository reasons — we rationalized explanations for what we couldn’t understand. Early myths and legends gave way to organized religion as a form of systemized belief. Religious moral doctrine offered a semblance of certainty in the intrinsic value of life and thus offered protection against the threat of meaninglessness and associated despair that meaninglessness may bring with it. The promise of eternal existence in paradise granted through belief in an afterlife in heaven helped dampen the fear of death, and in doing so, helped usher away the threat of insignificance.

Ironically, religion found its greatest challenge in the form of a primary foundational element – the notion of “truth.” The Scientific Revolution and the Age of the Enlightenment called into question the established “truth” of religious doctrine. Outside of religion and thus without the offer of God’s limitless pardons, the rise of secularism unlocked a previously unparalleled perceived level of agency in the lives of individuals acting in the world, as well as, for some, engendering a feeling of deeper personal responsibility necessitated by that freedom. If our morals and values aren’t dictated to us by an external entity, the responsibility for their creation and maintenance falls on the individual and the consequences are experienced by the collective.

Nietzsche’s lamentation over “the death of god” was a historical and sociological proclamation rather than a purely theological one. Without religion, we may turn to other sources that serve the same explanatory and meaning-bestowing function for us in our lives, and we use these systems for direction and purpose. In theorizing about a contemporary stand-in for religion, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, pointed to “culture,” which could be defined as an elaborate collection of social mores, norms, taboos, rituals, values, and structures. Becker argues that with the rise of secularism, culture has assumed the same function as religion: “Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not…” For Becker, outside of a codified belief system like religion, culture represents a way for humanity to give shape to and define our existence. In this way, both religion and culture can be used as a means to quell nagging existential dread.

In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Ernest Becker builds from works by Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Norman O. Brown, and Otto Rank to discuss the psychological and philosophical implications of being hemmed in on both sides by the temporal bookends of finite biological existence while butting up against the silence of a disinterested universe; a situation that could make our goals and achievements seem futile when considered at the cosmic scale.

Becker argues that people turn to the “causa sui project” (i.e., “immortality project”) in a defiant creation of meaning. The causa sui project, for Becker, is an attempt to live beyond one’s biological lifespan through cultural significance, viz., leaving a legacy. Through reaching a level of cultural significance, people hope to immortalize themself within human history in an attempt to justify their existence. For Becker, this flight from the limits of biological existence represents an attempted retreat solely into the realm of symbolic existence; however, as a symbolic afterlife is not eternal, it too will come to an inevitable end as time progresses and acts of creation are lost in time. Even while acknowledging the ultimate futility of the causa sui project, Becker suggests that there may be little other recourse.

Becker is only one of a large number of people who have theorized on this topic and the range of conclusions reached varies widely. This essay does not attempt to provide any systematic, single answer to existential nihilism, because (1) I do not believe that such an answer exists that could answer this question universally, and (2) I believe that postmodernity shows us that we have finally (for the most part) moved past the idea that this is possible or even desirable. In this essay, I will introduce many points of view by several thinkers for consideration in addition to my own, but there are still many points we need to establish before we can firmly address the question of existential nihilism. As Bazarov, the young nihilist in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons proclaimed,“the ground wants clearing first.”

“One sticks his finger in the ground in order to judge where one is. I stick my finger in existence — it feels like nothing. Where am I? What is the ‘world’? What does this world mean? Who has duped me into the whole thing, and now leaves me standing there? Who am I? How did I come into the world; why was I not asked, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations, but thrust into the ranks as if I had been forced by a Seelenverkopper? How did I come to be involved in this great enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved in it? Am I not free to decide? Am I to be forced to be part of it? Where is the manager, I would like to make a complaint! Is there no manager? To whom then shall I make my complaint?”

Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein translates from German to English as “da,” as in “being,” and “sein,” as in “there.” This terminology may point to the fact that, to exist, man must be situated somewhere in space and time, and, further, within a particular cultural context and historic positioning. We occupy a position in space and time and are indissolubly connected to the social world in which we inhabit, both of which are constitutive elements of being. We exist in a present shaped by past experiences and a world with histories that predate us, born with biologically innate characteristics and into socioeconomic factors beyond our control.

We know ourselves only in and through the world, which is a world that sits withdrawn behind a veil of everyday demands and activities. We cannot untangle ourselves from other people and their expectations. With birth, we emerge into a world that predates us and is already constituted with a host of collective meanings for objects which were defined outside ourselves. We are presented with these collective meanings that we did not create, and we must at least partially accept them so that we can be able to participate in society without issue.If we attempt to detach ourselves from the world in order to observe it, we may realize any attempt at reflection is always relative to our embeddedness within the world. We can never fully withdraw from it and tell ourselves that we are abstracted removed from it while remaining in good faith; never can we reach an objective vantage point beyond our position within it.

Social constructs shape our social environment and are built upon relational understanding. This relational understanding exists as a network of fluctuating opinionsbetween individuals of a particular time. This network of fluctuating opinions influences how individual members of a society come to understand objects they encounter in the world, rather than an unadulterated apprehension of qualities intrinsic to those objects: “Since the ‘intelligibility’ of shoes, for example, depends on that complexly interconnected totality of human practices which provides shoes with the function which makes them shoes, only his prior understanding of world allows the cobbler to understand what he is doing.”

In addition to making the social world intelligible to the individual, social constructs can function as cultural constraints that limit human behavior. Society provides people with ready-made, pre-molded societal roles to fall into, and these roles give people the feeling of significance and permanence. It is easy to blindly take up societal roles and each pre-manufactured moral dictum with conviction. Participation in society offers a semblance of coherence and unity that could be otherwise inaccessible:

“Most men do not take the universe or their experiences of it, which they confound with it, to be disorderly. Few of us are given even the opportunity to do so, for our societies provide us with ready-made orders which we at first learn as best we can and then later perhaps contribute to or modify, thus sometimes discovering something of the arbitrariness in the relatively serviceable orders we habitually recognize. These ready-made orders, or sets of “models” of and for experience, we may call a society’s culture, and the anthropologist assumes, from profitable experience with the assumption, that culture is one of the most powerful constraints on human behavior. This is not to suggest that culture is the sole determinant of human-behavior-in-society. It is simply that men act in accord with their “definitions of situations” and their “rules” for dealing with those situations; in the light of such definitions and rules their behavior may be seen to be rational and therefore comprehensible to us.”

Growing up within society, and being thereby embedded within it, contributes to the establishment of an illusion that the world and its constructed-ness could be no other way. It may seem as though the world exists in an unquestionable state, an objective configuration of the way things must be. However, this is not the case — ultimately, meaning, as something conferred, exists within a particular cultural and historical context, and social constructs that meaning gives life to are not fixed but change in step with culture. The implication is that how we view the world is similarly non-fixed: "meaning drowns in a stream of becoming: the senseless and over-documented rhythm of advent and supercession.”

Further, it is not possible to access meaning that does not originate from human ideation. Something only means something to someone. Objects do not hold the meanings we confer upon them in their being; in the absence of interpretation, they exist without the labels we give them in order to make sense of them. The labels we give them only apply to them because we say that they do. For example, if the connection between a word and what it refers to was not arbitrary, we would not have a multitude of human languages with different words for the same referent. Tree, arbre, árbol, yiroo, and guie are all labels (words in this specific example) that refer to the same thing, and not a single one of these labels is the definitive, “correct” label for the woody, stemmed, perennial plant found on Earth.

A picture corresponds to a referent because we connect the two in our minds. For instance, a printed picture is nothing more than an amalgamation of particles of ink on a substrate, yet we see these globules of ink and mentally connect what we see to what we understand as the external world. We assign meaning to these globules of ink; however, without humans to assign this meaning, these same globules of ink refer to nothing. There is no necessary connection between (1) the globules of ink that form the shape of my mother in a printed picture of her and (2) the physical and conscious being that is my mother, just as there is no necessary connection between the squiggles of the written word “dog” and the four-legged canine animal.

Values, whether cultural or personal, do not exist outside of a moral agent to realize them, and as such, “value” itself is a man-made construct: “Nothing—absolutely nothing—can justify my adopting this system of values rather than that one.” We create our own systems of value, and thus we are solely responsible for maintaining them: “I have to actualize the meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide it alone, without any justification or excuse.” At each moment, the objects of our world depend on the meaning we give to them, as people are the sole beings through whom meanings arrive in objects. Paper money is a socially agreed upon material symbol of value, i.e., a symbolic representation of social relations and agreements. Objects have the appearance of value only because we bestow them with their value. Truths and values, which do not exist as discoverable entities in and of themselves, are freely invented by humanity.

The construction of racial and ethnic identities is one case of humanity imparting meaning to natural phenomena to lend the world a semblance of order. The pervasive and recurrent naivete of ethnocentrism falsely positions one’s culture at an assumed universal center, relegating the meaning derived by other cultures as inferior. However, this assumed center cannot hold when put under scrutiny. In a view that rejects the validity of ethnocentrism, phenomenal experience is not absolute and universally applicable, and as such, it is impossible to make value judgments that are objectively justifiable and “true” independent of a specific cultural context. Acceptable social behaviors to one cultural group may be rejected as unacceptable behavior by another cultural group. Rather than absolute, cultural ideas are relative, as our perception of the world is informed, in part, through enculturation and the culturally determined experience of visual perception.

Enculturation (also known as cultural conditioning), as posited by 20th-century cultural anthropologist, Melville J. Herskovits, suggests that we adjust our behavior according to what we perceive as acceptable within the cultural parameters and context we exist within. We absorb and interpret a host of competing social influences, norms, and messaging from our environment and then translate them into what we believe to be acceptable behaviors to others around us within our culture. These parameters may present themselves as constraints to the number of alternatives that we see ourselves able to choose between freely, as not all alternatives will be deemed as “acceptable” to others around us: “Deliberate tutelage, punishment of inappropriate behavior, and the rewarding of approved behavior are of course involved in enculturation; but much of enculturation is less direct than this, creating its impact not so much by the choice of alternative that is rewarded or punished as by the limitations of the narrow set of alternatives presented for consideration.”

