" Will night never come ? "

Existence is absurd.

Do not tell me you have never thought about it. Before meeting Bob, you had already thought about despair, your more or less close die, and about the meaning of your presence on this earth, right ? Still, there few ways to busy oneself until the death come.

First of all, you are maybe one of these people who thinks existence is absurd, and only absurd. Nothing else. You may be one of these people who does not want to despair, because you will die one day or another. Your consciousness of the truth make you try to negate your existence by telling you that your life on earth is just an illusion and that you have got an immortal life waiting for you beyond. Then, you are one of these guys who live an ethical life. You are nauseated. So your quotidian is your values.

#Nietzsche would have say that you have drown your ethical despair into a religious life.

What’s the point of all of this ? At least, when you wake up, open your window, and see a huge grey and threatening cloud, you stay constructive and tells you that there is an explanation on everything and that, anyway, God is waiting for you. But does it mean that you really see the life, the existence, as it is, yourself as you are ?

#Nietzsche would have say so. Ethical people try to have an ethical life, to moralize everything, and to escape from their desires because to them, they are absurd anyway. But the truth is that morality is anti-nature. By the way, #Nietzsche write in his Morality as anti-nature that « spiritualization of sensuality is called love ». Therefore, humans try to moralize sensuality, which is the very true thing about being, calling it « love » and turning it into something ethical. But, if we continue on that way, we soon see that love does not really exist. It is just a moral invention of humans to forget the absurdity of their existence and convince them they are not beasts but overmen.

The ethical life through Didi and Gogo

In his play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett shows us the absurdity of existence. Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for another man (for 50 years now !), Godot, who will give a sense to their life and answer to their meaningless questions. But nothing happens. And they still stand there, waiting until the night, until the death, stuck in a lifetime that never ends.

Even if Beckett disproved this assumption, it is pretty easy to think that « Godot » could be « God » here and that Beckett would have wanted to show the absurdity of ethical existences like Didi and Gogo’s ones in his play, and the lack of self in such existences too.

But there is an other kind of despair in ethical lives. Instead of being positive waiting their life beyond, some people can be so obsessed by the idea that this world is not the real one that they stop living, they completely deny their actual existence, and fall into an awful despair that destroy their self. It can remind us of Mall (played by Marion Cotillard) in Inception that is obsessed by the idea that the world in which she lives in is not the true one that she choose to fall from a tower, and kill herself, in a total despair, not being herself anymore, to meet HER real world.

In The Gay Science, #Nietzsche write « Perhaps man will rise ever higher when he once ceases to flow out into god ». To him, the one who think that the « apparent world » (our world) is only a moral-optical illusion, and that the « true world » (God’s world) will save us is loosing is self. God is the enemy of life. The Church fight passion, but THIS is life. For instance, the only single moment when Vladimir and Estragon, still waiting for Godot, are happy, is when they sleep. While they are dreaming, they are alone with themselves and their illusions. They do not think (what leads every human being to the despair), they just live, without thinking about their death, about others, about anything.

Consequently, it seems that you deny your existence when you follow your faith. You are not yourself, you just live like moral tells you to live. So if we want to be ourselves, we have to do what we want. If we want to be happy, we have to follow our dreams, because the despair is the opposite of willing oneself to be the self that one truly is.  

#Nietzsche said in his Preface « We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge ».

Knowledge kills action. Only illusion leads you to act. So dreaming is the only way to escape from reality and to exist as you really are. If you want to know who you are, fall asleep, do not be ethical !

There is an other way to find your self : art. According to #Nietzsche, « the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent » (trying to understand anything and to know why you are on this earth, if your life have a meaning) is « the primal cause of evil », whereas the art is « the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness ». In a word, you have to follow your five wits to be happy and find your self. In fact, you have to follow your aesthetic side. An aesthetic person prefer to be nothing that the person he could be : it is sure he knows is self and knows why he exists, or at least does not care of dying and accept that the life is absurd, and live with it.

On the picture beside, #Godot is represented like Elvis Presley, a dancer, singer, who uses his body. Forgetting the spiritual side, Godot have finally come to save Vladimir and Estragon from their waiting of answers (actually it is a reference to Lucky in the play) ! Art is the answer. The essence of nature is to express with all the body.

But even if an aesthetic life can help you to know your self, it can also bring you despair like #Kierkegaard describe it. To #Nietzsche like #Schopenhauer, forgetting the higher values, being atheist obviously turn you to be a pessimist person that thinks existence is absurd anyway and that existence have no meaning. In fact, it leads you to nihilism.

In both of the situations (to be a believer or not), people try to escape their no-meaning life by waiting God or by enjoying little things of the life to forget their absurd lives, just like Amélie Poulain in Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain that loves to plunge her hand into the seed back or to skimming stones.

The aesthetic life through Kit and Holly

In the movie Badlands, Terrence Malick tells us the story of Kit and Holly, the new Bonnie and Clyde. They escape from their town to live their easy life just the two of us, killing some people on their way. Holly is a teenager with freckle, that does not notice that her boyfriend kill even her father. She just take care of the sun, the wind, around her. Kit is a dustman that does not want to be a dustman. He escape his previous life to be what he want and live with Holly. Bodies he shoot are nothing to him. It seems that he find the life absurd. At the end of the movie, he give away and let policemen take him. He know he will probably die (he will be sentenced to the electric chair), but he seems pretty happy at the end and proud of the attention people dare bring to him. He found himself and obviously does not care about what God could think about him.

« Estragon : Then it’ll be night.

Vladimir : And we can go. »