Albert Camus:

    Rebelling Against the Absurd

     If human life is absurd, empty, meaningless, leading only to death,

can anything of value be rescued from it?
If we are thrown into a completely desolate and forlorn existence,
why do anything?  Why not kill ourselves now
instead of waiting for the final absurdity of death to take us?

     Albert Camus (1913-1960) maintained in his own life

a tension between this awareness of the futility of human existence
and his own defiant, rebellious self-affirmation.
His writings (philosophy and fiction) reflect and illustrate this paradox:
Altho ultimate and lasting meaning is impossible,
we can still create our own dignity as persons by challenging the absurd.
A strange love of life emerges from a devastating encounter with despair,
as John Cruickshank explains in his book on Camus:

         His inquiry, which set out to discover

    how the absurd paradox might either be solved or destroyed
    ends by making this paradox itself the basis for positive action....
    Camus derives meaning for his existence
    from an original denial of the possibility of meaning....
    Camus takes as his key to existence
    the very fact of not having a key.

     Cruickshank distinguishes four ways in which we notice the absurd:

     1. We might feel the absurd when something interrupts our daily routine,
when our comfortable, automatic, habitual ways of life suddenly fall apart
and we are forced to ask the deepest possible why?

     2. The absurd might intrude into our smooth-flowing consciousness

when we become acutely aware of the passage of time:
Life becomes transparent to its end, and we see that it adds up to zero.

     3. Sometimes familiar objects become radically alien and strange.

We discover ourselves exiled in an accidental world that makes no sense.

     4. Our separation from other people, our estrangement from ordinary life,
might open us to the deep clash and disharmony of existence.
We see normal human behavior as shallow, empty, mechanical, senseless.

Albert Camus: Philosopher of the Absurd

Albert Camus (1913-1960), novelist, dramatist, philosopher, essayist, was born in Algeria on 7 November, 1913.
His mother was Spanish and his Breton father was killed in World War I in 1914. Camus was raised and studied under
difficult but reasonably happy circumstances: “though I was born poor, I was born under a happy sky in a natural
setting with which one feels in union, unalienated”. Initially a journalist in Algiers, and later in Paris, he was Editor of
Combat, the underground resistance newspaper from 1942 to 1946. Camus, like his friends Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir, was then an active member of the resistance. He was but 46 when he was killed instantly in a
road accident in January 1960, having been offered a lift back to Paris by a close friend (Roger Gallimard, the
publisher, who later died of injuries sustained in the crash). The Nobel prize for literature was awarded to Camus in
1957.

Whilst his major interest was mainly in literature, he studied philosophy at Algiers University, and wrote didactic
texts which are certainly philosophical. In philosophical histories or dictionaries he is usually listed under French
existentialism and accorded higher status, as philosopher, than Simone de Beauvoir. Camus rejected the category
“existentialist”. For many years a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir they were to experience a massive “falling
out”. But this had earlier roots, to do with jealousy, with Camus’ fierce individualism, combined with a post political
ethics, and a refusal to commit himself politically to causes at a time after WW II when Sartre, under the influence of
Beauvoir, was moving away from his earlier violent and alienated notion of the individual. The final straws were
probably Sartre siding with the Communists (Camus would have no truck with them), an intemperate review of
L‘Homme Révolté in Les Temps Modernes, and an equally intemperate reply by Camus. Sartre responded equally as
badly to Camus in Les Temps Moderne (August, 1952): “… you may be my brother — brotherhood is cheap — you
certainly aren’t my comrade” (Sartre, 1952). (But they had been comrades in the resistance).

Camus had enormous consideration for others and was extremely generous, perhaps to a fault. In his early days
Beauvoir said that she liked “the hungry ardour” of their companion, yet that he could become concerned that his
generosity was received with ingratitude. He could become formal in discussion if not righteous and, “pen in hand, he
became a rigid moralist” (Beauvoir, 1968: p.61). Perhaps the acclaim and his good luck went to his head. Nor as
moralist did he have time for the deliberations and the risks involved in translating his moralism into political thought
and action. In his later life he was probably closer to Gaullism than socialism, refusing to denounce colonialism in
Algeria in Stockholm were he was to be awarded his Nobel prize. But in an ever increasing modernism and
performativity Camus traces the disappearance of old Europe and the “spaces” where morals and justice are being
replaced by the spaces of new technologies.

