The aim of art in such a context is to add experiences. As an expression of integrity it might, though it need not, assist individuals in achieving the lucid awareness that can appreciate every moment without giving way to hope in an illusory future that destroys the ability to experience the present. “For the absurd man,” writes Camus, “it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference” (M, 70). There are no ultimate metaphysical explanations in an absurd world, and recognition of this may be the first step toward overcoming the despair that had been the nihilist legacy.
Describing—that is the last ambition of an absurd thought. . . . The heart learns . . . that the emotion delighting us when we see the world’s aspects comes to us not from its depths but from their diversity. Explanation is useless, but sensation remains and, with it, the constant attraction of a universe inexhaustible in quantity. . . . In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping . . . consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly (MS, 69 70, my italics).6
In a world without transcendence, therefore, “All existence … is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime. … It does not offer an escape for the intellectual ailment. Rather … it marks the point from which absurd passions spring and where reasoning stops” (M, 70, 71, my italics).
Creation is a microcosm of the absurd macrocosm in which qualities are proliferated ad infinitum. Creative activity is a mirror in which individuals see an image of their futile life. This can be accomplished internally by the way in which an absurd work illustrates divorce and ultimate inexplicability; and externally by the multiplication of tentative perspectives. The intellectual ailment results from the longing for resolution. Instead, creation offers the absurd mind an indefinite number of perspectives. Instead of explanation, it offers description; instead of necessity, it is pure gratuitousness.
But if life can be found to be filled with qualities immediately experienced —with truths we can feel—then the role of absurd art becomes clear and important: It lives in the multiplication of those qualities, in the diversification of perspectives, in the way in which it offers itself for contemplation and enjoyment. Art speaks for diversity, for the proliferation of qualities ad infinitum, and against exclusiveness and finality. It thus serves to reconcile humans to a life without ultimate justification.7
Contrary to the opinion of many commentators,8 Camus never repudiated this perspective, however much his center of interest may have shifted. Absurd creation speaks of the absurd artwork as the expression of a lucid consciousness seeking to augment experience through the multiplication of perspectives without ultimate resolution. It is a work self-conscious about its impotence, seeking justification in the immediate qualities of its creation and presentation. To all these values Camus holds firm, but he finds them insufficient. They are but the outlines of a position; they set the boundary conditions of the human experiment. Once these boundary conditions have been accepted, once the absurd experience has been lived through and the intellectual ailment overcome (at least insofar as the failure of ultimate explanations had incapacitated one for living), the problems of living remain: Choices must be made and consequences undergone. “Revolt. The absurd implies an absence of choice. Living is choosing. Choosing is killing. The objection to the absurd is murder” (Notebooks II, 221).
AN ETHICS OF QUANTITY
The Myth thus leaves us with but the bare bones of a perspective. “All that remains [for the creative experience] is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty
A world remains of which man is the sole master” (MS, 87). Having disposed of the question of objective transcendence, Camus suggests: There is perhaps a living transcendence, of which beauty offers the promise, which can make this limited and mortal world preferable and more lovable than any other. Art thus leads us to the origins of revolt to the extent to which it tries to give form to a value which flees in perpetual becoming, but which the artist pursues, wishing to snatch it from the flow of history (R, 258; L’HR, 319).9
As the absolute diminishes as an acceptable resolution of the problems of human existence, the need for practical solutions becomes more urgent. Absurd creation sought to point us toward the qualities embodied in the present. But it was not capable of offering an answer on its own terms to that felt need for unity that demanded of experience a certain order. Yet the need had to be met. Even if total order is unattainable, may not partial orders be found? The absurd, of course, never denied this possibility, nor sought to negate its importance. What would a work of art be without order? And what else could be the role of discipline? But the concern there had been to free us from our destructive attachment to totality, to the vain and destructive hope for salvation. Thus the question of partial unities had not been broached.10 This The Rebel sought to do.
“As description,” wrote Thomas Hanna of The Myth’s theory of art, “a work of art is simply another absurd phenomenon, but the difference is that here, for the first time, this personal awareness is brought out toward others and indicates their common lot” (Hanna [I], 37). Lucid description is The Myth’s final injunction, never ultimate explanation or judgment, for that would be unjustifiable. This is the force of the ethics of quantity to which we have referred. But a problem with that notion has caused much confusion, and we would do well here to clarify its philosophical import.
From the perspective of absolutes, either you have an ultimate ground of explanation or you do not. The absolute does not admit of degrees. If you do not have absolute values, you have no justification for evaluation and choice at all. That is the situation in which individuals faced with the absurd find themselves, and that is why they so often draw the nihilistic conclusion.
Camus accepted that situation as a starting point and sought to show the possibility of reaching another, equally logical, conclusion. Within this framework of the impossibility of total explanation, Camus suggests the possibility of total acceptance of the qualities of immediacy. No judgment is to be passed upon experience; all that can be said is whether there is more or less of it. Thus absurd creation, which offers no judgment and does not explain what cannot be explained. It presents its artistic unities as gratuitous offerings whose only value, if they have any, is the extent to which they increase the quantity of one’s experience.
It is at this point that a significant problem arises for Camus, for he does not seem sufficiently clear as to how art can increase the quantity of one’s experience, yet be simply repetition. As far as pure quantity is concerned, the only significant difference would involve the span of living, which is equivalent to a repetition of the same neutral quality. In fact, he says elsewhere in The Myth that there is no substitute for twenty years of life. However, the force of his point, and his ethic, seems to lie in a slightly different path from that of quantity. He may rather be taken as suggesting that by presenting qualitatively different experiences, between which, of course, no absolute value judgment is possible, the scope of experience is enlarged. Increasing its quantity would then be equivalent to expanding the diversity of its encounters, of the quantity of the irreplaceable immediate qualities experienced by a lucid consciousness facing an inevitable death. The repetition would not refer to a constant reduplication of the same qualities of experience, but rather to a repetition of the absurdist thematic of divorce. This interpretation is consistent with the basic line of his argument. Thus the “goal of absurd art,” writes Hanna, is “that art means nothing more than itself” (Hanna [I], 37), a self that is simply the presentation of an infinite diversity of qualities.
Once the role of qualities in an ethic of quantity is understood, the continuity in theory between TheMyth and The Rebel becomes less opaque. The structure of a work of art, even an absurd one, has a positive and necessary role as a response to the need for unity and coherence. The stylization, as an expression of the artist’s freedom with respect to the materials,
affords art its distinctiveness, by removing it from the ordinary flow of experience and giving to it a form that concentrates that experience. Art may thus increase the quantity of experience by the revelation and description of its diverse qualities.
Thus while there is some truth in the remark of Thomas Hanna—itself typical of most interpretations of Camus—that there is a break in continuity between the theory of art in The Myth and in The Rebel, to call that of the later work a “repudiation” of the earlier one is to miss the more fundamental continuity. Here is Hanna’s argument: The esthetic injunction of the absurdist experiment was to describe the world with nothing added to it. This of course is not the case with the esthetics of revolt. . . . The world is no longer strange and intractable, it is now capable of transformation. And, more importantly, man does not hold his nostalgia of unity in defiance of the world, but, in revolt, he now aggressively seeks to transform the world in the image of revolt’s value. … In this earlier esthetics Camus’ basic description of man and his unity, and the world and its disunity, is much the same as it is in his mature thought. The essential difference is that earlier there was no compulsion for man to create a