Alan Watts spent the early part of his adult life as an Episcopal priest, but in his early thirties he walked away from that career and turned to a different vocation: bringing Zen teachings to Western audiences. The Marginalian notes that his singular fusion of secular philosophy and Eastern spirituality still guides openhearted and openminded readers toward living with presence, making sense of reality and becoming who they really are.
Between 1965 and 1972, Watts delivered a series of talks exploring different facets of Zen. Eight of those talks were later collected in the posthumously published book The Tao of Philosophy. In the sixth lecture, titled “Sense of Nonsense,” he examines how meaning can be found by surrendering to meaninglessness.
The article observes that the same inquiry has rattled some of humanity’s greatest minds. It points to Margaret Mead, whose dream concerned the essence of life, and to Chinua Achebe, who struggled creatively against meaninglessness, as examples of thinkers who have wrestled with the tension between meaning and its absence.
Watts opens the question in everyday terms. He asks why we love Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse, with its “slithy toves” that “gyre and gimble in the wabe,” why old English songs are full of babbling choruses such as “fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and “hey-nonny-nonny,” and why jazz singers enjoy scat syllables that seem to go nowhere.
For Watts, this love of nonsense is not a failure of seriousness. It is participation in what he calls “the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world,” something that is not necessarily going anywhere. He argues that only in unusual moments of insight do we get the point: the true meaning of life is no meaning, its purpose is no purpose, and its sense is non-sense.
Still, he does not treat all nonsense as equal. He asks whether this can be “significant nonsense” — not chaos, not “blathering balderdash,” but nonsense with rhythm, fascinating complexity and a kind of artistry. It is in this kind of meaninglessness, he suggests, that we come to the profoundest meaning.
The Marginalian recommends reading The Tao of Philosophy alongside Watts’s reflections on true happiness, the ego and the universe, and the difference between money and wealth, and revisiting D.T. Suzuki, a major influence on Watts, on how Zen can help cultivate character.
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