The Rebellion Against the Absurdity of Life.
Most existentialists regard life as an absurdity that carries pessimism in itself. Life, as they believe, is inherently contradictory and thus disharmonious. The dualism between soul and body, subjectivity and objectivity, human nature and human desire, and reason and moods, give birth to unavoidable clashing that human specie is incapable to accord. We therefore feel helpless as individuals in this world. Anxious, fearful, despairing, humans are condemned to be free in choosing among sadness.
The solution existentialists propose is accepting, embracing, and enjoying such struggle. To live is to struggle in this infinite suffering. To live well is to enjoy such masochistic abuse which humans are condemned to take. Living is a pessimistic becoming where hope and happiness are alms that nature spares. Freedom is thus lost, autonomy becomes an illusion. Since the moment humans are born, we are restricted in the spatial and temporal frames that nature imposes on us.
But to accept the absurdity of life is itself a contradiction. To accept is to first acknowledge a thing's existence and then to assimilate such thing into the subject, whether in consciousness or unconsciousness. Therefore, to accept the absurdity of life is to incorporate the contradictions into ourselves. However such action is not taken by the individual willingly but rather forcefully, for humans are not masochistic by nature. In consciousness we struggle to abandon disharmony; in unconsciousness we are troubled by the indistinct rattling of conflicts. The absorption of life's contradictions is thus incomplete and unsuccessful. Accepting the absurdity of life is an impossible task for humans to accomplish.
Moreover, the means and the end of such action are contradictory. We accept the absurdity of life with a purpose, hoping to reconcile the conflict within ourselves in order to transcend our sufferings into happiness. But the absurdity of life does not allow the clashing to harmonize. It forbids the gap between our existence and the content we are trying to assure to be filled. Therefore, to accept the absurdity of life becomes an action that is to be done for itself. Such necessity requires too much of discipline in human nature that it becomes a form of oppression we impose on ourselves. Accepting the absurdity of life instead creates more separation within the subject and only leads to the absurdity of accepting absurdity.
We have to recognize, living is not digging into our own existence but seeking a way out of our subjectivity. Humans as individuals are nothing, as Sartre believes. It is among our relations with the others and with the human specie that we obtain our essence. It is through transcending our individual facticity we become ourselves; it is through envisioning the infinite our finiteness is opened to we become free in constructing our essence. Therefore, to accept the absurdity of life confines humans to their facticity and limit our becoming, which is our essence.
The infinite within our finiteness can only be achieved through imagination, because the infinite requires a vision that cannot be perceived with our perception of the present. To imagine is to construct a hopeful future which we will ourselves to be. But such constructed imagery should never be concrete or we walk astray on our paths of achieving it, and it should never be invented without a firm foundation of our internal truth or it becomes an useless fantasy. Imagination should be rightly employed with our intention of saying no to the absurdity of life, and it should be guided by the hopeful attitude alone.