Albert Camus and His World:
Here Comes the Sun!
David Begelman
Albert Camus and his
contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, have reputations that pretty much survive in
broad conceptual brushstrokes. This, although their interactions were often in
the nature of continued squabbling and on occasion, peevishness. Maybe their
increased distancing from each other fueled Camus’ unwillingness to be
classified as an existentialist, perhaps not. But the rupture in their
relationship in all likelihood removed him further from the ideas of the
philosopher who authored the turgid L'Être et le Néant (Being
and Nothingness). As Camus famously remarked:
“No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see
our names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement to which
the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and
refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur…when
we did get to know each other, it was to realize how much we differed. Sartre
is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The
Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist
philosophers” (Camus, 1968, p. 345).
Camus’ reluctance to be called an existentialist lacks clarity absenting
elucidation of just what “existentialism” is to begin with. We await a precise
answer from commentators conversant with the movement. Far from articulating
its meaning precisely, they have yet to come up with something that has
definitional transparency.
The doctrine is sometimes spun as “Existence precedes essence,” (l’existence
précède l’essence) a Sartrean sound bite taxing understanding inasmuch as
it’s difficult to comprehend how ontological status can be ascribed to a
featureless something before its “essences” color the existential palette.
Persons come bundled in this or that attribute before existentialists of
whatever stripe take to refashioning them.
If the expression is shorthand for stressing the idea that persons are
free to decide their destinies before any classifactory system prefigures this,
it may amount to a persuasive definition (Stevenson, 1938) of humankind, not
one that necessarily jibes with the way we are constituted. Moreover,
boundaries of self-determination are often constrained by the contingencies of
time, place, and capacity. A starving African child has far less latitude to
make life-defining choices than a French Nobelist.
Sartre himself said his existentialism “means that…man exists, turns up,
appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, in the
existentialist scheme, is indefinable it is only because he is nothing, Only
afterwards will he be something, and “he will have made what he will be”
(Roemer, 1995). Needless to say, this patter is not much help in clearing away
the conceptual cobwebs. I should like to think that we are somethings, however
pristine, from the get-go; not nothings about which something might later be
said!
As far as the history of existentialism is concerned, its spokespersons have
a tendency to reify concepts like “being” or verbs like “exists” in ways that
are troublesome. Sometimes it seems as though they’re putting forth ideas that
can be likened, Heidegger-like, to the proposition that because nobody beats
Kasparov at chess, one grandmaster, Nobody, is capable of the feat (Carnap,
1932,1978; Ayer, 1947).
A familiar wisdom has it that existentialism is the thing Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, de Beauvoir,
Tillich, Barth, Shestov, Bultmann, Sartre and Camus all share. Talk about mixed
crowds squeezed into a Procrustean bed of commonality! Not to mention the
conspicuous omission of Protagoras, especially when it comes to his notion of
ἄνθρωπος μέτρον (“Man is the measure of all things”). What more suitable banner
might be waved should an anthropic view of the world be an overriding
existentialist mantra? In addition, we have the Third Century C. E. church
father and failed Montanist, Tertullian, who, in his De Carne Christi
voiced the sentiment, “Credo quia absurdum” or “Prorus credible est, qua
ineptum est,” roughly translated as “I believe it because it is absurd,”
doubtlessly a note of joyful wonder to numerous “existentialists.” H. L Mencken
was later to quip that, “Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer” (Mencken,
1946).
* * *
Camus’ love affair with his homeland, Algeria, never ended. He came from a
family of pied-noirs, or colloquially dubbed “black feet,” originally
French settlers of North Africa who, according to folklore, traipsed into their
homes with muddied footware.
One senses that Camus’ life was a trajectory born of conflicting
sentiments. His upbringing was one of deprivation and a less than nurturing
home life in his grandmother’s cramped apartment in the Belcourt section of
Algiers, close to the Arab quarter. From this impoverished background he segued
into more intellectual and literary pursuits at the University of Algiers, a
far cry from the earthier existence that was his original lot. Formerly, he had
worked at selling car parts, as a private tutor, a salesman, police clerk and
worker at a meteorological institute. And all this dotted with bouts of
tuberculosis that demanded respite from days on the soccer field. The rest is
history, although his take on his earlier life was not without a nostalgic look
backwards.
Like his hero Sisyphus (Camus 1975), Camus insisted that he was happy with
his life despite its earlier adversity. Even the harsh treatment by his
grandmother (she used a whip to discipline), the early death of his father in
World War I in 1914, his mother’s physical and emotional handicaps, bouts of
pulmonary distress, not to mention panic attacks and depressions, did little to
quell his enthusiasm for days by the Mediterranean seaside and the warmth of
its sun. The flavor of his romance with the Algerian landscape is noticeable in
his many essays, as well as one passage from his Love of Life:
“There lay all my love of life: a silent passion for what would perhaps
escape me, a bitterness beneath a flame. Each day I would leave this cloister
like a man lifted from himself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance
of the world…It was at these moments that I truly understood what countries
like this could offer me. I am surprised men can find certainties and rules for
life on the shores of the Mediterranean, that they can satisfy their reason
there and justify optimism and social responsibility. For what struck me then
was not a world made to man’s measure, but one that closed in upon him. If the
language of these countries harmonized with what echoed deeply within me, it
was not because it answered my questions but because it made them superfluous.
Instead of prayers of thanksgiving rising to my lips, it was this Nada whose birth is possible only at the sight of landscapes crushed by the
sun” (Camus, 1968, p. 56). Is it any wonder the posthumous collection of his
essays is entitled “Lyrical and Critical Essays”?
There were, of course, other facets of the
story. Camus’ encomium for life under the Algerian sun includes a quite
different strand of sentiment. Take, for example, the passage in Nuptials:
“At the neighborhood movie houses in Algiers,
they sometimes sell pastilles with engraved red mottoes that express everything
needed for the birth of love: (A) questions: “When will you marry me?”; “Do you
love me?”; (B) replies: “Madly”: “Next spring.” After having prepared the
ground, you pass them to the girl next to you, who answers in kind or simply
plays dumb. At Belcourt, there have been marriages arranged like this, whole
lives decided in an exchange of mint candies. And this gives a good picture of
the childlike people of this country” (Camus, 1968, p. 86).
