The Problem of Nihilism and Absurdist Impasse in (Post)Modern

Literature: A Metaphysical Appraisal of Samuel Beckett and Albert

Camus

Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment for the award of the degree of

Doctor of Philosphy
In
English

By

Mohd. Maroof Shah

Supervisor
Prof Hamida Bano

Department of English
Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad
2012
 Declaration
I do hereby declare that this dissertation entitled The Problem of Nihilism and

Absurdist Impasse in (Post)Modern Literature: A Metaphysical Appraisal of Samuel

Beckett and Albert Camus is original research carried out by me. No part of this dissertation

was published or submitted to any other University/Institute for the award of any

Degree/Diploma.

Mohd Maroof Shah

Place:

Date:
 Dedication

To all those who are struggling to find meaning in their lives in an age that seeks to

live by bread alone.

To all those countless wage labourers who are denied their full share in the joys of

transcendence by a system that lives on their blood and sweat.

To my parents whose love that seems to spring from some heavenly fount shows me

that the universe is not indifferent or gratuitous but a space for creation of values that

give meaning to our odyssey on earth.

 Is it not conceivable that our entire civilization is built upon a
misinterpretation of man? Or that the tragedy of man is due to the fact that he
is a being who has forgotten the question: Who is Man? The failure to identify
himself, to know what is authentic human existence leads him assume a false
identity to pretend to be what he is unable to be or to not accept what is at the
root of his being. Ignorance about man isn’t lack of knowledge but false
knowledge.
-Abraham J Heschel

Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.

-Abraham J Heschel

We don’t understand that life is a paradise [at present], for we have

only to wish to understand this and it will immediately appear before us
in all its beauty.
The Brothers Karamazarov, Dosotovesky

“What is the purpose of life? I believe that the purpose of life is to be

happy.”
-The Dalai Lama

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they
miss.
-Thomas Carlyle

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice.
You must take it. The only question is how.
-Henry Ward Beecher
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction 1 - 25
2 Review of Literature 26 - 45
3 Genealogy of Abdsurdist Thought 46 - 64
4 Albert Camus: The Absurdist against Transcendence 65 - 85
5 Samuel Beckett: The Absurdist Confronting Transcendence 86 - 130
6 Albert Camus: A Metaphysical Appraisal 131 - 180
7 Samuel Beckett: A Metaphysical Appraisal 181 - 218
8 Beyond Absurdism: Recovering the Sacred 219 - 230
9 Simone Weil: Mystical Response to Absurdity 231 - 252
10 Waiting for God 253 - 261
11 Conclusion 262 - 271
Works Cited 272 - 282
Abbrevations

Samuel Beckett’s works:

E & O Ends and Odds

ATF All That Fall

HD Happy Days

WG Waiting for Godot

EG Endgame

TN Texts for Nothing

MU Murphy

UN The Unnmaeable

MD Malone Dies

P Proust

TR Trilogy

M Molloy

Albert Camus’ Works

C Caligulla

MS The Myth of Sisyphus

R The Rebel

FA The Fall
AHD A Happy Death

FM The First Man

O The Outsider

Simone Weil’s Works

N Notebooks

F First and Last Notebooks

WoG Waiting on God

 Acknowledgments

A thesis on absurdism could not have been possible in a truly absurd world where our dear

ones are not around to offer one not only help in different capacities but encouragement and most

importantly love. It is quite “embarrassing” to problematize the key thesis of absurdists without

formally beginning to work on them in this very page. In a nihilistic landscape and the wasteland of

spirit that absurdists confront there is really no room for acknowledgement of love that sustains all

relationships.

I first of all thank God, the ground of creativity, without which no creative or critical work is

possible. All intellectual endeavours involve partaking of the Logos that in Sufi metaphysics is

embodied in the light of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, on whom be blessings and peace.

Without Logos no language, no meaning and no intelligent activity is possible. The fact that I have

completed the present thesis, is for one nurtured in the ambience of tasawwuf, a proof of blessings of

the chain of masters to whom I am connected through my Master whom I better leave unnamed here.

