The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first book I read at Stanford. At first, I thought it was just some old epic stories featuring a struggling hero, but it turned out to be much more than that. I find it inspiring in helping me think about human existence, and especially, how we should seek a meaningful life.
Gilgamesh
What I am going to do is to talk about the idea of absurdity, which is a core idea in Satre’s existentialism, through the lens of Gilgamesh. I will go through Gilgemesh’s existential crisis and use that to analyze absurdity from a philosophical perspective. I will argue against the notion that absurdity necessarily brings despair. Instead, I will argue that absurdity is essentially a human condition and we can, and should be optimistic about the meaninglessness of our lives.
To begin with, here is Gilgamesh, whose story I believe you are all familiar with. He was the king of Uruk. He was two-thirds god and one-third human. Like most ancient heroes, he was strong, powerful, good-looking, the best of the best among his people. Yet he experienced a sense of anguish about his life. At the beginning of the story, he said:
“ I have not established my name stamped on bricks as my destiny decreed; therefore I will go to the country where the cedar is felled. I will set up my name in the place where the names of famous men are written, and where no man’s name is written yet I will wise a monument to the gods.”
I think what’s happening here is that Gilgamesh realizes the emptiness of his life, and he is eager to create meaning for his life. And the way to do this, for him, is to accomplish something great, to leave a name for himself.
Things changed when his lifelong friend, Enkidu, dies. Gilgamesh was devastated, and for some reason, he started to contemplate his own life. So suddenly Gilgamesh went from weeping for his friend to agonizing over his own mortality. He said:
“How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead. Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the Faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.”
I think there is something very interesting going on here. I will argue that the death of Enkidu is the revealing moment at which Gilgamesh realized the absurdity of his life.
To move on, I will first define what absurdity is. To borrow from philosopher Thomas Nagel, absurdity is the “Collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” You can see there are two elements of absurdity here. First, as humans, we always value something. In other words, we consider something as more important to others, and we choose to do some things instead of others. At the same time, we are also gifted with the capacity to step back and think about our decisions and life. And when we do that, we always realize that what we care about may not have any inherent meanings at all, or as Sartre says, we are always free to do anything. In the case of Gilgamesh, he takes his life very seriously, and he also takes his relationship with Enkidu very seriously. He believes he can do anything with his life, and he depends the meaning of his life on the legacy he can leave. Yet the death of Enkidu touches on that, it makes him realize how ridiculous his meaning for life is in the face of mortality. And I think it is very common among us humans, and naturally, Gilgamesh chooses to seek immortality and become a god.
However, I will argue against Gilgamesh here. I will argue that immortality does not eliminate absurdity, and I will also try to convince Gilgamesh that absurdity is essentially a human condition. It seems to me that the only way to justify the claim that immortality can make a life not absurd is to argue that absurdity comes from the limitation of our life span. And we see from Thomas’ Negal’s argument that absurdity can arise at anything, whenever we doubt something that we choose over our life. From this observation, it seems that a life that is absurd over a normal lifespan would not be less absurd should it be extended to eternality, instead, it will become infinitely absurd.
Just as we think the absurdity as an unavoidable issue, we can also consider it as an essentially human condition. Thomas Nagel points out that the reason we can experience absurdity is that we can step back and view our lives from without. A computer may not necessarily be able to experience absurdity, nor can an ice-cream or tree. The point I am trying to make here is that absurdity is a necessary part of our consciousness, without which we wouldn’t even be humans. At the same time, I would argue that absurdity is compatible with a good life. What do I mean by this? I want to make the case that just as we do not know a lot of things but can still believe we have a decent amount of knowledge, we can also question the meaning of our life while embracing this life.
On the other side, absurdity also brings us opportunities to create our own values instead of adhering to bad faith. This is where I am going to bring in Sartre. Sartre believes that we are condemned to be free, that is, we exist before we are ever defined by anything. I think the freedom that Sartre envisions is key to the problem of absurdity. It challenges us to utilize our human faculty of doubt and reflection over our lives and to go from there to seek for a life well-lived that is individual to us.
As Satre put it “Existentialism is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself. also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realization, that man can realize himself as truly human.”
In the case of Gilgamesh, I imagine Satre will well say to Gilgamesh that he need not worry about the fact that he will not live forever, but he should understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams. expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, aborted hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively.” He should be in possession over his life, and that makes him who he is.
Back to our hero Gilgamesh. As he embarked on the quest for immortality, he went through some absurd things. He went through all the difficulties and make it to the island of God, yet he failed the test of not sleeping for six days. He finally got the secret plant that can rejuvenate the old, but he lost it to a serpent while he was washing in the river. This part of the stories is filled with irony, and I suspect it must have made Gilgamesh realize something about his own existence.
After Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, he was neither sad nor self-defeated. Instead, the first thing he did was to show Urshanabi the city of Uruk, as if he was showing the proud work of his. I think this is the moment where Gilgamesh embraces the absurdity of his life. He accepts the fact that he will not be god and thus immortal, and he chooses to use his action to define himself. We do not know what Gilgamesh did exactly after he returned to Uruk, but from how people celebrate his legacy we know that he turned from a despot to a really good king that cares for the people. In this sense, the absurd journey that Gilgamesh took in search of immortality gave Gilgamesh an answer.
To conclude, I will use Siduri’s wise words to Gilgamesh, which I think pretty much summarizes Sartre’s message to us:
“Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”