“Childlike,” indeed—except, possibly, for those
of the country who authored treatises on Plotinus and St. Augustine and went on
to win Nobel Prizes! Evidently, as in most parts of the world, Algerians come
in all shapes and sizes. In the manner of “existentialists” who defy being
stuffed into one philosophical niche, they are not all of them attracted by
“sensual delights” or “amusements” that Camus designated elsewhere in Summer in Algeria are “idiotic” (Camus, 1968, p. 87).
One receives the strong impression that much of
Camusean discourse was tied up in a flirtation with and tension among matters
of the mind, spirit and body. And when it came to beguiling rhapsodies about
his homeland in North Africa, one senses it was difficult for him on occasion
to suppress traces of condescension—for all the delights his country had to
offer. The failing is apparent in other passages in which Camus takes back with
one hand what he gives with the other. Thus:
“Yet here is a race without past, without
tradition, and yet not without poetry—but a poetry whose quality I know well,
harsh, carnal, far from tenderness, that of their very sky, the only one in
truth to move me and bring me inner peace. The contrary of a civilized nation
is a creative nation. I have the mad hope that, without knowing it perhaps,
these barbarians lounging on beaches are actually modelling the image of a
culture in which the greatness of man will at last find its true likeness. This
race wholly cast into its present lives without myths, without solace. It has
put all its possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defence
against death” (Camus, 1975, p. 135).
Both Sartre and Camus, despite their real or imagined differences, were on
the cusp of a French post-war media craze as leading European intellectuals.
Rumor has it that another strand in their estrangement was Sartre’s discomfort
with Camus’ popularity, good looks and attractiveness to women. Philandering on
wives of quite different dispositions, Simone Hié, a morphine addict, and
Francine Faure, a mathematician, was not a rare pastime for the writer, given
as he was to dalliances with many women, including Patricia Blake, Catherine
Sellars and Maria Casarès. The last named lover broke with him in 1945 after
discovering his wife Francine was pregnant. The role was not a new one for the
actress. She starred as “Nathalie,” the spurned lover of the mime Baptiste
(Jean-Louis Barrault) in Marcel Carné’s memorable 1945 film Les Enfants du
Paradis). Might the homely Sartre’s lamentation: “L’enfer, c’est les
autres” (“Hell is other people” in his drama Hui Clos) be
a sour grapes theme driven by a strictly personal agenda? But this is
speculative, and detracts from very real differences between the two writers.
One of these involved political issues, in contrast to their philosophical—and
not always transparent—musings.
Camus abandoned communism before Sartre, although both writers were
previously staunch defenders of the ideology. Sartre was intolerant of Camus’
more modulated solution to the unrest between Algerian rebels and French
colonial interests, while Camus rejected Sartre’s support for revolutionary
violence likewise championed by leading left-wingers of Europe. Yet a
Camus-like political stance in another racial divide was to find expression in
Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, a movement that sought to reconcile
the conflict between white Afrikaners and a secessionist black constituency.
Others have drawn the same comparison (Djebar, 2000).
A flavor of Camus’ heroic stance in the face of the intransigence of
warring political factions is suggested by many passages in Algerian
Chronicles (Camus, 2013), including:
“On the left, we hear justice repeatedly cited as a excuse for affronts to
any authentic idea of justice. The Right has thus ceded the moral response
entirely to the Left, while the Left has ceded the patriotic response entirely
to the Right. France has suffered from both reactions, The country needed
moralists less joyfully resigned to their country’s misfortune and patriots
less willing to allow torturers to act in France’s name. Metropolitan France has
apparently been unable to come up with any political solution other than to say
to the French of Algeria, “Die, you have it coming to you” or “Kill them all,
they’ve asked for it.” Which makes for two different policies but one single
surrender, because the real question is not how to die separately but how to
live together” (2013, pp. 28-29).
Camus despised totalitarianism and the oppression of the poor and
disenfranchised, and felt that any political resolution of the French/Arab
clash had to avoid bloodshed at all costs. Despite the ups and downs of Camus’
political views throughout his life, his antipathy to capital punishment was
finalized while writing for the newspaper Combat, and became his
conviction to the end.
For a thinker who emphasized
the “absurdity” of existence, Camus’ political track record on his resistance
to the Nazi regime and efforts to contribute to a resolution of the Algerian
crisis would appear to clash dramatically with the tenets of any such
philosophical position. Yet Camus to the end insisted that resistance to
tyranny was not incompatible with his emphasis on the meaninglessness of life.
He continued to emphasize his metaphysical position on absurdity, even in the
context of believing in the possibility of human resolutions, political or
otherwise. Some such counterpoint between the shifting nature of his ideas
about absurdity and the efficacy of human action is suggested in The Rebel (L’Homme
révolté), where he concludes that one interpretation of absurdity is
contradictory. While it lays claim to believing in nothing, it nonetheless
believes in its own capacity to protest or resist, as well as what such
resistance can accomplish. Again,
considering Camus’ outspoken efforts and campaigns for the downtrodden and
persecuted, regarding him as a “philosopher of the absurdity of life” seems
oddly out of whack with this courageous strand in his thinking.
* * *
The
internet has this to say about the relevant concept: “In philosophy,
"the Absurd" refers to the conflict between (a) the human tendency to
seek inherent value and meaning in life
and (b) the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not
mean "logically impossible", but rather "humanly
impossible’" The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause
the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the
two existing simultaneously. Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought
stating that the efforts of humanity
to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because
the sheer amount of information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make
certainty impossible. And yet, some absurdists state that one should embrace
the absurd condition of humankind while conversely continuing to explore and
search for meaning. As a philosophy, absurdism thus also explores the
fundamental nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious
of the Absurd, should respond to it.”
