The restrained irony that pervades this work constitutes Camus’s first published attempt to confront the experience of absurdity into which he had been precipitated. But the solution remains essentially artistic—a matter of style—while the felt dilemmas lose none of their experiential force. Germaine Bree beautifully summarizes the results of this attempt when she writes: Poverty, old age, the solitary travels of a young man without money, the silent, helpless night of vigil beside a mother loved but inaccessible, all these forms of life strip the individual bare of illusion, habit, diversion, and bring him face to face with the incomprehensibility of his life and of his death. And in those moments of nakedness, when all rationalization and all protective ideas and beliefs disappear, the beauty of the earth secretly suffuses the soul, reducing to nought the “absurd” human being, tempting man away from a wounded humanity into its own indifferent perfection and immortality. “But these are the eyes and voices which I must love. I belong to the world through all my gestures, to men through all my pits’ and gratitude. Between these two facets of the world I do not wish to choose. … If I listen to the irony slinking behind all things, it slowly emerges, blinking its small clear eye: live as if…” (Bree,75-6).
The world of the human and the world of the nonhuman— Two Sides of the Coin—bound together by an “as if,” and at the end a certain death. In Nuptials further meditation on the meaning of the eventuality of death seems to take us a step beyond this “stylistic” solution toward a suggestion of the positive role that consciousness can play in replacing the “as if” with lucidity. Camus observes:
The true, the only, progress of civilization . . . lies in creating conscious deaths. … As for me, here in the presence of this world, I have no wish to lie nor to be lied to. I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror. It is to the extent I cut myself off from the world that I fear death most, to the degree I attach myself to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky. Creating conscious deaths is to diminish the distance that separates us from the world and to accept a consummation without joy, alert to rapturous images of a world forever lost (LCE, 77—8, my italics).
An almost solipsistic, lucid partial reintegration into the cosmos is suggested here as the way to heal the rupture of the recognition of death—but at the expense of the world of the human.4
A dichotomous antagonism, a rejection, and an acceptance—such seems to be the stage of development to which Camus has arrived.5
2
The Death of God
We can no longer do without positive values. Where will we find them? We have to look within ourselves, in the heart of our experience, namely in the interior of rebellious thought, for the values we need (A/II, 80).
ALONE IN THE WORLD
“God is dead,” proclaims Nietzsche’s madman, and we have killed Him. The Christian God is no longer believable. Yet this cosmic deed remains light years away from being understood. It is a frightful, portentous event. For when the belief in God evaporates, the entire structure of Western beliefs must come tumbling down. Is this not a cataclysmic event? Does it not threaten to wrench from the West the root structure of the meaningful drama by which we live? But we do not yet know that we no longer believe. We still go through the rituals, say the right words on the right occasions, and act as if our life had cosmic significance. But our belief lacks coherence and substance, its shell is cracking, and our civilization totters on the brink of the cataclysm.
Such was Nietzsche’s vision in the 1880s when, “philosophizing with a hammer,” he touched his tuning fork to the most elusive and yet profound resonances of the experience of the West.
Nietzsche did not kill God, writes Camus; he found Him dead in the hearts of his contemporaries and proclaimed this fact aloud. But he came too soon. The civilized, who were amused and amazed, viewed him only as a madman, remaining secure in their sense of cosmic importance.
But the deed had been done, and its reality was beginning to gnaw at the vitals of our civilization like a cancer in the body politic. Nihilism was the emerging legacy of this deed: the systematized belief in nothing, the sense that without God our lives are devoid of significance. Morality loses its foundation; everything is permitted but nothing makes any difference. We are adrift in a Newtonian world of matter in motion following purposeless natural laws, which during the course of Darwinian evolution has given birth to sensitive and reflective animals who differ from the rest of creation solely in the knowledge of their impending death. It’s only a matter of time.
Nothing—no God, no purpose, no morality, no conscience—hinders such animals from grasping for whatever they can get, as soon as they can get it. “Everything is permitted” means the law of force, power, and efficiency. From nihilism to Nazism the path is direct. And the defeat of Nazism is only a temporary setback, generated by a vitalized conservative reflex, in the seemingly inevitable “progress” of the West toward realizing the full significance of the death of God. Now “beyond freedom and dignity,” we are rapidly approaching “1984.”
What is absurd about life, writes Camus, is neither the universe nor people, but the confrontation of the two. Energized by the demand for an ordered, dignified, meaningful existence, suffused with the memory of several thousand years of Judeo-Christian providence, confronting a world eternally indifferent to that need and unresponsive to that memory, such is the source of our experience of the absurd.
The experience of absurdity, however, is not universal, not inevitable, not necessary, not even necessarily true. But it is rooted in historical reality, it is legated to us by the failure of the Judeo-Christian drama that has been at the center of our experience.
As this dramatic setting collapses, sometimes slowly and surreptitiously creeping behind the curtain of ordinary events, sometimes violently ripping off the masks of habit and belief with which we dress our appearances, the experience of meaninglessness moves to center stage. The absurd, says Camus, is but “one perception among many.” Yet, once it appears, it casts a pall across our world, coloring our activities, values, and purposes with its hue. We see ourselves in a new light. No dimension of experience can long remain immune from its influence, try as we may to go on with our habits and our “daily round.” Even those who are able to submerge their attendant anxiety with a nervous and often obsessive reaffirmation of normality find themselves in a transformed social world. The conservative reflex, try as it may, cannot hold back the effects of the cataclysmic event. It is a matter of taking stock of our experience—and that of our epoch—and seeking to develop a response that will preserve the values that are worth saving.
To demonstrate the absurdity of life, however, cannot be an end, writes Camus. To encounter absurdity is only the beginning. The beginning of awareness; the beginning of reflection; the
beginning of the long and arduous effort to find our way out of the dead end which is the nihilistic conclusion to the death of transcendent values.
If the death of God is the central given for Camus, and the perception of life’s ultimate absurdity the seemingly obvious consequence, the nihilistic conclusion is no more logically necessary than is the leap of faith. Suicide,
whether philosophical or natural, involves an abdication of the struggle to give meaning to our life on its own terms. For Camus, the central challenge of our times, and of his life, was to confront nihilism head on: to accept life as given, pervaded as it is by an absurd sensibility and lacking transcendent values, while remaining committed to the possibility of meaningful living. The significance of this challenge cannot be understood, and the intensity of the struggle to combat it cannot be grasped, unless the profound passion for life that underlies the entire effort is appreciated. For the reflective person who is not deeply moved by the pulsating rhythms of bodily existence, no articulation of the meanings of life will suffice to render life worth living. Starting from the experience of life’s vitalizing energy in need of an integral ordering, and confronted with the memory of a cosmic setting that has collapsed, Camus commits his being and his thought to the struggle to find an alternative to nihilism. He writes from within “a world where everything has lost its meaning” in order to “throw some light on the blind battle we [are] waging and thereby to make our battle more effective” (RRD, 3, ix).