I have no words to thank the Department of English, MANNU that provided the opportunity

to pursue PhD. Prof Amina Kishore and Prof Syed Haseebuddin Qadri – whose very personality

recalls the great tradition of tasawwuf and whose reminders for treading cautiously when making

comparisons between two separate worldviews have helped – have showered parental affection at

different stages to make possible my work. I have nothing to offer except prayers (again, a taboo

word in the world without God) for them and to my supervisor Prof Hamida Bano who has been a

long standing moral and intellectual support not only for completing the present thesis but for many

other academic pursuits.

I owe enormous gratitude to my parents, my brothers Dr Manzoor and Peerzada Muzammil

and all my family members including Dr Sumera, Irfana Chesti, Abida Bano, Shakeela Bano, Shams-

un Nisa and Saliha Shah who provided the space and shouldered family responsibilities to allow me

pursue my dreams. Remembering gifted mathematician and symbol of intellectuality Prof Wali
 Muhammad Shah who led me to philosophical pursuits is a privilege. Debt owed to my

beloved teacher Nazir A Wani needs special mention.

The present work could not have been undertaken without the support of Dr Syed Sumbul,

my life companion. She has always been a symbol of sacrifice and I don’t think I can ever repay her.

What a pleasure to remember my little hikmah whom I could not give enough love for the sake of

work on this thesis but whose name “wisdom” keeps me reminding of our life’s goal as proposed by

our own tradition (which sees the Prophet S.A.W. as a teacher of wisdom) and seconded by

traditional philosophers and sages. My special thanks to Dr Bilal A Dar from whose work on

absurdism I have benefited and who was kind enough to partly proof read my thesis. The debt I owe

to Naseer Ahmed Naseer for not only hosting me in MANUU but also helping in many other ways

besides proof reading is too huge to be repayable. Without the valuable suggestions of Masrook A

Dar and Showkat Ahmad Tilwani, scholars of MANUU, I couldn’t have completed the work. I have

no words to thank them for help in proof reading.

 Shah 1

Introduction

Modern age is an age characterized by change in orientation towards

transcendence. In theological terms it is inclined towards atheism or agnosticism and

when it is theistic it is not metaphysically grounded but associated with religion and that

too often with its exoteric dimension which in itself is a limited and relative plane of

reality and quite susceptible to error/ deviation when looked from the broader perspective

of metaphysics. We can hardly name any great figure in modern literature that could be

called religious in strictly orthodox integral sense of the term. Our age has, most

characteristically, treated the question of reality and God in a narrowly rationalistic

perspective as it is generally ignorant of the traditional doctrine of God as Reality. It does

away with a symbolic view of things and converts the world of wonder and meaning into

brute gratuitous things. That is why in the God-forsaken world the problems of meaning

and teleology are bound to occur and response could be some sort of absurdism.

Assumed to be posttheological and postmetaphysical age it is quite unfashionable

to apply “outmoded’’ theological and metaphysical principles in criticism of literature.

However the claim of the perennialist authors is that modern man is hardly aware of

traditional wisdom enshrined in pure metaphysics which is not to be confused with the

rationally framed post-Aristotelian metaphysics that is the science of being. The

knowledge of the Infinite (and, in perennialist reading, the Greeks were unaware of the

notion of the Infinite) is not the prerogative of rational philosophy or reason. They

criticize the whole enterprise of Western philosophy for its incomplete or distorted

metaphysics. They denounce in very forceful terms the foundations of the Project of
 Shah 2

Modernity with its diverse cultural and literary expressions. The Renaissance is rejected

as devil inspired movement as it cut off the vertical dimension, which in the form of

traditional religious wisdom had tied man to heaven, to the transcendent realm of timeless

reality since ages. Post-Enlightenment instrumental rationality that undergirds modern

industrial culture with its descaralizing and de-individualizing objectification comes

under severe attack complementing the attack of certain postmodernists and left inspired

critics like Adorno. Much of what passes for literary criticism today hardly deserves the

name of criticism from their perspective. Modernism is a dehumanizing project even if

various versions of secular humanism have been flouted by many modern thinkers that

find expression in modern literature especially existentialism associated literature.

Postmodernism with its relativist manifesto is primarily a misosophical cult and in their

judgment hardly worthy of serious attention. There is no such thing as art and philosophy

today. For that we have to turn to ancients or traditional cultures. Perennialists

demonstrate how, with the oblivion of right orientation towards transcendence, wisdom

has been lost in knowledge, knowledge in information and life in living as T. S. Eliot

had noted.