One can, of course, contend that any conceivable response to the “absurd”
character of human existence might incorporate the very trait it was supposedly
recruited to explore. Aside from this, there are several terms that coelsce in
“existentialism” and Camus’ discourse. Among these are “absurdity” and
“meaninglessness,” not always synonomous in ordinary parlance.
Some philosophers define “absurd” more narrowly to cover situations in
which there is “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and
reality” (Nagel, 1970, p. 718). The discrepancy, however, is only be a
necessary, not sufficient, condition of
absurdity under Nagel’s definition. There are countless instances in which
aspirations fail to achieve goals without any hint of “absurdity,” in the
philosophically relevant or ordinary senses of the term. Moreover, it is
questionable whether such formulae do justice to a term that roves more
indiscriminately over the semantic landscape. Because of this, it ostensibly
confounds attempts to make it undergird such grandiose enterprises as a
doctrine of Absurdism.
As commonly observed, the term “absurd” describes an idea, a person’s
behavior, or an object or situation arousing amusement or derision. A
situation, argument, or remark thus can be “absurd.” When life or existence in
general is taken to illustrate the concept, as presumably instantiated in
“your pants falling down as you are knighted” (one of Nagel’s examples), one
wonders whether “absurdity” in the existentialist lexicon tends to become a
case of galloping extrapolation. If the absurdity of a knighted person’s
trousers falling down is illustrative of something about life at large, why
doesn’t well-buckled and securely fastened trousers—as are most pairs of the
item in knighting rituals throughout history—illustrate the very opposite, that
however checkered life is with angst, aburdity or futility, it is also bursting
with sensible meaning and coherence? Extrapolation can go both ways. Yet Nagel
feels the pervasive absurdity of existence is a plausible idea, while Solomon
(2006) avers that an omnipresent sense of absurdity “poisons our everydayness
and gives our every experience a tinge
of futility” (p. 37). Nagel goes on:
“The sense that life as a whole is absurd arises when we perceive, perhaps
dimly, an inflated pretension or aspiration which is inseparable from the
continuation of human life and which makes it absurdly inescapable, short of
escape fom life itself” (Nagel, 1970, p. 718). Yet he is also mindful of
differences between the individual case or situation and overarching
philosophical formulations:
“Many people’s lives are absurd, temporarily or permanantly, for
conventional reasons having to do with their particular ambitions,
circumstances, and personal relations. If there is a philosophical sense of
absurdity, however, it must arise from the perception of something
universal—some respect in which pretension and reality clash for us all. This
condition is supplied, I shall argue, by the collision between the seriousness
with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding
everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt” (Nagel,
1970, p. 718).
It should be noted that there are two senses of the “universality” of the
clash between pretension and reality: (1) we all have experienced the disparity
in the ongoing challenges of daily life, because what most of us sometimes want
or strive for is frustrated—in some cases, most of the time, versus (2)
everything all of us want or strive for is arbitrary and open to doubt, and is
therefore encumbered by a sense of absurdity. I take it that the Absurdist
thesis is that individuals who cannot bring themselves to adopt outlook (2) and
opt for (1) have not taken the true pulse of life.
All the same, a philosopher who elects to promulgate “Absurdism” has to
confront the fact that there still may be varying degrees of absurdity that go
unmentioned and unexplored in his formulation. In this respect, just what does
the doubt, meaninglessness, and contingent aspect of life amount to for any
individual in any situation? When I boil an egg on the stove, it is not
suddenly transformed into a chandelier on one occasion and a cucumber on yet
another. So there are a great many regularities in my existence I depend on
anchoring me in the reality receiving a bad press in Absurdism. Yet were I
confronted with unexpectedly appearing chandeliers or cucumbers, might you
suppose Absurdists would fasten on this to reiterate their same point of view
about life? But surely there is a momentous difference between a world in which
an egg remains an egg and one in which I am jolted by its turning suddenly into
chandeliers and cucumbers!
Furthermore, fine-tuning “absurdity” is paradoxically absent in Absurdist
discourse. In a world of unpredictably debuting objects, are their appearances
staggered? That is, can I inevitably count on a cucumber appearing after a chandelier, or is the sequence
randomized? And isn’t the randomization of experience more absurd—however
the term is defined—than its alternative of regularized, because staggered,
presentations? Despite the possibility of shades of absurdity, not a word in
Camusian or Sartrean discourse about how their central concept can come
packaged in augmented or attenuated forms! The semantic variability of absurd
is also a characteristic of expressions like meaning, meaningful and
meaningless (or meaninglessness). Nozick (1981) has reviewed eight
senses of “meaning” that infiltrate ordinary discourse.
Going on, it is far from obvious that a world depleted of meaning
has to be one that is absurd in the sense of “illogical” or
“irrational.” There are clinical conditions—those frequently accompanied by
suicidal thoughts, plans or intentions, in which the world seems emptied of
meaning and pleasure (ahedonia) although not perceived as “absurd,” at least
not in the ordinary sense of the term. Persons who are in major depressions
describe their experiential world just this way, although it is not the one
inhabited by Camus characters like Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall (La
Chute). This narrator was a lawyer so invested in making speeches about
himself and his experiences, it is safe to say that in the Freudian sense he is
cathected to the external world in spades. The same is true for Patrice
Meursault in The Stranger (L’Êtranger) or Dr. Bernard Rieux in The
Plague (La Peste).
Whatever strains of ruefulness infiltrate the psychologies of sundry Camus
characters, the hard edge of the clinical condition is seldom, if ever, in
sight. Those characters don’t report the sting of anything akin to major
depression, despite all the talk about the absurdity of life. Possible
exceptions are unnamed persons in The Myth of Sisyphus referred to by
Camus who seem to have a psychiatric condition. In that treatise, Camus cites
cases in which “…many people die because they judge that life is not worth
living,” and contrasts these with cases in which some “paradoxically” get
“killed for ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living.” The
contrast here suggests the one between instances of psychiatric and political
or issue-oriented significance. The former type seems
to be represented by cases in which Camus declares a person experiences “…the
absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that deadly
agitation and the uselessness of suffering” (1975, p. 13).
