Contemporary discontent of Man

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD
"The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God" by Eugene Rose - An Essay

... The world has by no means passed out of the age of absurdity [...] , but rather into a more advanced — though temporarily quieter — stage of the same disease ... in its shadow men stand paralyzed, between the extremes of an external power and an internal powerlessness equally without precedent. ... The whole world, it almost seems, is divided into those who lead meaningless, futile lives without being aware of it, and those who, being aware of it, are driven to madness ...

... The present age is, in a profound sense, an age of absurdity. Poets and dramatists, painters and sculptors proclaim and depict the world as a disjointed chaos, and man as a dehumanized fragment of that chaos. Politics, whether of the right, the left, or the center, can no longer be viewed as anything but an expedient whereby universal disorder is given, for the moment, a faint semblance of order; pacifists and militant crusaders are united in an absurd faith in the feeble powers of man to remedy an intolerable situation by means which can only make it worse. Philosophers and other supposedly responsible men in governmental, academic, and ecclesiastical circles, when they do not retreat behind the impersonal and irresponsible facade of specialization or bureaucracy, usually do no more than rationalize the incoherent state of contemporary man and his world, and counsel a futile “commitment” to a discredited humanist optimism, to a hopeless stoicism, to blind experimentation and irrationalism, or to “commitment” itself, a suicidal faith in “faith.”

But art, politics, and philosophy today are only reflections of life, and if they have become absurd it is because, in large measure, life has become so....

.... Nietzsche, in the Will to Power, comments very succinctly on the meaning of nihilism:

What does nihilism mean? — That the highest values are losing their value. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question: “Why?”

Everything, in short, has become questionable. ... [C]ertainty and faith that once held society and the world and man himself together, are now gone, and the questions for which men once had learned to find the answers in God, now have — for most men — no answers.....