Absurdism and its relation to faith in Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot"

Ponomareva Anastasiia Lecturer, Department of General Education and Humanitarian Disciplines, Voronezh Industrial College of Humanities named after Vasily Mikhailovich Peskov 394063, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, Revolution Ave., 20 As-ponomareva@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

It is well known that philosophical existentialism is divided into two currents: religious, represented by Marcel, Jaspers, Lev Shestov, and atheistic, to which researchers include Sartre, Camus, and partly Heidegger. This tradition originates from Jean-Paul Sartre, who claimed that he did not believe in God, and "Existentialism is nothing more than an attempt to draw all conclusions from consistent atheism" ^[1]. The atheistic position is considered to be "consistently atheistic", as suggested in the studies of Vasenkin A.V. ^[2] and Bessmertnova S.V., the latter even sees the opposite of atheistic existentialists to "inconsistent atheism", "depending on religion because of its belief in the reasonableness of being itself" ^{[3, p.72]}.  And although, in general, one should agree with the definition of existentialism as a broad ontology that includes the problems of human existence, it seems possible and relevant to challenge the view of the "consistently atheistic" position of some well-known representatives of the "philosophy of existence", among whom not only philosophers, but also writers, playwrights, artists.

The features of the atheistic worldview are most sharply expressed in absurdism, by which Camus understood "the clash between our expectations and the world" ^{[4, p.38]}, and his overseas colleagues, for example, Nagel, "clashes within ourselves" ^{[5, p. 287]}.

The starting point of the absurdist reasoning is the Nietzschean proclamation of the "death of God." The thesis itself first appeared in 1885 on the pages of the novel "Thus Spake Zarathustra." The concept of dissociation from God and turning towards endowing people with truth is placed at the very beginning of the book:  Nietzsche resolutely makes it clear that his hero is not on the path with a God-glorifying hermit who turned away from people because of their imperfections. Nietzsche's anti–Christian position does not tolerate any "ifs", he completely turns away from divine "truths" and turns to man, arguing that ... "the most terrible crime is to blaspheme the earth and honor the incomprehensible above the meaning of the earth!" ^{[6, p.8]}.  The starting point of his philosophy, therefore, is in many ways similar to the later existential trend, it begins with the statement that "if there is no God, then everything is allowed."  

But, unlike nihilism, where this attitude receives a positive reception, turning the thinker to the problem of man as the highest value, in absurdism this situation is perceived as traumatic, undesirable. God, being a concept of human thinking, enslaves the absurdist with a philosophical attitude towards "abandonment" in the world, homelessness in it. The path of liberation that Nietzsche saw in his famous Zarathustra, refusing to stay with a hermit worshipping God and devoting his life not to God, but to people, is paved with symptoms of painful separation for atheistic existentialists. "Despair", "anxiety", "loneliness" are the existentials of a person in a crisis situation, which adherents of the philosophy of existence try to extrapolate to the entire human race. Evola spoke exhaustively about this, noting that ... "what Nietzsche had as an imperative, the existentialists acquired the character of duties", "in emotional tone, it is almost equivalent to a feeling of absolute freedom as an onerous burden rather than as a conquest" ^{[7, p.169]}. That is why all works of absurdism are imbued with mood anxiety, reflecting the characters' rootlessness in the world.

"Waiting for Godot" is well known to researchers of absurdism, it expresses it in two ways: both in a philosophical and artistic dimension. The comprehension of this work, however, is limited to several types of interpretations (Freudian, historical, biblical) and general statements about the meaning of life, which supposedly can consist only in meaningless expectation. Despite the fact that Beckett vehemently protested against the interpretation of the missing character – Godot – as a God, the most fruitful research was in this direction.

The biblical references in the play are tightly sewn into the canvas of the work. Moreover, the arsenal of allusions to the Bible is constantly being updated, the connections between this text and other works of Beckett make it clear about the importance of the biblical level of interpretation.  Thus, N.I. Mikeladze, a researcher of Beckett's work, notes that "Beckett's constant return to these issues speaks, rather, of his tormenting doubt about the randomness of God's mercy, as well as in the Augustinian concept of Predestination" ^[8].   Despite the importance of understanding the basic semantic field of the play, the analysis of biblical allusions is not part of the task of our philosophical research. It seems more productive to compare the nihilistic attitude with the absurdist one and Beckett's reception of Nietzsche's philosophy.

O.V. Zatonskaya, for example, draws attention to the proximity of Beckett's poetry with some of Nietzsche's theses, considering the connection between the concept of Superman and the main character of Beckett's poem "Vulture" to be important.  Carrion for a vulture is an allegory of everything that exists, as long as existence burdens a person, a Superman will not be born in him. According to the researcher, in the poetics of the poem there is a desire for transcendence, which, due to the passivity of the hero, remains without realization. "A person initially has a desire to evolve, develop, become above the conventions of the outside world, which are offal. But at the same time, the hero of the poem "Vulture" is present in the text only indirectly. He is incapable of action, his character is passive due to his doom to exist in a world where everything is alien to his nature. This causes loss and only a torment frozen in eternity, the liberation from which is death" ^{[9, p.298]}. The concept of superman is also found in "Waiting for Godot", and here it appears in two interpretations: first, it is a caricature of a person who has realized his will to power, the symbol of which is well recognized from the philosophy of Nietzscheanism, the whip. Secondly, it is an attempt to present the antipode to passive characters.