Ethnocentrism assumes a universal center with the presupposition that a universal value system is possible, however, value judgments are neither universal nor entirely idiosyncratic. Rather, value judgments are subjective and constrained by one’s positionality, i.e., one’s exposure to collective interpretations particular to one’s culture. Once established in the mind, learned behaviors become unconscious shapers of future behavior. For example, a child is taught to raise one hand and pivot it to and fro from the wrist to signal hello; this traditional form of greeting, a hand wave, is taken up as a way of initiating contact with another person. However, it is not the case that a hand wave is a universally understood symbol of greeting that exists beyond human-bestowed meaning made legible through the process of enculturation. The hand wave is only legible as a greeting in the context of the widely accepted understanding that it is as such within a particular culture or set of cultures. As another example, traditional European kinship labels, such as “aunt” and “niece,” are only one way of identifying and classifying kinship relationships and may vary from culture to culture.

Consideration of the arbitrary nature of social constructs could be the catalyst needed to dissolve the illusion of their weighty necessity. At the same time, people are social creatures, so social pressures can be difficult to reject. Any partial turn away from social norms can be a step away from the acceptance of others and the comfort and safety it offers. An awareness of the artificial nature of social constructs can be useful, as it allows one to decide how much one is willing to ”play the game” or deviate from norms and risk social consequences for non-conformity.

All the while, humanity’s ultimate destiny is one with the Earth’s. People are situated in the immediate world of their concern, yet a contingency exists to that involvement. I sit down to write, and I am pulled away as I feel the rumbles of my empty stomach, and I am reminded that my consciousness depends on my physical body to sustain itself. We are, but we do not have to be, and one day we will be no longer. Repressing aspects of yourself to be with others and fit in, to live for the approval of others, is to accept one’s place among the collective, taking up a safe pre-approved position within a rigid framework of socio-cultural obligations and duties rather than taking responsibility for one’s own agency.

As there is no universal moral order by which we can guide our actions, we are in a limited sense “condemned to be free” as Sartre asserted in Being and Nothingness — individuals are left to derive and maintain their own systems of attributing value and creating meaning in the world. As a society, we have largely outgrown mythological and theological accounts of the world, yet we still need to make ethical judgments. Without religion, we must take up the responsibility for determining what is “right” and “wrong,” as we have no absolute grounds on which to base our decision-making.

Without any clear rational, external, ethical foundation that has an objective basis, we must still choose. There are innumerable decisions one must make over the course of one’s life, and, perhaps paradoxically, even inaction represents an active choice for which we are equally responsible. In this way, we are always without excuse as we must always choose, regardless of how much social structures constrain our free choice.

Philosophy, more generally as a studied application of critical thought, began as a tool for understanding the world around us and our place within it, i.e., our “existence.” Early Philosophy began with the questions of “what’s out there” (i.e., “what is reality?”) and “how do we come to know it?” — ontology and epistemology, respectively. Between philosophy’s beginnings and the present day, many additional philosophical branches and traditions have emerged, each with its own particular focus.

Existentialism is an umbrella term that has been applied to a list of widely disparate and discordant figures in the continental rationalist philosophical tradition who have explored the topic of human existence. Many of the thinkers to which the tradition is given credence either preceded the invention of its name (e.g., Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc.) or outright rejected the label and any association with the tradition (e.g., Heidegger, Camus, etc.):

“...it is difficult to explain what the term “existentialism” refers to. The word, first introduced by [Gabriel] Marcel in 1943, is certainly not a reference to a coherent system or philosophical school. Indeed, the major contributors are anything but systematic and have widely divergent views, and of these, only Sartre and [De] Beauvoir explicitly self-identified as “existentialists.” In surveying its representative thinkers, one finds secular and religious existentialists, philosophers who embrace a conception of radical freedom and others who reject it. And there are those who regard our relations with others as largely mired in conflict and self-deception and others who recognize a deep capacity for self-less love and interdependence.”

Intellectual interest in the philosophy of existence long predates the 1930s-1960s popularization of “existentialism” as a cultural phenomenon. Death is one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is regarded as one of the oldest surviving human stories. Since then, core themes in the philosophy of existence have been central to many of our greatest works of literature, poetry, visual arts, and music.

Philosophy studied the physical world beyond us, life, and the human mind, aspects which later gave birth to the specialized disciplines of physics, biology, and psychology. Many of the same inquiries into the conditions and consequences of existential-ontological and epistemological concepts that were taken up by early philosophical questioning persist today, including that of existential freedom, death, meaning, and purpose. The 20th-century rise in the cultural consciousness of topics like death and the ambiguity of existence was predicated by the violence of World War II, but these core existential issues have been a general topic of human concern since philosophy’s origin with the pre-Socratics.

Structuralism is a loose philosophical tradition and method of analysis that succeeded existentialism and challenged many notions posited by existentialist thinkers. Structuralists, like Claude Lévis-Strauss, refuted the existentialist claim that self-creation was possible (Sartre’s notion of radical freedom), instead asserting that we are not totally free, as we must navigate within the narrow parameters of social constraints that predate us. In other words, the self does not shape the world; the world shapes the self.

Structuralism rejected the Causa Sui project posited by Sartre and carried on by Becker, which states that despite the imposition of societal pressures, we have, to a certain degree, the inherent freedom and responsibility to create ourselves, and thus we are “the gods” of our own creation: “the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness, who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, a self-created man. He will not be merely the pawn of others, of society; he will not be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer, nursing his own inner flame in oblivion.” Turning away from an empty acceptance of pre-existing meaning put before us, existential thinkers claimed that we are free to separate ourselves “from this world by contemplation, to think about it, to create it anew.”

Structuralism suggests that total freedom is an impossibility, and thus by extension, total self-creation is also an impossibility under a structuralist view. However, despite our situatedness, this impossibility of total freedom does not mean that the individual moral actor is completely free from the moral responsibility for their actions. Even if our actions are indeed shaped and constrained by our context, as structuralism suggests, it is still within our possibilities to understand these social structures to the best of our abilities and deviate from the norms prescribed to us when and where we see fit. In other words, we may not be totally free, but we are still free, to a degree, to choose.

Additionally, if total freedom is an illusion, as structuralism suggests, it is still valid that the anxiety produced by any illusion, of freedom or anything else, is still real anxiety. In other words, total freedom may be an illusion, but even so, the anxiety of perceived freedom may not be. Likewise, even if our actions are predetermined, when one raises the question of whether it is Q or not Q in an act of reflection, one cannot do so without the presupposition that it has not yet been determined whether Q or not Q. In other words, the very act of supposing reveals that one is free to suppose. Further, even if a determinist view is correct and all of the events of one’s life are already set in stone, we still do not know yet know the contents of what it is that has been determined. It remains impossible to know the future, regardless of whether or not that future has already been decided, which is a fact that reclaims the import of actions we make in the present.

Many thinkers highlight the person who acknowledges the reality of our situation and chooses to defiantly plunge into life anyway — Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Camus’s Sisyphus, Sartre’s man of Causa Sui, De Beauvoir’s man who lives for others, and Cioran’s unsparing example of complete acceptance of one’s situation.

For Camus, man’s condition only becomes tragic once one becomes conscious of it. If the realization is never reached, if one is not aware of the absurd nature of one’s condition, there is nothing to be concerned about. Just as a fear of danger is only awakened in man when he is conscious of it, so too does the absurd loom just over one’s shoulder, hiding in plain sight. In this way, Camus’ thought aligns with existential nihilism. According to contemporary philosopher Donald A. Crosby:

“The existential nihilist judges human existence to be pointless and absurd. It leads nowhere and adds up to nothing. It is entirely gratuitous, in the sense that there is no justification for life, but also no reason not to live. Those who claim to find meaning in their lives are either dishonest or deluded. In either case, they fail to face up to the harsh reality of the human situation.”

Building from the work of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and in dialogue with many of his contemporaries in the continental rationalist tradition, Camus argues that life is essentially meaningless, despite humanity’s persistent struggle to find meaning, and the desire to impose order on chaos. For Camus, the absurd manifests in the interplay of the fundamental human need for meaning and significance, and the unreasonable silence of the universe.

Coming to terms with the absurd means rejecting the pursuit of objective existential meaning, as for Camus and some other thinkers, there is no such meaning to be discovered. For Camus, neither humanity nor the universe we inhabit are in themselves absurd; the absurd only arises through the incongruity between humanity’s search for objective meaning and the lack of such meaning in the universe. For Camus, the person who triumphs over absurdism lives without objective meaning and faces up to the surest deliberate escape from the absurd — suicide — without succumbing to it.Camus advocates an honest confrontation of the realities of human existence, which means living a life facing the absurd rather than denying it.

For some, philosophical suicide is one method of avoiding the matter. Becker, De Beauvoir, and others argue that philosophical suicide permits one to exit the inescapable reality of finitude and enter into the symbolic world where such a event does not exist, i.e, to ignore the problem by escaping into a world of illusion rather than address it head-on. Religion and bad faith are two forms of philosophical suicide, the latter corresponding to Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir’s notion of “the serious man”— a person who shirks the personal responsibility to create meaning for themselves by embracing pre-manufactured purpose afforded to them through the societal roles and cultural practices that predate them. The serious man is deadened by habit, fulfilling tasks mindlessly and without purpose, moving through life in passivity, taking up what has been prescribed for one’s life rather than assuming the responsibility of forging the content of one’s own existence. Afraid to deviate from norms and exert one’s own individuality, the serious man leads an inauthentic existence delimited by the meanings and conditions for living put forth by other people.

Philosophical suicide also manifests in our pursuit of fleeting pleasures to placate ourselves, veiling our discontent in a shroud of hedonistic pleasures. The pangs of existential dread are felt more easily by the idler than by the one who hides in distraction — in a life where solitary anguish and the threat of death are drowned out by hedonistic excess, it is easier to ignore a lack of objective meaning and value. While this turn towards drinking, gambling, sex, drugs, or another reprieve may offer a momentary respite, our feelings of discontent may swiftly return if the glass is not refilled.

We are the repository of precious gifts and talents that death will one day eradicate. As the novelist Saul Bellow lamented via his character Moses Herzog, “Death waits…as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that.” For Camus, to acknowledge this reality and admit defeat; to be crushed by the world, accept its crushing, and do nothing to spite it, is philosophical suicide. Camus encourages us to accept the ultimate futility of one’s efforts, and yet rather than lament their futility, bask in the delight of them anyway.