On the other hand, most literary existential heroes have a mind-set that
would capture the interest of philosophers, not necessarily psychiatrists. But
it is nonetheless one that Camus takes to be how his characters define the self
and the world. So we are off and running, without, it may be said, any
intention to psychiatricize those literary characters.
An intriguing character in Camus’ The Plague is Father Paneloux, for
he is the one who has a familiar take on the figure lurking persistently behind
the scenes in these discussions, God. Paneloux is a Jesuit priest whose view of
the plague devastating the Algerian city of Oran is, naturally, unlike the
Camus-like atheism of other characters in the novel. He believes that God is
loving and, as in the mind-set of American evangelists like Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson, believes the plague is both a test of faith as well as a scourge
sent by the deity for the punishment of earthly sins. Whatever the scope of
Paneloux’s prattle about divine punishment and a supervising God, he delivers
sermons predicated on religious understandings of blight flourishing since the
infancy of our species. As such, they reflect a system of belief that purports
to supply answers to riddles about life that existentialists, believers or
otherwise, likewise address.
Paneloux is intriguing as a character because the “absurdity” of the world
is a pan-existentialist theme that both Sartre and Camus celebrate as driven
by, inter alia, the absence of religious absolutes in a system of
understanding. Paneloux’s trust in the Almighty places him squarely in the
other tradition, although his reliance on faith to the exclusion of being
treated by physicians for his terminal ailment suggests he may harbor traces of
Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, in contrast to St Ignatius Loyola’s
Catholicism.
All the same, it is questionable whether God, Paneloux-style or otherwise,
can rescue anyone from existential angst, since religious thinkers as
committed as Kierkegaard—reputedly the philosopher who kicked off the
existentialist movement—were not spared the outlook likewise adopted by
atheists like Camus and Sartre. Does this mean that with or without God, we are
still fated to be saddled with their anguished view of life? And if this, why
all the fuss? After all, Camus and Sartre were both fully engaged in a world of
political struggle even granting their morose view of life. Accordingly, the
Absurdist frame of mind would appear to be redundant when a hero, literary or
otherwise, takes a stand against the depredations of history.
The lesson here is that if atheism isn’t the lynchpin for the view that
life is absurd or meaningless, why pretend that it is? And if God is incapable
of supplying meaning, or relieving meaninglessness or absurdity (because he
failed to do so in the cases of Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel), we are led, as
the poet says, to an overwhelming question: what would?
The objection to this might be that human life just happens to be the kind
of thing freighted with absurdity, the truth or falsity of religion
notwithstanding. If there is no way out of the dilemma of life’s
meaninglessness, the challenge then becomes specifying the possible (i.e.,
hypothetical) structure
of an experienced world that would alleviate the problem, make matters
different than they are. If no answer is forthcoming, what are we talking about?
Is existentialist discourse itself conceptually threadbare, given a definition
of “meaninglessness” all too familiar to philosophers: that which characterizes
an empty proposition, statement, belief, philosophy. If there is no conceivable
alternative to the absurdity or meaninglessness of the world, is the claim
that it is, alas, vacuous?
Let’s go on. I start to see a patient who complains of suicidal thoughts
and feelings of emptiness. Life offers “no hope” for him, and he reports a
pervasive experience of the “meaninglessness” of everything. There are also
collateral neurovegetative symptoms, like appetite and sleep loss, loss of
libido and anhedonia. He is not an existentialist, nor should we draw any
connection between his symptoms and this philosophy. That is not the point.
What is?
Let’s say the patient, for want of a better expression, has a blin about
the world. It’s not as tolerable as the one depicted in philosophies like
Camus’ or Sartre’s. What he experiences is a quite intense, pervasive thing—far
worse, it may be conjectured, than Antoine Roquentin’s “disgust for existence”
in Sartre’s Nausea (Sartre, 1964). This fictional character has a
blin about the world also, but notches down from the one perceived by
our patient in a major depression. He is “not at all inclined to call myself
insane; I see clearly that I am not” (p. 2). In fact, Roquentin experiences
disgust with the world in a sort of sweetish form (une espèce d’écoeurement douceâtre) of
detachment or alienation, very short of a state of mind that
would benefit from a regimen of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors).
One way of putting the matter is to say our patient has a condition,
not a philosophy or world view (although it is conceivable he or
she might develop one based upon an exceedingly morbid view of everything). We
are convinced what he or she needs is psychological care and/or medication, not
philosophical enlightenment. But the contrast here does not mitigate the fact
that both the patient and Roquentin (as well as all of Camus’ heroes from
Caligula to Sisyphus) have blins about the world that differ in scope,
intensity, and the likelihood of suicide. So what are the weighty differences
among them all that speak to something important?
We are tempted to say that the patient’s perception of the world needs to
be treated and restored to normalcy; that is, to an outlook that is salutary,
not one mired in a depressive state. We want to help him or her achieve a more
ordinary, sane blex, not the blin that is the result of
malfunctioning neurotransmitters. We want to assist the patient out of his
condition so that he sees the world as blex-like. What this
amounts to may for the moment be indeterminate; its outlines may be blurred,
yet to be specified or sharpened in detail. But we feel we have a general idea
of what we mean. (Actually, there are an untold number of perceptions of the
world we would deem antidotes to the patient’s blin, if put to the
challenge of delineating them.) So while we have refrained from describing at
length the blex that should be a desired perception of things, we know
for sure it couldn’t be like the blin that is the patient’s world—which
is why we consider him to have a “condition.”
