PHL415, Lecture 3

Camus, Absurdity, and Suicide and the Myth of Sisyphus

There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide. Should one live or take his/her own life?

While this is a provocative way to start an essay, Camus’ point is much more general—it is about the meaning of life. If life has meaning, we shouldn’t do it, and if it does not, it seems that nothing prohibits us from it.

He is concerned with the relationship between individual thought and suicide, not suicide as a social phenomenon. Why? Because suicide is about my relation to the world, not yours.

Killing yourself amounts confessing…It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

Camus is committed to trying to understand life, even though it might be irrational.

The feeling of the absurd—the divorcement of man from his life or the actor from her setting.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree which suicide is a solution to the absurd.

Does the Absurd dictate death?

Is there a logic to the point of death? He calls this an Absurd Reasoning—thus the focus of the first major division of the book.

Absurd Walls

We might ask, in our common everyday usage, what is the use of ‘wall’? Walls are normally structures that at the same time keep something inside them and keep something outside of them as well. They are a limiting structure.

A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as his sincere impulses.

For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.

Part of Camus’ method is to give many examples of the absurd without giving a definition of it in any strong sense.

· As a man grows older, he knows his time becomes more and more limited. He constantly seeks tomorrow, yet tomorrow will eventually end his life—thus he shouldn’t seek it. This revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

· Our conceptions of the world lead us to see it in one way. Yet at this point we no longer rely upon those conceptions and the world becomes itself again, a foreign and irreducible thing. When it becomes itself again, it negates our conceptions of it. The denseness and foreignness of the world is the absurd.

· The stranger we meet in the mirror and for a brief second don’t know who it is—even though it is your reflection is the absurd.

· In reality there is no experience of death. He talks about the mathematical aspect of death, which I take to be a binary function—either dead or alive. He says that time works out both the problem and the solution after death. His point is that we have no indication that there is life after death, and thus, 1) we need to come to grips with the event that will happen and 2) that we will not know until after the fact what happens when we die or succinctly, there is no experience of death. The tension between these two results in the feeling of the absurd.

In the next section, from your readings, Camus goes on to consider the irrational elements of the world that our outside of human reason.

1. The Impossibility of Distinguishing True from False.

You can’t distinguish the true from the false. His version is broad. In asserting that all is true, the statement all is false is true as well. However if all is false, then the original assertion that all is true is false. If all is false is true, then all is true is false, and our secondary assertion, all is false is true ends up all is false is true is false, ad infinitum…

2. The Impossibility of Understanding.

The mind is supposed to be a total unity however by its own posits it is diverse and different. To understand is to unify. Camus’ point here is that reality may be a unified whole yet man divides it up into thoughts. These thoughts are not unified but exist independently. Without unity, there is no understanding. Camus states, “..we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One (whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve.” In the mind acting, it takes a whole and makes it parts, and in the process, undermines understanding. If the mind kept the whole, a unity, it would not undermine itself.

There is another aspect to this. Previously I mentioned the absurdity of the world. Our past conceptions drive our current conceptions except when the encounter the absurd. We no longer use these past conceptions to organize our current situation, and thus the world becomes a bundle of perceptions. The mind unifies based upon past experiences, or what Camus calls ‘nostalgia’. But when the mind tries to progress, a problem arises. Camus states, “So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding.” 18

3. The Failure of Self-Knowledge

“Of whom and of what can I say: “I know that!” This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers…the aspects cannot be added up.” 19

We might ask why the aspects can’t be added up giving a conception of the self and what you know about yourself? The initial lines of this passage tell us why. That which is empirical or what we can touch and feel is what we can know. To say that I am ‘x’ and ‘y’ is construction, we have constructed something about our self, and constructions aren’t stable. For example, I could say that I am a philosopher, but tomorrow change my mind and call myself a logician. Those are constructions of what I think I know about myself, yet they are distinct and fleeting. What then can I know about myself from these two attributions? Not much…

4. The Failure of Scientific Knowledge

Camus draws upon the imagery of the atom to make the claim that scientific knowledge is no different than poetry and literature. It seems to me that his point is that science tells a story and while stories can be true, we need to recognize them for what they are—stories and characterizations of the way the world ‘is.’

The purpose of 1-4 is to show that the world resists our demands of reason.

· In 1, we notice an incoherence between truth and falsity.

· In 2, we see a problem with our structure which needs to unify, but in the process, delineates.

· In 3, we see how self-knowledge is limited.

· In 4, science, being a source of rationality, is no different than poetry for our understanding.

As Camus concludes, “Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that the world is absurd.”

More on the Absurd…

“In this unintelligible and limited universe, man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds him to his ultimate end. In his recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear and definite. I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place.”

Camus is further clarifying the absurd here. The world is irrational, but not absurd. Technically the absurd is the link between myself and the world. This link is one of confrontation where my consciousness is set up against the world and its walls that hem it in. Restated, my consciousness is opposed to the limits of the world, instead of being unopposed and unbounded. Thus, when Camus is talking about Absurd Walls, he is referencing the way the world limits my consciousness and in the process of limiting it, a confrontation occurs between conscious-ness and the world—resulting in the absurd.

He concludes the section:

“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need (happiness and for reason) and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend upon it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.”

The absurd is born and must not be forgotten because whether or not a person chooses to live is a consequence of recognizing the absurd for what it is. The world, the desire for clarity and organization, and the absurd are the characters in the drama, and we must recognize how they work together and their relation to human existence.

Summary of 1-28. Camus begins by considering what he takes to be the most fundamental philosophical question, should one commit suicide? His method is to look for the relationship between individual thought and suicide. Suicide arises when one no longer deems life as worth living. Life may not have any meaning, but that does not justify suicide. So he begins his search for a reason to justify not taking one’s own life. This takes him into a discussion of the relationship between an individual and the irrational world resulting in various examples of the absurd. The limits of our consciousness are the walls of our world—they are absurd because they limit. This will become important later on when Camus makes his famous quantity/quality distinction where it is the quantity of our experiences that is important and not the quality.

The Myth of Sisyphus

“It is said that Sisyphus, being near death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen the face of this world again, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail…A decree from the Gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.”

“The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back under its own weight. They had thought there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

“You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions—not wanting to return, as through his torture—pushing the rock. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing.”

Sisyphus has an absurd existence. He knows his life will never be different and that he cannot change it. He accepts his fate, much like we accept death, and tries to carve out an existence.

“It is during that return (going back down to start again), that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lair of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

There is a struggle, pushing the rock. All of his effort and thought are expended on it. Yet, when he gets to the top suddenly he is free of his immediate burden and consciousness returns. He can now reflect on the situation, and as he does, he begins his return to bottom. The gods have no hold on him, he has accepted his fate and surpassed by this acceptance. A “…this is what you give me, then this is what I’ll take attitude.”

“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious… Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Building on the last passage, one can imagine Sisyphus returning to the bottom of the hill with a smirk on his face. His torture is victory at the same time because the vibrant character of the moment shows he is still alive through the pains and aches, and through being alive, he is victorious—by defying the gods.

“All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols… If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable (death)…For the rest he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death.”

The absurd man cannot control death, but the rest he can.

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The rock is his burden. He negates the gods by accepting his fate in one respect, and he raises the rock in an act of scorn to the gods. He has no master anymore, the gods can do nothing more to him. His struggle is one of his own doing, and thus, by accepting his fate, we must try to think of him as happy—because his choice led him here.