Albert Camus: Rebelling Against the Absurd

If human life is absurd, empty, meaningless, leading only to death, can anything of value be rescued from it? If we are thrown into a completely desolate and forlorn existence, why do anything? Why not kill ourselves now instead of waiting for the final absurdity of death to take us? Albert Camus (1913-1960) maintained in his own life a tension between this awareness of the futility of human existence and his own defiant, rebellious self-affirmation. His writings (philosophy and fiction) reflect and illustrate this paradox: Altho ultimate and lasting meaning is impossible, we can still create our own dignity as persons by challenging the absurd. A strange love of life emerges from a devastating encounter with despair, as John Cruickshank explains in his book on Camus: His inquiry, which set out to discover how the absurd paradox might either be solved or destroyed ends by making this paradox itself the basis for positive action.... Camus derives meaning for his existence from an original denial of the possibility of meaning.... Camus takes as his key to existence the very fact of not having a key. Cruickshank distinguishes four ways in which we notice the absurd: 1. We might feel the absurd when something interrupts our daily routine, when our comfortable, automatic, habitual ways of life suddenly fall apart and we are forced to ask the deepest possible why? 2. The absurd might intrude into our smooth-flowing consciousness when we become acutely aware of the passage of time: Life becomes transparent to its end, and we see that it adds up to zero. 3. Sometimes familiar objects become radically alien and strange. We discover ourselves exiled in an accidental world that makes no sense. 4. Our separation from other people, our estrangement from ordinary life, might open us to the deep clash and disharmony of existence. We see normal human behavior as shallow, empty, mechanical, senseless.

Albert Camus: Philosopher of the Absurd Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, dramatist, philosopher, essayist, was born in Algeria on 7 November, 1913. His mother was Spanish and his Breton father was killed in World War I in 1914. Camus was raised and studied under difficult but reasonably happy circumstances: though I was born poor, I was born under a happy sky in a natural setting with which one feels in union, unalienated. Initially a journalist in Algiers, and later in Paris, he was Editor of Combat, the underground resistance newspaper from 1942 to 1946. Camus, like his friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, was then an active member of the resistance. He was but 46 when he was killed instantly in a road accident in January 1960, having been offered a lift back to Paris by a close friend (Roger Gallimard, the publisher, who later died of injuries sustained in the crash). The Nobel prize for literature was awarded to Camus in 1957. Whilst his major interest was mainly in literature, he studied philosophy at Algiers University, and wrote didactic texts which are certainly philosophical. In philosophical histories or dictionaries he is usually listed under French existentialism and accorded higher status, as philosopher, than Simone de Beauvoir. Camus rejected the category existentialist. For many years a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir they were to experience a massive falling out. But this had earlier roots, to do with jealousy, with Camus fierce individualism, combined with a post political ethics, and a refusal to commit himself politically to causes at a time after WW II when Sartre, under the influence of Beauvoir, was moving away from his earlier violent and alienated notion of the individual. The final straws were probably Sartre siding with the Communists (Camus would have no truck with them), an intemperate review of LHomme Rvolt in Les Temps Modernes, and an equally intemperate reply by Camus. Sartre responded equally as badly to Camus in Les Temps Moderne (August, 1952): you may be my brother brotherhood is cheap you certainly arent my comrade (Sartre, 1952). (But they had been comrades in the resistance). Camus had enormous consideration for others and was extremely generous, perhaps to a fault. In his early days Beauvoir said that she liked the hungry ardour of their companion, yet that he could become concerned that his generosity was received with ingratitude. He could become formal in discussion if not righteous and, pen in hand, he became a rigid moralist (Beauvoir, 1968: p.61). Perhaps the acclaim and his good luck went to his head. Nor as moralist did he have time for the deliberations and the risks involved in translating his moralism into political thought

