Gavin Ortlund Is Wrong About the Ache

There Are Options Beyond Existentialism and Christianity

Last week I finished Gavin Ortlund’s Why Christianity Makes Sense. I’ve seen a few reviews over the last couple weeks/months, and I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring, saying something different.

This isn’t going to be a full review. In many ways, this book is a cliche Christian apologetics (but I’m biased!). What makes this book unique is Ortlund’s twin themes of Ache and Enchantment. In this post, I’m going to talk about Ache because it’s philosophically fraught. Let’s get into why.

The Ache

Ortlund opens the book asking:

“Have you ever been struck by the beauty of nature and found yourself yearning for something you cannot quite put into words? Are you genuinely curious about what life means—why we’re here, and what it’s all for? Has beautiful music or a nostalgic memory ever drawn up a deep ache in your heart—an ache you don’t fully understand?”

Ortlund calls this feeling of longing “The Ache”:

“Think of the ache as a restless longing for something transcendent—yet we can’t quite pinpoint what we are longing for. The ache is hard to articulate, and it often comes and goes without our control. You might sense it while listening to music, or missing your loved one, or reflecting on what your life means. Sometimes it sneaks in for no apparent reason at all.”

For Ortlund, Christianity is the answer to the ache, as it explains not only the mysteries around us, but the longings within us (his phrase, not mine).

The existentialist may say we feel this ache because we’ve lost our existential grounding, while Ortlund believes this ache is a form of foreshadowing. The feelings of joy and happiness we feel in this life are pale imitations to the joy and happiness we will feel in God’s Kingdom, and these random feelings of ache are just a reminder of how inadequate this world is.

Not Every Nontheist Is An Existentialist

Ortlund’s argument about the ache hinges on his readings of existentialism and absurdism. Namely, he relies heavily on the assumption that existentialism and absurdism are exhaustive of all nontheistic philosophies of life, and that they are hopeless and depressing. He also depends heavily on people sharing his feelings of ache.

This is problematic. For one, the anxieties and problems of existentialism and absurdism really only persist if you make certain (erroneous) assumptions about meaning and purpose that not all nontheists share. I know I don’t.

In fact, I think existentialists are not great atheist (or nontheist) philosophers. That may sound nonsensical to some, but if you follow my reading of Thomas Nagel’s criticism of absurdism, it makes more sense. You can find this essay here.

Nagel points out that many arguments for the absurdity of life are inadequate. For instance, people often point to the briefness of life, or our smallness in the cosmological scale, as a reason to think life is absurd. The problem is that it’s not clear how our smallness or temporary existence implies absurdity or how being bigger or having greater longevity would make our lives not absurd.

Nagel also points out that an external justification doesn’t liberate something from something being absurd, saying:

“If nothing can justify unless it is justified in terms of something outside itself, which is also justified, then an infinite regress results, and no chain of justification can be complete. Moreover, if a finite chain of reasons cannot justify anything, what could be accomplished by an infinite chain, each link of which must be justified by something outside itself?”

Put in more concrete terms, if we need God to make life not absurd, what makes God’s role in the universe not absurd? For many people, putting God in the system fixes everything, but for others (such as myself) it just adds a layer of absurdity.

For Nagel, the fact that we view the world to be absurd is more of a problem internal to human beings than it is an actual feature of the world. It’s worth quoting him at length:

“One may try to escape the position by seeking broader ultimate concerns, from which it is impossible to step back-the idea being that absurdity results because what we take seriously is something small and insignificant and individual. Those seeking to supply their lives with meaning usually envision a role or function in something larger than themselves. They therefore seek fulfillment in service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advance of science, or religion and the glory of God.