Another consideration: the yardstick of a blex is not that it has to
be suffused with a happy or optimistic coloration; only that in some
requisite way it is an appropriate mind-set, shorn of a blin-like
overlay like that of our patient that masks it,. And far from the primacy of
any feel-good measure of a blex, it is possible to harbor a blin that
involves an overly “happy” perception of the world. Such blins are
called manias. No literary existential hero has one, unlike countless persons
who experience bipolar disorder or a toxic “high.” The point is that in adumbrating
the outlines of a blex, we should avoid ratcheting up the euthymic or
hyperthymic quotient to a point of diminishing returns.
A word of warning. We have defined blex as a desideratum. If this is
taken to mean “things as they truly are,” we may have bargained for more than
we surmise. In this, we distinguish between blin and blex as
though the latter were the real world, whereas the former were a sort of
artificial, subjective overlay that distorts “reality.” Is this a legitimate
move?
What if it turned out that blex is nothing other than a blin meeting
with conventional approval and sanction? It’s not as though our depressed
patient is insulated from a reality that can be metaphysically authenticated,
established or endorsed; only that he is in a condition we feel moved to help
change out of a moral concern for his suffering. We’d adopt the same remedial
stance even if his dismal blin were the real blex, on the
assumption that our conventional notion of blex turned out to be nothing
other than a parochial blin we happened to mistakenly identify with
external reality! This opens the door to questioning the metaphysical status of
any contender for a blex including, naturally, those put forth in the
writings of writers like Camus or Sartre.
Unless I am mistaken, both philosophers suppose that the “absurdity” and
“meaninglessness” of life is a blex, not merely a blin they
have manufactured or artificially
grafted onto things. In other words, they seem to be insinuating that others
who do not see the world as they do experience different blins about it
that do not match the proper blex-like texture of reality. But should
the very notion of the latter fall under an epistemic cloud for both
existentialists and those of drastically differing persuasions who have their
own notions of blex, we are left with a surfeit of contender blins that
proliferate without, it may be said, any way to charter a meaningful course to
a bedrock blex the authenticity of which can be conceptually established
sub specie aeternitatis. We’ll come back to this conundrum.
Returning to our depressed patient, there are currently some therapeutic
approaches to his condition that not only have an efficacious track-record, but
in addition do not include biomedical modalities like medication. They are
grouped under the rubric cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT), and often
include assisting a patient to alter the cognitions, beliefs, or
self-statements the practitioner believes contribute to (or create) his mental
problem (Beck, 1967, 1972, 1975; Ellis, 1977, 1994). The thinking among CBT
practitioners is that an incorporated belief-system associated with the
affective (i.e., emotional) character of the depressed state is the culprit
responsible for the latter, as it is with a variety of maladaptive patterns.
Accordingly, to modify constituent beliefs about the self and the world is a
pathway to eradicating the entire symptomatic picture. In many research
studies, although not all, this has more or less proved to be the case. In
other words, it is an incorporated belief system about the world or the self
that is the target of therapeutic efforts in majorly depressed patients. The
therapeutic approach is called cognitive restructuring. But precisely what
misconceptions about the self or the world is the putative therapeutic target?
Here’s where it gets tricky.
CBT practitioners, if pressed to make a concession to the spirit of
“existentialist” philosophy, might grant that there is something “absurd” about
the patient’s world. But the psychotherapist only means by this that the
patient harbors “absurd,” “irrational” beliefs or cognitions about himself (not
the facticity of the world around him) that are at the bottom of his
psychiatric problem. In other words, the patient’s problem consists basically
in his irrational interpretation of certain events that give rise to his
depressed state. He believes it is the thought process of the patient that is
illogical, not life, the world or existence itself. Let’s see what this might mean.
The patient experiences an event. He develops a belief or theory about it
which is a misconception; he then experiences an emotional response quite in
accord with said misconception, resulting in his “condition,” a depression that
requires treatment.
Take an example. The patient is a lawyer who is a very different kind of
person than the attorney of Camus’ The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. He
has argued a case unsuccessfully in court, whereupon the defendant he
represented is sent to prison for a long term. The lawyer misinterprets this
event to prove his personal inadequacy as a litigator, which misconception is
at the root of his subsequent despondency requiring treatment. Again, we are
not here referencing a case similar to the plight of any character in a Camus
novel.
The CBT practitioner addresses the clinical problem by attempting to
counteract the patient’s belief that he is personally inadequate based upon his
failure to win the court case. He might, for example, attempt to convince the
patient that he’s got to appropriate a more realistic mind-set of “You win a
few, lose a few,” or reference the spotty track-record of famous litigators, or
rely on other arguments to show that the patient is drawing a false,
irrational or “absurd” conclusion about himself from the paltry
reason that he didn’t win one court case. He might urge the patient to remember
how many difficult cases he did win prior to the one failure he misconstrues as
proof of professional incompetence.
In an important sense, the success of the CBT approach consists in
incorporating a technique of exhortation or argumentation. The
relevant metaphor here is that psychiatric status is much like a jury,
responding to an attorney’s (psychotherapist’s) appeal to examine critically
the case for the assumptive guilt of a defendant. And if the jury is won over,
the depression will be alleviated because its cognitive foundation, that the
lawyer is inadequate or a failure, will have been undermined. What does all
this have to do with Camus?
The CBT practitioner—and I trust I am not mischaracterizing him or
her—raises no questions about whether the lawyer’s depression can conceivably
be or not be a blex—as opposed to merely a maladaptive blin,
essentially because the therapist is not interested in metaphysical conjecture.
In the course of his or her professional activities, procedures are not
predicated upon assumptions about the true nature of reality, as though
therapeutic techniques were driven by covert philosophical positions. He knows
the patient’s blin makes him dysfunctional, end of story. And efforts to
rid him of it are designed to alter his psychiatric state for a more
satisfactory mode of adjustment, purely and simply.