Perennialists have mainly focused on the problems and issues of comparative

religion, art and philosophy and have not very seriously dealt with contemporary

literature although they have expressed their view here and there in short articles or

passages on it. Full length studies of contemporary literature especially of existentialist

and absurdist literature from the perennialist perspective have yet to come. None of the

major figures in the perennialist school has extensively dealt with any major

contemporary author. However the perennialist school has been increasingly impacting
 Shah 3

modern academy and seems to promise a great deal in freshly approaching certain

important contemporary dilemmas and crises and reorient contemporary criticism. It is

with this attempt at reorienting criticism that this thesis seeks to engage as a metacritical

and metaphilosophical enterprise.

I have relied on the original works of major perennialist figures and absurdist

authors for this comparative study. In fact, to be more precise, it is a critical work that

takes the standpoint of perennialists for approaching absurdists. Certain convergence in

their responses to fundamental problems of existence is also emphasized. In fact there is a

remarkable fusion of Eastern and Western thought currents in absurdists and in their

writings one sees a sort of impasse in Western philosophical tradition, a searching

reexamination of the fundamental assumptions on which the Western especially the post-

Renaissance modern civilization is based. They have ruthlessly exposed the fictive idols

constructed by modern man to replace God. They have made fundamental criticism of

Christian theological and Western modernist philosophical worldviews. They have

exposed many cherished myths of the modern age. Though they have not consciously

taken a mystical view or the Eastern metaphysical position but their point of departure

has remarkable convergence with Eastern approach though their solutions and

conclusions often differ sharply. Their key failure, according to perennialist reading, lies

in n o t providing antidote to despair that they inherit from modern forms of nihilism.

The present work is an attempt to more rigourously examine those background

assumptions of modern antitranscendentalist thought that inform their work and then

dissolve the issues like nihilism which crop up. The absurdist attempt of

overcoming nihilism is not convincing. For achieving this end metaphysics

as defined by perennialists in
 Shah 4

“empirical” rather than speculative or rationalist terms that bypasses critique of modern

antimetaphysical thought currents needs to be appropriated and a dialogue ensued

between perennialists critics of Western Modernity and its cultural products and

postmodernist/absurdist critics of the same. The present work is an attempt to see how

this dialogue may fare and bridge the gap between those who complain of hiddenness of

God and feel excluded from grace and those who claim that grace is there but man is

refusing to receive it.

My endeavour has been to analyze the major works of Camus and Beckett from

the perspective of the perennialist school whose major exponents are Rene Guenon,

Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, and in the light of the perennial wisdom an

attempt is made to see why the East has not been bedeviled by the problem of pessimistic

absurdism. This problem, as it will be argued, could only arise in the Western context that

shares either an exoteric Christian theological or the egocentric rationalist framework.

This pessimism is the logical dead end of Promethean Faustian humanistic secularist

ideology to which the post-Renaissance Western man is committed. It represents the

crisis of antitraditional outlook of the modern West. But the question is why not

historicize this outlook and see if at all this crisis could have been initially averted or

could be averted by an improved understanding of both theological and metaphysical

heritage against which it revolted and got itself landed in murky waters from which it has

been unable to escape?

Foregrounding the problem of contemporary attitude towards transcendence I

have raised certain questions that problematize our usual approach of engaging with

absurdist thought in general and Beckett/Camus criticism in particular. There is much

 Shah 5

that is inadequately theorized in the received understanding of absurdist project. I am

asking a host of questions to those who plead for taking leave of transcendence as

traditionally understood and build on the foundations of “unyielding despair” a new

world. How come the great reticence to reject the ancients for whom God is every breath

they breathe and the question of suicide hardly entertainable? How they write off or

judge dozens of traditional civilizations and millennia of human experience in declaring

that man has come of age and discarded illusions and should refuse to look heavenward

or into the depths of his own being where all the heavens and gods reside? How do they

discount the great architects of traditional civilizations who have built great cultures?

