Happiness Tuesdays

“I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” ― Albert Camus

OVERVIEW

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy . . . the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus was an important work on the philosophy of absurdity and its connection to existential questions of meaning/meaninglessness. I finished this book in 2021 and never posted a review; honestly, I didn’t fully ‘get’ it. Now, I’m ready to revisit, focusing on Camus’ essays of An Absurd Reasoning, The Absurd Man, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus sets out to ask, among other things, “If life is meaningless, is suicide a reasonable response?”

Absurdity

Camus thinks life is absurd and a “meaningless pantomime.” He defines the “absurd” as the “divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” There are many ways in which life is absurd: we want the world to feel familiar and safe… it doesn’t; we want the cosmos to be explainable… it isn’t; we want life to have meaning… life is meaningless. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The absurd is a divorce, an unbridgeable gulf. (I’m reminded of that recorded caution before one steps onto a subway car: “please mind the gap.”) The degree to which we feel absurd is proportionate to the distance between what we wish to be true and what we perceive to be true. 

To underscore, absurdity is not the same as meaninglessness. Meaninglessness, according to Camus, is a reality… a lack of objective purpose in the cosmos. Absurdity, rather, is the tension created by our desire that reality be different.

Other philosophers have different perspectives. Thomas Nagel thought the absurd wasn’t about our desire for meaning, but rather the unwarranted seriousness with which we take our lives (given how objectively unimportant they are). Richard Taylor thought absurdity was “pointlessness;” Joel Feinberg agreed, but thought pointlessness was only one species of absurdity. Modern philosophers like John Gray (Straw Dogs) and David Benatar (The Human Predicament) have also tackled the absurdity of existence.

No matter which your nuanced definition of absurdity, once you’ve pulled back the curtain and seen the hideous truth of things, it’s hard to unsee them. Death is real; life is meaningless; the self is an illusion; existence is pointless. There’s no putting the absurd genie back in his bottle. If you choose truth, you must always remain ‘a prey to those truths.’

Religion

For some, the inability to square a natural reality with their deepest wishes/desires drives them to abandon natural reality. They choose, instead, to believe that the world is meaningful, that they are safe, and that they have cosmic importance. They choose the super-natural. If the absurd is the gap between our desires and our natural truths, some simply choose super-natural truths. God and religion, in this way, eliminate absurdity – they eliminate the gap between what we wish to be true and what we believe to be true. Camus (unsurprisingly) implores us not to ‘sacrifice our intellect,’ not to endeavour an escape from reality. The goal is not to cure ourselves of the human condition; the goal is to learn to live within it.

If you anchor yourself in natural reality, you commit yourself to living as an “absurd man.” What does that look like? What does it mean, as Camus says, to live without appeal?

The absurd man

The absurd man is committed to reason. He accepts harsh realities and maintains a sober intelligence. He lives with a courageous lucidity. He chooses to live with his existential ailments, never appealing to false cures. The absurd man knows he is finite (immortal desires thwarted by mortal realities are a potent form of absurdity). He knows that nothing he does will last. He probably suspects that any notion of “human progress” – that the future will be better than the past – is also absurd. Therefore, the first rational consequence of living as an absurd man is immediacy, abandoning hope for any better, brighter future… for any future at all. The absurd man refuses aims and aspirations. He does nothing for posterity or legacy. He adopts, rather, an indifference toward the future. The second consequence is freedom. To live in awareness of the absurd is to live without confines, to possess a “freedom of thought and action.” To the question of whether absurdity sanctions immoral behaviour, Camus responds no, but neither does it sanction its opposite. It sanctions nothing. Freedom entails only that we can behave in any way, not that we should behave in any way. Lastly, the absurd man lives in defiance, in revolt. He bitterly acknowledges the unenviable reality of man, and still he persists. In this persistence, he achieves an absurd victory.

