Alienation and Absurdity

"One of the essential aspects of every good mood is a sense of identification with something outside oneself, whether it be delight in meeting and establishing a rapport with someone, or delight in personal achievement (i.e. we have intervened in the world and world responded as we intended it to) or finally, delight in some kind of work or action.  Things seem to have a perceivable meaning and thus we seem to be in a kind of harmony with the world.  If I include feelings of alienation and absurdity among my bad moods, it's chiefly because this sense of identification is lacking in them.  Indeed the impression that I'm deeply alienated from what goes on around me, that I don't understand its logic and meaning, the belief that it will remain, probably forever, distant, alien, and incompatible with everything I think and feel - this is neither pleasant nor uplifting.  On the contrary, it is chilling and sometimes even terrifying....Still, I don't necessarily consider it a thoroughly negative mood.

     First of all, the sensation of absurdity is never - at least not as I understand it - the expression of a loss of faith in the meaning of life.  Quite the opposite: only someone whose very being thirsts after meaning, for whom 'meaning' is an integral dimension of his own existence, can experience the absence of meaning as something painful, or more precisely, can perceive it at all.  In its tormenting absence, meaning may have a more urgent presence than when it is simply taken for granted, no questions asked - somewhat in the way someone who is sick may better understand what it means to be well than one who is healthy.  I believe that genuine absence of meaning and genuine unbelief manifest themselves differently; as indifference, apathy, resignation and the decline of existence to the vegetative level.  In other words: the experience of absurdity is inseparable from the experience of meaning; it is merely, in a manner of speaking, its 'obverse,' just as meaningfulness is the 'reverse' of absurdity.  Absurdity, therefore, cannot be thought of as something a priori negative or even reprehensible.

     Moreover, I would even say that on some levels, the experience of absurdity may seem to move things forward.  In  many cases, it is precisely this sensation of distance and alienation from the world, of having abandoned the conventional stereotypes of experience on which the superficial and mystified meaning of the world is based, that opens the door to genuinely fresh, sharp, and penetrating vision - vision that particularizes; and this particularizing vision is precisely what can put us face-to-face with truth and therefore - through its 'capacity for doubt' - can uncover as well the real weight that 'meaning' has.  (Some may have wondered - to return to myself - at the apparent contradiction between my 'absurd' writing and my 'idealism' in other things; perhaps this explanation will be illuminating.)

     My...mood, however unpleasant, has yet another (rather practical) positive side: by creating a gap between me and my surroundings, it protects me in a sense.  When I observe my surroundings in this way, I am less superficially vulnerable than someone who is fully 'involved,' caught up in the turbulence of random events and his immediate response to them.  In short, I am less submerged, and so can manage to keep my head above water, which enables me to see better and - perhaps - to bear witness more effectively."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga