One of the greatest films of all time, The Seventh Seal, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1957, tells the story of a medieval knight travelling through a plague-ridden land. He encounters Death and resisting its call offers to play chess in exchange for more time – until he doesn’t lose, at least, he can continue on living. Finally standing face to face with his own mortality, he takes this opportunity to make one final attempt to find an answer to life’s greatest question.
What is the meaning of it all? And is there a God? But, of course, the answer that he is looking for has never been found.
The horror that our protagonist is describing is what the philosopher Albert Camus termed “the Absurd”. As Camus put it, (quote) In other words, we seek to lead a meaningful life, follow a reasonable path, and yet the world just doesn’t turn our way – our plans get constantly struck down by a life that does not care about our desires. This tension is the Absurd – one way to overcome it, is accepting religion, the belief that nonetheless all is part of an overarching meaningful plan, even if we can’t fully understand it.
To Camus, this means accepting an illusion – and in the film we see the evil that this illusion leads to, like people willing to mutilate their own bodies in repentance, thinking that the plague is a sign of God’s wrath, and a town dehumanising, torturing and finally executing a young girl, believing that the Black Death stemmed from the devil inside of her. Like our protagonist, a disillusioned knight who has fought in the crusades, his cynical squire is suspicious of how the priests use society’s fears to fuel their own power and influence over it: Rather than fall into the arms of the priests, the squire opts to accept the absurdity of life. As a young girl burns on the stake for sins that she couldn’t have possibly committed, he asks: According to Camus, this is the answer – accepting our helplessness and the emptiness of life, but with no despair.
Whoever manages to achieve this, he calls “the absurd hero”. Such a person would stop the never-ending conquest of a supposed capital-letter Meaning and simply enjoy their life amidst the absurdity. What they would do, is freely decide how to lead life and consequently craft their own little meaning.
But given the horrors of life and the supposed meaningless of it, how could we not succumb to despair? One answer is to look on life through the lens of humour. Or perhaps, we can look at life like an artist and cherish the moments of beauty so that they will encourage us in moments of terror.
And all the while, do our best to have fun. But what if Camus is wrong and our despair is mistaken? What if, nonetheless, there is a God or a meaning to be found?
According to Sören Kierkegaard, this question is a trap – reason will never take us to an answer, there’s always doubt and the possibility of error. Rather, he advises a leap of faith, a decision that there’s a God and we should live in accordance with his plan, or decide there’s no God and live in accordance with our own. On the end of the day, he says: (quote) Or as Ludwig Wittgenstein, deeply influenced by Kierkegaard’s philosophy would put it: So, when the final hour does strike, there is nothing to be learned, no great revelation but a simple end to life.
Once more, our protagonist turns to despair, but not his squire. And so it ends, with no mystery being solved, for there never was one. To end on another quote by Kierkegaard: We can only tread blindly.
We don’t know where we’re going and why. But while we’re on the way there, we better make the best out of our journey. Thanks for watching.
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