Article: Nobody Exists on Purpose: The Scant Optimism Hidden Beneath the Existential Nihilism in Rick and Morty
"No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted
as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he
lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of
all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design,
a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an ‘ideal of
man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’—it is absurd to want
to hand over his nature to some purpose or other.” – Friedrich Nietzsche“Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. We’re all gonna die.” – Morty Smith, Rick and Morty
Essentially, the tenets of existential nihilism can be boiled down to the quotes at the beginning of this article. Life, says the existential nihilist, has no inherent significance. There is no purpose to our suffering as human beings, and there is no ultimate Meaning of Life to be sought after, much less found. A bleak outlook, to be sure – but Rick and Morty uniquely takes such views and, somehow, makes them beautiful within the webs of its chaotic two seasons (a third is currently in development, with a season premiere possibly confirmed for late this year).
Fourteen-year-old
Morty Smith is a typical American teenager, not particularly intelligent or
special, who is co-opted into inter-dimensional adventures with his
grandfather, Rick Sanchez. Rick is jaded, an elderly scientist and pragmatist
who has literally seen and done everything he has ever desired and now finds
that the more he travels between dimensions and through our own and alternate
universes, the less thrilling he finds reality. For Rick, there is no sense of
wonder. There is no vastness to the
experience of living – he sees that there are infinite possibilities and
infinite versions of himself, and therefore sees no point in attempting to find
value in his own life. Morty, beginning the series as a wide-eyed and terrified
kid surrounded by things he cannot comprehend, is presented as a possible key
to Rick’s deeply hidden humanity and hopes – but as the series progresses, the
messages of nihilism and emptiness become more and more prominent. Even Morty’s
youthful idealism is no match for Rick’s deadpan, matter-of-fact harshness.
And yet….Rick and Morty posits the importance of
small things. It suggests that there is a glimmer of hope, even for a character
like Rick Sanchez.
It can be argued
that the reason most people want to accept that life has meaning is because
they want to assert that their deaths will have meaning; that there must be a
reason to live and struggle, so that when they have died there can be said to
have been some kind of importance in their having existed. A reason for
everything that has happened to them. A purpose.
But Rick, having
long ago realized that the entity considered himself as an individual is one and the same with an infinite
number of other entities known as “Rick Sanchez”, despairs at finding meaning
in the life he’s living in his own dimension – and so he sees no meaning in his
eventual death, either. If he dies in one version of reality, another version
of himself can simply step in and take over where the deceased left off, the
rest of the world none the wiser for it. Rick finds no meaning even in his own
death, then, because he recognizes that, within infinite universes, he dies
somewhere every single minute of every single day.
“For man to be
able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation
of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.” – Leo
Tolstoy
But Rick, as
much a mad genius as he is, is stifled by his refusal to look inward. The
series doesn’t explain much of his past – glimpses are given for the audience
to piece together, but Rick’s pain is largely an internal weight he carries
around with him, even as he mocks his son-in-law and grandchildren for their
mercurial, hypersensitive reactions to what happens around them. This is a
character who is deeply hurting, but who rebuffs that hurt because to put a
name to it would be to admit culpability for the direction his life has
heretofore taken. His only real hope, then, is to secretly put his faith in
Morty – notice, in little ways, that even Rick seems abashed at the changes
taking place in his grandson’s character over time. Seeds of guilt and regret
coat small facets in his personality, building up to the second season finale
and the decisions he ultimately makes. But as long as Rick holds belief,
however small, that he can ‘save’ Morty, even if he sees the relationship
between himself and his daughter as irreparable in the end – there is a tiny
light at the end of the tunnel for the Smith family, and even, the series
suggests, for Rick himself.
There is room in
the realities of Rick and Morty for
even the seemingly purposeless life to find value
– even, the show seems to suggest, if there is no inherent meaning or purpose to be
gleaned in survival or, indeed, in sacrifice. We root for Rick Sanchez because,
despite his world-weary cynicism and distant, petulant demeanor, he represents
the art of a patchwork conscience, which we are able to watch begin to unfurl
and start to discover itself. Even if reason eludes us in a literal sense,
there is still some kind of strange significance in experience – in all the
myriad realities of possibility, Rick and
Morty isn’t so much concerned with the journey, or even the final
destination. Instead, it is content to tell the story of a man who has all but
abandoned himself in every reality, and attempts to prove that even when life
is completely pointless, there’s still a bright side to existence.
“Be good, Morty.
Be better than me.” – Rick Sanchez, Rick and Morty
-Dana Culling