Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) may rightly be called the philosopher of the Absurd. In his essays, stories and plays, he mercilessly confronts the world on its own terms and finds that he cannot reconcile his human urge to unify and explain all experience with the world’s incurable plurality and lack of coherence. He finds this situation ‘absurd’!

Confronting Absurdity, one has, according to Camus, three options: commit physical suicide, commit philosophical suicide, or accept the absurd and live absurdity to the fullest. So Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” (All quotes in this essay are from The Myth of Sisyphus unless otherwise noted.)

If living in this world is incurably absurd, why do it? Why go on? Why not just end it as quickly and as painlessly as possible? 

“Does the Absurdity dictate death?” Ultimately, Camus rejects the option of physical suicide. Like ‘philosophical suicide’ (below), it negates the Absurd; but it also amounts to running away from what’s real.

Camus claims no priority on the recognition of the Absurd. Throughout his essay he acknowledges other philosophers and writers who have confronted the Absurd: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Husserl, Sartre and Dostoevsky, among others. “…All started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antimony, anguish or impotence reigns.”

But Camus gently accuses all of them of committing ‘philosophical suicide’, of “hoping in spite of everything”. To paint with an overly broad brush, Camus suggests that each of these men uses the terror of the Absurd to ‘prove’, in the end, that there must be some order, some purpose, some meaning capable of overcoming that terror. This Camus rejects.

In fact, Camus’ uniqueness rests on his unwillingness to seek relief in some species of phony faith or false hope – relief from the terrifying conclusions forced on us by the Absurd. “A man devoid of hope, and conscious of being so, has ceased to belong to the future.”

What makes Camus’ brand of nihilism particularly heroic is his willingness to maintain his position while freely acknowledging that he does not know whether he is right or wrong. Radical skepticism is closely related to nihilism, precluding any philosophical certainties:

“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”

Both Camus and Sartre admit that is possible that God exists but, unlike Pascal, they attach no importance to the matter: “Hence, what he (the absurd man) demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows…and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.”

In this Camus reveals himself to be a proper child of the Enlightenment: ‘Live solely with what he knows…bring in nothing that is not certain’. This seems obvious to us denizens of the scientific age, raised as we were on Ayer, Wittgenstein, and Austin, et al. But it would seem very odd to anyone born before, say, 1700. In those ‘unenlightened times’, what was not ‘known’ was a matter of ‘faith’ and faith was the foundation of knowledge.

Camus offers a concise exposition of the Existentialist’s dilemma: “Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists…I can sketch all the aspects it is able to assume…but aspects cannot be added up…”

Camus is dragging Descartes out of the head and into the heart. Furthermore, he is asserting a paradigmatically existentialist doctrine that the sum of all qualia can never lead to even a single etre. In this he bridges Parmenides Hot Link and Sartre: 

“Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”

In other words, my existence will always surpass my essence: “This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction…”

Camus may justly be called the philosopher of the Absurd, but 300 years earlier another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, focused on a similar problem in his Pensees:

“We do not require great education of mind to understand that here there is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly that death…threatens us every moment…There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible…For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after…I am frightened…”

Faced with an analysis of the human condition similar to Camus’, Pascal came to a very different conclusion, known as Pascal’s Wager. From a common starting point, Pascal and Camus draw diametrically opposed conclusions. Camus’ absurd man “has ceased to belong to the future” while for Pascal, there is no good other than the future. 

Of course, Camus and Sartre would both accuse Pascal of ‘bad faith’, of ‘philosophical suicide’…but I’m not sure Pascal would care.

It is also worthwhile to compare Camus with Whitehead and Jung. They both view God as the process of essence acquiring existence. Everything evolves, everything grows, including God. The early books of the Old Testament seem to endorse this view. Abraham argues with God and uses reason to deflect his intentions; Job uses law to force a peevish and recalcitrant God to ‘be God’ and act justly.

We are trained to think that all action has a motivation, a purpose, a goal; if there is no future, no transcendent meaning, no objective values, no hope, then how does one go about living one’s life? If we reject physical suicide and refuse philosophical suicide (hope), then what options are open to us?

“No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition…All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize it or cancel it. The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.” 

Contrast Camus’ concept of freedom with that of Pope Leo XIII. Leo, of course, believed in transcendent values, in objective Truth and in the imperative of Justice. Therefore for Leo, the only real freedom is the freedom to do what is right (just) and profess what is true. To do otherwise is to be enslaved (by evil) for who would voluntarily profess something she knew to be false or do something she knew to be wrong? For Leo, that person would be living in ‘bad faith’.

By contrast, Camus’ freedom is unfettered by concepts such as transcendence and objectivity. Camus’ heroes are free to create ex nihilo. In that sense, we are all gods. (Psalms 82: 6, John 10: 34)

“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning…That idea that ‘I am’, my way of acting as if everything has a meaning…all that is given the lie…by the absurdity of a possible death…Death is there as the only reality.”

The foundation of the Judeo-Christian world view is found in Exodus 3:14 where God tells Moses, “I am who am.” Camus undermines a 3500 year tradition by claiming that ‘I am’ is per se a lie. In this he resonates with certain Eastern traditions that reject the concept of ‘self’ entirely.

Contrast St. Paul: In the end even death is subjected to Christ and Christ to God. For Camus, death subjects everything to itself; that is the essence of the Absurd. Everything hangs on this point! 

Paul and Camus would agree that death and meaning are utterly incompatible! In fact, they constitute the archetypical incompatibility: not ‘life and death’ but ‘death and meaning’. Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value. This is the fundamental divide underlying the intellectual history of the Western world. 

“Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future…He still thinks that something in life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free…”

“Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary…In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences. Choices, actions cannot be justified by anything outside themselves.” 

So given that suicide and bad faith are no longer options, how does one live? For better or worse, Camus tackles that question head on. We explore Camus’ lifestyle prescription in a companion article on this site. Spoiler alert – It isn’t pretty!

Image: Portrait from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, 1957.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

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