Logical positivists thought of nonsense as a defect of language. Hence, they were dismissive of religious ideas by deeming them nonsense. However, we now realize that nonsense is a good thing, for the most part. Furthermore, nonsense is a more complex order of language that supervenes on ordinary language. Could nonsense language sometimes be better at expressing religious ideas than ordinary language is?
Certain familiar religious ideas plainly resemble types of nonsense we previously identified. For instance, according to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are one single being. How can one single entity be three distinct entities at the same time? In fact, the notion of the Trinity appears to satisfy our established definition of numerative nonsense.
The line between spiritual doctrine and spiritual practice can sometimes be hard to draw. In the medieval period, people sometimes contemplated the Trinity as a logico-spiritual exercise. They felt that pondering the Trinity gave them insight into the identity and nature of God. Pondering the numerical nonsense of the Trinity was then a spiritual practice for inducing transcendent consciousness. In that respect, then, the Trinity is comparable to glossolalia and koans. Accordingly, the method of studying transcendent consciousness described earlier in the chapter might also apply to the Trinity. We could then compare the various states of spiritual consciousness produced by glossolalia, koans, and contemplating the Trinity.
Nonsense is an illuminating metaphor for life itself. What is the meaning of life? Does life have a meaning at all? Is life itself, and the entire cosmos that houses it, meaningless nonsense? Big questions like those have fueled religious and philosophical debates for centuries.
In the aftermath of World War I, some brilliant European thinkers and writers took an extreme position on the big question of human existence. The absurdists, as they were known, maintained that the universe, together with everything in it, including human existence, is meaningless and nonsensical. Alfred Jarry, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, the best-known absurdists, wrote thought-provoking and entertaining literary nonsense. Their works resonated with millions of people who were traumatized by war and could therefore more easily accept that life might be meaningless and unintelligible. In the war, nonsense had intruded itself into people’s lives and somehow needed to be taken into account. As G. K. Chesterton put it:
If nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.59
Absurdism was a literary movement rather than a clearly articulated philosophical position. Absurdist ideas were too nebulous to be put together into a single coherent system of thought. Hence, like some other grand theories of everything, absurdism grew so large that it fell in under its own weight. Specifically, the following reasoning shows how that happened.
Absurdism is the doctrine that the universe, and its entire contents, including even human life itself, is meaningless and unintelligible. Now, absurdism is obviously something that exists in the universe. Therefore, absurdism itself is meaningless and unintelligible nonsense.
Furthermore, something can be meaningless and unintelligible only against a general background in which some other things are meaningful and intelligible. For instance, consider the sentence “There is a smomastrum of snanage dancing tender equations within the bionic stratosphere.” We can say with complete confidence that the sentence is deliberate, meaningless, unintelligible nonsense. However, we can say that only because we can contrast the sentence with so many other sentences that are meaningful and that do make sense. In other words, if there were no meaningful, intelligible things in the universe, then there could be no meaningless, unintelligible nonsense either. For unintelligible nonsense to exist, there must be some meaningful, intelligible thing with which to contrast it.
Absurdism went too far, therefore, in proclaiming that absolutely everything in the universe is nonsensical. Even so, nonsense is a compelling and persuasive metaphor for all of existence, and human life in particular. The universe we live in is so vast that we cannot clearly understand what size or shape it might be, or even whether it is finite in extension. And, like nonsense, many things in life are sometimes confusing. The perplexity we feel in struggling with life’s dilemmas is comparable to reading a work of deliberate nonsense.
In sum, nonsense is a primordial element of spiritual and religious thought, writing, experience, and practice. Hence, the sense of nonsense has a spiritual dimension in addition to a psychological dimension. Nonsense permeates the spiritual life, from abecedaries and other holy texts to consciousness-raising practices such as koans, glossolalia, and meditating on the Trinity. Plainly, unintelligible nonsense can sometimes be a more effective linguistic vehicle for spiritual thought than intelligible, literal language can.
Accordingly, although absurdism was an incoherent and self-defeating doctrine, it still propounded an insightful and provocative metaphor. Life itself, one might say, is a kind of nonsense tale.
[contents]
* * *
54. The Supreme Yoga, 87.
55. Émile Grillot de Givry, An Illustrated Anthology of Sorcery, Magic and Alchemy (Causeway Books, 1973), 109.
56. Ayer, “God-Talk Is Evidently Nonsense,” 144–145.
57. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 420–421.
58. Quoted in Jack Huberman, The Quotable Atheist (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2007), 20–21.
59. Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, 9.
Chapter 6
Nonsense and Knowledge
Nonsense is the end result of all sense.
Georges Bataille
Nonsense interacts dynamically with reason in the quest for knowledge. To talk about nonsense and rational knowledge in the same breath seems contrary to common sense, for reason and nonsense supposedly directly oppose each other. In this case, however, common sense is a vast oversimplification. And in reality, the concept of nonsense is as indispensable for rigorous rational inquiry as are the concepts of truth and falsehood. This chapter will present and support six statements about relationships between nonsense and knowledge. Together, they paint a more accurate, complex, interesting, and colorful picture of nonsense in the search for rational knowledge than common sense does.
Nonsense Is Neither True Nor False
Many people assume that nonsense is the same as falsehood or that nonsense is a particularly blatant and glaring form of falsehood. Hence, the statement that nonsense is neither true nor false may seem counterintuitive at first. Nonsense and falsehood move in separate planes of thought and analysis. Confusing them causes no immediate harmful effect on the mind. Down the line, however, confusing nonsense with falsehood severely compromises one’s ability to think cogently about some important questions of science, psychology, religion, and spirituality.