While Camus argued that there is no hope to find ultimate meaning in life, this does not mean that there is no possibility for any kind of hope. Hope, like meaning, does not exist outside of humanity and is up to us to create. Hope, equally unjustified by external validation as meaning and purpose, remains a possibility that is open to being created by the individual. If we choose to “dwell poetically” as Heidegger suggests via Hölderlin, art can offer solace. Humanity is gifted with the powers of imagination and expression, talents that define part of what it is to be human.

Humanity does not exist in a vacuum — each instantiation of humanity, each conscious individual, only exists in relation to everything outside of it. The theory of intentionality states that consciousness is always directed outward, which is to say consciousness is always consciousness of something. In other words, in every instance that you think or perceive, you are thinking of or perceiving something, whether a concrete object in the world of your immediate perception or an abstract, intangible concept.

Heidegger argued that existential anxiety that is born from freedom may not be intended towards a discrete object, and therefore one is anxious about something that is a non-entity (has no material presence), i.e., in this sense, for Heidegger, the object of one’s anxiety exists “nowhere.” This appears to be in line with the anguish that arises from our freedom that Kierkegaard wrote of a century prior.

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish writer and philosopher. He links existential anguish with an awareness of our freedom and a recognition of the possibilities our freedom begets, i.e., anguish arises in our experience of the possible, which, try as we may, humanity can never fully escape from. The idea of truth as subjectivity originates with Kierkegaard, as he argues, beaten by the illogical nature of its condition, humanity turns from the reality of its situation in response. Because we are unable to explain human existence through logical means, Kierkegaard proposed that one should combat the absurdity of existence by moving outside the logical in the search for meaning. He contended that it is better to lean into what may only be an illusion, viz., a self-acknowledged and unfounded belief in God’s existence, rather than turn one’s back completely to the notion of metaphysical salvation.

For 18th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, solace is hard to find. Central to his essay “The Vanity of Existence” is his assertion that (1) the paradox of desire, (2) the transient and slippery nature of the present, and (3) the inescapable eventuality of death render existence as nothing more than a futile endeavor, as contentment, if arising at all, is fleeting before being swallowed into the past. To Schopenhauer, existence is fundamentally comprised of desire and suffering. We strive to achieve or attain our desires, after which we reach momentary satiation, which invariably gives rise to boredom unless new desires are formed. Again we then suffer until we achieve those new desires, so we begin striving again in pursuit of them. Schopenhauer argues that this pursuit is in vain. We achieve satisfaction only briefly before present success recedes irreversibly into an unreachable past, i.e., an immaterial nothingness similar to the future. The present, which is the only vantage point by which we can experience existence, remains relegated to the primary states of suffering or boredom. Crosby sums up Schopenhauer’s existential nihilistic view succinctly:

“For him, life is riddled with disappointment, frustration, and pain. Whatever small significance it might have been thought to have is nullified by the inevitability of death. Our dreams of happiness and fulfillment are soon turned into nightmares by the mocking malignancy of the universe. The only feasible goal for anyone who understands the human condition is the abandonment of all goals and the cultivation of a spirit of detached resignation while awaiting life's last and greatest absurdity, an annihilating death that wipes us so cleanly from the slate of existence as to make it appear that we had never lived…For him, as for existential nihilists in general, human existence in all its manifestations exhibits an inescapable and unalterable absurdity. Strut, fret, and delude ourselves as we may, our lives are of no significance, and it is futile to seek or to affirm meaning where none can be found.”

In a similar vein, Proust suggested that a true paradise is a paradise lost, or in other words, what’s least accessible can become what is most desired. Desire, as a propositional attitude towards a future state of affairs, points us to the human condition within time. Heidegger and Sartre both later elaborated on the critical relationship between humanity and temporality, with Heidegger citing time as “the ground” from which being is possible, and Sartre later building from Heideggerian thought in this respect. Being must either exist in time and concurrently exist at a particular location in space, or not at all.

To desire eternity is to desire to be always. However, nothing lasts indefinitely, and lapsed time can never be retrieved. Temporality is subjective or “experienced time,” and can be defined as “the state of existing within or having some relationship with time.” In other words, time as it appears to human perception. This subjective, or experiential, time is often theorized as divided into three — the past, the present, and the future.

Some say we are continuously bound to the present, with each moment slipping into the past with the same effortlessness that it materialized. For those who share this view, the specious present is an infinitesimal moment, an incredibly tiny limiting point separating past and future. I hear a door creaking, waking me from my light sleep, and I realize it’s my mother in an adjacent room. I realize this is a creak from a door that’s been opened and closed many times. Simultaneously, I realize this is a discrete moment, unique to all other instances, a discrete moment that I will never experience again. Like all others before it and all instances yet to come, it seems to slip away from me with that same cursed immediacy it now appears before me.

However, there are many ways to conceptualize the present. If we consider temporality as Heidegger and Sartre proposed, we view human temporality as a totality, where the nature of being cannot be isolated entirely to the “islet of the present.” According to this view, on an individual basis, we can be thought of as the totality (sum) of what we are in the present moment, what we have been (our past), and what we have not yet become but will one day be (our future). In Heideggerian/Sartrean terms, our facticity and transcendence (our future) converge and act on the present. One pursues various possibilities that may lie in wait in the future, bears the weight of one’s own past, and acts exclusively in the specious ephemerality of the present.

All the while, death looms as an upcoming certainty that intrudes on present concerns, truncates future possibilities, and will one day swallow an entire life and absorb it into the past. We belong to time – as the past begins to cast long shadows over our future, we must cope with the irreversibility of temporality, or lived time. We hold an unshakable relationship with temporality, which leads us incrementally toward the grave.

The present may not always feel pleasant. Torment that seems unresolvable has been theorized as stripping the possibility for hope. When considering the changes you can make in your life in the present to help shape your future, it’s easy to say you can do something; however, achieving it isn’t always as easy. We may compromise on some of our dreams and insist on others. Not all achieve their ambitions, and not all are satisfied even when the possibilities they worked towards are actualized. Still, the regret of never attempting may haunt those who never try.

Michael Sugrue, contemporary philosopher and academic, has stated, “Guilt is the uncomfortable certainty that we are not what we could have been,” and “Unrealized potential is a debt you owe yourself you can never pay back.” We may grapple with the pangs of unmet desire, look to the future, and find no guarantee of ever finding what eludes us. Yet it is possible to not only come to terms with the possibility of never achieving lifelong ambitions, but to find beauty, and even value, in the possibility of an unfulfilled struggle chasing them. To find dignity in failure.

At any given moment, we may reflect on our present situation in the context of everything that has preceded it and see our lives as a half-made chess board — there are the pieces already committed on their course, limiting our options for present and future action. As part of our “facticity,” the past helps structure the present. The past is inaccessible, i.e., it can never be physically returned to. However, just as it can never be returned to, it can also never be undone. While we are alive, we cannot escape our situatedness and facticity, but we are responsible for determining the meaning of this situatedness and this facticity upon reflection. Despite the self maintaining a level of self-sameness, self-interpretations nevertheless change over time. For example, an idea of the self at age 15 may be radically different when reflecting on it at age 16 than it is at age 30 or age 60. I reread my old writings, from such a long time ago that the words I read seem as though they were written by a completely different person. In a sense, they were. At times, I cannot identify myself within words I had written years prior, yet they still “belong” to present me. These are moments when I feel snatched up by memories; I start to relive moments that feel oddly foreign as if experiencing the history of another person. This past me is, in a sense, no longer with us, yet speaks to us from the past as a specter that haunts the present.

Death solidifies the self into a metaphysical mass adorned by the rings of time, like a truck of a tree cut down before its natural end. Its rings are a visible mark of time passed, yet the husk decays and slowly dissipates like the crisp details lost in the ever-fading memory of a loved one. When I sit and reflect on past events, I bring fragments of them into the present. Just as the present chases the future without the ability to catch or coincide with it until death, remembrance pursues past moments without the ability to retrieve them in their totality. With time, details of memories of the past become obscured, though habits may linger as residues of experience. Remembering the past is not necessarily remembering the events as they transpired. What is lost in time are those things for which no record remains, and no one exists to recall it. Still, the ripples created by the event bear their impact on the present, and in this way, the past events lost to time still impart their influence on the present. We glean what we can from past and present events in anticipation of the future.

There are times that I begin drafting a response in my mind before the other person has even finished speaking. In moments like this, I physically exist in the present moment, because I cannot be otherwise, but my mind stretches like taffy from the present moment beyond itself into ever-onrushing moments of the future.

If change is constant, then while we are alive, we are in a continual process of becoming. People can spend a lifetime chasing their desires and never reach them. Like the carrot looms before the horse, we stretch endlessly towards many futures, most of which we will never reach. Futures never actualized are brushed aside as innumerable specters of a present that could have been yet will no longer ever be; the number of lost futures always far outweighs the single present that has been actualized.

Each year that passes represents less and less to the whole. One month of life to a newborn is a lifetime; one month of life to an octogenarian is a drop in the bucket. While the structure of experienced time is static in a sense — a-series moments seem to flow past each other in a flow of endless becoming that can lend us a feeling of perpetual incompleteness. We glide into the future with a handful of potentialities to be manifested from the myriad of refracting images of potential futures. As time progresses, versions of ourselves continually diverge from our present self and slide into the past, frozen and continuously separating from our present self: "One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse."

With human consciousness comes an eventual awareness of death, typically at an early age. Though we may try our best to avoid dwelling on it, in some sense, we anticipate death. Death extinguishes all possibilities but does not exhaust all possibilities while we are still alive. In life, there are countless projects one can take up; however, as a finite being, one cannot take up all projects. One must make choices, and some possibilities will be foreclosed in doing so.

Sometimes we can’t help but do the mental math on how much time we have left before certain possibilities slip through our fingertips. Goals exist as mental projections into a future not yet reached. In a sense, a world of future expectations is built that can only be made manifest by the actions of a present that is ever-shifting towards, yet in a sense never reaching until death, the future. For beings bound to the present, the future is like a mirage — it’s real in a sense, yet is immaterial and as such, its shape resists being solidified and fixed in anything but the imagination. As futures collapse into the present, we may experience that which we have not expected nor wanted. With death, what once existed in the perpetual present slips entirely into the past, and we become nothing but our past. Perhaps, death is the final act of finding one’s symbolic home in time. However, as long as you are alive, there is more left of your existence than your facticity and present situation account for. Until death, there is always still time to commit action.