But a role in some larger enterprise cannot confer significance unless that enterprise is itself significant. And its significance must come back to what we can understand, or it will not even appear to give us what we are seeking. If we learned that we were being raised to provide food for other creatures fond of human flesh, who planned to turn us into cutlets before we got too stringy-even if we learned that the human race had been developed by animal breeders precisely for this purpose-that would still not give our lives meaning, for two reasons. First, we would still be in the dark as to the significance of the lives of those other beings; second, although we might acknowledge that this culinary role would make our lives meaningful to them, it is not clear how it would make them meaningful to us.

Admittedly, the usual form of service to a higher being is different from this. One is supposed to behold and partake of the glory of God, for example, in a way in which chickens do not share in the glory of coq au vin. The same is true of service to a state, a movement, or a revolution. People can come to feel, when they are part of something bigger, that it is part of them too. They worry less about what is peculiar to themselves, but identify enough with the larger enterprise to find their role in it fulfilling.

However, any such larger purpose can be put in doubt in the same way that the aims of an individual life can be, and for the same reasons. It is as legitimate to find ultimate justification there as to find it earlier, among the details of individual life. But this does not alter the fact that justifications come to an end when we are content to have them end-when we do not find it necessary to look any further. If we can step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God,’ and put all these things into question in the same way. What seems to us to confer meaning, justification, significance, does so in virtue of the fact that we need no more reasons after a certain point.”

Nagel then disagrees with Camus’s answer to absurdity and the problem of suicide, saying that the absurdity of our lives need not be a point of distress or defiance, concluding:

“If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

I bring this up because the clear difference you see between existentialists/absurdists and other nontheists like Nagel is this desire for objective mattering. In a weird way, this existentialist response to the absurd is quasi-theistic, insisting on the necessity of this all-encompassing thing, meaning. But in other nontheistic philosophies, this response is rejected.

The key point here is that this line of argumentation won’t work on every nontheist. It’s kind of like arguing for Divine Command Theory in metaethics, by demonstrating all nontheistic moral realist theories are false, without addressing the nonrealist ones. It will be persuasive to the realists, but not the nonrealists.

A Non-Existentialist Response to Absurdity/“Meaninglessness”

Ortlund’s apologetics won’t speak to people like me because it conceptualizes existential problems much differently (and more erroneously) than I do. He comes to radically different conclusions, which you can read in the book. Let me briefly elaborate on my alternative explanation and solution to existential absurdity and meaninglessness.

It’s Evolution, Of Course

I think our desire for significance is different from our desire for immortality, but they come together to create similar beliefs.

As biological creatures hardwired by evolution, we don’t want to die. Similarly, humans are social creatures and we often project and anthropomorphize our desire to chase status onto the universe as a feature of the universe. And so, it’s not enough for us to live forever, but we want to matter forever as well.

If our ancestors didn’t have such a strongly-embedded inclination to chase significance (that is, social standing), they would probably fail to reproduce and pass on their genes. We probably had ancestors that didn’t care much for being significant, but they were taken out of the gene pool via sexual selection, as the people who did care about being significant won all the sexual partners.

We thus live with the legacy of a primate brain shaped to care about social standing/significance so much that we project that desire to the universe, beyond what is possible or reasonable.We then confusingly believe significance, of the lack there of, is a feature of the universe, just as Camus did.

We’re Mistaken

But these beliefs are mistaken. If we examine some of these desires, we find them flawed and incomplete. For instance, no one merely wants to live forever. We wouldn’t want to live forever but be hopelessly crippled or otherwise miserable. No one would want to be the king of the universe forever if it entailed being worshipped at every moment in an annoying way or everyone being overly inauthentic in your presence.

No, there are specific things that we individually desire, strive for, and hope to preserve, and that is the business of life. Part of the reason why philosophy and science can’t give us an adequate answers about the specifics of what a good or happy life entails is because everyone is different and has different individual desires.

To the extent that we want more of the goods of life, perhaps even infinitely more, it’s because we can imagine a world where those additional come with no costs, even when that’s impossible, or fundamentally changes the world around us, or severely undermines the conditions that create those goods in the first place.