Now suppose the CBT therapist after successfully treating his patient were
to take a course in existentialism at a local university campus. After
completing it with a passable grade, he thinks back to his therapeutic success
with the lawyer, and begins to pose questions quite in accord with what he has
learned in his recent coursework. “I helped my patient to achieve a more
satisfactory adjustment to be sure, but now I have other types of questions
about the treatment.” One he poses is: “Am I entitled to say that I helped
my patient to see reality better, become in touch with the blex, not
the artificial and maladaptive blin that is the result of his depressive
state of mind?” (And here we are speaking about blex as the emotional
texture of the world, not simply the character of a belief, illogical or
otherwise.)
The therapist here engages in some chancy speculation, if only because
approaching the issue this way can conceivably raise searching questions about
why his patient’s depression has to be construed as merely a dysfunctional blin,
and not a blex that, however maladaptive or disagreeable, is the true
nature of “reality.” Maybe we are all of us bamboozled by the temptation to
regard the world as something that is at bottom vastly different from the way
it seems to majorly depressed patients. It is but a stone’s throw from this
mind-set to drawing parallels to the discourse of Camus and Sartre. Maybe, as
they declare, the blex is “absurd,” “illogical” “meaningless,” or some
such existential concept! (It is questionable whether the disparity between
Sartre’s view that the world itself is absurd and Camus’ view that it is only
the relation between the person and his world comes to a weighty
difference.)
We can move ahead, it seems to me, in two distinguishable ways: (1) take up
the challenge of determining philosophically the true nature of blex, on
the assumption that Camus and Sartre might, for all we know, be correct in
their view about the absurdity of life, or (2) contend that deliberations or
theories about the true nature of blex are at bottom nonsensical since
there is no way to even hypothetically adjudicate contrasting metaphysical
claims.
As a footnote, we assume that the Camus/Sartre view that existence or the
world is “absurd” isn’t captured by the notion that life is frequently unfair, inconvenient or unpredictable.
We hardly need Camus or Sartre to assure of us something we all of us know
as a daily reminder of what it is to be alive, and before the two developed
their respective philosophies. Moreover, is it the empirical features of
experience that inspire existentialist philosophies, or the subjective outlook
on the world favored by them? If the former, is existential angst or
“absurdity” at bottom only a selective focus on a world of seeming that
includes as many uplifting and “meaningful” experiences as well as their
presumed antitheses? Is not the world just as often fair, convenient and
predictable? Again, and in line with (2), how is the true nature of blex
conceivably established should the focus be on the externality of meaning,
in contrast to conflicting mind-sets we bring to experience?
Sartre himself was prescient about the stakes in all of this. In the very
first pages of Nausea he reflects, “So a change has taken place
during these last few weeks. But where? It is an abstract change without
object. Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city
and this nature: I must choose” (Sartre, 1964, p. 4). Maybe he must; but his
choice doesn’t guarantee it will be the right one—should talk about
rightness here make any sense at all. Tolstoy registered remarkably similar
sentiments when he revealed, “But five years ago something very strange
happened to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of
life, as though I did not know what to do or how to live…They were always
expressed by the questions; what is it for? What does it lead to?” (Tolstoy,
1940, pp. 14-15).
A reminder: in none of this, does an issue revolve around the empirical
features of the world. The existential heroes of Camus and Sartre apprehend the
factual world in precisely the same way as anyone when it comes to sensory
perception. The sun of Camus’ Mediterranean beach is the same sun for everyone,
but may cause a variety of reactions, just as it does when bathers sustain
differently tanned skins while under it: “When you frequent the beach in summer
you become aware of a simultaneous progression of all skins from white to
golden to tanned, ending up in a tobacco-colour which marks the extreme limit
of the effort of transformation of which the body is capable (Camus, 1975, p. 129).
More often than not, and as most dermatologists are wont to remind us, you’d be
doing yourself a favor staying out of a blazing sun, on the beach or elsewhere!
* * *
Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus addresses several issues, two of which
are notable, although the first, ideas about suicide, has been given the lion’s
share of attention. He declares that “Judging whether life is or is not worth
living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (Camus,
1975, p. 11). The second issue is contained in the terminal paragraph of the
treatise:
“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” (Camus, 1975, p. 111).
It strikes me that the second of these themes, Sisyphus’s happiness in
futility, is the more intriguing one. As for the first, it remains a mystery
why suicide should be a philosophical problem for Camus, much less a
fundamental one, in exploring the possibility of a relationship between it and
absurdity. As we know, Camus finally opted for life—albeit in the form of
resistance in the face of absurdity—thus uncoupling the sapience of suicide from
his doctrine of Absurdism. Yet there is a certain tension, if not
contradiction, in Camus’ discussion of the “exact degree to which suicide is a
solution to the absurd” since “The principle can be established that for a man
who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his action.
Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct” (Camus,
1975, p. 14). However, by framing the issue this way, Camus implies that an
argument, however covert or verbalized, can be mounted for or against
suicide, given the meaninglessness of life. But the final decision, whatever it
turns out to be, is delivered under the auspices of a supervisory rationalism
vetting the proper connection between central concepts! (Jeanson, 1947). To argue
the necessity of resistance to absurdity is already to concede the game to the
philosophic or rationalistic mind-set Camus has taken enormous pains to
repudiate. After all, Camus reminded us in 1942 that absurdity teaches us
nothing (Camus, 2008, p. 24).
Moreover, there is something oddly out of keeping with an existentialist or
Absurdist who raises a question about a compelling aspect of suicide, when at
the heart of his philosophy is the primacy of one’s free decision. Regarding
absurdity as any kind of reason to consider suicide might, from a Sartrean
point of view, illustrate bad faith (mauvaise foi). It would be akin to
pleading a case for or against it, as though any such deliberation diminished
or augmented what comes down to a freely undertaken, unimpeded decision!
To recapitulate the plight of Sisyphus, Camus writes:
“The gods
had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain,
whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some
reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless
labor” (1975, p. 107).