It’s possible to rewatch a movie years later and see it with new eyes. In the intervening years, the film has remained the same, but the world hasn’t, and by extension, neither have you.

I wonder how many thoughts I have in the present that feel like the first time I’ve ever had them, yet could be the same or similar thoughts that I’ve had previously but don’t remember having. One can revisit thoughts committed to writing. An epiphany that feels like it could have only been generated at a particular time could be a thought previously had and now revisited, like a boomerang returning to a hand that forgot it sent it. As a present relation inevitably gives way to future relations, writing records a relation in time between its author and its subject matter.

Spoilers abound in the section that follows, so if there’s a film you haven’t seen, it’s best to skip that entry until you have.

Persona is a 1966 classic by legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. This enigmatic film is a mystifying exploration of weighty themes including but not limited to personal identity and the performance of the self, time and temporality, mental illness, and the medium of filmmaking itself; put more simply, it is a complex film that is difficult to pin down with a singular, definitive, comprehensive analysis.

Bergman uses techniques and tools of exposition to mirror the conceptual content of the film. The plot, which centers around the fractured psyche of a young woman who appears to be undergoing a crisis of identity, is shown through cinematography that feels equally fractured. As an actress, the protagonist, Elizabeth, works in a profession where she must assume the identity of other people through the roles she chooses to take up on stage. Self-referentiality, Actress Liv Ullmann (a real-world actress who played many roles across her career) plays the role of actress Elizabeth, who also by profession, plays the role of many others.

After having a breakdown, Elizabeth begins to feel as though the acting never ends, whether on stage or off. This may point to the notion that the very nature of being a person in the world demands that an identity is performed for the exterior world. Recognizing the artificial nature of the structures holding up the social world, Elizabeth revolts by trying to relinquish her agency — she refuses to act, but this time in the “real world.” In a critical scene with her doctor, Elizabeth is told that even the decision not to act is itself a performance; perhaps for Elizabeth, there is no escaping what torments her most.

The word for Persona is derived from the Greek word for “opera mask,” and the title choice is only one among several allusions to the profession of acting offered by the film, viz., Bergman’s depiction of Elizabeth as an actor redoubles the allusion to acting and the related theme of performance. As a second example, viewers of the movie see behind the scenes of the sets that Elizabeth works on. Film reels, camera crews, lighting technicians, and the rest of the filmmaking industrial apparatus remind viewers of the constructedness of that environment, which can be extrapolated to the engagements of the “real world” that Elizabeth also tries to explicate herself from.

In the English translation of the film, the doctor tells Elizabeth that “there is a chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself.” As individuals, we may construct a persona as a shield, i.e., as something that protects us, for use in the external world. However, the construction of this same shield, this persona, constrains our agency in the external world by limiting us to the actions of this socially constructed identity. Anything more, anything which would cause us to step from behind the mask, i.e., beyond the limits of the persona we construct, may again leave us vulnerable.

In Persona, inner, psychological space is brought forward to meet external horrors, e.g, when introspective Elizabeth is seen watching horrific imagery of the outside world broadcasted by a TV set in the barren hospital room she is trapped within. She does not want to look, yet seems to be unable to look away. She steps back from it as far as she can, pinning herself in the corner of the dimly lit room; she can move no farther away from it, yet still, she continues watching the TV without being able to change or affect (i.e., she cannot act on) what she sees occurring in the outside world.

The film showcases an interplay between inner and outer selves, the negotiation between the ”true” self and the persona. In Persona, personal identity is called into question, as Elizabeth seemingly begins to merge with her caretaker, Alma. There is an open question of whether the two women literally or figuratively merge into one, as the film never reveals that that is the case explicitly. Furthermore, it cannot be ascertained whether it is Elizabeth who merges into Alma or the other way around. Is Alma the image of the person that Elizabeth wishes to be? Does Elizabeth see Alma as the ideal self and the person she wishes to be perceived as by the external world? Or is it Alma that wishes to become Elizabeth? Is Alma caring for Elizabeth as a person who might care for the persona one cultivates for the external world? Is Elizabeth a manifestation of Alma’s inner conflicts? Who is wearing who as a mask? Who is the true self? Is every action in the external world a performance? Is there always a need for a persona?

While Elizabeth suspends her own agency, Alma uses her agency to fulfill the duties of her role and, along the way, reveal more and more to Elizabeth. The secrets once locked within Alma are confidentially revealed by Alma to Elizabeth and then released by Elizabeth into the world by way of a letter to Alma’s husband. In this way, we see in a sense that, ultimately, it is Alma who is unmasked by Elizabeth.

Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 short film written, produced, and starring Maya Deren and shot by and co-starring her husband Alexandr Hackenschmied.

Deren masterfully takes up a subject difficult to convey through a visual medium. The film as a whole, which is only 14 minutes in length, can be interpreted as occurring entirely within reflexive consciousness. Highly abstract and experimental, the film explores the potency of a singular moment and the tendency of the mind to take moments of the past, held in the memory, and drag them back into the present through intentional consciousness. The film follows the female protagonist and cycles back and again through recurring motifs which could be read as noematic flashes of her past intermingled with one another and brought into the present.

Deren’s visual representation of a subjective point of view through the means of filmmaking was something that had not been done before, or at least as widely seen, in the history of film. For its time, Meshes of the Afternoon was a highly innovative approach to the visual storytelling of an experience that is typically only a personal (i.e., untransmittable) individual experience. E.g., one might have recurring intrusive thoughts that seep into the present, and these thoughts can seem so present and real to the person experiencing them, however, this real experience cannot be transferred to another to experience them directly (i.e., the experience cannot be communicated in a way that supplants direct experience). Deren takes the inherently subjective nature of experience and turns it into something visually legible that others can relate to.

Synecdoche, New York is a 2008 film by writer and director Charlie Kaufmann. The title is a play on the city name Schenectady, New York — “synecdoche,” being a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole or vice versa. Arguably, Kaufmann’s film owes a lot to the much earlier experimental documentary film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm written, directed, co-produced and edited by filmmaker William Greaves. Like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Synedoche, New York is a complexly layered self-referential work of metafiction.

Synedoche, New York’s protagonist, Caden Cotard, is a middle-aged stage director and hypochondriac. Caden is married to Adele, a visual artist, who acts as his foil; she is almost cartoonishly opposite to him in many ways. As Caden’s theatre work gets increasingly larger in scale, Adele’s artworks get smaller and smaller. While Caden is constantly worried about his health and anxiously thinking of death, Adele lives with abandon, paying little attention to her own wellbeing. She truly lives moment to moment and she enjoys her life, yet her carefree attitude is also her downfall in the end, as she ends up dying from something she could have possibly prevented if she would have taken time to reflect on her health, her choices, and her future. In contrast, Caden thinks obsessively about death, to the point that he doesn’t even think about the life he’s currently living, let alone take time to enjoy it. Despite all of this, it’s hard to ignore the futility of their actions when, regardless of their greatly contrasting dispositions and even more disparate life choices, in the end they both end up in the same place anyway — dead.

Caden’s increasingly bloated stage production within Synecdoche, New York, as well as the film itself, is the old adage “art imitates life” taken to a hyperbolic extreme — many layers of simulacra that become increasingly difficult to differentiate spiral out to blur the line between performance and reality. As the play takes on cosmic proportions and the production level gets increasingly intricate, the play becomes a microcosm of the outside world, a world within a world, with actors playing the roles of actual living people, and then actors playing actors who are playing actual living people, and so on.

Actors in the real world take up the role of others professionally, and, if “all the world’s a stage” then in a sense, we’re all playing characters too. The characters in any movie act as symbols that are used to illustrate themes that go beyond the plotline alone. Perhaps the film points to the difficulty of separating “yourself” from the character you play for others. The characters in Caden’s play are modeled after real people, and so too are the characters in Kaufmann’s film, as they represent us in the real world, Caden most specifically. Caden Cotard is a character that represents the everyday person, replete with desires, anxieties, hopes, dreams, regrets, and frustrations, as do the myriad layers of actors playing actors playing people in Caden’s production.

Caden seeks uncompromising honesty in his art, which is mirrored by Charlie Kaufmann’s equally uncompromising honesty. Death and time figure heavily as themes throughout Synecdoche, New York, and the film asks us to sit with the uncomfortable implications of finitude, which are only made relevant by the inescapable onslaught of time. In the film, Caden wants nothing more than to create something of significance before he dies, and thus he struggles with time as much as he struggles with the thought of death. He wants to do something meaningful, yet he knows he doesn’t own an eternity to make that happen. He is in a rush to complete his life’s work before his time runs out. Time slips swiftly between his fingers throughout the film, as days and months pass in frightening rapidity, sometimes in only mere seconds of screentime. Through Caden, Kaufmann illuminates the possibility that no matter how great our efforts to make something significant, time may pass more swiftly than our ability to achieve our ambitions.

Of the play, Caden states after winning the MacArthur Grant,

“We’ll start by talking honestly, and out of that a piece of theatre will evolve. I’ll begin. I’ve been thinking a lot about dying lately…You know, regardless of how this particular thing works itself out, I will be dying. And so will you…And so will everyone here. And that’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurdling towards death. Yet here we are for the moment alive. Each of us knowing we’re gonna die. And each of us secretly believing we won’t. ”

Caden uses cleaning to occupy his mind. It seems like the one consistent side task that can take his mind away from his health and from death. As the world slowly crumbles around Caden, he never seems to take notice. He has extreme tunnel vision and obsessively thinks about the show and about his health. Ironically, Caden is building a play that he intends to represent life in complete, brutal honesty, however, as life in the real world outside of the production building changes, he takes no notice and consequently, the play does not reflect these changes. Like the real world around him, Caden’s personal life crumbles from neglect.

Generally speaking, people desire love and acceptance. Sometimes people edit themselves to win the approval of others; we hide parts of ourselves and instead only show the parts that we think others will accept, rather than the whole. On the flip side, a potential partner can seem to have more potential the less you know about them. The mystery of a new person can serve as a receptacle for wishes and desires — the less is known about someone, the more one can project one’s own wishes and desires onto them. Yet every character has a story much larger than the moments you witness on screen. Those moments we’re not privy to, and will never be, could be some of the most formative moments of someone’s life.

