More to the point, after criticizing the “leap,” he asserts that it is “just as legitimate as any attitude of mind” (MS, 33). It is “not the affirmation of God that is questioned here,” he says further on, “but rather the logic leading to that affirmation” (MS, 42n). “I am taking the liberty … of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But this does not imply a judgement.
It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation” (MS, 41). To the charge that he is not doing justice to the richness of existentialist thought he responds that he is “simply borrowing a theme from them and examining whether its consequences can fit the already established rules. It is merely a matter of persistence” (MS, 37—8).
But if proof is not the issue, what then is? What are those “established rules”? And what is being herein “essayed”? “What have I done however other than to reflect upon an idea that I have found in the streets of my time? That I have nourished this idea (and that a part of me may always nourish it) with my entire generation, that goes without saying. I have simply taken the necessary distance from it in order to treat it and to decide its logic” (L’Ete LCE, 159).
Wanting to purge his thought of the purely personal, and to explore its implicit logic, Camus continually refined his essay, as we have seen, in the direction of greater objectivity and universality of expression. Thus many readers were led to read more into his argument than he intended. And yet, repeatedly, throughout the essay, he sought to underscore its limits. Not a philosophy of the absurd, nor an effort to prove that suicide is unjustifiable, nor even a critique of religion and the “leap of faith,” The Myth expresses Clamus’s determination to work out a rule of life consonant with the absurd. “To prove the absurdity of life cannot be an end, but only a beginning” observed Camus, when reviewing Sartre’s Nausea in 1939. “It is not this discovery which is interesting, but the consequences and the rules of action that can be drawn from it” (LCE, 201-2).
It is perhaps impossible to insist too greatly upon the personal roots and the continuing personal significance of the meditation that is The Myth. Beginning with a sense of what the world holds and of the truths of science,
Camus comes to reflective consciousness within the conceptual confines of a world that hasn’t any rational grounds for transcendent belief nor any obvious and self-evident factual bases.
These are the “facts” with which he begins. He does not assert that new facts might not arise that would change this situation or that new insights or transformed belief systems might not lead to other rational conclusions as to the meaning of life. He asserts only that these views are not currently available to him and that he does not see them as being on the horizon. In short, it is presently impossible for him rationally to ground such beliefs.
At the same time, he brings to his quest a deep-seated need for transcendent significance to give depth to the activities of ordinary life. He is sure that he shares this need with many of his generation and perhaps with most reflective westerners.
What is the upshot of this deeply felt experiential bind? Must life be judged meaningless because we cannot rationally satisfy our need for transcendent significance? Is suicide not a rational response? Or must one make the “leap of faith,” believing that since life cannot flourish without transcendent significance, there must be such a “truth”?
These questions focus Camus’s inquiry. He holds, as he says, certain truths from which he cannot separate himself. These truths are not a priori or axiomatic. They are simply experiential givens that provide the context for the emergence of an absurd sensibility. They inscribe themselves within the experience of one who is also committed to living only with what he knows.
To respect intelligence for Camus is equivalent to refusing to “play fast and loose with the order realities take” in his experience. Can one live meaningfully while remaining within the bounds of the experientially given?
Camus is not denying the right of an individual to “take the leap” but merely contesting the claim to a logic that leads there. Nothing in experience rationally justifies such a faith. Reason, of course, docs not rule it out. In fact, reason has nothing to say about it. That is his point. Neither are individuals obliged to remain committed to, or limited by, reason. They may, like St.
Thomas, say that where reason ends faith begins. For Camus, that attitude is as legitimate as any other. He simply wants to point out that no rational justification or any empirical evidence sustains it (MS, 40). And he rejects “the leap” simply because it does not answer to the demands that he has placed upon his inquiry. These demands begin with a commitment to the facts as the senses reveal them, and to the inferences that reason can draw from those facts, and nothing more. “My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence which aroused it” (MS, 49-50).
Is this enough? In the Western world, metaphysically sculpted by Greco-Romanand Judeo-Christian perspectives, that exigence ontologique has taken the shape of transcendence, usually contoured by belief in divine purposeful-ness and an afterlife. Within an experience so contoured, to encounter the nonexistence of the transcendent is to confront a world pervaded by the sense of Divine Absence. In such a world we may feel uprooted, cut adrift, torn between the inner need for a ground of being and the outer reality of a life that is purposeless and no longer worth the effort. The temptation is no doubt profound to insist that the need must be met: to believe even though, or, out of spite perhaps, because, it is absurd. Or to conclude, like Bazarov, that life is not worth living because it lacks ultimate significance, and that it is therefore legitimate “to smash everything.” Or, like Camus’s imaginary German friend, that the only “values” are those of the “purported” animal world, namely force and violence.
Here is the nub of the problem to which The Myth is addressed. Torn between the nihilistic abyss of metaphysical despair and the illusory summit of metaphysical hope, Camus searches for a middle way—”I only wish to remain on this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear”—a path that, while remaining true both to the experiential givens and to reason as our only but limited guide, leads us into a life that, though without ultimate significance, is found to be worth the effort.
THE SEDUCTION OF HOPE
Kafka’s Nostalgia
The “intellectual ailment” that, phoenix-like, continually gives rise to metaphysical hope seems rooted in the quasi-ontological need to believe life has a transcendent purpose. In this soil, which has so long nurtured religion, Camus strives to clear away the brush of logical confusions, and then to uproot that hope by which “man is delivered from the weight of his own life” (MS, 136) and led to submit to a nonexistent future. The full destructive implications of that seemingly ineradicable hope do not become clear until The Rebel. But The Myth traces the failed logic by which humans seek to restore a faith when all seems lost. An undercurrent of this work is the powerful undertow that, regardless of the facts, would drag even the most sophisticated thinkers into the maelstrom of a transcendent belief that they do not seem quite able to give up.
It is this undertow by which Sartre is pulled along, according to Camus. Here lies the root of that ontological “desire to be God,” which Sartre saw at the base of human effort, and later admitted to have been the constitutive structure of his own “project to be.” Even later, it is Sartre’s commitment to what Camus believes to be a messianic vision of the role of the Communist party that dynamizes his attack on The Rebel. Camus has this in mind when
he criticizes “existential preaching . . . with its spiritual leap which basically escapes consciousness.”
Nowhere, perhaps, is this struggle to draw hope out of the depths of despair more poignantly expressed than in the writings of Franz Kafka. In The Castle, the absurd is recognized, accepted, and man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd. Within the limits of the human condition, what greater hope than the hope that allows an escape from that condition? As I see once more, existential thought in this regard … is steeped in a vast hope. The very hope which . . . inflamed the ancient world.
But in that leap that characterizes all existential thought … in that surveying of a divinity devoid of surface, how can one fail to see the mark of a lucidity that repudiates itself? (MS, 135, my italics).