Pozzo is a hero who does not associate his existence with an encounter with the mysterious Godot, but this does not mean that he is not looking for the meaning of his being outside himself. Pozzo, driving his servant with a whip, is presented as a satirical image of Zarathustra, and he needs his slave no less than Lucky needs his master. At the same time, Pozzo is the only one of the four who has a unique vision of why he needs another person: "The most insignificant being can enrich you with something, teach you something, make you feel your happiness better" ^[10]. This character is fundamentally different from the others in that he does not act as a supplicant.

Lucky, loaded with things, is a clear reference to the three stages of the human spirit, namely the camel, bearing the burden of public morality. The pretender Pozzo is seen not only as a caricatured superman, but also as a God, which suggests that Estragon imagined God like this: with a whip and a leash. The function of Pozzo and Lucky in the play, among other things, is to concretize the generalizations of the main characters about Godot. Godot is a person whom Vladimir and Estragon are unlikely to see and recognize, but they admit that they were engaged in "begging" and "begging" in relation to her. Their immediate plans depend on who allegedly sends them a message to wait through a messenger, but their expectation of this meeting only exacerbates their torment.

Godot is a person who has taken care of the absence of signs of his existence to such an extent that he may well not be found behind these loud statements about her with an equal degree of probability. In this regard, it seems appropriate to cite the parable of the invisible gardener, first told by the religious philosopher Anthony Flue in 1953 ^[11]. One day, two researchers came to a clearing in the jungle. One of the researchers suggested that some kind of gardener must be taking care of the clearing. Another objected, "There is no Gardener here." Then they set up a tent and started watching. In view of the absence of any signs of the Gardener, one of them suggested that the Gardener was invisible. And they surrounded the clearing with barbed wire, through which they passed a current. There was not a single scream that would have betrayed the guest. The movements of the wires did not betray a single attempt to get through them. All the same, the Believer insisted on his own: "There is a Gardener here, invisible, disembodied, not subject to electric shock; A gardener without smell and making no sounds; A gardener secretly caring for his beloved garden." And, in the end, the Skeptic wondered how the Invisible Gardener differs from the imaginary gardener, and indeed from the statement that the Gardener does not exist.

The absurd effect of waiting for Godot is created by the impossibility of verifying the idea of this existence. As the characters admit, they hardly remember a couple of Pozzi and Lucky, and everyone could play the role of Godot if they wanted. It is no coincidence that, playing this option in the mouth of Pozzi, the author asks: "How do you find me? Ok? Average? Is it tolerable? So-so? Is it frankly bad?" . To know Godot, this invisible Gardener, is possible only with the help of an apophatic approach. The characteristics that the main characters give to God make him transcendent: "Taking into account the existence of a personal God as it stems from the latest sociological works of Poinson and Watman in the form of a substance of a gray-bearded timeless extra-spatial cocoon, which from the height of its divine apathy, divine aphasia, divine agnosia, will fall in love with us all except some..." ^[10].

From the point of view of the artistic analysis of the text, the above passage is nothing more than a stream of consciousness, a technique that gained love among modernist writers of the period after World War II. The repeated repetition of the same words and symbols, the obvious incoherence, the rejection of normal punctuation symbols help to simulate the work of thought, while, however, the artistic conventionality of everything that happens is deliberately emphasized: Lucky begins to "think" after he is ordered to "think". The God of the characters is all the existing stereotypes about him, he combines the features of the Old Testament Yahweh and the "indifferent" God of the deists, who does not interfere in the earthly affairs. It is no coincidence that the three "a's" in the words aphasia, apathy, agnosia indicate to us the negative characteristics of God, who is, of course, a projection of a human being as the absurdists imagine him to be, on a higher, "divine" level. It is not Godot who loses the ability to recognize, participate and speak coherently – it is the heroes of the works of the absurd who attribute to him their characteristics of a broken, left waiting for something unclear human type.

The expectation of divine patronage does not spiritualize the characters, but, on the contrary, kills all the best in them. Pozzo, for example, complains that his slave partner used to perform "incredible jumps" and danced different dances. And now he's dancing the only one – "dancing with nets." And here again, an association with Nietzsche suggests itself, who perceived dance and bodily practices in general as a way to know the world. An absurdist hero cannot be a dancer, because a dancer is a Nietzschean symbol for a soul rejoicing in itself. The hero of the drama of the absurd, as represented by Beckett, is a weak puppet pretending to be a master or a slave, in this case it does not matter. They are wanderers entangled in the nets of the world, as evidenced by Lucky himself, pretending to be entangled in the nets.

