Camus - The Absurd Flashcards
Partially Examined Life - Episode 4 Camus
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. “
Camus thought that anyone who was intellectually honest could not refute that life is absurd. He thought that life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning (in the face of death).
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”
Camus then asked, what should we do in light of this? Commit suicide if we’re all going to die anyway?
Absurdity is a relation between our minds and the world and the fact that they don’t match up in lots of ways. We have a desire to unify everything but nature, at its core, is unknowable. Lots of other philosophers like Kant have tried to demonstrate this. We have perceptions of reality but not direct experience of it. Or we have expectations of a fair world, but these are not borne out in the uncaring Universe.
Given all these things, it’s a relational concept between our mind, our reason versus this vast uncaring world. There is a tension between those things. To Camus, the only admirable response is to keep this tension going.
If you come up with a philosophy that denies the Absurd, like God, then you are copping out. This is philosophical suicide because you are denying the relationship with the irrational world. If you physically commit suicide this is also copping out. Living with this tension in mind, and keeping the human need vs irrational world unreconciled, is the best way to live.
Suicide is a solution to Absurdity. However, it’s the wrong solution because you are accepting it rather than revolting against it.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
The essential paradox arising in Camus’s philosophy concerns his central notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea that philosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannot escape asking the question, “What is the meaning of existence?” Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological, metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.
Isn’t absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms, strictly speaking no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posture that ends in silence?
Was Camus actually a philosopher? He himself said no, in a famous interview with Jeanine Delpech in Les Nouvelles Littéraires in November of 1945, insisting that he did “not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system”
Camus’s philosophy can be thus read as a sustained effort to demonstrate and not just assert what is entailed by the absurdity of human existence. In the process Camus answers the questions posed by The Myth of Sisyphus, “Why should I not kill myself?”, and by The Rebel, “Why should I not kill others?”
If not with religion, where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope” and in refusing to hide from the fact that we are going to die. For Camus “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days…. I can see no point in the happiness of angels” (N, 90). There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.
He advocates precisely what he takes Christianity to abjure: living a life of the senses, intensely, here and now, in the present. This entails, first, abandoning all hope for an afterlife, indeed rejecting thinking about it. “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door”
Only by yielding to the fact that our “longing to endure” will be frustrated and accepting our “awareness of death” are we able to open ourselves to the riches of life, which are physical above all.
What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Since “the most obvious absurdity” (is death, Camus urges us to “die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will”. In short, he recommends a life without consolation, but instead one characterized by lucidity and by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and its limits.
In his statement of the problem and its solution, Camus’s tone, ideas, and style are reminiscent of Nietzsche. “God is dead” is of course their common starting point, as is the determination to confront unpleasant truths and write against received wisdom.
Camus postulates an inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wild longing for clarity” and the “unreasonable silence of the world”. Camus views the world as irrational, which means that it is not understandable through reason.
According to Camus, each existentialist writer betrayed his initial insight by seeking to appeal to something beyond the limits of the human condition, by turning to the transcendent. And yet even if we avoid what Camus describes as such escapist efforts and continue to live without irrational appeals, the desire to do so is built into our consciousness and thus our humanity. We are unable to free ourselves from “this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion”. But it is urgent to not succumb to these impulses and to instead accept absurdity. In contrast with existentialism, “The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits”.
Sisyphus demonstrates that we can live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it”.
What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus’s answers.
