Sometimes, after conceding the existence of reality, one admits that this reality might be fundamentally absurd. It would be there, certainly, but without reason, without structure, without intrinsic intelligibility. The world would be a brute fact, an opaque given, and any search for meaning would be nothing but a human projection, a desperate attempt to impose order on what has none.

This position has a grave, almost heroic appearance. It gives the impression of lucid courage facing the silence of the world. But it rests on a major confusion and a profound metaphysical error: the absurd, taken in the strong sense, is indiscernible from nothingness.

Let us be clear. What is truly absurd—that is, devoid of all structure, all determination, all intelligibility—is not. It cannot be.

Why? Because to speak of something, whatever the minimal degree of discourse, already presupposes that this something is determined in one way or another. To say "X exists" implies that X is something rather than nothing, and therefore that it possesses at least a minimal ontological structure that distinguishes it from nothingness.

An absolutely absurd world would be a world without structure. A world without structure would be indistinguishable from nothingness. Yet nothingness is not a being. It is not even a "something." It does not exist.

Thus, to posit an absolutely absurd reality is to pretend to affirm the existence of what, by definition, cannot be distinguished from what is not. It is a contradiction disguised as an existential posture.

Nothingness does not exist (and this point is decisive)

Here we must clear up an extremely widespread confusion: nothingness is not a thing. It is not a strange, obscure, mysterious reality floating somewhere behind being. Nothingness is nothing other than an abstraction of the mind, a convenient conceptual tool for speaking of the total absence of beings.

To say "there is nothing" does not designate a special object called "nothing." It simply means: there is no object.

Nothingness has no properties. It has no structure. It does not act. It does not give itself. It cannot be the cause of anything.

Consequently, every reality that exists is, by the mere fact of existing, structured, determined, intelligible at least in principle. Even what we do not yet understand is not absurd: it is simply beyond our current understanding.

To say the world is absurd is still to give it meaning

Here is a decisive point, often missed.

To say that the world is absurd is not to remain silent. It is still to say something about the world.

Yet to say that something is absurd, one must implicitly compare it to a horizon of meaning. One can only qualify as absurd what disappoints an expectation of rationality. The absurd is never primary: it is always relative to a presupposed meaning.

To say "the world is absurd" actually means:

The world does not correspond to the meaning I expected from it.

But then a question immediately arises, and it is unavoidable: by virtue of what would this expectation of meaning be illegitimate?

Why would this expected meaning be an illusion, rather than the indication of a real order that surpasses us? Nothing allows us to decide in favor of the absurd without already supposing that the world should be something other than what it is—which is yet another way of imposing a norm on it.

One can perfectly reverse the perspective: what we call "absurd" may be nothing other than the order of reality as it is, an order that exceeds our categories, our desires, our simplifying schemes.

The absurd would then not be in the world, but in our refusal to admit that it is not immediately transparent to us.

Down to earth: why the absurd is impracticable

Let us take things simply.

First example: recognizing something. If I recognize a chair, a stone, a face, even confusedly, it is because what I perceive possesses a form, a stability, a minimal identity. Pure undifferentiated chaos would not even be recognizable as chaos. It would be nothing.

Second example: being wrong. I can only be wrong in relation to something that is determined. If everything were absolutely absurd, there would be neither error nor possible correction. Yet we constantly correct our errors. This presupposes a reality that does not vary according to our representations.

Third example: speaking. To say "the world is absurd" presupposes that words have meaning, that sentences refer to something, that the interlocutor can understand. In other words, it already presupposes an intelligible world. The statement destroys what it presupposes.

Fourth example: acting. Even one who proclaims the absurd gets up in the morning, avoids danger, seeks what seems preferable. He acts as if the world had a stable and knowable structure. The absurd is never lived; it is only proclaimed.

Realist philosophy therefore does not claim that the world is entirely understood, nor that it is simple, nor that it yields without resistance. It affirms something much more sober, but also much more solid:

What is, is not absurd, because the absurd is not.

There may be mystery. There may be opacity. There may be what is incomprehensible to us.

But there cannot be a reality absolutely devoid of reason without being itself disappearing.

At this stage, the demand becomes unavoidable: if reality is, and if it is not absurd, then it calls for reasons, causes, an intelligibility that cannot simply be denied without incoherence.

The question is no longer if reality has a reason. The question is now: what is the depth of this reason, and how far does it lead.

And it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid what follows.