The futility of being - what is this feeling? Why does it feel like the futility of being?

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

Definition

First of all, it is necessary to understand what the futility of being means. Everybody knows this standing. For example, a person works, works, works. At the end of the month, she gets a salary, and she diverges for two or three weeks. And suddenly it is covered with a feeling of senselessness of what is happening. He works on not the most beloved work, then receives money, and they do not compensate for all his mental and physical expenses. In this case, the person feels the emptiness that has dissatisfied 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, the person under consideration usually fixes a subjective feeling of life that is felt only by him.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre - a French existentialist philosopher, in general, calls a person "a vain passion", putting into this concept a little different, not a household meaning. This needs some explanation.

Friedrich Nietzsche has the idea that there is only one power inside the world - the Will to power. It makes a person develop, build up power. She also draws plants and trees to the sun. Sartre "screws" the idea of Nietzsche and puts the Will to power, which is in man (of course, the antiquity of Jean-Paul has its own terminology), the goal: the individual searches for God-likeness, he wants to become a god. We will not retell the entire fate of the individual 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 God will never replace him. And since a person can never become a god, all his passions and desires are in vain. According to Sartre, everyone can exclaim: "Uuuuuu, the damned futility of life!" And by the way, according to the existentialist, only despair is a genuine feeling, but happiness, on the contrary, is a phantom. We continue our journey through 20th century French philosophy. In turn, Albert Camus's reasoning about the meaninglessness of existence.

Albert Camus. The meaninglessness of being is born from man's striving for acquiring 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 a loss of meaning only because he is seeking the higher purpose of his being, and the world can not afford it. In other words, consciousness makes a split in the relationship between the world and the individual.

Really, 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 "futility of being"? Of course not, because he will be perfectly happy. The fear of death will be unknown to him. But only for such "happiness" will have to pay a high price: no accomplishments, no creativity, no books and films - nothing. Man lives only in physical needs. And now the question for connoisseurs: is it worth the "happiness" of our grief, our dissatisfaction, our futility of being?