How come the audacity to correct or advise the profoundest thinkers, artists, saints and

prophets of traditional cultures that have all taken transcendence to be a reality? Are great

epics, scriptures, temples and other magnificent architectural achievements, music and

other art forms and traditional sciences that have sustained them for centuries or

millennia and have been in fact the abiding contribution of these civilizations to humanity

products of basic epistemic errors and flawed ontology? Are religions and everything

associated with them that include almost every cultural activity in traditional civilizations

that have traditionally grounded human search for values and meaning, products of

wrong speculation or fear? Are great aesthetic systems that celebrate beauty that saves by

virtue of being a royal road to transcendence and a testimony that this world is not

indifferent to our deepest aspiration for beauty and joy simply a product of faulty

psychology and juvenile romanticism? Is contemplative life that has vivified not only a

galaxy of saints and monks of varied traditions and inspired great artists simply a doomed

search for essence of the self as Beckett would have us believe? What about the great
 Shah 6

mystics who report that in the cave of their hearts or depths of their being they have

found eternity of unalloyed joy and thus evidence of a basically benign reality at the heart

of the universe? What about those great system builders who have used logic and reason

profitably to serve man and appease his hunger for truths that are accessible to reason at

least? What remains if one loses faith in human reason and its demonstrable claim to

make universe more comprehensible? How do they account for the fact that the universe

is comprehensible to the extent that we have created wonderful technology and are able

to scan atoms and measure distances unimaginably huge? Where do they place

intelligence itself that judges something absurd presupposing something that is not absurd

as Schuon says? How can they disregard almost all great traditional philosophers who are

unanimous on the primacy of wisdom accessible to intellectual intuition or the

accessibility of the Real to heart or a galaxy of artists who thought they copied their

masterpieces by visualizing Platonic Forms? How do they reject experience or

testimony of countless believers who found access to reality to certain extent

through the contemplation of the traditional symbols, and of mystics of all traditions and

all hues who positively reported about heavens (their own states of higher

consciousness, of course) and as a result got the peace that passeth understanding

and dissolved all questions including absurdity or hysterical angst if it lurks

somewhere? Closer home how can we explain away countless examples of works of

Holy Spirit that sustain life? For instance, mothers who prepare breakfast, lunch and

dinner for the children being motivated by nothing but love that Jesus identified with

God and with which the Holy Spirit vivifies believers (reductionist psychologism may

not countenance it but none including the psychologists has ever been blind to the

power of love to lift us and its joy and in

 Shah 7

perennialist pneumatology and ontology joy is an attribute of the Real, of transcendence).

The question, in short, is should we side with the great founders and sustainers of

civilizations in whose anthropology the Transcendent Principle has the supreme

importance and countless other witnesses of the Spirit or with those who proudly declare

that only modern man is mature and can assert that transcendence is an

illusion? Shouldn’t we, with Heschel, question the whole basis of anthropology on

which our entire civilization is built upon?

Against the great Tradition that is centered on Transcendence we can’t entertain

those who report from hell because it has been their misfortune to see only mess and

absurdly demand that reality must be comprehensible in human or rational terms as if it

were an object out there and alien entity unconnected with one’s subjectivity that really

projects it according to both traditional thinkers and explorers of the quantum world. We

can’t reject the unanimous reports from mystics of all climes and ages who have been

more daring adventurers of consciousness and have taken greater care to discipline the

faculties that could be attuned to suprasensory and suprarational realm. They have all

reported of the heaven within and heaven without, of joy unspeakable. They have no

complaints. They know that they are somehow taken care of and not uncalled guests here

on earth. If we create a system that makes people lonely, descaralizes cosmos by

emptying symbols of their meaning and closes off doors of communication between men

and angels why should we blame God? If people can’t unconditionally love whose fault

is it? The sun rises today as ever, the stars continue to dazzle the dark sky and the birds

continue to sing songs of heaven. If one has lost the power to perceive the wonder, the

mystery, the beauty, the glory and the grandeur of all these things whose fault is it? If one
 Shah 8

fails to cleanse the doors of perception and see all things as Infinite how come one can

complain of inaccessibility of the Real? Onus lies on man to create a heaven in the depths

of his being. The samsara is samsara but for those who know how to see all is

transformed into beautitude of nirvana. Mountains continue to be mountains after the

enlightenment but one sees them with one foot above the ground as Zen mystics report.

