Thomas Nagel. What is the thesis of Nagel's article The Absurd - Essay Example

He mostly takes the key concern on meaning of life. Thomas Nagel sets out that there are good grounds that make absurd to apply to lives. He viewed that our lives are absurd therefore meaningless that is absurdum. In his article, Nagel opens by stating four reasons for absurdum. The first reason he cites is that our being here will not be important for a very long time from now. He states nothing we do now will matter in million years to come. Thomas Nagel said that” by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.

” He goes on and says that everything we do now in a million times will be meaningless. (Joad, 1944). The second cite for absurdum is that he sees that we are very small as compared to the entire universe. Thomas says that the whole universe is infinite large as compared to our lives, therefore our lives are absurd for now. . (Jaspers, 1969).  In ordinary life, life itself is absurd; Nagel puts that “when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed” in addition, Thomas Nagel continues to consider what count good ground for his thesis.

He claims we try to check one that has aspiration and reality. Nagel went ahead and gave an example, to demonstrate this being knighted just as trousers fall down. He went ahead and said that for most of time we live our lives as if they are not absurd, as if there is no nothing that brings changes between our aspiration and reality that makes our live absurd. Nagel had certain perspective in mind that we look at our lives from a stand, which is not involving. In this stand, we can step back and find the whole system of critics and justifications, which controls our supports and our claims to rationality which rests upon our habits therefore we should know how to disagree without circularity.

Generally Nagel claims that absurd is striking sort of thing in our lives. The most interesting aspects of his article are the problem that Nagel connects problem of the meaning of life to other problems of epistemological of radical skeptics’. Actually, he claims that such skeptic come in when there is use of disengaged standpoint. Thomas Nagel says that both cases someone wills recognizes the justification made which cannot be justified without the threat of circularity. Thomas Nagel claims, “In both cases the final, philosophical doubt is not contrasted with any unchallenged certainties, though it is arrived at by extrapolation from examples of doubt within the system of evidence or