Applied Camus

In an earlier post, Camus, we explored the philosophical reasoning behind the philosopher’s version of nihilism: the rejection of concepts like ‘the future, consequences, transcendent values’.  

With no objective values and no concern for the future, we are left to live life entirely as we wish. “Everything is permitted.” (Nietzsche) Of course, that does not mean that we must behave as libertines. Each of us is free to fashion a code of ethics for herself. But we must not imagine that these private codes have any objective justification or that they constitute a ‘categorical imperative’, i.e. that they are in any way binding on others…or even on one’s self.

That said, Camus devotes the second half of The Myth of Sisyphus to sketching styles of life that might be consistent with living out the implications of the Absurd. I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system; for example:

“I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation… I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living…value judgments are discarded…A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate…For on the one hand the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences.”

Sheer gobbledygook, am I right? Let’s enumerate the errors: (1) “I cannot conceive” – who cares what Camus ‘can conceive’ if we are all independent actors responsible for our own lives; (2) “What counts” – value judgments are not discarded, they are front and center here; (3) “Values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences” – so values do have meaning after all, as long as they are ‘Camus approved’; (4) “All experiences are unimportant” – except that the quantity and variety of those unimportant experiences is what gives life meaning: ∞ * 0 ≠ 0. 

First, Camus dismisses the possibility that asceticism and the absurd could be compatible. This seems strange. If there is no objective value in the world, why mightn’t someone renounce that world (short of suicide), relish his solitude, and focus on his ‘inner self’? Practitioners of Taoism and Zen, well acquainted with the Absurd, often follow this practice.

Even more disturbingly, Camus substitutes ‘quantity’ of experience for the forbidden ‘quality’. But isn’t quantity itself a kind of quality? Is ‘large’ a quality or a quantity? If, as Camus asserts, more of some things is better than less, doesn’t quantity then become a value (a quality) in itself?

One recalls a particularly crass expression from the 1980s: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” as well as Gatsby’s famous exclamation: “Living well is the best revenge”. Perhaps not our loftiest values…but values nonetheless!

Camus further explains that the quantity of our experience replaces any consideration of quality…only so far as we are conscious of those experiences: “For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our lives…To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them…A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard.”

So ‘quantity’ is no longer a variable? Instead, Camus now introduces a new ‘transcendent value’: consciousness! Not the abstract phenomenon of consciousness but the act of being conscious of a particular experience. Conscious experience is certainly different, qualitatively, from unconscious experience (whatever that might be). But is this not precisely the goal of Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and cloistered monastic orders? Is it not the case that many have renounced the world precisely in order to become more conscious?

To immerse one’s self in the hurly-burly of life may not be the best way to heighten consciousness. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth)

“To the absurd man a premature death is irreparable. Nothing can make up for the sum of the faces and centuries he would otherwise have traversed.” Where are these faces, where are these centuries, where is this sum? They can’t be in the future because, as we show in our earlier essay, Camus rejects the category of ‘future’ entirely. 

Earlier, Camus referred to experiences as ‘accumulated’. What suggests to Camus that experience can be totalized in this way? And what about the zero term in the equation? (I mean, of course, death.) Doesn’t death automatically multiply all the terms in any equation by itself, i.e., by zero? Isn’t Death the great eraser? ∞ * 0 = 0.

Death is not an experience that you ‘add’ to other experiences. In fact, death is not an experience at all. Death is the absence of experience and, even more viciously, the annulment of all experience. “…There is no experience of death…it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths…and it never quite convinces us”.

Roman Catholic doctrine does not sanction divorce. Once married, always married. But it does allow annulment, the retroactive ‘erasure’ of the marriage itself. Not married, never married. Isn’t that the role Death plays in Camus’ system? Not living…

So how are we to live in an absurd world? Camus details several options, but he makes it clear that this does not constitute an exhaustive catalogue of possibilities.

First, Don Juan. “Don Juan” is a collector of experiences. He seeks a long, varied and intense life: “Don Juan has chosen to be nothing”, i.e., to lose himself in himself. In fact, as we shall see, all of Camus’ absurd heroes choose to be nothing. This seems odd. What is choosing to be nothing but suicide…or at least renunciation, two options previously rejected by Camus (above)?

Second, the Actor: “The actor has three hours to be Iago…Never has the absurd been so well illustrated…There is no frontier between being and appearing… In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.” We are reminded of Prospero’s iconic speech in The Tempest.

Third, the Conqueror. This is the man of action, but Camus acknowledges that the project of the conqueror is ultimately futile: “Nothing of the conqueror lasts, not even his doctrines.” Shall we refer to Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains.” (Shelley)

As Camus repeatedly points out, death is inconsistent with objective values. If death is the final reality, then values are meaningless. On the other hand, if meaningful values are a reality, then death is odd man out.

Camus suggests that death is not merely the absence of value but the ‘exaltation of injustice’. Here he’s right: of course it is! It’s the primordial injustice. But this observation is revealing because ‘injustice’ implies ‘justice’. By acknowledging injustice, Camus has once again let the camel’s nose of objective value into the tent of the Absurd. What is Justice if not a transcendent value that gives meaning to existence? 

Finally, Camus turns to art and the artist. He proposes an ‘absurd aesthetic’:

“An art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself… The absurd creator…must give the void its colors.”

Is Camus distinguishing representational from ‘abstract’ art? I doubt it. I think it more likely that Camus denies that any art is representational, i.e. it is always abstract.

Camus is to be praised for his analysis of the Absurd. His description of the human condition takes a back seat to no one’s. Yet his project, in the end, fails. Try as he might, he cannot escape the need to let values seep into his scheme. 

This raises a question: Is it possible to talk about the world in any non-trivial way without making reference to Value? And if not, does that mean that values are indeed real or is this merely an invitation to remain silent? “My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence.” (Dylan)

In the course of our lives, we are confronted with facts we think we know, people we think we meet and judgments we think we make. From these nearly universal experiences, three great philosophical questions organically emerge: What is the nature of ‘knowledge’? What is the nature of ‘the other’? What is the nature of ‘value’? These questions form the basis of Philosophy’s Big Three: epistemology, ontology and ethics/aesthetics. They also give rise to the three great ‘null hypotheses’: skepticism, solipsism, nihilism.

Camus incorporates the null hypothesis: “The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated…” Here he is channeling Parmenides’ contrast of Aletheia (Truth) with Doxa (Appearances).

“In one of its aspects, eternal nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours…”

Camus is on to something here! Is he anticipating Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? Or is he summarizing Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken? In either case, the World consists solely of possibilities: ‘pure potentiality’ (Aristotle), ‘the wave function’ (Schrödinger), ‘the sum of all histories’ (Feynmann). When we actualize any one potentiality, when we collapse the wave function, we consign the alternative paths to ‘eternal nothingness’. “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds. (Oppenheimer…misquoting the Bhagavad Gita.) 

So life as we know it, like monogamy, consists of actualizing one path and ‘forsaking all others’. In brining one reality to life, we destroy all potentiality. E pluribus unum – is that the real absurdity of life? 

“In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences.” In that case Camus’ world cannot be absurd after all, littered as it is with scales of values, value driven choices, and value based preferences. So give Albert an A in Ontology but, sadly, a D in Ethics, or as Sister Martha Mary used to write at the bottom of my report cards: “Needs improvement.”