“These beings, with no attachments, no principles … are so free they disintegrate, deaf to the call of action or creation.” Sartre’s “characters are, in fact, free. But their freedom is of no use to them.” Speculating on Sartre’s version of our absurd condition, Camus senses a twofold problem. First, these characters have absolutized their freedom to compensate for a transcendent absolute by whose loss they are haunted. Second, but less clearly, this liberty in which they are “enclosed” bears witness to a deeper isolation from the world around them and, most particularly, from nature. Freed “from [their] own nature, and reduced to self-contemplation, [Sartre’s characters] become . . . aware of [their] profound indifference to everything that is not
[themselves]. [They] are alone.” But, so cutoff, they cannot be called to significant action and are left to contemplate the futility of their situation. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming,” comments Camus, “that is its whole tragedy.” Sartre’s hero in Nausea can only dwell upon “those aspects of man he finds repugnant” because, haunted by life’s ultimate insignificance, he has no sense for “man’s signs of greatness.” Not tragic but pathetic and futile is the Sartrean vision of humanity from which Camus wishes to distance himself (LCE, 204, 205,201).
Yet the tendency to lump Camus and Sartre together under the aegis of existentialism is not completely inappropriate. They do share basic concerns, nurtured by a common historical situation. If we were to seek that commonality, it most probably would lie in their effort to help us face a world in which transcendent absolutes can no longer be appealed to or relied upon.
From within this shared historical and existential situation, both Sartre and Camus speak to the possibilities by which we can reconstitute a meaningful life. Demystification in the service of a liberation in which people take that control which is possible over their own lives may be said to be their shared goal. With their common emphasis on “the return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep,” which, according to Camus, “represents the first steps of absurd freedom,” “the initial themes of existentialism keep their entire value” (MS, 59).
Despite obvious similarities of theme and mood, however, important differences remain that bear directly upon my investigation. For the early Sartre of Being and Nothingness and before, which is all that would be relevant at this point, the For-Itself is the absurd passion to be God. It is thus haunted by an Absolute which it needs but cannot be. “Solid as a rock,” this In-Itself is
characterized by unchanging self-identity and persistence in being – at least
from the point of view of the For-Itself. The For-Itself wishes “freely” to be the In-Itself that it is not. Being an “absurd” and contradictory passion, the problem of the Absolute is concretized in innumerable strategies of “bad faith” in which the For-Itself seeks to found itself as a being not subject to the vagaries of that temporalizing freedom that it is. Bad faith is flight from freedom by which the For-Itself seeks to hide from itself recognition of its finite and contingent being.
For Camus, on the other hand, not “bad faith” but metaphysical “hope” is the continual temptation that ever draws the human being from the possibilities of “authentic” living. Of course, Camus does not talk of “authenticity” as does Sartre, and explicitly seeks to avoid preaching. From his own experience he speaks to those who have shared his sensibility and his concerns.
But his passionate commitment cannot fail to make its mark; so much so, in fact, that many have taken him as arguing for an advocacy position, which he disavows. Of course, he does not use such a morally charged term as “authenticity” in contrasting his suggested lifestyles with their opposites. But is this not the feeling he conveys? To call “the leap of faith”
“philosophical suicide” is not exactly being nonevaluative and purely descriptive.
Our Experiential Location
“What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility,” observes Camus, “is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems” (MS, 104).
Rooting intellectual problems in the soil of sensibility as he invariably does, Camus focuses upon the existential sources of our contemporary metaphysical concerns. And where better to observe the human effort to make sense of, and come to terms with, our shattered world than in its dramatic rendering by some of its most sensitive souls? “It would be impossible,” he claims, “to insist too much on the arbitrary nature of the former opposition between art and philosophy” (MS, 96).4
“To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing). . . . The philosopher, even if he is Kant, is a creator. He has his characters, his symbols, and his secret action. He has his plot endings” (MS, 99-100). Similarly, “the novel has its logic, its reasonings, its intuition, and its postulates. It also has its requirements of clarity.” The best novels “carry with them their universe” (MS, 100). How better to give expression to a world that has lost its depth? “For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing” (MS, 94). “Incapable of refining the real, [absurd] thought pauses to mimic it” (MS, 101).
It might be suggested that the novel is the appropriate philosophical expression of the experience of life’s absurdity (along, perhaps, with the epigram). How better to express the felt pervasiveness of the absurd? “Great
feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. [Or with Caligula, of the demand for salvation.] A universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind” (MS, 10).
It is within the universe lighted up by the experience of absurdity that Camus’s effort at clarification begins. He accepts the truths of science as legitimate expressions of reason’s effort to make sense of existence. He recognizes their tentative and hypothetical nature. However legitimate they may be within their sphere—and he docs not in any way disparage them—they do not speak to his personal quest. Out of this experience of disproportion between the facts of experience as reason reveals diem, and the exigence onto-logique for some fundamental meaning to life as we deeply feel it, emerges the sentiment of life’s absurdity. At the present moment, reason does not offer any answer to the metaphysical demand generated by that exigence onto-logique. Yet the demand remains. What he asks for is a rule of life for that condition which he recognizes as his. He does not want someone to tell him how to deny what seem to him palpable givens. He wants to know whether, starting from within the existential confines denned by the absurd, life can still be shown to be worth living—and, if so, what the rule of conduct is for that condition.
Limitations of Intent
If The Myth treats of a culturally important idea, however, it is not the only, nor necessarily the most pervasive, one. In fact, Camus’s essay “leaves out altogether the most widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened age: the one, based on the principle that all is reason, which aims to explain the world” (MS, 42). (It is, of course, that attitude with which he will be primarily concerned in The Rebel, although I have already suggested some of its possible roots in the disabused sensibility here studied.) Rather, his aim is “to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it” (MS, 42).
But I must not jump too far ahead, lest I go astray. If there is a logic that Camus is pursuing here, it does not follow that he is arguing for a philosophy. He is seeking to diagnose a malady, albeit an intellectual one, from which he and many of his contemporaries suffer in order to point the way toward a cure. He is not claiming that those who do not suffer from that malady are wrong, any more than he suggests that his cure is proof of the illegitimacy of other remedies. He is simply seeking to determine the logic of those alternative prescriptions.
Could he have been clearer about the personal roots or the conceptual limitations of his essay? “Let us not miss this opportunity to point out the relative character of this essay,” he wrote in an early footnote (MS, 5), commenting on the many possible reasons for suicide. The self-imposed limits of the essay are repeated on numerous occasions, as when he contrasts the Western “acceptance of the world” with Oriental thought’s choice “against the world.” Such a choice, he notes, “is just as legitimate and gives this essay its perspectives and its limits” (MS, 64).