The futility of being - what is this feeling? Why is there a sense of the futility of being?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:42

Despite the high style of the phrase "futility of being", it means a simple thing, namely the phenomenon when a person feels the meaninglessness of everything that happens. He has a feeling of aimlessness of the existence of the world and himself. Our article will be devoted to the analysis of this state of the human spirit. We hope it will be informative for the reader.

Definition

First of all, you need to understand what the futility of being means. Everyone knows this standing. For example, a person works, works, works. At the end of the month he receives a salary, and it diverges in two or three weeks. And suddenly he is overcome by a sense of the meaninglessness of what is happening. He works at a job that is not the most beloved, then he receives money, but they do not compensate for all his mental and physical costs. In this case, a person feels the emptiness that dissatisfaction has made in his life. And he thinks: "The futility of being!" He means that here, in this very place, his life has lost all meaning. In other words, consideredwith the phrase, a person usually fixes a subjective, felt only by him, loss of the meaning of life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre, a French existentialist philosopher, in general, calls a person a “vain passion”, putting into this concept a slightly different, non-everyday meaning. This needs some explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche has an idea that inside everything in the world there is only one force - the Will to Power. It makes a person develop, increase power. She also pulls plants and trees to the sun. Sartre “twists” Nietzsche’s idea and puts the Will in power in a person (of course, the old Jean-Paul has his own terminology), the goal: the individual seeks god-likeness, he wants to become a god. We will not retell the whole fate of the personality in the anthropology of the French thinker, but the point is that the achievement of the ideal pursued by the subject is impossible for various reasons.

Therefore, a person can only want to move up, but he can never replace God with himself. And since a person can never become a god, then all his passions and aspirations are in vain. According to Sartre, every person can exclaim: "Oooo, the damned futility of being!" And by the way, according to the existentialist, only despair is a true feeling, but happiness, on the contrary, is a phantom. We continue our journey through French philosophy of the 20th century. Next in line is Albert Camus' reasoning about the meaninglessness of existence.

Albert Camus. The meaninglessness of being is born from the desire of a person to gain a higher meaning

Unlike his colleague and friend Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus does not believe that the world is meaningless in itself. The philosopher believes that a person feels the loss of meaning only because he seeks the highest purpose of his being, and the world cannot provide him with such. In other words, consciousness splits the relationship between the world and the individual.

Indeed, imagine that a person has no consciousness. He, like animals, is completely subject to the laws of nature. He is a full-fledged child of naturalness. Will he be visited by a feeling that can be conditionally called the term “the futility of being”? Of course not, because he will be perfectly happy. He will have no fear of death. But only for such “happiness” you will have to pay a high price: no accomplishments, no creativity, no books and films - nothing. Man lives only by physical needs. And now a question for the connoisseurs: is such “happiness” worth our grief, our dissatisfaction, our futility of being?