Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘absurdity’ functions not as a peripheral literary curiosity but as a structural concept that marks the boundary between meaning and its negation. The term’s most sustained philosophical elaboration appears in Yalom’s engagement with Camus, who deployed ‘absurd’ to designate the constitutive condition of a meaning-seeking creature stranded in an indifferent cosmos — a position that forced secular therapeutics to construct meaning rather than receive it. Merleau-Ponty radicalizes this further by demonstrating that absurdity and absolute self-evidence are phenomenologically indistinguishable, each arising from the same demand for total consciousness that simultaneously generates and dissolves significance. Jung’s Red Book stages absurdity as the liminal membrane through which meaning must perpetually pass: meaning is a ‘transition from absurdity to absurdity,’ rendering the two terms not opposites but reciprocal moments of a single psychological rhythm. Simondon introduces a structural distinction between the ‘empty absurd’ — a state of informational nullity produced by aesthetic withdrawal — and a more ontologically charged ‘mysterious absurd.’ Freud, operating from an entirely different register, treats absurdity as a deliberate artifact of the dream-work, a product of unconscious craft rather than existential condition. Across these voices, absurdity remains entangled with questions of meaning-construction, the limits of rationalism, and the psyche’s encounter with groundlessness.
So meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning.
Jung proposes that meaning and absurdity are not opposites but mutually constitutive moments in a continuous psychological oscillation, each dissolving into the other.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
The experience of absurdity and that of absolute self-evidence are mutually implicatory, and even indistinguishable. The world appears absurd, only if a demand for absolute consciousness ceaselessly dissociates from each other the meanings with which it swarms.
Merleau-Ponty argues that absurdity is not an independent existential fact but the reciprocal shadow of the demand for total self-transparency, making it phenomenologically equivalent to its apparent opposite.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
Camus used the word ‘absurd’ to refer to the human being’s basic position in the world—the plight of a transcendent, meaning-seeking being who must live in a world that has no meaning.
Yalom synthesizes Camus’s foundational definition of absurdity as the structural mismatch between human meaning-hunger and a cosmos that supplies no grounding answer, framing it as the central existential-therapeutic challenge.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
feeling like that of the empty absurd (which we seek to distinguish from the mysterious absurd) precisely corresponds to this state of a return to nothingness in which each reactivity or recurrence is abolished by an absolute inactivity and absence of information.
Simondon differentiates the ‘empty absurd’ — a depressive informational nullity — from a qualitatively distinct ‘mysterious absurd,’ grounding the distinction in the dynamics of individuation and aesthetic withdrawal.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
I have to catch the dream-work in the very act of intentionally fabricating a surdity for which there was absolutely no occasion in the material.
Freud proposes that absurdity in dreams is not accidental but a deliberate construction of the dream-work, serving as a vehicle for repressed critical or ironic content.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
What ridiculous nonsense, Socrates now remarks, for a person to do the bad, knowing it is bad, and that he ought not to do it, because he was overcome by good.
Nussbaum traces Socrates’ use of absurdity as a logical reductio — a demonstration that akratic action, once subjected to hedonistic premises, collapses into self-defeating incoherence.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Misfortune follows upon misfortune, and again and again they are interpreted as necessary, proceeding from sound causes, reasonable, and worthy of the best of all possible worlds—which is obviously absurd.
Auerbach identifies Voltaire’s technique of rendering absurdity visible through the ironic gap between catastrophic events and their rational justification, using comedy to expose the incoherence of theodicy.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
TWINSHIP AS MYSTERY AND ABSURDITY
Turner positions absurdity alongside mystery as a category through which ritual process confronts social contradiction, indicating that liminal rites deliberately invoke the irrational to dissolve and reconstitute structural oppositions.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Thus the same absurdity has followed from the true account as well.
Sorabji employs absurdity in a strictly logical sense — as a formal reductio ad absurdum within Stoic and Galenic debates on the relation between physiological blending and psychological qualities.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000aside
But the most absurd cause of his errors is the war between the senses and the reason.
Pascal designates the conflict between sense and reason as the deepest source of human epistemic absurdity, situating it within his anthropology of fallen nature and the self-deceiving structures of the human condition.
, Pensées, 1670aside