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ABSURDITY
âThere is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else ⊠is childâs play; we must first of all answer the question.â1
Among the most celebrated challenges of the twentieth century, the opening lines to Albert Camusâ The Myth of Sisyphus left AndrĂ© Malraux, the dashing novelist and intellectual, unsatisfied. As an editor at Gallimard, Franceâs most prestigious publishing house, Malraux, who had been deeply impressed by Albert Camusâ other manuscript, The Stranger, found the new work labored and meandering. âThe beginning stumbles around a bit,â he counseled the author: âSince you have made clear that the essay will adopt the perspective of suicide, itâs unnecessary to repeat it so often.â2
Malraux was wrong: the essay adopts the perspective not of suicide, but of our absurd condition. If, one day, we discover ourselves in âa universe suddenly divested of illusions and lightâ; if we nevertheless insist on meaning, but instead hear only âthe unreasonable silence of the worldâ; and if we fully absorb the consequences of this silence, Camus affirms, suicide suddenly imposes itself as the sole response.3 Malrauxâs stricture notwithstanding, this is why the essayâs celebrated opening line still demands our attention. If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy.
When we confront the question, however, we discover that traditional philosophy fails to guide us. Philosophers have no purchase on this subject, Camus writes, which is âsimultaneously so modest and so charged with emotion.â4 Perhaps for this reason, many professional philosophers have insisted, and some continue to insist, that it is a false problem, glistening dully like a stream made brackish by the confusion of formal categories or the abuse of language. Yet there are other philosophers who now criticize their guildâs failure to grasp the stubborn presence of the absurd in our lives. As Robert Solomon insists, the absurd âpoisons our everydayness and gives our every experience a tinge of futility.⊠We find ourselves desperately trying to move more quickly, to nowhere; or we try to âentertain ourselves.â â5 In terms less dramatic, but equally emphatic, Thomas Nagel compares absurdity with what he calls âthe view from nowhere.â This view tears us from our everyday subjective experiences and forces us to assume an external viewpointâa perspective that rattles the conceits and assumptions we hold about our lives. This view forces upon us truths that are both prosaic and paralyzingâthat we need never have lived or that the world will continue without the faintest of shudders when we die. In seeing ourselves from the outside, Nagel notes, âwe find it difficult to take our lives seriously.â At such moments, we confront absurdityâa âgenuine problem which we cannot ignore.â6
Hence Camusâ decision to leave behind philosophyâs traditional vocabulary and techniques. Rather than a chain of arguments, The Myth of Sisyphus is instead a salvo of impressions, some intimate, others literary, all of them urgent and lucid. The Myth is an essay, similar to those written by one of Camusâ models, Michel de Montaigne. In its pages, Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophyâthe questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the worldâless with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase. Camus no more worried that there remained âsomething provisionalâ to his work than Montaigne did that his self-portrait kept changing.7 In fact, Camus achieves with the Myth what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed for Montaigneâs Essays: it places âa consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.â8
For Camus, however, this astonishment results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute, of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world. âThis world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.â9
Absurd reasoning, Camus warns, surges with an urgency alien to traditional philosophy: no one, he insists, has ever died for the ontological argument. Even the great explorers of the absurd, thinkers who have bent their minds to reach firm conclusions, have with few exceptions swerved at the last moment from this journey. Kierkegaard, Camus declares, blinked first in his confrontation with the lidless gaze of the absurd. The Danish thinkerâs âleap of faith,â far from being a heroic act of lucidity and logic, amounts to philosophical suicide. Rather than leaping into a world where absurdity rules, Kierkegaard retreats to God, to whom he gives âthe attributes of the absurd: unjust, incoherent, and incomprehensible.â10 Even an absurd god, Kierkegaard confesses, is preferable to an unfathomable void.
As with an earlier Christian thinker, Blaise Pascal, who was famously frightened by âthe silence of these infinite spaces,â Kierkegaard was terrified by the prospect of a life lived in the absurd. But Camus insists that, for the absurd man, âSeeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.â11 But we must not cease in our exploration, Camus affirms, if only to hear more sharply the silence of the world. In effect, silence sounds out when human beings enter the equation. If âsilences must make themselves heard,â it is because those who can hear inevitably demand it.12 And if the silence persists, where are we to find meaning? What must we do if meaning is not to be found? Can we live our lives without the reassurance, once provided by religion, of transcendental justifications for the world and its denizens?