It’s clear that Adele and Olive’s departure left a hole in Caden’s life that he could never refill. Caden desperately wants to return to the life he had with Adele and Olive, but he cannot. That time in his life has passed and is gone, yet he refuses to let it go. Like elapsed time itself, he cannot recapture what he once had. Midway through the film, Claire replaces the role that Adele played in Caden’s life, and she tries to offer Caden the love, support, and admiration he once sought from Adele. Still, she is not Adele. Clarie and Ariel are stand-in’s for Caden’s first family which has gone missing in his life. He doesn’t care about them in the same way as his first, and the on-screen moments spent with them are glossed over in a stretch of time that feels sparse in comparison. Used purely as understudies for Adele and Olive, Claire and Ariel could never live up to Caden’s expectations. The physical spaces Caden cleans in the role of “Ellen” are always spaces that Adele once occupied. Is he trying to wipe his memory of her? The character of Adele Lack doesn’t even figure into the stage production, which is a very noteworthy exclusion. When Claire leaves, Caden needs a Claire replacement not only in the stage production but also in his life. Hazel enters stage right.

Time in the film is moving much faster than we think, mirroring how the years of life can feel like they’re “flying by.” During a session with his therapist Madeline, Caden learns of Little Winky, a child who found success and recognition by the age of 4. Little Winky’s success is what Caden yearns for but is fearful that he’ll never reach. Others, like Adele and her new husbands, also find the fame and success Caden lacks during their lifetimes.

We are born and we realize one day we will die, but we carry on as there’s not much to be done about it. Our lives, and their endings, are shaped by the culmination of decisions we make over the course of our lives, and those choices have an impact for ourselves and others. Late in the film, Adele dies from lung cancer, but in an act of foreshadowing very early on in the film, we see Adele coughing heavily. Could her demise have been different if she didn’t choose to ignore the signs? Similarly, despite the warning signs (the home is literally on fire), Hazel buys the home she will one day die in, stating to the realtor, “I like it, I do. I’m just really concerned about dying in the fire.”

In some cases, a single decision can be life-changing and set you on a new course entirely. When Caden ignores Madeline’s advances on the plane while reading a book Madeline authored, the book’s contents, which served as narration for the events presently unfolding, are suddenly emptied. A new path in life was offered to Caden, and he decided not to pursue it. An entire storyline ceases to be a potentiality. Sometimes an event that can appear at first to be nonconsequential can translate into a sequence of events that substantially changes the course of one’s life. Decisions open up new doors and simultaneously close others. Not all doors can be walked through. One must choose.

Caden had an almost singular focus, and it was what he told himself he wanted most. Things got away from him in the meantime. Two marriages and two distinct families escaped him. What happens when you never complete your life’s work? Caden’s ambition was to make something so true to life, yet he only knew how to make it once his life was fully complete. He had to live an entire life in order to reach it, but at that point it was too late. It was an ambition so great, that it was ultimately impossible. Were Caden’s ambitions ultimately futile?

We fade into existence, and we know that one day, perhaps abruptly, we will be ushered out of it by time itself. The film begins with a soft fade from black to grey and from grey to an opening shot of Caden’s alarm clock that quickly changes from 7:44 to 7:45. We see Caden lying in bed, and we notice the clock change from 7:45 to 7:46after mere seconds, just as Caden adjusts himself and closes his eyes. This choice of opening scene may seem inconsequential on first viewing, but it points to how life can seem to pass by in the blink of an eye. Indeed, “the end is built into the beginning.”

La Jatee is a 1962 film by Chris Marker composed almost entirely of still frames. Time and temporality feature heavily in this experimental film, where a man is sent through time to change the course of human history, and in doing so, he changes his own.

The film can be read through a deterministic lens. The fact that the man, as a child, witnesses his own death long before it happens could be read as an allusion to fate. The man had agency, or so he thought, yet since unknowingly witnessing his own death, all of the events of his life played out and still resulted in the same end, as if there was nothing that he could have done differently for things to play out and reach a different outcome.

Is it easier to move forward when you know you can’t go backward? No, not necessarily; sometimes, the past calls you home in a fit of nostalgia. In a separate read of the film, nostalgia ends up being the ruin of the main character. He desperately tries to reclaim a time that no longer belongs to him, and he dies shortly after reattaining it. In this way, his obsession leads him to his death.

Marker’s choice to use stills may have been a financial decision, however, this choice matches well with the film’s central theme of “time,” and separately, as a reference to the medium of filmmaking itself. “The moving image” is nothing more than a rapid sequence of still frames; the perceived continuity is created in our minds. The choice to use still images allows us to question whether the typical perception of filmic movement at 60 frames a second or faster is at all a representation of “reality” that corresponds to immediate human perception. The connection to time is made stronger through the idea that every photograph, in a sense, is a fragment of the past frozen in time.

Touki Bouki is a critically acclaimed 1973 Senegalese film by self-taught director Djibril Diop Mambéty made on a shoestring budget of $30,000. The film follows two disillusioned star-crossed lovers looking for fame, fortune, and respect — in short, they seek a “better” life full of “the finer things” and are willing to compromise communal moral standards to achieve it for themselves.

Mory and Anta are two romantic partners who plot a move from Dakar to Paris. After several schemes, Mory seduces and covertly robs a wealthy man under the guise of feigned romantic interest, and it appears that the duo’s dreams may finally come to fruition. In the end, their hopes are dashed by law enforcement’s efforts to track them down, with Mory fleeing before the police close in on the boat leaving from Dakar for Paris. Mory’s partner Anta is left aboard the ship to sail away without her love.

The film, experimental in narrative structure, is a cinematic poem. Mambéty employs jump cuts and deliberately discordant sound and music choices to convey some of the conceptual themes of the film. As one example, the film features a disorienting non-linear narrative structure, and its pace frequently changes as if to reflect how lived time can be experienced. Cattle feature prominently as a motif in the film, and their presence could be read as an allusion to the value of a life. The cattle, seen both slaughtered and as used for decorative ornament, could parallel the feelings of the isolated, wandering, marginalized lives of humans living in Dakar at the time. We see recurring images of a young cattle herder riding a calf, and the film's non-linear structure suggests that it could be a young Mory from years gone by.

As an adult, Mory rides a motorcycle with the bull skull fixed onto the handlebars. As a symbol of death, the skull could be interpreted as a reminder of the life that remains in the present. The parallel between cattle and people is further underscored by scenes of Mory being attacked intercut with scenes of goat slaughtering. During this scene, the skull is first removed from its handlebars, which may allude to Mory’s loss of agency. Later in the film, the skull is displaced from its home on the handlebars a second time. The second time it leaves its place, it lies broken to pieces on the ground. With the fragments held in his hands, a parallel is drawn again between Mory and the now-shattered bull skull when a stranger looks down at him and asks, “Recognize it? It was a handsome beast.”

After he leaves the ship, we see Mory in his new expensive clothes, yet as utterly defeated and disillusioned as he was before his and Anta’s dreams of Paris seemed like a future reality. Despite his new exterior in fancy clothes, Mory’s choices look as limited as they were from the start. The editing sequence, which jumps back and forth and circles around, reinforces the feeling that Mory’s life isn’t going anywhere. Together with Mory, we feel the brittle delicacy of a life held in suspension.

Brazil is a satirical absurdist black comedy written and directed by Terry Gillam and released in 1985. The film follows Sam Lowry, a lowly employee adrift in the overwhelming bureaucracy of “Central Services.” Set “sometime in the 20th century,” bureaucracy permeates society in Brazil. The government’s sole function seems to only be to propagate itself. The paperwork is as endless as it is seemingly unnecessary and mindless. The ministry’s administrative procedures are so convoluted that even their paperwork requires paperwork.

Sam seems only happy in his dreams. Sam finds his reality to be unappealing and a real escape from his circumstances seems to be a complete impossibility, so Sam settles to escape through defiant acts of imagination. In his dreams, Sam is a hero. Trapped yet content in a mind-numbing job in an ill-functioning society, Sam periodically whisks himself off to metaphysical escape, slipping into a more exciting existence in his imagination where he is a valiant winged warrior who must save a helpless “damsel in distress.” An administrative error leads Sam to the home of Ms. Buttle, an unlucky widow whose husband was the unfortunate target of a case of mistaken identity. In an absurd second case of mistaken identity, Sam projects his desires onto the widow’s neighbor, thinking he has finally met the woman of his dreams both literally and figuratively.

The illusion of choice is an undercurrent in the film. At dinner with his mother, her friend, and her friend’s daughter, the four order from the menu, however when the food arrives, it looks nothing like what is pictured on the menu — regardless of their order, guests are served similar mushy piles of pallid gruel. Regardless of whether choice is a possibility or a mere illusion, Sam rarely tests his fate. He is given many opportunities for heroic action in his real life, however, he only attempts to exercise his agency in the real world when he may benefit from doing so. Much like everyone else around him, Sam lacks empathy and his actions appear to be entirely self-serving. It isn’t until the well-being of someone he cares about is threatened that he chooses to act. Ultimately, his decision to act is in vain, as it leads to his arrest and a calamitous end for both him and Jill. Captured by the government and set for torture by his old coworker Jack, all seems lost for Sam until Archibald Tuttle, an anarchist and “terrorist” whose identity Archibald Buttle was mistaken for, along with a band of insurgents, comes to a surprising rescue. Sam escapes with Tuttle before the latter disappears quite literally under a massive pile of paperwork.

In the end, Sam and Jill are reunited and appear to finally escape the city together, but this too is only in Sam’s mind. As we see Jack and government official Mr. Helpmann enclose Sam’s view, it appears that Sam never left the torture room, which suggests that the events since we last saw him in the room were pure delusion. Completely detached from the reality of his dystopian situation, a giddy smile tells us Sam is happy.

Regardless of whether Sam’s escape with Jill is real or imagined, in a way, the outcome is the same for Sam. Sam seems happier in his permanent daydream than he was living in the real world. His actions in the real world have proven ineffectual, and it seems the only way he can find his solace from society is through unrelenting delusion.

Sam has finally made his long-desired escape to the exotic location of his dreams, but only in his dreams. Does it really make any difference to him whether this permanent vacation is real or a delusion if he genuinely believes it to be true? Perhaps this isn’t so unhappy of an ending after all.

