(Originally Written October 10, 2008 in the Journal)
Notes on Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and other essays
Myth of Sisyphus
An Absurd Reasoning
"Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to human, stamping it with his real" (Camus)
This is pure subjectivism - all thought is anthropomorphic. A thought then, What of Imago Dei? If we, created in the image of God reflect on the world out of this sense aren't we reflecting on the world from a universal standpoint, albeit imperfectly due to our limitations?
Camus is an absolute empiricist. I feel my heart, it exists. I feel the world, I touch it. Therefore, it exists. "There ends all my knowledge, the rest is construction" (Camus). But he states even his own heart is and will remain indefinable to him.
The gap between certainty of existence and defining the content of existence is so wide it cannot be filled.
The irrational (existence's paradoxes and inconsistencies), the human nostalgia (our deepest desire for unity familiarity, and obsession with clarity), and the absurd (the abyss we stare at when we attempt of true knowledge and find none) converge to create in our minds a desert which we ought not attempt to escape by suicide (literal or the act of giving up thought or reason) or attempt to transcend by hope (a process of leaving knowledge to enter into pure construction). This is the point that demands action - suicide or recovery.
Philosophical suicide is the abdication of duty in pursuing knowledge either by giving up or by giving into hope.
The absurd is "the divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints" (Camus).
The absurd is to be both impossible and contradictory.
The absurd is a disproportion between intentions and reality of consequences. "The absurd, which is a metaphysical state of the conscious man does not lead to God. Perhaps the notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God" (Camus).
Absurdity springs from comparison. It is essentially a divorce; it does not lie within the two things being compared but in the actual confrontation of the two things. The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in the meeting of the two.
The absurd is the fundamental truth - the one thing that cannot be disposed of.
Now, it is the absurd that crushes man - the force that drives man to a broken point. The thing that crushes us we must fight to preserve. The absurd is an unceasing struggle - which implies "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)" (Camus).
So Camus' way is thus:
1. Break from the monotony of life to discover life is meaningless.
2. This shock demands action, either suicide or recovery
3. The recovery is acceptance of the absurd as ceaseless struggle
4. Ceaseless struggle brings to the mind three realizations
- There is no hope
- There is continual rejection
- We must be dissatisfied
The existentialists (Chestov, Kierkegaard and Jaspers) came to the truth of the absurd and offered their reaction to it as escape. They did so out of forced hope - creating religion.
The absurd man, the existentialist, recognizes the absurd and the limited value of reason - but, rather than abandoning reason for religion, he in his awareness, simply knows there is no longer a place for hope.
The absurd man seeks to live with his ailments, while the man who has seen the absurd and turned to religion has become frantic and frenzied, seeking to be cured.
Kierkegaard views despair not as a fact, but as a state of existence - the state of sin. Now, Kierkegaard in his final dealings with the absurd sacrificed the intellect (reason) to the belief in God for he sacrificed his pride (sin) to God. Camus recognizes the limitations of reason, but states that if this is pride he sees no sufficient cause to sacrifice it.
The absurd man, the absurd mind seeks what is true at all costs. It seeks what is true, not what is desirable. If Kierkegaard warns that there is nothing but despair then the absurd man takes truth and despair.
Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl) - the making of structures of consciousness and the phenomena which appears in acts of consciousness - objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Husserl used this to provide a firm basis for all human knowledge.
Phenomenology seeks to describe actual experience - not explain the world.
Phenomenology claims truths but that there is no Truth.
Husserl's method was "the intention":
1. Negate classical reasoning (thinking as a unifying/familiarizing procedure). Thinking is actually a relearning how to see again and to direct consciousness.
2. Directing consciousness illuminates every little truth.
3. It isolates events from one another to represent an incoherent-ness in experience; thus, every isolated object of consciousness is its own "magical appearance".
The absurd spirit wishes to enumerate experience, not transcend it.
Husserl's methodology would be acceptable to the absurd man if it simply stopped at the enumeration of experience, but Husserl jumps from the psychological truth of his theory to the metaphysical. Thus, he reintroduces a rationalism akin to Plato. Unlike Kierkegaard who returns to God - Husserl returns to a form of truth as polytheism - flattening all hierarchy and making all truth equal little gods.
The difference between Husserl's abstract god and the dazzling God of Kierkegaard is minimal and only one on how to arrive at the conclusion. Kierkegaard, like other religious philosophers deified the absurd and called it God. The abstract philosophers like Husserl rationalized the absurd to the point of creating standard reasons. They began at the nausea of recognizing the absurd but go to one extreme (rationalizing/abstract) or irrationalizing (deifying/religious escapism).
Nausea is looking into the face of the absurd. There are then three paths to follow. Religion is the path of deifying the absurd. It is an escape or a reconciliation to avoid the divorce. The abstract is the pat of rationalizing the absurd. It is an escape or a reconciliation to avoid the divorce. The absurd man does neither. He takes the divorce. This is the path of acceptance.
The absurd man knows that existence is unreasonable - neither too rational nor too irrational. He accepts the limits of reason and does not give it limitless power as Husserl or abandon it as sin (pride) like Kierkegaard.
Absurd Freedom
What is known (that what is certain) cannot be denied or rejected. One can negate all, but one's desire for unity. One can refute all the world but chaos.
One can only understand a thing in human terms (thus cannot transcend). "What I touch, what resists me - that is what I understand" (Camus).
The break - the divorce of mind (reason) and the world is caused by awareness of it.
The absurd man lives in the certainty of this divorce and does nothing except on the basis of certain knowledge. The only certainty is the absurd and thus he cannot escape it in good conscious through religion. He hears that this is the sin of pride but he does not know what sin is.
Life is better lived because it does not have a meaning.
Hope in transcendence (religion) is to escape the reality of the absurd - to abolish the intellect is to elude, not solve the problem.
The absurd man lives in constant revolt against the world and against his desire for unity (escape/hope). It is in this revolt that gives life its value.
Camus really loves the pride of man. He focuses all of his energy on praising the absurd man and abhors any type of degradation.
To the absurd man the notion of the metaphysical freedom or determinism is not important - the absurd man is only certain of his own freedom.
Camus denies the paradox of God and freedom has been solved or laid to waste, it remains. Either god is all-powerful and the author of all evil or we are free and God is not all-powerful. But, none of this is important because we only experience our own freedom and the eradication of hope and future makes us more free.
The absurd tells me this: there is no future. Freedom in the classical sense is based on hope, hope based on future. Our hope in the future actually makes us slaves to the conventions of thinking.
The Ideal of the absurd man: to live with a constantly conscious soul in a ceaseless procession of presents (no pasts/no future)/
Three consequences of absurd reasoning:
1. Revolt
2. Freedom
3. The ideal (passion)
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