Editing Absurdism (section)

=== Internal and external ===
An important disagreement within the academic literature about the nature of absurdism and the absurd focuses specifically on whether the components responsible for the conflict are internal or external.<ref name="Gordon1984"/><ref name="Nagel2012"/><ref name="Pölzler2014"/><ref name="Fox2019">{{cite journal |last1=Fox |first1=Jacob |title=Absurd Relations |journal=Human Affairs |date=2019 |volume=29 |issue=4 |pages=387–394 |doi=10.1515/humaff-2019-0033 |s2cid=204963858 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/FOXAR|doi-access=free }}</ref> According to the traditional position, the absurd has both internal and external components: it is due to the discrepancy between man's internal desire to lead a [[Meaning of life|meaningful life]] and the external meaninglessness of the world. In this view, humans have, among their desires, some transcendent aspirations that seek a higher form of meaning in life. The absurd arises since these aspirations are ignored by the world, which is indifferent to our "need for validation of the importance of our concerns."<ref name="Gordon1984"/><ref name="Pölzler2014"/> This implies that the absurd "is not in man ... nor in the world, but in their presence together. " This position has been rejected by some later theorists, who hold that the absurd is purely internal because it "derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves".<ref name="Gordon1984"/><ref name="Nagel2012"/><ref name="Fox2019"/><ref name="Belliotti2019Introduction"/>

The distinction is important since, on the latter view, the absurd is built into human nature and would prevail no matter what the world was like. So, it is not just that absurdism is true in the actual world. Instead, any [[possible world]], even one that was designed by a divine god and guided by them according to their higher purpose, would still be equally absurd to man. In this sense, absurdity is the product of the power of our [[consciousness]] to take a step back from whatever it is considering and reflect on the reason of its object. When this process is applied to the world as a whole including God, it is bound to fail its search for a reason or an explanation, no matter what the world is like.<ref name="Gordon1984"/><ref name="Nagel2012"/><ref name="Hamer2020"/> In this sense, absurdity arises from the conflict between features of ourselves: "our capacity to recognize the arbitrariness of our ultimate concerns and our simultaneous incapacity to relinquish our commitment to them".<ref name="Fox2019"/> This view has the side-effect that the absurd depends on the fact that the affected person recognizes it. For example, people who fail to apprehend the arbitrariness or the conflict would not be affected.<ref name="Gordon1984"/><ref name="Nagel2012"/><ref name="Hamer2020"/>