universe. Subsequently it has a chance of going further. It is alive; in other words, it must die or reverberate.” “‘Begins,’ that is important,” says Camus of the collapse of the stage setting.
“Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness” (MS, 10) .8 It is consciousness that inaugurates and maintains the break, and there alone a response is to be made. “If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity” (MS, 38). Without that ontological
“insistence upon familiarity” there would still be no absurd.
Camus is thus speaking from within a certain sensibility in which “the stage setting has collapsed.” It is as if we had been unceremoniously thrust out of our cosmic home. We have lost our place. Our world no longer seems to have been prepared for us. Our destiny is not overseen by a providential deity. Even worse, it seems not to be overseen by any deity whatsoever. We have become metaphysical refugees, aliens in a world not of our choosing. Each of us is now alone, to confront our individual destiny with, at best, a highly uncertain sense of the human collectivity.
The Meaning of the Absurd
And what exactly is this absurd?
If I accuse an innocent man of a monstrous crime, if I tell a virtuous man that he has coveted his own sister, he will reply that this is absurd. . . . The virtuous man illustrates by that reply the definitive antinomy existing between the deed . . . and his lifelong principles. “It’s absurd” means “It’s impossible” but also “It’s contradictory.” If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view (MS, 22, my italics).
The (implicit) unity of experience has been shattered. The intention and the reality meet across a now unbridgeable abyss, united only by nostalgia. Consciousness struggles to maintain its grasp of a world that eludes it. “My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it,” observes Camus.
That evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds
them together. … It [is] a matter of living and thinking with those dislocations. There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of the equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide. I merely wish to purge it of its emotional content and know its logic and its integrity (MS, 37).
THE SEDUCTION
The Myth of Sisyphus thus has a very limited and well-defined objective: from within the existential space defined by the experience of a generation, to explore the possibilities for meaning that life offers on its own terms. Can one remain true to the experience of the absurd, yet go beyond the nihilism that has seemed to be its unavoidable companion? “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone” (MS, 40).
Camus, like so many others, felt the appeal of the transcendent. Such belief, however poignantly desired, seems rationally unjustified. On what grounds can one defend that belief without denying the experience that had initially given birth to the inquiry? Is there not something dishonest in such a procedure? Unable to shake the feeling of dishonesty, Camus explores the possibility of living with what experience alone reveals. Hence his rule of method: “If I attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure away one of the terms of the problem” (MS, 31).
As for the Christian appeal to a faith in that which transcends understanding, Camus cannot sec the logic.
Even if fellow-feeling inclines one toward [salvific hope], still it must be said that excess justifies nothing. That transcends, as the saying goes, the human scale; therefore it must be superhuman. But this “therefore” is superfluous. There is no logical certainty [there]. There is no experimental probability either. All I can say is that, in fact, that transcends my scale. If I do not draw a negation from it, at least I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible (MS, 40).
“To Chestov,” Camus observes, “reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason” (MS, 35). “It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd. I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace. I ask for the rule of life of that state. … I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine” (E, 128; MS, 40—1). As for those who invite “the leap,” “they do not respond to my intention” (E, 128; MS, 41).
If, rather than offering an answer, hope may be seen as a seductive subterfuge, it is educative nonetheless. “We recognize our course by discovering the paths which stray from it” (MS, 113). Most particularly when, as with
Kafka or Dostoevsky, they are fertilized by the soil of the absurd. What is in the nature of the terrain that continually calls forth such metaphysical fruit?
Salvific faith answers existential despair. Hope and suicide are one to the precise extent that both are grounded in the inarticulate sense of life’s intrinsic meaninglessness. Hope—and Camus uses the word here only in the metaphysical sense—means that life is worth the effort only to the extent that it has transcendent significance. On its own terms it is a loss. A mind so imbued must look beyond. But, as we have seen, there is no logic to that transition. The “because” is emotional, not rational. It is to this “golgotha” of the intellect that Camus refers when he speaks of philosophical suicide. It is the consequence of the conclusion that only a leap of faith in the existence of transcendent meaning can rescue life from the hopelessness and futility that otherwise would be its fate.
But what generates such a conclusion? Is it self-evident? An unalterable and eternal verity? Or, perhaps, just a Western imposition that contains poised within the destructive seeds of nihilism?
One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is … a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide —that is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death?
(MS, 8-9).
Joining with Nietzsche’s effort to contribute to a transvaluation of values by unmasking everything by which the nihilism of our age was being hidden from itself, Camus has sought to describe that lived but inarticulate nihilism that is at the root of contemporary transcendent faiths. In The Myth the problem is first posed by Christianity, and then by the philosophical suicides of existentialism. In The Rebel, picking up the untapped strain of rationalism, which is “the most widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened age,” Camus explores the nihilistic roots of historical messianisms—of which more later.
Responding, in 1950, to a reporter’s question, Camus observed, according to Emmett Parker:
The world . . . was governed by the nihilists and it was up to those who believed in the existence of certain values to affirm them and to give them form. . . . The struggle against nihilism was a battle against time. Crying that time was short was a waste of time. “But if we succeed during this time in defining what is opposed to nihilism, illustrate it, make others share it, then our chances of success will increase and we will gain time.” The true task of the artist, Camus insisted, was to maintain, amid outcries and violence, our lucidity, our generosity and our will to live (Parker, 117 B).
THE EXIGENCE ONTOLOGIQUE
Some Conceptual Ambiguities
Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world … is reducing it to the human… . That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute, illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama (MS, 17; E, 110).