DE Weekly: Nagel, Irony, & the Backward Step
Below is an archived email originally sent on May 18, 2026.
Nagel, Irony, & the Backward Step
“Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate: they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?”
This is the opening paragraph of Thomas Nagel’s 1971 essay “The Absurd.” Nagel is an American philosopher and University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. Among many other things, his body of work explores the philosophy of mind.
His most interesting ideas, I think, concern the topics of consciousness and subjective experience, but I’ll have to save that for another time. For now, let’s stick with his understanding of the absurd.
You’ll recall that Albert Camus, one of the foremost thinkers of the idea of the absurd, stated that absurdity stemmed from the conflict between human beings and the universe; i.e., human beings seek meaning in life and the universe offers none. This, he said, is absurd.
In his essay “The Absurd,” Nagel argues that the “absurdity of life,” as coined by the Existentialists, does in fact exist, but that it stems not from the aforementioned external conflict; rather, absurdity stems from an internal conflict.
The internal conflict Nagel describes is one between the extreme seriousness we live with, and the ability to take a “backward step” and view our lives from a detached, universal perspective.
Nagel’s suggestion is an interesting one. In my reading of him, he appears to agree that absurdity exists, and that it carries with it the same implications Camus thought it did.
However, when it comes to what he thinks should be our response to it, he veers completely from what Camus believed should be our response.
Nagel writes in another essay of his that we tend to take an objective view of our lives that “demolishes” the subjective truths we hold about those lives. At the end of the day, he argues, this is why “we find it difficult to take our lives seriously.” That this is the case is something he calls a “genuine problem we cannot ignore.”
Up to this point Nagel and Camus are in agreement: the human condition is absurd, and that is a problem. So, where does each philosopher take us next?
As I have written about so extensively and so many times in the past, Camus’s famous response to the absurd is revolt.
Only a heroic, defiant revolt against the meaninglessness of the universe, fueled by human passion and scorn for a world that offers us no meaning can help us make sense of everything.
Nagel calls Camus’s rebellious attitude “overly romantic,” even “self-pitying.” According to Nagel, we would be better off simply accepting the human condition with irony and humor.
Why does he believe this? It’s mostly due to our cosmic insignificance. If what each of us do as individuals means so little in the grand scheme of things, well… that’s actually a little funny. And it’s funny we take things so seriously.
Nagel explains his view at the beginning of “The Absurd” thusly:
“It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter.”
You can see why Nagel advocates for a healthy sense of humor upon realization of the absurd.
For him, life is absurd because we all have doubts about meaning and the way we live our lives, but we all ignore them on some level. Then, we go on to live our lives with an undiminished seriousness and try never to consider those doubts (as reasonable as they might be).
Even if we admit that nothing we do will necessarily matter in a million years, we carry on the pursuit of our trivial goals anyway.
Nagel does not necessarily say that the answer is to adopt an attitude of irony toward everything in life, especially things you truly consider to be important. Rather, he simply argues that the concept of our seriousness in life is quite humorous.
“At the risk of falling into romanticism by a different route,” Nagel writes, “I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”
For him, the internal conflict––the collision between subjective meaning and objective triviality––is not a tragedy. That the world offers us no universal meaning is not a bad thing.
It is simply just part and parcel of the human condition itself. Thus, we should choose not to despair upon realizing so. Instead, we should appreciate the irony in it.
After all, perhaps our sense of “absurdity” in any case is simply our way of perceiving our situation as humans.
To this possibility, Nagel says we should have no reason, then, to resent or escape our human condition. “It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so,” he says.
“Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.” –– Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd”
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Nagel’s essay “The Absurd” is available for free on the University of Kentucky’s Department of Philosophy website. It’s not too long, and it’s interesting. Give it a go!
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