Despair

Here we begin to circle back to the question of suicide. For Camus, it does not necessarily follow that absurdity should lead to despair. I don’t know that Camus argues convincingly why defiance is a more appropriate response than despair, but if I had to argue on his behalf, I’d say: if what you take to be of the highest value is truth (which Camus clearly does), then living in full awareness of what is true, what is real, is the highest achievement of man… and that requires that you live. To commit suicide is to be crushed by truth, not to be in pursuit of truth. Suicide is resignation, and what Camus wants from you is the opposite, is resistance. Revolt is “the certainty of a crushing fate” without the accompanying surrender. You maximize your life by maximizing the amount of time you are awake to it, no matter the bitterness of the arrangement.

“. . . revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled. No disparagement is of any use. That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have something exceptional about them.”

So, we must live in defiance, in revolt. As Camus has become famous for saying: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

The absurd hero

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, the paradigm of futile existence. Camus, however, imagines Sisyphus the “absurd hero.” Why? Because Sisyphus’s passion for life and hatred of death put him in this predicament; also, even though he is tortured by his situation, he persists. He scorns the gods in his persistence. Sisyphus’s heroism is born of his lucidity and refusal to give up. He continues pushing his boulder, knowing that nothing will ever come of it. He lives with indifference toward the future, with hopelessness, and with revolt. This is the “absurd victory.”

Like Sisyphus, you are burdened with absurdity. You’ve been thrust into a meaningless existence, tasked with rearranging boulders until you die, nothing ever coming from your endeavour. Take your circumstances and scorn them. Adopt a rebellious attitude – fill your life with passion, revolt, and freedom. Struggle against your absurdity, and in that struggle know that life is worth living.

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

There’s a lot about this book I didn’t like. The language is fairly inaccessible, and Camus does a poor job of justifying his preference for revolt. After all, rebelliousness might describe how you should go on, but I don’t think it satisfies why you should go on… or, even closer, why you ought to go on. So, my to-dos won’t draw on Camus’ work. I will instead point you to other philosophy that I think better addresses the “oughts” of existence.

Recommended reading

Imagining that many people find themselves reading The Myth of Sisyphus because suicide seems a logical reaction to the absurdity of existence, here are three books I would recommend reading next (far more optimistic than gloomy Camus):

·         Finding Purpose in a Godless World (Ralph Lewis)

·         Nature is Enough (Loyal Rue)

·         The Big Picture (Sean Carroll)

If you’re into poetry, read Jarod K. Anderson’s entire Field Guide to the Haunted Forest collection. If you want a secular but spiritual approach to meaning, try No Nonsense Spirituality by Brittney Hartley. And if you want to review what many other philosophers have offered about meaning, read The Meaning of Life by John G. Messerly.

Not everyone believes, as Camus did, that without cosmic meaning life is without any relevant meaning. Loyal Rue summed it up this way:

“The universe as a whole is a meaningless affair, the bus is going nowhere. But cosmic nihilism does not entail that all attributions of purpose are necessarily unjustified. The bus may be going nowhere, but this doesn’t mean that occupants of the bus cannot go to and fro filled with genuine goals. The fact – if it is one – that the universe is a meaningless affair does not reduce my life to a meaningless affair. It simply means that my purposes have no cosmic significance. But why should that deflate my quest for a meaningful life? Do human ends have to serve cosmic ends in order to be genuine?”

If you feel yourself being sucked down the black hole of nihilism, there are better resources available to you than Camus’ work. If you have an unassailable supply of dopamine, Camus is fine.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If you had to describe the book in one sentence? The appropriate response to absurdity is revolt, not resignation.

Who should read this book? Optimistic nihilists.

It seems prudent to reflect, however quickly and unseriously, that Camus himself barely followed his own advice. He said the absurd man should live with indifference toward the future, but he fought vehemently against fascism and totalitarianism (why should progress and a better future have mattered to him?). He felt that without God most everything was up to arbitrary human judgment… but his life seems to have orbited around certain values that closely approached “objective values,” as some philosophers define them. Lastly, he espoused respect and compassion for all humans, on the basis of their shared human condition, and yet he cheated so relentlessly on his two wives that one of them attempted suicide.

Engage with Camus’ work to the degree that you can retain your sanity while doing so, and don’t imagine he was ever a paragon of his own philosophy.

Myth Of Sisyphus: And Other Essays, The

By CAMUS, ALBERT

The Search for Happiness

Do you believe that happiness is found in the act of living out a task, rather than completing it?