This Jewish philosopher knows our politics are absurd — and why that’s a good thing

In 1970, Jewish philosopher Thomas Nagel authored ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” which could help readers navigate an upside-down world. Photo by LOU BENOIST/AFP via Getty Images

Robert Zaretsky March 11, 2026

Should we survive the next three years, the odds are good we will look back on Donald Trump’s second presidency as the “Years of Living Absurdly.”  This, at least, is the view of media outlets, ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times to The Daily Beast and The Guardian, on the dizzying variety of the president’s words and actions.

But there is the politically absurd and, well, the philosophically absurd. For the latter, a good place to start is with the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who was born to German-Jewish refugees living in prewar Belgrade who then immigrated to the United States after the war’s end. Perhaps understandably, Nagel had an ironic take on the word.

In 1970, this professor of philosophy at New York University, perhaps best known for his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published “The Absurd,” an essay which could be thought of as  “What Is It Like to Be in an Absurd World?” In a dozen sharp and snappy pages, Nagel makes the case — unusual for most professional philosophers who treat the “absurd” with either skepticism or scorn — that “absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”

Of course, when we hear the word “absurd,” some of us tend to think of Albert Camus. That we do so is not at all absurd. After all, when he was still an unknown 20-something, he declared that “the feeling of absurdity can strike us in the face at any street corner.” In other words, at one point or another in most of our lives, we have reason to look to the skies and ask what the reason is to our lives — and fail to receive an answer.

“The absurd is born,” Camus writes, “from this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

The young Camus eventually found the reason in rebelling against this absurd condition, finding meaning not beyond, but in this world. Yet Nagel did not fall for this youthful and heroic response. “It seems to me,” he drily observes, “romantic and slightly self-pitying.” But he nevertheless acknowledged that Camus was on to something essential and enduring. It is simply that our absurdity “warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.”

Though I fell hard for Camus, I wonder if Nagel is on to something important. He suggests that we think of the absurd as a form of epistemological skepticism. By this, he means our unbreakable habit of taking the world, and everything which constitutes it, for granted. We cannot help but do so even though we can always provide excellent philosophical reasons for not doing so. You know the familiar variations on this tune. For example, how do I know that what I unthinkingly take for reality is not a dream (or nightmare)? Or, for that matter, how do I know what I unconsciously take for my embodied or physical self is not simply an electrical impulse sent to a brain floating in a vat? And so on.

Despite these skeptical doubts that reason cannot satisfactorily answer, I nevertheless experience the table where I am now sitting as very real and not a dream. And I live my life as if “I” am the white-haired figure I see in the mirror, one who also enjoys life. Nagel quotes a famous line by the Scottish skeptic, David Hume: “Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices…I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and I am merry with friends.” As for the skeptical speculations, they are filed away for another day of philosophizing.

To think absurdly, Nagel suggests, is not unlike to think skeptically. It happens when we question not the reality of the world, but instead the seriousness with which we treat it. While I might well insist on the very real possibility that life is meaningless — a position I underscore in my existentialism class with all the gravitas an aging academic can muster — I confess that, phony that I am, I do take my life very seriously. And, moreover, this is what I wish my students would do.

When we step away, if only mentally and momentarily, from the world we take so seriously, Nagel believes we win something important — namely, the ability “to appreciate the cosmic unimportance” of our situation. By “transcending ourselves in thought,” we adopt a view from above — an ironic perspective — that provides the critical distance necessary to take our lives less seriously.

We can and must, as Camus argues, rebel against an unjust and unraveling world. The situation in which we find ourselves as a nation — one at the mercy of a merciless and monstrous ego — is existentially important.  But is it not, from a certain perspective, also absurdly unimportant? This is the gift of ironic distance; by “making us spectators of our own lives,” we can smile at the spectacle in which we all have roles.

But irony, if I understand Nagel rightly, is also a burden. Our late-night comics are masters at slicing the men and women who run our country down to size, but here is the rub: While we are busy delighting in the deflation of these oversized egos, we are also delighting in the inflation of our own. We take comfort in our superior smarts and morals, but as we all discover sooner or later, this comfort proves as lasting as a May fly.

As the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has suggested, true irony, or at least the irony practiced by Plato in his dialogues, is meant not only to knock the fools in power down a peg or two, but also those who are busy laughing — e.g., you and me. In an age which pits one half of the country against the other, no lesson — one that teaches modesty and humility — seems more vital.