Naked is a challenging, bleak 1993 film by director Mike Leigh and starring David Thewlis as Johnny. The film follows the misanthropic, misogynist “wide boy” Johnny and the unfortunate souls who cross his path over the course of a few days and nights. The film opens in a Manchester alley, with Johnny raping a woman in the dead of the night. Johnny promptly flees town in a stolen car and escapes to London with the hope of finding a hideaway at the flat of a former girlfriend, Louise.

The following day, after waiting on Louise’s stoop, Johnny is invited into the apartment by Sophie, one of her two roommates. The other roommate, Sandra, is currently out of the country with her boyfriend in Zimbabwe. Louise arrives home after work and finds Johnny in the apartment, and their interaction is tense. Later that night, Sophie and Johnny begin sleeping together, but Johnny Johnny soon tires of the new relationship and promptly begins to physically and emotionally abuse the vulnerable and emotionally dependent Sophie. Days later, after separate arguments with Louise and Sophie, Johnny leaves to again wander the night streets.

While reading aloud from the Bible outside a vacant office building, Johnny meets Brian, the lone security guard on duty. Brian eventually warms up to Johnny and lets him in. They soon fill the empty office building with their animated and meandering conversations saturated with their conflicting personal views on the nature of temporality and existence.

Seeing as the building is completely vacant, Brian has a lot of time to think and read while on duty. Similarly, Johnny, being unhoused and unemployed, also has much free time to read and think. After Johnny probes the issue of boredom with the present, Brian reveals himself to be future-oriented. After he insists that he thinks Brian is unsatisfied with the present, Johnny argues that the present “doesn’t exist,” as the present “now” is immediately and ceaselessly superseded the very instant it comes into being. Johnny then spouts a conspiracy theory that no one has a future as the world will be ending soon, as prophesied in the Bible. Brian, while exasperated, is unconvinced.

Johnny zooms out to evolutionary theory, stating that just as our evolutionary predecessors could have never imagined us, so too may we not be able to conceive of what will one day surpass us. If evolutionary progress has sharpened human intellect over time, then perhaps, given the opportunity, our successors will be far smarter than us, as we are far smarter than our evolutionary predecessors. The two have deeply conflicting perspectives, and Johnny colludes his diatribe by presenting Brian with the reasons he believes that God must be fundamentally malevolent in nature. It seems Johnny’s onslaught of caustic arguments, which at points have veered into nihilism, have finally proven capable of eroding Brian’s feeble defenses.

The following day, Brian finds Johnny on the street and they have breakfast together. Brian hands Johnny a picture of a cottage in Ireland that he hopes to live in someday in the future. Johnny dismisses Brian’s dreams, “Fuckin’ shit-hole, innit?” After a moment’s hesitation, Brian has the last word with the twice repeated utterance, “don’t waste your life,” which leaves Johnny, who is usually never at a loss for words, speechless.

This silence, however, is short-lived. Having learned nothing, a moment later, Johnny is right back to his typical behavior. On the street, Johnny meets a waitress and after following her home, Johnny is invited inside and hopes to stay the night. She eventually grows uncomfortable with his presence and throws him out. Johnny makes a show of his exit, “Well, it just goes to show ya. That no matter how many books you read, there are some things in this world that you never, ever, ever, ever, ever fucking understand.”

Johnny presents an interesting character study. Johnny has a warped, nihilistic worldview. Johnny hates humanity, has an even sharper hatred of women, and he seems to hate himself perhaps most of all. He is a misogynist whose outlook is filled with pessimism and anger. Johnny is hostile towards the idea of “work,” as evidenced by how he treats the topic of Louise’s and Brian’s separate careers with bitter contempt. The deep-seated insecurity and anguish that twist about at Johnny’s core do not mean that we should pity him. In spite of his wit and charm, Johnny’s actions are equally incorrigible and reprehensible, he never learns from his mistakes, and makes absolutely no effort to change.

Jeremy, as Louise, Sophie, and Sandra’s morally bankrupt, rapist landlord, is a character within the film that complicates viewers’ read of Johnny. Jeremy, who has absolutely no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, may lead some to believe Johnny “is not that bad” in comparison. Johnny harms society in the pursuit of his end goals (sex, shelter, money, etc.), while Jeremy harms society, and more specifically, the women he preys on, as his end goal. Jeremy is unreservedly malicious and possesses class privilege Johnny does not. After inflicting severe harm, Johnny can leave freely and without punishment. In contrast with Johnny, Jeremy’s brand of misogyny and chauvinism shows that the troubles that pervade the working class are no less present in the upper class.

Johnny is equated to Christ in at least one scene at the cafe waitress’s home, where he stands up and the ornamental rays from a clock behind him seem to light up his profile like a halo. And perhaps only in comparison to Jeremy, Johnny is a saint in the absolute loosest of terms. While Jeremy wants women to suffer, Johnny is unbothered by the suffering he inflicts but it isn’t the suffering of others that is his end goal. Johnny has many frustrations which seem to manifest in negative behaviors toward others. He shows compassion in rare instances, though it is difficult to determine the level of Johnny’s sincerity from moment to moment. For example, his kindness to Louise near the film’s end is questionable, as it seems that he either recants his position or has merely feigned compassion to gain Louise’s trust and render her more susceptible to his deception.

As the film ends with Johnny hobbling once again out into the London streets, we see that even after all that has transpired, Johnny is utterly unrepentant.

Even from a non-theistic perspective, life can be deemed valuable partly because it is neither infinite nor repeatable. It exists as a temporary treasure, gifted by chance and from origins unexplainable by human reason. Opening oneself to the totality of existence can mean acceptance of everything existence entails — the winds that push us triumphantly forward, as well as the insurmountable tides that we know will surely wash us under in time.

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, climate change, famine, natural disasters, pandemics, the negative externalities of global capitalism, what else? Progress on some of these issues is made very slowly over time, but during our lifetime, these ills and other sources of suffering are here to stay. Even if they did not, in time, other sources of suffering would surely arise in their stead. Perhaps we make things more difficult for ourselves when we choose to struggle against the existence of suffering instead of accepting it as an unavoidable part of being alive. We’re at the social gathering, and we won’t be leaving for a little while, perhaps we might as well try to enjoy it.

What can be gleaned from the work of Emile Cioran is that it is our choice to accept the world, which exists for no discernable purpose whatsoever. Cioran’s writing impels us to accept the world in all its sheer meaninglessness, rather than for the sake of whatever meaning it can give us; for to search endlessly for a rhyme and reason in a universe where no such order can be found is a futile endeavor. Perhaps a certain kind of calm comes from no longer fleeing what we are afraid of. Ironically, if we rest in it instead, we may find calm. Accepting the unwelcome yet genuine conditions of our existence, we still may find a path forward.

The days of our lives that pass in sorrow and heartache, along with the days of our highest jubilations, will in death collapse into a frozen “past” that will comprise the entirety of one’s existence. While we are still alive, existential anxiety can be both a source of discomfort and an animating force that can compel one to take action. If we choose to harness “the fertile restlessness of the Spirit,” not towards ends that hold no personal meaning (i.e., unreachable ends that depend on absolute value or universal meaning), but towards those endeavors which we find most personally meaningful, through our freedom and subjectivity we can create the purpose we lack. Austrian neurologist, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl points to human agency in the face of uncertainty: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In a world where manmade meaning exists, in a world where there exists a complete lack of reason or qualification for our existence beyond that which we make for ourselves, human suffering holds no more meaning than hope and happiness. It is fully within the realm of possibility to choose to live as fully and as deeply as life allows. Without external justification, we can still create the meaning we haven’t been given; the meaning of life becomes entirely ours to decide.

Not all nihilistic truths are purely destructive or negative. Gianni Vattimo is a contemporary philosopher who suggests that nihilism should not be understood as something we need to overcome and, rather, should be treated affirmatively. Some of Vattimo’s stance reminds us of Cioran: "In terms of action, it means the acceptance of futility must be seen not as a frustration of one's hopes and aspirations, but as a prized and defended vantage point for the athletic leap of consciousness into its own complexity." Recent and contemporary philosophers and theorists like Vattimo and Donna Haraway, under the umbrella of postmodernism, acknowledge the validity and simultaneous limitations of intersubjectivity.

Perspectivism, part of Nietzsche’s much earlier philosophical thought, holds that perception and knowledge are inextricably linked to individual interpretive perspectives. Accordingly, it follows that there is “...no transperspectival truth, no inherent nature of things or reality-itself to which our claims must be held responsible, and no means of rationally adjudicating among conflicting perspectives.” This means that a dominant or commonly-held perspective is not something that holds truth or validity in objective terms, but rather, it is simply a prevalent viewpoint: “One perspective may come to prevail over others for a time and to gain widespread acceptance as true, but only because it succeeds in dominating other perspectives as a more potent expression of the will to power.”

There are no knowledge claims that do not come from a particular viewpoint or perspective, which is to say that there is no knowledge that can be said to be completely neutral and ahistorical. Just like individuals in the world who are responsible for making knowledge claims, knowledge itself is always situated. Even “objective” data can only be understood through subjective interpretation. Though without objective certainty, we may feel like we fall through life with the same defenselessness of a raindrop, If objective certainty can never be ascertained beyond subjective measures, then it follows that its fulfillment too must be subjective.

With the loss of the belief in God, whose existence gave purported access to objectivity, came a loss of the foundation for all our notions of absolute truth and morality. The absence of metaphysical foundations, first theorized by Nietzsche, gives way to a “plurality of interpretations,” making it clear that there is no one dominant way of understanding the world:

“But no reality exists as such, no world of enduring facts or intelligible structures or essences to which perspectives can be related as more or less adequate representations. Only perspectives exist, and each human interpretation or claim to truth, no matter how familiar, obvious, or convincing it seems, is just one more perspective or expression of will (theorized by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Russell, and others as a blind impulse or energy that drives the world), ‘a means of becoming master of something’...The search for transperspectival criteria of truth or for ‘objective knowledge’ is doomed to failure, for it wrongly assumes that truth can be gained independently of particular perspectives or that there is a "world out there" to which perspectives are approximations.”

Following Nietzche, Vattimo offers his theory of “hermeneutical nihilism” as the only plausible philosophical outlook. Following the dissolution of modernity’s fable of history possessing a unified, coherent metanarrative, postmodernity offers no logical progression and no universally-shared sense of where we are heading. Hermeneutical nihilism suggests that there are no universal facts, and instead, there are only subjective interpretations that acknowledge something as fact within the narrow parameters of one’s cultural positionality. This is not to say that there are no constraints that may be understood as universal by various cultures, e.g., biological and temporal constraints like the inevitability of biological death for all living things, but instead to call into question claims of objective certainty in inherently subjective matters that lie beyond bio-temporal constraints.