The question, Camus concludes, is âto find out if it is possible to live without appeal.â13
As a literary and philosophical quarry, the absurd first appears in Camusâ journal in May 1936, the same month he defended his dissertation on the subject of neo-Platonism at the University of Algiers. âPhilosophical work: Absurdity,â he assigned himself as part of his study and writing plan.14 Two years later, in June 1938, the absurd again appears on his to-do list, then a third time at the end of the same year. Though he is mostly at the stage of research and reflection, Camus had already decided to approach the subject more or less simultaneously through three different genres: as a novelist, playwright, and essayist. He had begun work on his play Caligula in 1938, though it was first performed only in 1945. As for The Stranger, Camus completed a draft just days before the Germans smashed through the Ardennes in May 1940. And it was at that same moment, when France still appeared, if not eternal, at least solid and secure, that Camus yoked himself to what he described to his former teacher Jean Grenier as his âessay on the Absurd.â15
During this same period, Camus discovered another young and still unknown French writer who was grappling with the absurd. In 1938, the veteran journalist Pascal Pia, who had founded an independent newspaper, Alger rĂ©publicain, had hired Camus. Given the paperâs straitened financial situation, Camus quickly found he was juggling many tasks, including that of book reviewer. Two thin books by Jean-Paul Sartre soon came to his attention: The Wall and Nausea. In these remarkable works, Sartre described a world awash in pure contingency. Caught in the undertow of events for which there is no ultimate or external justification, Sartre observed, we are overcome with a sense of nausea. What other response can we feel when we discover that events, once imbued with meaning, are in fact arbitrary; that our acts, once invested with intention, are only mechanical; and that the world, once our home, is simply alien.
Still, though the stories were compelling, Camus concluded that they offered little more than a kind of existential solipsism. To be sure, the âintense and dramatic universeâ informing the stories in The Wall was striking, but what were we to make of characters incapable of doing anything meaningful with their freedom? Similarly, in Nausea, Camus marveled at Sartreâs depiction of the worldâs oppressive density, but insisted it was wrong to conclude âlife is tragic because it is miserable.â Instead, our tragic sense of life lies in the worldâs âoverwhelming and beautifulâ natureâwithout beauty, without love, and without risk âlife would be almost too easy.â From the heights of his youth, Camus affirmed: âTo observe that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.⊠What interests me is not this discovery [of lifeâs absurd character], but the consequences and rules of action we must draw from it.â16
Though young, Camus was a veteran of the absurd. When still an infant, he lost his father in the purposeless mayhem of the Battle of the Marne; as an athletic teenager, he coughed blood one day and discovered he had tuberculosis; as a reporter of Alger rĂ©publicain, he discovered, behind the universal values of liberty and equality of the French Republic, the grim reality for the Arabs and Berbers living under the colonial administration; as the paperâs editor, he inveighed against the absurdity of a world war that, as a committed pacifist, he unrealistically insisted could have been avoided; and as a pacifist exempted from the draft because of his tuberculosis, Camus nevertheless tried to enlist: âThis war has not stopped being absurd, but one cannot retire from the game because the game may cost your life.â17
He was, in a word, already fastened on the lessons to be drawn from an absurd world. He shared this conviction not just with his readers but also with his fiancĂ©e, Francine Faure. (The couple was waiting for the finalization of the divorce between Camus and Simone HiĂ©, a glamorous and seductive woman whose drug addiction defeated Camusâ efforts to cure.) Camus told Francine that most everyone thinks the war is absurd, but this amounts to little if anything at all since they then go on living the lives they had always lived. But what interested him were the ethical consequences of this insight: âWhat I want to draw is a humanistic way of thinking, one that is clear-sighted and modestâa certain kind of personal conduct in which life would confront life as it is and not with daydreams.â18
Eventually, it was Camusâ insistence on consequences that forced the closing of Alger rĂ©publicain in 1940. Already hated by the local authorities because of his relentless attacks on their treatment of the Arab and Berber populations, Camus doubled down once France declared war in September 1939. Though without illusions about Hitlerâs Germany, a âbestial state where human dignity counted for nothing,â Camus also refused to nourish illusions about the purity or lucidity of Franceâs leaders.19 He was convinced that the powerlessâworkers, peasants, small merchants, and clerksâwould pay the price of this march to war just as his own father had in 1914. (He had not yet understood that the powerless, in France and the rest of the world, would nevertheless pay if the Nazis were not opposed by military means.) The censors, intent on maintaining public morale, suppressed growing chunks of the paperâs front page; Camus, equally intent on outwitting the censors, would reprint passages from literary classics, such as Voltaireâs entry on âwarâ from his Philosophical Dictionary, to fill the gaps. Even this, though, did not survive the officialsâ scissors.
In November, Camus confided to his journal: âUnderstand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin witho...