Imagine, Heidegger suggests, that, regardless of the reason, in a deafening instant the world of meaning that you inhabit in such comfort and familiarity is thrown out of joint and collapses. In that terrifying moment everything around you is suddenly pitched into chaos and loses its significance. And not just this or that world of meaning—your job, your marriage—but your very reason for existing at all. As you lose touch with the overarching purposes and goals that gave meaning to your life, your world of sense implodes and significance is sucked out of all the things that got their meaning from it. Yes, those things are still there—but so what? Now they don’t matter at all. Perhaps, like Sartre’s Roquentin, you cannot say what exactly happened between one step and another on some grey February day, but in that dramatic instant all the things you once knew and were so sure of get detached from their predicates—practical, theoretical, or whatever—and begin to float free of their anchorage in the meaning-giving context that itself has abruptly disappeared. As they float away from their meanings, those things turn on you and press in upon you with a terrifying closeness: horrent omnia, as Augustine says: everything becomes terrifying.31 No longer mediated by the now-lost world of significance, they become frighteningly immediate, with no semantic framework to hold them at a safe distance and situate them in a meaningful relation to you.
In this instant of terror you, too, float away from the calm and self-assured self that you were only a second ago. In a flash of insight you realize that your world of meaning is based on nothing solid at all and has no final reason that can account for it. The thin wall that previously separated you from your groundless facticity collapses, and you have to face, for the first time, the absurdity of the burden you bear: the need to make sense of things, with no founding or final reason.32 In confronting the ultimate meaninglessness of sense-making, you realize that whereas you once could make sense of everything, you now cannot make sense of anything, much less of sense-making itself, and least of all of your own self. You encounter the absurd—not just this or that puzzle or problem or mystery to be solved, but the very real fact that making sense is ultimately an ungroundable, futile task into which you are thrown by the sheer fact of being human. As Heidegger puts it, for that brief instant you hang suspended over the abyss of the absurd.33
But as absurd as it is, you also see, in a flash of insight, that your thrown-openness is the only thing that separates you from your death. It may be finite, groundless, and with no ultimate reason or outcome, but at least it is
31. Confessiones IV, 7, 12: “horrebant omnia.” Patrologia Latina 32: 698.30.
32. SZ 278.19–20 = 323.18–20: “[die dünne] Wand, die gleichsam das Man von der Unheimlichkeit seines Seins trennt.”
33. GA 9: 112.7 = 88.35, “schweben” with ibid., 115.5 = 91.7: “sich hineinhaltend in das Nichts.”