If one refuses to see and arrogantly believes that God who stands for sweetness and

joy in all things if properly perceived, soul ravishing beauty, captivating wonder and

vivifying mystery has no place in his world one can’t help. One can’t

understand the basic premise of absurdists that God is dead. He is dead for those

who have identified him with some abstract world only or with some idol of

imagination or reason. Saints and mystical philosophers can’t make any sense of “God

is dead.” The God of certain theology may be dead but of the artist who has

transcended his narrow cage of personality and a mystic or an ordinary believer who

has not lost the attitude of thanksgiving, of seeing life as sacrament, of wondering

about the moral law within or the reign of the Good and discerning meaning of

traditional symbols, God can’t die. They glorify him for all the “dappled things.” Let

the murderers of God despair and rot in dustbins and self-digged graves and curse

themselves or entertain themselves with trivial sadistic games. We can only pity them

for their sin and guilt. But we can’t believe their interpretation of discoveries of

inductive intellect that suddenly disenchanted the world for them and emptied it of

its meaning. Who says that science has really succeeded in removing the veil of

mystery from things? Of course it asserted so and many who beieved in the gospel of

Enlightenment or Darwin or Freud imagined that mystery is gone. We can

understand the violence of cultural modernity that fights the shadows and images of God
 Shah 9

in every nook and corner but we can see how it has been constructed and imposed and

expose the lie. We, living in the postmodern age, are no longer overawed by the grand

claims of reason and science to explain away the sacred or mystery and can point out how

unholy alliance of knowledge and power has sought to play the trick.

Perennialists would argue, in light of what has been said here, that the claim that

God is dead is either false or true about a small fraction of people who are dwelling in the

Platonic cave. The claim of death of God can only be made by those myopic or

melancholic patients who have slipped into a dung heap inside a pit and smell nothing

but ammonia which has fogged their brains. They then decide to live there and can’t

breathe the fresh air and see the sunlit sky. As a metaphysical claim it is a product of

what a Vedantist or a Buddhist would call ignorance. As a factual claim regarding

certain culture that took instrumental rationality too seriously and which converted the

world into an object that no longer speaks to us we can countenance it but then we can

attempt to historicize it and question the logic of the whole project that culminated in it

and proceed beyond it.

It seems quite evident, as perennialists and many other thinkers would remind us,

that curses against logic, reason (ratio) intelligence (buddhi) and language that we find in

ample measure in absurdist literature simply rebound on the face of those who utter them.

It is like spitting on heaven that falls back on the one who spits. God can’t be mocked and

man can’t escape his own judgment against himself if he fails to be true to his

theomorphic image. This can be done only if man could escape human state and return

the ticket of life. But this is obviously not possible. We have to make peace with heaven
 Shah 10

if we want it here on earth both within and without. Defiance against heavens or Absolute

is suicidal. There can be no argument against the fact that we, the creatures of flesh and

blood, are contingent beings or mere creatures who have thousands of limitations and

don’t contain the Principle within us can’t stand against the larger Whole that both

grounds us and surrounds us. God/Totality/Tao/One/Other/Self can’t be wished away,

cursed or mocked. God as the Ground of our being or Being as such, as our deepest self,

as our subjectivity that witnesses, as something that is beauty, truth, reality, joy and

knowledge (bound as we are to seek all these values), as our power of perception can’t be

dispensed with. This is the God of mystics and prophets that traditional metaphysicians

and mystical philosophers present to us. Against this God man can’t rebel as that would

be at the cost of denying himself or what is the most treasured thing in him.

I have attempted a sort of deconstructive reading of absurdist works such as The

Myth of Sisyphus and Waiting for Godot and tried to juxtapose it with the perennialist

alternative reading of the same and then argue for exploring the possibility of

appropriating and proceeding beyond post-Nietzschean bleak vision of modern man as

presented by Camus and Beckett that is to a significant extent shared by almost all

representative writers of the modern West. Taking note of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian-

postmodern critiques of onto-teleo-theological thinking and seeking to appropriate it from

the vantage point of transtheistic traditional metaphysics the thesis attempts to explore,

through recovering the fragmentary images of the sacred scattered here and there in

otherwise desolate landscape of (Post)Modernity, the possibility of dealienation of

alienated anti-traditional modern man.