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus
was no innocent victim of divine punition. In the Iliad, Homer describes
him as “wily,” a manipulator. On other versions of the myth, he was a murderer,
seducer, betrayer and trickster extraordinaire. In one, he chained Thanatos,
incurring the displeasure of Ares, who became irate that no warrior could die
in battle with Death thus shackled. Sisyphus, whatever the magnitude of his
effront to the gods, illustrates only too well what a lopsided contest it is
when mortals have the temerity to incur their wrath. In this, he is well within
the tradition of other mythological heroes whose fates must be reckoned
stunning cases of overkill. (Shakespeare was later to extend the same heavy
hand to Malvolio of Twelfth Night and Shylock of The Merchant of
Venice, should anyone harbor the view that the Bard always had his
sympathetic characters arrange to make the punishment fit the crime.)
Sisyphus is often grouped in
a triumvirate along with the equally hapless Ixion and Tantalus, both consigned
to forms of eternal punishment. These were contrived as just desserts by a
heavenly host with nothing better to do than arrange extravagant forms of
comeuppance. Ixion, after killing his father-in-law and lusting after Hera, was
bound by Hermes to an eternally spinning fiery wheel. Tantalus, in one version
of his myth, is said to have pilfered ambrosia and nectar from Zeus’s table on
Mount Olympus. For this infraction he was made to stand for all eternity in a
pool of water under a fruit tree. When he reached for the fruit, its branches
would recede; when he bent down to drink the water, the latter would do the
same thing.
Lessons about the catastrophic upshot of
crossing the gods is evident everywhere in Bulfinch (2010). And that fabulous
wayfarer, Odysseus (considered in some mythological accounts to be a son of
Sisyphus), illustrated what it meant should one arouse the ire of a deity—in
his case, Poseidon.
Unlike Ixion and Tantalus, who seem immobilized
in their torture, one wonders why Sisyphus didn’t simply walk away from his
repetitive task. After all, his slippery personality was clearly in evidence in
other chapters of his career. The king of Corinth (formerly Ephyra), Sisyphus
was a stockpile of surprises during his lifetime, having turned the tables
previously on quite a number of characters: Zeus, Thanatos, Hades, Autolycus
(who made the fateful mistake of stealing his cows), Salmoneus, Asopus,
Persephone and Merope. Even if the gods were to contrive another punishment for
disobeying the ground rules of his ultimate rock-and-roll caper in Tartarus,
could it be any worse than the task Taylor (1991) for one considers to be the
epitome of futility? And given our hero’s aptitude for trickery, why not
arrange yet another wily scheme to elude his sentence?
The
other strand to the story that Camus underscored bears repeating:
“One
does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of
happiness…Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are
inseparable.” And again: “All Sisyphus’ silent joy
is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing” and “There is no sun
without shadow, and it is essential to know the night” (Camus, 1975, p. 110)
Camus concludes his treatise with the memorable
peroration:
“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 or futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that
night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the
heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
(Camus, 1975, p. 111).
There are enough remarks
about futility/meaninglessness being paired with happiness/joy in The Myth
of Sisyphus to leave us puzzled over the juxtaposition. Just why are these
polarities joined together by Camus? The challenge here would be the task of
uncovering some point to Camus’ unusual pairing.
Camus, it may be observed,
was hardly one to disparage the possibility of happiness in an otherwise absurd
world. When he did, it was only in connection with what he construed as the
pie-in-the-sky fantasies of religion. In Nuptials he declared that
“there is no superhuman happiness…I can see no point in the happiness of
angels” (Camus, 1968, p. 90)—manifestly because he felt as an atheist no such
emotions existed. But he harbored them in his own life, as when he delighted in
basking under the sun of an Algerian beach.
The Camus essays of the
1930s document the writer’s conviction that living life to the hilt—and this
means savoring all the worldly, sensual joys one might experience—is possible
once the yoke of the transcendental is repudiated. But this only dramatizes
that a Camusian world is one that sets its face against theism and the promise
of everlasting life. In the so-called existentialist literature of other
philosophers within the fold, “absurdity” seems to take on significance only as
it contrasts with a prevailing religious view of the world. “Meaninglessness”
for many of them seems to be forever waiting in the wings before the
Nietzschean dictum of “God is dead” becomes an order of the day.
There are numerous thinkers
who maintain that there is a close relationship between belief in a deity and
the meaningfulness of life. Craig (1994) for one asserts emphatically that “For
if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd” (p. 40). This writer goes
on to declare that immortality alone without God is empty from the standpoint
of meaning: “But it is important to see that it is not just immortality that
man needs if life is to be meaningful. Mere duration of existence does not make
that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if
there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance”
(p. 42).
The “meaningfulness of life” in Craig’s scheme
of things must pertain to an externally derived awareness of absurdity. For
there are many atheists like Hitchens (2007), Dawkins (2006), Harris (2004),
Dennett (2006) and Krauss (2012) whose view of the world absenting a godhead
encompasses one richly endowed with meaning. Craig’s conception of them must be
a group whose existence is meaningless, although they don’t know this!
According to him, these atheists, unlike Sartre and Camus, don’t perceive the
absurdity of life that their atheism presumably encourages at every turn.
Perhaps Camus would never have considered suicide in a world in which God,
heaven and a system of steadfast religious absolutes prevail. Yet even under a
perspective of eternality, perhaps he should have. After all, might not suicide
be broached, given a life hitched to transcendental meaning—a.k.a. unremitting,
because guaranteed, monotony? Should such a conclusion seem implausible, is
Camus’ conjecture that life will be experienced better only when it is viewed
as meaningless any the less counterintuitive? (Camus, 1975, p. 53). Nozick
(1981) for one took up the challenge of critically examining the notion that
the idea of “meaning” is ineluctably linked to religious belief.
Those contemporary writers who, far from extolling the virtues of a
presiding godhead, consider religion to be a case of dictatorship by a deity
whose principal function is to monitor every thought and deed on pain of
eternal punishment. For them, it is the epitome of totalitarian rule, much like
a celestial North Korea (Hitchens, 2007). On a lighter note, a similar opinion
was registered in the third act of G. B. Shaw’s Man and Superman, in
which characters from Mozart’s Don Giovanni convene to discuss the
merits of heaven compared to the alternative establishment:
“Ana: But why doesn’t everybody go to Heaven, then?
