Art as an Answer to the Absurd

Why do we assume the “meaning of life” must be expressed in words?

In graduate school, I came across the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surrealist filmmaker who makes some of the most bizarre and fascinating films I have encountered. The first film I watched by Jodorowsky was El Topo. Judging just by its opening scenes, one might assume Jodorowsky was setting up a classic Western-style hero’s journey. The film opens with our hero, played by Jodorowsky himself, and a young boy riding through the desert on a horse. The pair stop and our hero tells the young boy to bury his favorite toy and a picture of his mother in the sand. Immediately following this scene, the narrator tells the story of a mole (which is what “El Topo” means in Spanish) who tunnels through the Earth hoping to finally reach the surface and see the sun, only to be blinded by the sun when he finally emerges. Finally, the plot proper begins with the main character, now alone, vowing to find the four most skilled gunslingers of the desert and defeat them in battle. Although they are symbolic rather than literal, these introductory scenes are not challenging to interpret. They depict the universal story of the hero who must leave behind their childhood, and go through several trials to reach some kind of precious treasure or transcendent truth. As the film continues we find explicit symbols from various spiritual and religious traditions reinforcing this archetypical hero’s journey toward ultimate truth. That being said, although this symbolism continues throughout the entirety of the film, as the plot progresses, holding onto this idea of a linear hero’s journey toward a final truth becomes increasingly impossible. Even in the first half of the film, where the story of our hero fighting the four gunslingers remains somewhat intact, we find the film plunging away from this archetypical journey into seemingly absurd scenes of sensual surrealist abundance that elude any meaningful interpretation. As the film progresses further these interims of sensory, surrealist chaos begin to take over the plot itself until the linear narrative of the plot becomes almost unrecognizable from what it was at the beginning of the film.

One way to interpret the film's descent away from linear structure and into symbolic pandemonium is by taking a nihilistic or Absurdist interpretation of the film. One could suggest that Jodorowsky is emphasizing the inevitable breakdown of our neat, linear narratives and structures of meaning into the meaningless chaos of immediate sensuous existence; a sensuous existence that has no ultimate meaning except what we attach to it. It is this asymmetry between our most narratives and the silence of the universe that French philosopher Albert Camus referred to as the “Absurd.” Camus writes, "Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Camus was well aware that we needed stories and structures of meaning to get through life. Every time we get out of bed, whether we are aware of it or not, we are making use of a narrative to orient our day. When we get out of bed there are a nearly infinite set of possible actions. However, most of us pretty consistently choose from a small subset of these possibilities based on what stories about our lives we take to be meaningful and worth engaging in. Whether the story is one about the value of starting a family, making a lot of money, or finding a job where we contribute to society, the story we are telling ourselves allows us to delimit these possibilities in a way where we follow a relatively consistent path of action each day.

Thus, even though our goal may not be truth, in a certain sense we are all playing out our own personal hero’s journey. Absurdism emphasizes that even though we cannot help but organize our lives through a meaningful story if we stop to ask what the universal “right” story or meaning of life is, no Cosmic Judge will answer our plea for certainty. Of course, may have faith in a particular religion or philosophy but Camus thinks there is no universally valid way of determining which of these many cultural and religious stories is the right one.  And again, this is one way we could interpret El Topo. One might think that Jodorowsky is taking the culturally universal story of the hero’s search for ultimate truth and contrasting it with the absurdity and meaninglessness of bare sensual experience. 

Although such a reading works at an intellectual level it didn’t sit well with me because it did not line up with the experience of watching the film unfold.. Even though I couldn’t piece together the steps of this journey at a conceptual level, at an emotional and intuitive level it felt like the feelings and connotations the images of the film evoked carried me through a classic narrative story that brought this spiritual search to a resolution. To take this experience seriously, we need to ask the question: how might we understand plunging into the concrete immediacy of sensuous experience to be this resolution of the search for truth rather than a negation of it? When it comes to the more mundane stories we use to make meaning, this move of plunging our abstract story into the concreteness of immediate experience is something we want to do. For example, if we are cooking a meal, we cannot just keep telling ourselves that we will cook the meal, we must allow that story to embed itself in concrete reality. We must engage with the vegetables in our refrigerator and the stove within the context of that story and actually produce a meal. This is true of getting a degree, running a marathon, or getting a job. In these mundane stories, our explicit aim is to act in a way such that we encourage this story to sink into the concrete sensuous experience of our lives. 

We humans though do not just stick to these stories of personal goals or accomplishments, we can abstract from more personal stories and tell ourselves stories of more universal significance. For example, one day a skilled cook might wonder if there is more to life than just cooking tasty meals. In this way, they abstract from the immediate context of cooking and question the purpose of the wider context in which their cooking exists. Maybe they decide to cook for the poor at a soup kitchen. Now they have added a sense of meaning and purpose to their immediate experience. The vegetables they are cooking with now are not only imbued with the meaning of a tasty meal but also the meaning of service and charity. The Absurdist or nihilistic philosopher is concerned that as we keep abstracting out to look for the most universal context of meaning that all experience should partake in, we find no answer from the universe and thus conclude that there is no ultimate “meaning” or purpose to life. Works of art like El Topo, however, ask us to reconsider whether the proper means of arriving at this universal truth is to continue abstracting and look for some meaning or purpose outside of the immediate flow of sensuous experience. With the practical and mundane stories we use to orient our lives, we always aim towards a return to immanent reality; aspiring to imbue the story so seamlessly into our everyday experience that the objects we engage with reflect back the meaning of our story to us. One way to interpret El Topo is that it is asking us why we should consider the search for ultimate philosophical or spiritual truth to be any different. Maybe the most universal sense of meaning and purpose we can discover is something that shows up within and through the flow of immediate sensory experience, just like the vegetables and cooking knives reflect back the purpose of cooking a meal back to the cook. 

El Topo is a great example of such a work of art because it illustrates this dance between the abstract and the concrete so explicitly. However, we could look at art more generally as embodying at least one side of this dialectic; as producing a nonconceptual, concrete sensory experience that feels like the answer to the question of the meaning of life, even if we can’t quite put our conceptual finger on what that answer is. Music is a great example of this. I am sure many of us have felt renewed at the discovery of a new artist, album, or song because that work seems to embody something universally meaningful about the nature of human experience in a way that allows us to experience that meaning in an almost physical way, not just contemplate it or think about it. Whether it be through a work of music, a painting, or the vista from a mountaintop, Insofar as we have experienced sensuous phenomena expressing something universal about the human experience, we have experienced a concrete answer to the Absurdist or nihilist problem: for we have had some experience of ultimate meaning embodied in the concrete stuff of our immediate experience. Nietzsche likely had something similar in mind when, after noticing the error of his philosophical predecessors in searching for the meaning of life in higher and higher abstractions, he looked instead to the concrete experience engendered by the aesthetic writing, "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." 

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.