Despite the high style of the phrase “the futility of being”, it means a simple thing, namely the phenomenon when a person feels the meaninglessness of everything that happens. He has a sense of the 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, one must 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 for two or three weeks. And suddenly a sense of the meaninglessness of what is happening covers him. He does not work at his favorite job, then he receives money, and they do not compensate for all his mental and physical expenses. In this case, a person feels a void, which has done dissatisfaction 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, with the considered phrase, a person usually fixes the subjective, felt only by him, loss of the meaning of life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre - the existential French philosopher, in general, calls a person "futile passion", putting a slightly different, non-everyday meaning into this concept. This needs some clarification.
Friedrich Nietzsche has the idea that inside everything in the world there is only one power - the Will to power. It makes a person develop, build up power. She draws plants and trees to the sun. Sartre “completes” Nietzsche’s idea and puts Will to power in a person (of course, 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 individual in the anthropology of the French thinker, but the point is that achieving the ideal pursued by the subject is impossible for various reasons.
Therefore, a person may only want to move up, but he will never be replaced by God. And since a person can never become a god, then all his passions and aspirations are in vain. According to Sartre, everyone can exclaim: “Oooo, damn futility of being!” And by the way, according to the existentialist, only despair is a genuine feeling, but happiness, on the contrary, is a phantom. We continue the journey through French philosophy of the 20th century. Next in line is the argument of Albert Camus about the meaninglessness of existence.
Albert Camus. The meaninglessness of being is born from a person’s desire to acquire 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 this. 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 subordinate to the laws of nature. He is a full-fledged child of naturalness. Will it be visited by a sensation, which can conditionally be called the term "futility of being"? Of course not, because he will be completely happy. He will not be aware of the fear of death. But only for such “happiness” you have to pay a high price: no achievements, no creativity, no books and films - nothing. Man lives only on physical needs. And now a question for experts: is such “happiness” worth our grief, our dissatisfaction, our futility of being?