Perhaps I’m coming at these existential questions in a quasi-Buddhist or Epicurean way, but my point is that a lot of our anxieties derive from not sufficiently reflecting on why we desire things as we do, wishing the world were completely different than it actually is, and not fully comprehending the consequences of the world changing to meet all of our desires.

Happiness, Not Significance

And so, once we reflect upon all these things, the nature of our desires change accordingly. Your expectations change, as do the things you desire. You stop doing things for the sake of significance, instead opting to do them for the happiness they create.

Over time, you come to find pleasurable moments every day, and it has nothing to do with who you are or how significant you are. The more you notice them, the more you care about them and try to bring them into being. You start to care about these feelings and moments more than you care about being significant!

As a result, you start to look at things like significance, status, meaning, and so on, as merely instrumental to your happiness, not the meaning of happiness in itself. You stop caring about how significant things are, and instead focus on whether it makes you happy.

Ritual Is The Way

Once your brain pivots from significance to happiness, your focus shifts to another question: How do we cultivate these moments of happiness? The answer is simple: Ritual. More specifically, if you want to be happy, you have to be aware of what regular patterns of behavior make you happy, or at the very least enable your happiness.

The people who experience existential crises are usually young people making transitions in their life (say, from high school to college, as it was for me) or have otherwise experienced a life changing event that upends these rituals (losing a job, getting divorced, a death of a loved one). There’s a reason why we stereotype people going through existential crises as either college kids or divorcees. Those are the people going through the most radical, rapid changes in life!

If you want to avoid existential crises and have enduring happiness in life, you have to work for it through your habits or rituals. And when (not if!) you’re knocked off kilter by adversity, you need to intentionally create new habits and rituals to keep you grounded.

Soon after beginning regular rituals you’ll coincidentally stop asking existential questions because you won’t find them as psychologically compelling.

Am I Dodging The Problem?

Critics may say that I have completely changed the subject, and am thus evading the problem. But remember: My position is that existential absurdity, commonly understood, is a flawed concept in the first place!

As a human with the capacity to have desires, expectations, and to reflect upon the world, I agree that feeling the pull of absurdism is inevitable. But, per Nagel, that need not be a bad thing. The absurdist problem is not the absurdity of the world, but our individual inability to come to peace with absurdity.

To “solve” absurdism, we don’t need to adopt God or religion or any particular idea, because ideas cannot solve the absurdity of the world. No, to “solve” absurdism, we must come to peace with the absurdity. We get there by coming to peace and acceptance with the life we live through the activities and rituals we participate in.

I Don’t Feel The Ache

All to say, the ache that Ortlund is describing is real, but he misunderstands what it is, where it comes from, and how to fix it. So did the existentialists.

The ache we feel comes from the absurdity of life, yes. But that doesn’t derive from God existing or not existing or a feature of the universe. Rather, it comes from humans not being properly attuned to reality and not being at peace with how our expectations will never align with reality.

We want to have our existentialist cake and eat it too. We want to experience all the goods of the world eternally, without enduring the negative costs that go into creating them, not realizing that that’s impossible.

And so, to answer Ortlund’s questions at the beginning of this essay and his book, we have the ache because we erroneously want more out of life than it gives us, as we misunderstand both how the world works and the true nature of our desires. The cure to the ache is not to establish significance by accepting any particular idea, but to bring happiness into our lives through ritual, habits, and activities.

I won’t pretend that any of this is obvious or intuitive, or that I’ve never struggled with existential angst, just as Ortlund has. But I don’t feel the ache anymore because I’ve long given up on solving the ache through exploring ideas, instead opting for strategies and rituals that immerse me in an activity, whether it be work, play, exercise, or writing.

As a result, Ortlund’s entire book falls flat for me, and it likely falls flat for many other well-adjusted nontheists. That’s probably a good thing though. All else being equal, I would prefer a world with adults living through fewer existential crises, rather than more.