Navigating Existence #2: True World Theories

In my first armchair philosophy post, I touched on a key aspect of existentialist philosophy - what Albert Camus referred to as absurdity: the irreconcilable difference between the burning human desire to find meaning in the universe and the lack of meaning to be found.

Different philosophers talk about this same idea in a bunch of different ways, but interestingly, again and again, we see this being discussed in terms of anxiety, nausea, dizziness, despair.

This recognises that, confronting this essential reality is not a comfortable thing to do. In fact, it’s intensely uncomfortable, sometimes bleak, sometimes lonely experience. Jean-Paul Sartre, acknowledging this, said that we were “condemned to be free”, while Kierkegaard spoke of “the dizziness of freedom” bringing about an anxious state. 

Human beings, Sartre said, don't like feeling like this, and they seek to avoid it in all sorts of ways, including by seeking to impose meaning on the universe through some system of belief they use to rationalise existence.

Which brings me neatly on to Nietzsche’s idea of True World Theories and the subject of this post.

Some decades prior to Sartre, Nietzsche too had noticed that human tendency to seek out meaning in order to alleviate the discomfort of confronting the void. He noticed too that we often do this through belief systems. He noticed that a number of these belief systems – whether religious, political, or whatever – had similar profiles and he named them “True World Theories”.

The characteristics of such theories include that:

·       They are structured around an “ascetic ideal” i.e. an idea that there are two realms, the world that we live in, and the “true” world (whether this is a heaven to come hereafter, or perhaps a political utopia)

·       The true world is more valuable than our world. The true world is full of truth, happiness etc. while the real world is full of suffering and death

·       The true world is viewed by the believer as the world in which the self belongs, and not the real world. The real world thus becomes superfluous.

Nietzsche concluded that, in the end, the true world believer “places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting.”

And somehow, I find that bleaker than any unflinching, existentialist confrontation of a meaningless universe. Because the truth is, we can impose meaning on our own lives. We can celebrate this existence, however short it might be. 

I spent ages looking for a picture to accompany this post. Pictures of voids, chasms, great dark night skies. But then I saw this one, and I thought, Yes. This is it. Confronting it all. The terror, the beauty, the vastness of the universe. The smallness of Me. 


Soon: Simone de Beauvoir on finding meaning