Beauty and Nihilism: Life as Art

Why a worthwhile life doesn’t need divinity

For thousands of years humans had the belief that all their efforts, labour and suffering served a divine eternal purpose. And suddenly during the enlightenment a rumour started to spread: “There is no God.” This atheistic rumour spread and spread and eventually Nietzsche made the final verdict: “God is dead.”

With the death of God a new philosophical problem arose. A problem which not only affected philosophy professors, but society as a whole. The nihilism problem. People who lost their faith began to adopt the belief that life was meaningless, the god who filled their life with hope left the stage leaving nothing behind but an empty space, a space too big for anything or anyone to fill. How could this gap possibly be filled?

A car can help you to quickly travel distances, it is made and bought for that utilitarian goal. In contrast art serves no purpose and yet we humans have created museums filled with it, investing billions of dollars in art. Apparently it doesn’t need to be of any utility for it to be worthwhile, its beauty alone justifies its existence.

It seems that art proves meaning isn’t a necessary condition for something to be worthwhile. In this way it shows us that just like art life doesn’t need to have meaning in order to be worthwhile too, its beauty alone justifies its existence.

We humans tend to crave a divine grand purpose, only then in the eyes of many can life truly be meaningful. However, can’t we reverse that principle? Isn’t a life that is completely meaningless and still lived passionately paradoxically the most meaningful? One where its worth isn’t dependent on some external divine being.

But what would be a life that justifies itself? Life contains suffering, that is a non-negotiable. The common intuition would then be to find something which makes suffering worth it. Should life be good enough to cover the costs of suffering, in order to get to some kind of break-even point?

I believe we should abandon this transactional view altogether.

Instead we should try to embrace life like an artist making a piece of art. More often than not the amount of joy the piece provided the artist with was smaller than the suffering it caused him. And still knowing that if he could choose to do it again, he would.

Perhaps there lies the answer. Signing up for it no matter the costs. No matter how much life may throws at you and how disproportionately it is out of balance with the pleasure it brings you, you still choose it. You still attempt to love it, to embrace it, to find beauty in everything it has to offer. Making life itself a form of art and even its highest expression.