and action. In his later life he was probably closer to Gaullism than socialism, refusing to denounce colonialism in Algeria in Stockholm were he was to be awarded his Nobel prize. But in an ever increasing modernism and performativity Camus traces the disappearance of old Europe and the spaces where morals and justice are being replaced by the spaces of new technologies. The essential philosophical thought of Camus is to be found in Le Myth de Sisyphe(1943) (The Myth of Sisyphus [1943]) and LHomme Rvolt (1951) (Transl. into English as The Rebel [1969]) although there are differen ces and developments between the two. These ideas are of course explored in his novels. A major thesis of Camus, in both tracts, is the problematisation of death. In the earlier tract it is suicide and in the latter it is the death of others, especially murder. They do not involve studies of death but, instead, attitudes towards death. If we can have experience of other things we cannot experience death, Camus argues for, at best, any experience is second hand and parasitic. Camus ongoing point is that we can have no experience of death, in the sense that we experience sense data, emotions, etc., but that death is, as human beings, our only certainty. He has been titled as the writer of the absurd which, in his thought, can be described as the confrontation between our human demands for justice and rationality with a contingent and indifferent universe. Hence life is meaningless. Yet, we must accept the absurdity of life and we must go on living Sisyphus accepts his futile fate. But: Finally I come to death. In Le Myth de Sisyphe absurdity is a sensation or feeling, which seizes us suddenly. It is at the base of thought and action, even though it is indeterminate and confused and, if present, it is distant in time. Time is our worst enemy, causing us to place ourselves in time, and live with the future in mind we are ardent for tomorrow even though much of life is mechanical repetition. Faced by the absurdity of life consciousness becomes crucial to Camus thought it is the only good and the real good. It permits one to discern meaning and, as the world has no meaning, it is ultimately absurd (though it is the relationship between consciousness and the world which is said to be absurd). Our reaction to this experience of absurdity is pursued in L'Homme Rvolt. Metaphysical rebellion is the answer to absurdity. It is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation it disputes the ends of man and creation (it) protests against the human condition ( The Rebel, p.29). Rebellion indefatigably confronts evil. But it also sets limits, beyond which one cannot go, for rebellion without limits ends in slavery: he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and sustains the world again and again (ibid., p. 267). There is then a message of hope in rebellion because consciousness can make the walls or limits that could not formerly be penetrated, transparent. Consciousness is promoted by the absurd. There is a promise of a real awakening and no chance of returning to repose. But here Camus stops. There are no principles which define an appropriate rebellion. He is not so much theoretical here but practical. Each situation is new and the appropriate action determined by analysis of that situation. Camus was against violence but under certain conditions the rebel would choose limited and brief violence. On the eve of the liberation of Paris in WW II, he wrote in Combat: the barricades of freedom have once more been thrown up. Once more justice must be bought with the blood of men their reasons must then have been overwhelming for them suddenly to seize the guns and shoot steadily, in the night, at those soldiers who for two years thought that war was easy (Camus, 1944). There are limits then between opposites and moderation is the key. There are dualisms such as life and death; love and hatred; tenderness and justice; and justice for man against the contingenci es of history. Somewhat paradoxically the rebel must at one and the same time reject and accept history, and simultaneously deny and affirm. Camus always sought a middle path, an equilibrium, and moderation. But without principles for such moderate forms of rebelling Camus seems almost anarchistic. This concept of absurdity of the human condition is to be found in the Theatre of the Absurd which uses a variety of dramatic techniques which defy rational analysis in their presentation of the absurdity of the human condition. The term was coined by Martin Esslin in 1961 but he developed the notion of the absurd from Camus Le Myth de Sisyphe. Dramatists to whom this title might be applied include Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Talking of the death of her former friend Simone de Beauvoir was to say: it wasnt the fifty-year old man whod just died I was mourning; not that just man without justice, so arrogant and touchy behind his stern mask it was the companion of our hopeful years, whose open face laughed and smiled so easily, the young ambitious writer, wild to enjoy life, its pleasures, its triumphs and comradeship, friendship, love and happiness. Death had brought him back to life; for him time no longer existed (Beauvoir, 1968, p.497). Sartre in a eulogy for him in France-Observateur on 7 January 1960 said: He was, in this century and against history, the current heir to that long line of moralists whose works perhaps constitute that which is most original in French letters. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, battled uncertainly against the massive and misshapen events of this our time. But, inversely, through his obstinate refusal, he reaffirmed, in the heart of our era, against the Machiavellians, against the golden calf of realism, the existence of morality