The meaning that we create for ourselves is meaningless in the sense that it has no external validation; however, within the bounds of our own subjectivity, it can still hold personal meaning. What this meaning ultimately amounts to within one’s own subjectivity can only be determined by the person in question.

Human language is set apart from communication between others in the animal kingdom by the capacity for connotative meaning. If humanity is the prime source of complex meaning-making as far as we know, then perhaps the universe as we currently know it could only be thought of as meaningless without us. As the tree cannot bestow meaning upon itself, it is not up to the tree to offer its meaning to us. We identify, categorize, assign characteristics (size, color, weight), and assign meaning to the objects we perceive in the world. These distinctions come from us, they do not originate in the objects.

Following American scientist Carl Sagan, we are each an instantiation of the universe that has become conscious of itself. Still, we experience the world through a keyhole, as the world of our immediate perception is more than what our eyes allow us to see. People at one time thought the sun went around the Earth, and indeed from our perspective on Earth, it may appear that way. However, today we know that that is not the case. Things may appear to us to be one way so clearly from our perspective, yet not be that way in actuality.

We try to use the facilities of human reason to demystify the world as we perceive it, as if all can be known, yet more escapes us at a given moment than we may realize. Contemporary theories on the physical makeup of the universe suggest that approximately 85% of matter in the universe escapes human perception. This imperceptible substance, known as dark matter, together with dark energy, is currently purported by scientists to comprise the bulk of the universe, yet it remains entirely undetectable to our senses in everyday perception:

“In a sense, science has fallen through a rabbit hole, and the world in which we find ourselves is far more preposterous than any Carrollian adventure. We have been handed a Universe that is overwhelmingly dark to our eyes and our telescopes—one that is roughly three parts dark energy to one part dark matter, with only a pinch of the familiar sprinkled throughout the cosmos like a handful of glitter on a vast sea of dark felt.”

The presence of dark matter and dark energy is only one indication that the world is not how it appears to us by ordinary human perception alone, and yet connects meaningfully to that which we do perceive: “Just as we are not responsive to the broad bands of qualitatively similar electromagnetic waves that our eyes exclude or neglect in vision, so too are we unaware of the alternative categorizations, evaluations, and behavioral modes that our particular culture excludes or rejects.”

To an extent, we don’t observe the order we may perceive in the world, instead, we construct it through human reason and its subjective means of classification, inference, and deduction. In our perception of the world, we create relational categories of what we perceive, which are arbitrary. For example, humanity has carved up the salt water that covers 70.8% of the Earth’s surface into four oceans (or five, depending on who you ask), but the distinction between oceans could be otherwise. Who can say with authority where one ocean ends and the next begins? As a second example, the taxonomic groupings we create are contingent on human reason and, therefore, imperfect and subject to changes as new data is collected and new information is learned. People learn to categorize and interpret sensory information into pre-existing patterns specific to a culture and are only socially communicable within the limited constraints of linguistics.

We have agency over the creation of personal meaning, even while that personal meaning may be washed over and lost in collective meanings that exist outside of the individual person. Still, our perception is influenced by collective meanings and interpretations. The existence of learned categories of perceptional organization suggests that the process of perception is at least partially indirect. In contrast to phenomenal absolutism, theories of indirect or representational realism suggest that the world as we perceive it is the result of internal perceptual representations generated by conscious experience:

“the normal observer näively assumes that the world is exactly as he sees it. He accepts the evidence of perception is mediated by indirect reference systems. Implicitly, he assumes that the evidence of vision is directly, immediately, unmediatedly given. This attitude we here call phenomenal absolutism... Socially, one important aspect of phenomenal absolutism is the observer's assumption that all other observers perceive the situation as he does, and that if they respond differently it is because of some perverse willfulness rather than because they act on different perceptual content. ”

If my senses are imperfect and simultaneously the only way we can intake knowledge about the world, it stands to reason that our understanding of the whole is also limited. Our bodies are made of a collection of electrons and quarks, yet when I look down at my arm, I do not see a collection of electrons and quarks; I see “my arm.” My visual perception of my arm does not show me my arm as it is, when considering its compositional makeup. Instead, my visual perception shows me my arm as it appears to me. To have access to all of the information before us at once (i.e., to see the quarks) is not possible. My arm is an example of this fact, but this can be extrapolated to other entities within the world of our visual perception. If our bodies are made from the foundational building blocks of the organic compounds found on Earth, which to our present empirical knowledge cannot be broken down further, then perhaps after death we do continue in a very specific sense — our constitutive elements, those same electrons and quarks are released and reassembled to create countless other entities anew.

Everything that has been made, everything that will ever be made, all rises into being only to give into decay and disappear. Entities of our world flicker for a brief instant under the sun before disappearing forever. For the time that they exist, however, they may be a source of joy for us, or inspiration, or an outlet; they are something and possibly mean something to someone. After we die, apart from the memory of those who remain, we cease to be. But another part of us, the matter that constitutes our bodies, remains and is taken up and reconfigured into something new. The fundamental matter is not destroyed, it only changes:

“In one sense, of course, man is the only being through whom destruction can be brought about. A geological fold, or a storm, do not destroy anything — or, at least, they do not destroy directly; they merely alter the distribution of the mass of beings. After the storm there is no less than before. There is something else. And even this phrase is inappropriate, because in order to posit the disparity we need a witness, who can in some way retain the past and compare it to the present, in the form of a “no longer.” In the absence of that witness, there is being, both before and after the storm: that is all. And if a cyclone should bring about the death of some particular living beings, this death can only be destruction if it is lived as such. For there to be destruction, there must first be a relation of man to being, i.e., transcendence, and, within the limits of this relationship, man must apprehend a being as destructible.”

We have the capacity to assign meaning and greater significance to the process of change, recognizing it in the form of destruction, whereas there is nothing outside of ourselves that demands that it necessarily be conceptualized in that way. A cat who loses a litter will likely be undeterred to have another litter, whereas a woman who has a miscarriage may, in some cases, be too distraught to attempt to bear another child.

The day is coming when someone will think of you for the last time. Still, some things will persist. When I look up and see the moon, it is the same moon others thousands of years before me looked at. But I’m seeing it with different eyes. When I see a grove of trees, these may be the same sort of trees recent ancestors stood before and witnessed with their eyes. Of course this is true in the literal sense, but more importantly true in the figurative sense — the cultural climate that has conditioned the way I understand the world gives me access to view this same moon in a different way than others before me, and in the same vein, others after me. What that grove of trees represents to me, i.e., the particular associations I have of it, are likely different from past and future persons. I may think of the current climate crisis, I may think of the countless contemporary uses of trees as paper products or as inputs for the construction industry, etc.; associations that are not the same as people who lived thousands of years ago.

In his 1957 work Existentialism and Human Emotion, Sartre offers that “Life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning you choose.” Each passing moment, however, we perceive it, whether grand or mundane, is life. A plain, modest life has the same amount of dignity as one decorated with the highest honors, and both can be equally meaningful if viewed as such. It seems to me, while creating something that will outlive you is certainly possible, it too has an expiration date. It will crumble into the sea and be washed away someday, whether that is during your lifetime or sometime after. That’s not to say that it isn’t worth doing or pursuing, but knowing this may affect how you choose to prioritize what’s important and what’s not during the finite years of your life.

Existential nihilism offers one view of the world among many. Due to the lack of objective certainty for any given human perspective, the inherent ambiguity of our existence needn’t be falsely reduced exclusively to either end of the pole of naive optimism or unrelenting nihilism. The suggestion that life amounts to nothing more than alternating states of suffering and boredom is an exaggerated and reductive account. While it is certainly possible for a person to live a miserable life, it cannot be stated that all human lives across the board are miserable. Such examples of existential nihilism fall into the trappings of other views that collapse all instances of human life into a histrionic and dramatically overblown metanarrative. While one’s hand in life is partially out of one’s control (parts of one’s facticity and other factors of an inherently relational existence), there are plenty of decision points that can drastically change the course of one’s life at any point in time, as the character of future events can only exist in present speculation, rather than being ascertained prior to the events’ merging with the present.

Considered one of the greatest writers in human history, Leo Tolstoy was plagued by anhedonia and frequent thoughts of suicide toward the end of his life. Tolstoy found himself without any concrete answers to what haunted him most — the question of what meaning his life has if God does not exist, and death and inevitable erasure are certain. Tolstoy achieved far more than most in his life as a celebrated writer and has earned a prominent place in the canon of world literature. Despite artistic achievement of tremendous magnitude, he knew that all of his life’s works would eventually be buried in time:

“I could not attach a rational meaning to a single act in my entire life. The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That's what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid.”

Tolstoy found that rational knowledge and logic led him nowhere but a reconfirmation of the meaninglessness he feared. In a Kierkegaardian leap, he returned to faith late in life, taking up what he acknowledged to be the irrational as his only means of metaphysical salvation:

“Thus in addition to rational knowledge, which before had seemed to be the only knowledge, I was inevitably led to recognize a different type of knowledge, an irrational type, which all of humanity had: faith, which provides us with the possibility of living. As far as I was concerned, faith was as irrational as ever, but I could not fail to recognize that it alone provides humanity with an answer to the question of life, thus making it possible to live.”

It seems that, despite the question of whether faith is veridical, Tolstoy found his answer in it. Many of us are looking for something that we can believe in, and perhaps we adopt what we need to in order to find hope.

An indelible, everlasting mark is not possible. All legacies are inevitably erased with time, and thus, chasing an everlasting legacy is a fool’s errand. Still, the meaning we create during our lifetime is up to us to create, and its value is only ours to determine. We look out into the universe, and our gaze is unreturned. If the search for meaning is a human problem, then perhaps looking beyond ourselves for relief is a futile endeavor. If, like religion, values and meaning are fundamentally human creations, then it seems it is squarely on us to tend to the values and meaning we create. We are utterly insignificant when our lives are viewed on a cosmic scale; however, individual lives are not experienced at that scale. We can only know through our perspective, and like all things, our perspective is mutable.