The essential philosophical thought of Camus is to be found in Le Myth de Sisyphe(1943) (The Myth of Sisyphus
[1943]) and L’Homme Révolté (1951) (Transl. into English as The Rebel [1969]) although there are differences and
developments between the two. These ideas are of course explored in his novels. A major thesis of Camus, in both
tracts, is the problematisation of death. In the earlier tract it is suicide and in the latter it is the death of others,
especially murder. They do not involve studies of death but, instead, attitudes towards death. If we can have
experience of “other things” we cannot experience death, Camus argues for, at best, any “experience” is second hand
and parasitic. Camus’ ongoing point is that we can have no experience of death, in the sense that we experience
sense data, emotions, etc., but that death is, as human beings, our only certainty. He has been titled as the writer of
the absurd which, in his thought, can be described as the confrontation between our human demands for justice and
rationality with a contingent and indifferent universe. Hence life is meaningless. Yet, we must accept the absurdity of
life and we must go on living — Sisyphus accepts his futile fate. But: “Finally I come to death”.

In Le Myth de Sisyphe absurdity is a sensation or feeling, which seizes us suddenly. It is at the base of thought
and action, even though it is indeterminate and confused and, if present, it is distant in time. Time is our worst enemy,
causing us to place ourselves in time, and live with the future in mind — we are ardent for tomorrow — even though
much of life is mechanical repetition. Faced by the absurdity of life consciousness becomes crucial to Camus’ thought
— it is the only good and the real good. It permits one to discern meaning and, as the world has no meaning, it is
ultimately absurd (though it is the relationship between consciousness and the world which is said to be absurd).

Our reaction to this experience of absurdity is pursued in L'Homme Révolté. Metaphysical rebellion is the answer
to absurdity. It “is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation … it
disputes the ends of man and creation… (it) protests against the human condition …”(The Rebel, p.29). Rebellion
indefatigably confronts evil. But it also sets limits, beyond which one cannot go, for rebellion without limits ends in
slavery: “… he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind,
dedicates himself to the earth … and sustains the world again and again” (ibid., p. 267).

There is then a message of hope in rebellion because consciousness can make the walls or limits that could not
formerly be penetrated, transparent. Consciousness is promoted by the absurd. There is a promise of a real
awakening and no chance of returning to repose. But here Camus stops. There are no principles which define an
appropriate rebellion. He is not so much theoretical here but practical. Each situation is new and the appropriate action
determined by analysis of that situation. Camus was against violence but under certain conditions the rebel would
choose limited and brief violence. On the eve of the liberation of Paris in WW II, he wrote in Combat: “… the barricades
of freedom have once more been thrown up. Once more justice must be bought with the blood of men … their reasons
must then have been overwhelming for them suddenly to seize the guns and shoot steadily, in the night, at those
soldiers who for two years thought that war was easy” (Camus, 1944).

There are limits then between opposites and moderation is the key. There are dualisms such as life and death;
love and hatred; “tenderness” and “justice”; and justice for man against the contingencies of history. Somewhat
paradoxically the rebel must at one and the same time reject and accept history, and simultaneously deny and affirm.
Camus always sought a middle path, an equilibrium, and moderation. But without principles for such moderate forms of
rebelling Camus seems almost anarchistic.

This concept of absurdity of the human condition is to be found in the Theatre of the Absurd which uses a variety of
dramatic techniques which defy rational analysis in their presentation of the absurdity of the human condition. The term
was coined by Martin Esslin in 1961 but he developed the notion of the absurd from Camus’ Le Myth de Sisyphe.
Dramatists to whom this title might be applied include Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

Talking of the death of her former friend Simone de Beauvoir was to say: “it wasn’t the fifty-year old man who’d
just died I was mourning; not that just man without justice, so arrogant and touchy behind his stern mask … it was the
companion of our hopeful years, whose open face laughed and smiled so easily, the young ambitious writer, wild to
enjoy life, its pleasures, its triumphs and comradeship, friendship, love and happiness. Death had brought him back to
life; for him time no longer existed” (Beauvoir, 1968, p.497).

Sartre in a eulogy for him in France-Observateur on 7 January 1960 said: “He was, in this century and against
history, the current heir to that long line of moralists whose works perhaps constitute that which is most original in
French letters. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, battled uncertainly against the massive
and misshapen events of this our time. But, inversely, through his obstinate refusal, he reaffirmed, in the heart of our
era, against the Machiavellians, against the golden calf of realism, the existence of morality”