Read Leonard Cohen and Philosophy for Free Online Page B

philosophical tradition of existentialism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the past two centuries.
    Waiting for the Miracle: Cohen and Camus on the Absurd
    What is existentialism? French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his work Existentialism Is a Humanism claimed that all the philosophers under this peculiar heading share the belief that “existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective” (p. 348). What this means is that philosophy, and our thinking about human existence, must be grounded in the lived experience of the individual human person and not in some abstract theory or system. This is not to say that existentialism opposes all attempts at systematically understanding the world (through natural science, for example) but rather that such methods of understanding reality are never complete and that they indeed often fail to address the most pressing concerns of human beings.
    Though existentialism dates back to the nineteenth century it rose to prominence during and after World War II. This period represents one of the great spiritual crises of human civilization, an era where the promise and hope of technology, science, and civilization were shattered in the unspeakable brutality and horror of genocide and war. Traditional ways of thinking about good and evil, man and God, were no longer possible following Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The old systems had failed.
    It’s in this dark period of history that Albert Camus wrote his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus , first published in 1942 . Camus, much like Sartre, wanted to develop a philosophy that could address the terror that so many people were feeling in their lives. He centered his essay on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, which tells the story of a man who defiesthe gods and frees human beings from the domain of death. This was to commit the greatest of all sins in Greek culture, that of hubris , of trying to be like the gods, so the deities of Mount Olympus devised a particularly horrendous punishment for Sisyphus which was to last all eternity: He was to roll an enormous boulder up a hill and just as he was about to reach the top, after much pain and sweat, the boulder would roll back to the bottom, forcing Sisyphus to descend the mountain and begin all over again.
    The reason why this punishment is so horrifying to us is because the gods effectively rob Sisyphus’s life of all meaning. His life becomes absurd, a bad joke, filled with strife and suffering from which there seems no escape. Camus, living through the horrors of the war, saw Sisyphus’s predicament as mirroring human existence. Human life, he wrote, is fundamentally absurd (pp. 5–6). All of our efforts throughout history to overcome this absurdity and to infuse our life with meaning by appealing to some transcendent, absolute Truth—whether through art, love, religion, philosophy, or science—have ultimately failed. The horrors of World War II represented for Camus the chilling realization that underneath the surface of human invention, advancement, and progress lay the unavoidable reality of the absurd, waiting to break forth in the form of suffering, alienation, and despair.
    Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” from the album The Future is an ironic echo of Camus’s insight that if we base our life on the hope of some transcendent reality, some higher power, system, or science that will somehow make sense of everything, we’re simply out of luck. It’s obvious that the narrator of “Waiting for the Miracle” might as well be waiting for Godot. There is no miracle, so you might as well stop waiting and get on with your life.
    Cohen is reminding us in this song of a real danger, the danger of missing the beauty and grace right in front of our noses because we have our heads in the clouds, worshipping idols of our own creation and thereby losing sight of the divine. If you obsess about perfection everything becomes