“He who is greedy of credit and reputation after his death, doth not consider, that they themselves by whom he is remembered, shall soon after every one of them be dead; and they likewise that succeed those; until at last all memory, which hitherto by the succession of men admiring and soon after dying hath had its course, be quite extinct. But suppose that both they that shall remember thee, and thy memory with them should be immortal, what is that to thee?”

I can’t help but perceive it as a tragic occurrence — we’re born into this world and grow up with the assumption that our pursuits have significance, yet upon closer examination, it’s not entirely apparent to me that they do. I stop for a moment, and I think to myself “Death is freedom from worldly concerns and miseries.” These thoughts become too much, I step outside for a cigarette, and the nicotine washes away my dread.

The meaning that originates from others, while arbitrary in a sense, is nonetheless a real, constitutive element of the social realm that individuals are perpetually entangled within. The social world is replete with imposed limits to one’s agency — laws are enforceable, but social “rules” and norms aren’t binding unless you assent to following them (though there may be real social consequences if not followed). If I do not wish to follow the outdated social norm for a man to remove his hat indoors, nothing necessarily binds me to do so beyond my desire to not offend anyone. If I am aware of this social expectation but do not care about offending anyone in this way and I do not care about the social consequences of this action, there is nothing that can force me to comply. In this particular case, my choice is not dire, but things can become more complicated in cases where a choice must be made between two morally dubious options.

If humanity created God rather than the other ways around, then the moral dictums that are said to come from God find their origin instead in us. But how then did people decide on the particular sets of moral guidelines that comprise the foundation of all world religions? And if systems of morality originate in us rather than God, are they no less valid? If humanity itself is a wellspring of meaning untethered to God, perhaps we should look no further than ourselves to grant the validity of our own systems of morals?

Living in this social realm without an external objective moral compass may leave one bearing the brunt of moral ambiguity. The establishment of a personal system of ethics is lent import by the understanding that (1) if there is no divine order, then there are no binding, objectively correct and ascertainable rules and norms, and (2) that one’s actions invariably impact others. Despite this, if the social world we find ourselves a part of is simultaneously mostly contingent, i.e., if it “is what it is” yet could just as easily be otherwise, and if we indeed do have the agency to make choices yet those choices find their rational foundation purely through our inherently contingent subjectivity, then any imperative to commit moral action is called into question. This argument could also be stated as follows:

• if there is no objective basis for what is right and wrong, then any basis that is must be subjective.
• If any moral basis is subjective, that moral basis is then also arbitrary, if and only if what is arbitrary is defined as what is “subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion.”
• If any basis for moral action is subjective and therefore also arbitrary, then it stands that there is no imperative (i.e., there is no particular action one ought to do given any set of circumstances) for “morally just” action as determined by the individual.
• If there is no “morally just” action that one must do unconditionally, then it follows that there is nothing that necessitates “morally just” action beyond personal choice.

In this context, what one ought to do is conditional, i.e., dependent on particularized, circumstantial reasoning. For example, “If you want Y, then you ought to do Q.” If, however, you do not want Y, it follows that nothing necessitates that you do Q within this framework. Building on the work of Immanuel Kant, philosopher Philippa Foot argues in her 1972 essay Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives that the concept of “moral duty” not only has no absolute, binding authority but further that the fact that we may have any sense of strict moral obligation at all is pure illusion. I interpret Foot’s stance as ‘it is only in the case that you desire to be a moral person that you ought to act in a way that aligns with what you deem to be morally just given a particular set of circumstances.’ Put in more simple terms, there is no universal, binding mandate that we act morally, and the only reason to be a “good” person is that one wishes to be a good person.

“My argument is that they [who believe in the categorical imperative and the moral “ought”] are relying on an illusion, as if trying to give the moral "ought" a magic force. This conclusion may, as I said, appear dangerous and subversive of morality. We are apt to panic at the thought that we ourselves, or other people, might stop caring about the things we do care about, and we feel that the categorical imperative gives us some control over the situation. But it is interesting that the people of Leningrad were not similarly struck by the thought that only the contingent fact that other citizens shared their loyalty and devotion to the city stood between them and the Germans during the terrible years of the siege.”

There is a fear that nihilism leads to a breakdown of moral values, however this is not necessarily the case. Even in the case of pervasive nihilistic beliefs within a society, social disincentives for immoral action still exist. Even if moral values are deemed as lacking in objective justification and therefore baseless and arbitrary, social consequences for immoral or antisocial behavior remain. Social consequences, such as ostracization, act as cultural mechanisms that discourage immoral and antisocial behavior. As another limiting factor, laws and legal consequences would play a similar but more forceful role in the maintenance of a functional society. While some individuals may choose to engage in immoral and antisocial behavior, the fear of legal repercussions discourages many from acting upon such inclinations. Social and legal repercussions represent real consequences for any individual who chooses to cause harm or negatively impact public well-being, and these consequences exist regardless of whether or not they have no objective grounds. Even if their ultimate purpose of preventing harm is questioned, their immediate practical function remains intact.

Individuals may choose to respond to a lack of objective justification by creating a personal system of values or by engaging in ethical discourse with others to build a new framework for interpersonal moral beliefs. In other words, nihilism can present a starting point for moral and ethical theory, rather than an end.

Similar yet slightly different from Heidegger, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset suggested that if we can only be through the world, then our reality is constitutive of said relation to the world. If we can only exist as part of the world, then, for Ortega, it follows that we should care. As much as we are part of the world, the world is a part of us. Every single experience you’ve ever lived, every bit of knowledge, every ounce of meaning, could have only been given to you through your existence in the world. If we agree with Ortega’s assertion that we exist in union with that which surrounds us, then perhaps it follows that we should care as much about the world as we care about ourselves.

Everything that exists, exists in relation. Impermanence and death are among the operations of nature, and as such, cannot be avoided, whether biologically or symbolically. The startling diversity made possible through the temporal process of evolution as a natural condition of life is only possible through impermanence and death. Together with others, we have the joint inheritance of a common world, and our personal experiences of that world are shaped by this fact. In other words, one’s freedom isn’t exercised in a vacuum. We are neither context-free isolated individuals nor decision-less beings passively moving through time with the agency of a house plant. We exist in relation to beings that are not us, or we do not exist at all. Accordingly, we are not insulated from devastating misuses of freedom by others — the choice of another to drive while intoxicated, the choice of another to abuse children, the choice of another to use a firearm against innocent people, etc.

To have access to comprehensive knowledge, objective certainty, and an escape from the constraints of time and death would violate the natural limitations of human existence, which is a desire that cannot be realizable. There is not necessarily a problem with having hopes and desires that are unrealistic as long as one recognizes them as such. Desiring something that can never be can bring on despair when it inevitably goes unfulfilled.

As stated earlier, if objective certainty can never be ascertained beyond subjective measures, then its fulfillment too must be subjective. A world devoid of objective meaning and values is not the same as a world without any meaning or values. The existence of meaning and values is not contingent upon being validated by means beyond human reason. If it is true that humanity is capable of creating meaning and values and putting them into the world, then that meaning and value cannot be merely illusory — meanings and values exist.

It is precisely because we believe our pursuits to have meaning that they then do. Every action impacts the world that we are presently and inextricably embedded within and forever linked to within the context of time. You can believe that life is meaningless, but it is you alone who chooses to believe it, in spite of evidence to the contrary — every act of reflection, whether it is intended towards the question of the meaninglessness of existence or otherwise, smuggles meaning in along with it. If we cannot exist without creating meaning, it is incumbent upon us, humanity, to create the meaning we wish to have in the world.

There are countless examples of people creating works that others find great meaning in. Great fiction authors pen imaginative stories that wouldn’t exist otherwise. These are works that others find enjoyment in, or feel enlightened by, or derive humor from, or find value in, etc. This isn’t to say that the bleak reality of impermanence won’t take these works too in time, just as it will take their authors, but perhaps we should be grateful to have the opportunity and the privilege to be alive at a time to be able to experience them.

I feel a tinge of irony when I think about how much time I've spent thinking about life rather than being out experiencing it. But then I suppose that the moments sitting around thinking about life also constitutes genuine life experiences. On a rather unremarkable night with friends at an equally unremarkable restaurant, I had the oddly comforting thought, “This is life.” A thought that there’s nothing more than this; this is all it’ll ever be. Until death, I’ll be either with people or I’ll be alone somewhere in space and time. The feeling that, in a way, there’s really nothing more to seek, life will only ever be varying configurations of what’s already presently occurring — time spent alone and time spent with others at some particular location in space.

Nothing lasts, but still, we have the ethereal delight of immediate experience. If all life is a collection of present moments — present moments available to us now, present moments that have slipped away into the past, and present moments yet to come — then we’ve already reached our destination and we might as well try our best to enjoy it for what it is. The blank slate of existence allows us to build our own sandcastle, and we can make it as simple or as elaborate as we like.

This essay has followed a winding path from a loss of religious faith, to ambiguity and social constructions, to a sampling of historical Western philosophical thought on existence, to temporality, to an explication of these themes in the moving image, to aspects of the nature and limits of perception, finally to a reconsideration of existential nihilism, moral ambiguity, and relationality.

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you, like me, have confronted these same questions at some point in your life and are looking to find terms with them. With this work, I’ve tried to express my discomfort with what I see as the inherent uncertainty of existence, the continued search for personal meaning and purpose, and the desire for an answer that feels like it may suffice.

If nothing else, this writing represents the core of what I've learned about this subject up to this point in time. If you have your own thoughts and would like to share them and have a dialogue, please feel free to reach out to me at jamilfatti@gmail.com. Depending on when you’re reading this, I will likely have new thoughts to share with you as well, either as part of a continuation of this project, Plume, or more generally, as a part of life.

While I’ve shared some of my own views on this topic and tried to distill relevant points of various thinkers from the Western tradition, nothing beats reading their accounts for yourself, if there are particular accounts you think may be useful. Additionally, there is much relevant thought on this from the Eastern tradition and elsewhere, which I’m personally less familiar with at the moment, but is no less valid in depth, scope, and perspective. I encourage anyone troubled by existential nihilism to seek their own conclusions and, thereby, their own life’s meaning. What I’ve tried to make clear through my own thoughts in this essay is that creating meaning and finding purpose is possible; we do it every day. You have the capacity to create the personal meaning you wish to see in the world, and I’d encourage you to do so.

If this work has given you any solace, perhaps it will also give you something you can return to if doubt resurfaces.

Thank you.