The Statue: (chuckling) I can tell you that, my dear. It’s because heaven
is the most angelically dull place in all creation: that’s why.
The Devil: His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness;
but the strain of living in heaven is intolerable. There is a notion that I was
turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have induced me to stay
there. I simply left it and organized this place.
The Statue: I don’t wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of heaven.
The Devil. Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is a
question of temperament: I don’t understand it; I don’t know that I
particularly want to understand it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe.
There is no accounting for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don
Juan would like it” (Shaw, 1960, pp. 362-363).
Meaningfulness-cum-religion
is a package deal combining the idea of God with salvation and the immortality
customarily yoked to it. Yet Nozick for one has questioned why the idea of
“meaningfulness” gets forever coupled with timeless being:
“It is often assumed that
there is a problem about the meaning of life because of our mortality. Why does
the fact that all people die create a special problem? (If life were to go on
forever, would there then be no problem about its meaning?)” (Nozick, 1981, p.
579). Mark Twain observed that while eternality sounds comforting in the
pulpit, when you try it on for size you’ll see how heavy time will hang on your
hands.
Considered differently, it
may be redundant to ask why Camus assigns any particular emotion to Sisyphus,
consigned as the latter is in myth to the futile task of rolling a rock
endlessly up a hill. After all, Camus’ version of Sisyphus is only a fictional
construction, differing from the protagonist of the ancient story. Camus
reminds us that “Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld” and that
“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them” (Camus, 1975, p.
108). However, having been punished by the gods, Sisyphus suffers a plight
we would assume is other than “happiness.” Why should Camus consider Sisyphus
to be saddled with an emotion seemingly out of keeping with a plight devised as
comeuppance as dispensed by the gods? As Taylor (1991) suggested—almost as a
way out of the counterintuitive corner he feels Camus is in—Sisyphus’s
“happiness” might be a possibility had he constructed a temple with his rocks
atop the hill he rolled them up, however long this took. That would be at least
one foundation for positing a less than resigned and hopeless hero. In the
absence of any such felicitous denouement, what can we make of the Camusian
case for happiness? How is it possible to envision it in an individual
consigned to an enduringly futile plight in any case? Were we committed to explicating
how “happiness” could conceivably characterize the mind-set of the toiler beset
with his endless task, we might seek to determine whether there are matching
instances in real life serving to justify this possibility.
In the all too familiar notion of
capture-bonding, hostages or prisoners subjected to brutal or even sadistic
treatment by their captors may get to harbor positive—even
affectionate—feelings toward them, on occasion defending them when they come
under criticism or judicial review. The FBI has amassed a data-base of
individuals who “confuse” the occasional absence of abuse on the part of their
captors with solicitude or kindness. According to the agency, fully 8% of a
population of victims so treated illustrate what has come to be known as the
“Stockholm syndrome.” The name of the pattern is derived from a robbery in
Sweden in which bank employees held as hostage in a hold-up in a vault
developed emotional attachments to their captors. This was expressed in
rejecting assistance from the police force during a six day ordeal, and
defending the robbers even after the hostages were freed. Some commentators
(Henson, 2006) feel similar psychological processes may be operating in
military basic training, the battered wife syndrome and fraternity hazing, not
to mention a variety of other kinds of punitive situations.
It is not the author’s
present purpose to argue that Sisyphus illustrates a Stockholm syndrome, purely
and simply. The syndrome pertains to the attitude of victimized persons toward
their persecutors. Sisyphus’s mind-set in the Camusean spin on him is about his
predicament, not other persons—although its sympathetic tone parallels the one
of victims in the capture-bonding paradigm. Yet the two vastly different cases
may nonetheless represent instances of a common principle or process. For
example, in documented cases of capture-bonding, the victim’s experienced world
may become a sort of closed system within which such things as “harshness,”
“brutality,” “kindness” or “generosity” become distinctions that take on newer
meanings. Thus, a captor who is less cruel or arbitrary on Tuesday than he was
on Monday is no longer perceived as either of these, but as kind or generous in
virtue of the relatively more positive disposition. It’s as if distinctions
ordinarily drawn in normal, outside situations were reversed or transposed in
the newer system. The effect for all individuals in similar situations is not
ordained, and most traumatic experiences at the hands of captors are recounted
negatively. Accordingly, there is no way to predict which victim will undergo
capture-bonding after being subjected to whatever harsh treatment is his or her
unfortunate lot. Where does this leave Sisyphus?
For Camus, Sisyphus is not
alone in his take on a burden he is forced to bear. He is matched by Sophocles’
Oedipus and Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, both of whom conclude that “All is well”
despite their terrific burdens (Camus,
1975, p.109). “The descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also
take place in joy. The word is not too much” (Camus, 1975 p. 109). Does Camus
mean that the task in question is always one of joy, or encased in a system of
fluid meanings in which joy and sorrow alternate with each other? The latter
possibility sounds like the process underlying the capture-bonding paradigm, in
which familiar, albeit contrasting, emotions are reversed or transposed. A rock
is thus not configured as a burdensome thing to roll up a hill simpliciter.
It is perceived as either more or less burdensome than the one rolled up the
day before. The onerous task then gets unpacked as one in which comparisons
among “bad,” “better,” “worse” and “best” achievements flourish.
Could this be what Camus
means by happiness and the absurd being “two sons of the same earth”? It’s a
guess, and maybe a poor one. Be that as it may, considering it as a possibility
should prompt us to acknowledge that in the best and worst of all possible
worlds, one thing is a surety: the necessity of drawing distinctions. Whether
life is absurd may be up for grabs in some philosophical quarters; but making
distinctions about experiences is pretty much a done deal as the world
turns—and I mean any world.
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