Three characteristics of the absurd: inability to act, speech distortions (up to aphasia), as well as the expectation of God's judgment, traditionally encourage us to consider "Waiting for Godot" as a typical example of an absurd work. It is characteristic that among all literary works, the creation of the absurd is the most artistic, and therefore the most verified, technically the most difficult to execute. Through the contradictory assessments of critics and the controversial statements of Beckett himself, the researcher finally comes to a single question: If the play is really about man and God, then why would a man abandoned by God need God? The answer to this question contains the mystery of the genesis of the absurd as an existential experience.

Beckett defends a kind of anti-epistemology that criticizes Western epistemologies that trust either feelings, reason, or intuition and revelation and proclaim the possibility of knowledge of God. Dr. Maroof Shah, an Indian researcher of the ideological foundations of Beckett's work, notes that Beckett rejects the intellectual intuition of the mystic and remains in the positions of rationalism, being faithful to its initial positions, despite the acute awareness of its limitations.

Beckett's characters, without exception, are uncompromising rationalists. However, their minds cannot tell them with certainty at least one thing they want to know. Vladimir and Estragon ask questions about their own and others' identity, the essence of Godot, the nature of space and time. They're not even sure if they wake up under a tree every day, or maybe it's a bush. It is generally accepted in Beckett's text that the tree is interpreted as a symbol of Golgotha, but in fact, if it is actually a bush, it can be interpreted as a prototype of the Burning Bush lying in the center of the universe of the main characters.

Here it is worth paying attention to the very nature of the absurd character's questioning. This type of questioning betrays an absolute misunderstanding of the spiritual foundations of being, a complete lack of rootedness in them.

"What is love? What is creation? Aspiration? What is a star?" is how Nietzsche's Last Man asks and blinks. The very fact that he cannot explain these terms to himself testifies to their misunderstanding, alienation to the very nature of the last person and deep distrust or (it is unknown which is worse) deep indifference to them. The latter person is clearly connected with the type of the absurd hero, because they both represent models of existence that are denied transcendence. Anticipating Sartre's concept of man as a project of himself, Nietzsche writes about the need to build himself rectangular in relation to body and soul, and urges to grow not only in breadth, but also upward ^{[6, p. 81]}.

Nietzsche's godless world presupposes the existence of a positive worldview project, the philosopher's calls to "carry chaos inside yourself", "give birth to a star", "create a self-rolling wheel" are widely known. All of them are ultimately united by the consciousness of a high spiritual mission. The absence of a theological and teleological attitude does not prevent the development of a self-sufficient nihilistic concept, where the statement of the impotence of reason to exhaustively explain the world and the person in it does not lead to ontological pessimism.

The situation is different with absurdism in the texts of representatives of the "atheistic" mainstream within existentialism.

Dr. Maroof Shah, an Indian researcher of the philosophical dimension of Beckett's legacy, compares the wandering of Beckett's characters with staying in the circle of samsara ^{[12, p.88]}. Despite the stated continuity in relation to the philosophy of life, absurdism is based in its origins on the teleology of Aristotle, which means that it assumes the existence of a cause of causes, even if it puts it in the form of a signifier without any real signified. If we return to the parable of the Invisible Gardener, we can imagine the absurd hero as a child left in the Garden, and liken the Gardener to an adult who does not respond to his call. In more extreme interpretations, the Garden is replaced by a Jungle, and the Gardener is replaced by a parent figure.

         The doom of absurdism as an independent philosophy in this sense is rooted in its origins: the installation, on the one hand, on rationalism, and the rejection of dialogue with other traditions, on the other hand, on its fixation on the a priori sense, even if its representatives claim the opposite. Camus's notorious "revolt" against the absurd reflects nothing more than an attempt to restore man to his rights, which are a mental abstraction, to establish a "dialogue" with the unreasonable silence of the world, again conceivable from the standpoint of logocentric speculation. In view of the fact that the search for a divine being and the actual linking of life meanings with it occupies one of the leading topics in the philosophy of absurdism, the author believes it possible to revise the interpretation of the concept of "absurdism" as a concept necessarily associated with an atheistic perception of the world.  The longing for the World Builder betrays in the representatives of philosophy and literature the absurdity of adherents of a rationalistic teleological approach, which, having been removed in Nietzsche's philosophy, is paradoxically not discarded in the work of his followers. Representing a reception of Nietzsche's ideas, Beckett's text seems to illustrate the attitude towards the search for God, while simultaneously depicting a caricature of some of the key ideas set out in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". At the same time, it is difficult to assume that the correspondence polemic with Nietzsche ended with Beckett's victory. The condition of God's death did not prompt the absurdists to create a positive program of worldly and self-improvement, defining the existence of the heroes of the works of the absurd as self-immersion, lack of disclosure in relation to the universal being. The unavailability of original solutions that could be deduced from the premise of the death of God somehow forced representatives of this trend to concentrate on the nature of this event and return to it again and again in philosophical works, essays, plays, short stories, novellas and novels.

         The logical conclusion from the situation of absurdity outlined by Beckett in his famous play could be to accept life without Godot. In the original text, however, we observe not only the death of God, slowly poisoning his creatures with false hope, but also the death of a man who descended to the level of the "Last Man" of the German philosopher Nietzsche, with whom Beckett so desperately argued.