 Shah 11

The question is why can’t we, in the world imagined by absurdists, be allowed to

breathe the fresh air in the open sky of transcendence? The argument that it requires

sacrifice of reason to posit transcendence shows only poverty of one’s imagination and

failure to allow symbolic view of traditional scriptural statements. What perennialists are

asking is more respect for human intelligence and logic and cleansing of the “doors of

perception.” In fact, in perennialist understanding, God is Knowledge and it is

supramental and supraindividual faculty nous (intellect) whose reflection on mental

plane we call reason (ratio) that perceives transcendent realities. It is not the personal

God of exoteric theology but the transtheistic Absolute/Godhead that is posited by all

traditional religions as perennialist approach to comparative religion cogently shows that

is required to be affirmed when we talk of First Principle or the Transcendent Reality.

The brightest minds have had no difficulty in entertaining it and the greatest artists

have been busy celebrating its manifestations and men, in all ages, knowingly or

unwittingly, continue to worship it. It has been determined that men would really

worship God alone as Ibn Arabi, a great Sufi metaphysician, would demonstrate in his

exegesis of a Quranic verse.

Father Zossima’s conviction (in The Brothers Karamazarov) that paradise is here

with us, all around us if we only knew is laughed away by modern bats who fail to come

out of the dark night of the soul with the counterclaim regarding omnipresence of

darkness of hell from which there is no exit. Encounter with life is generally nauseating

and rarely elating for most modern writers. It means loss of God has not been overcome

and all the attempts to mitigate the corroding effects of nihilism or overcome it have been

unconvincing. So how to overcome nihilism continues to be the problem of postmodern

literature and our critics and writers seem to be short of ideas as divergent readings and
 Shah 12

misreadings of traditional theological sources that traditionally grounded values seem

to have yielded little success. Turning towards mysticism has been an important

strategy with certain writers – and that partly explains their huge appeal for diverse

audiences. Although suffering from certain faults like lacking in sophistication or failing

to precisely delineate and apply First Principles that have been obscured or distorted in

modern history, there seems to be a possibility of real breakthrough and dissolving key

problems including the problem of nihilism in this approach. I have attempted to

appropriate the most authentic sources of Eastern traditions by banking upon

perennialists whose key virtue has been to avoid personal opinion in matters traditional

and merely transmit the received metaphysical or wisdom traditions of the world. These

traditions have acted as cushions against certain sporadic skeptical or cynical elements

that have been with us for millennia but have emerged as dominant mode of thought in

recent history and driven us to a state of crisis. Our most gifted writers know how to

mock and not how to praise or celebrate possibly because there is nothing left to celebrate

after the withdrawal of God. Mourning over the god powerless to be born and modern

man’s vain search for the same absent God despite his resolute claim to lucidity is the

motif of modern literature. According to traditions man can’t live without the ideal of

Absolute. He is made for the Absolute and for knowing the Absolute or he perishes by

worshipping counterfeits of It. It is in the light of Absolute alone that contingent gets

justified. The light that is neither in the heavens nor in the earth, the light that never was

in the land or the sea is to be sought. Postmodernism rightly exposes counterfeits and

idols of reason. It shows how the light that man seeks is not in this world. But then it is

lost in abyss. It stops short of outbraving the brave. The moon that Caligula seeks in order
 Shah 13

to transfigure everything is there and man has to get it. The moon is the light that guides

travelers in the night of existence. It is the far off light that man must find in his bosom.

But the postmodern man is despaired of finding the moon. For him it is absolutely

unattainable and he has even the audacity to celebrate this loss but little realization what

this loss really means. Separation from the Beloved is nothing short of hell, assert our

perennialists.

The Absurd Man’s pagan affirmation of this worldly life, the life condemned to

the realm of finitude and horizontal plane and cut off from any meaningful relationship

with or belief in transcendence conceals at heart the great pain of the fall from Heaven

and too deep a gloom to allow for the Nietzschean joy of becoming or celebration of

dance of life.

Secular modernist thought is consciously severed from any vertical reference and

any theological grounding. However it is strange that generally modern literature is not

subject to a critical appraisal from the perspective against which it was a rebellion. It isn’t

generally recognized that d e s p a i r i n g t o n e o f m u c h o f modern literature is only a

symptom of a deeper disease that traditional civilizations well curbed. The context

of modernity, the background worldview that informs modern literature in general

and absurdist literature in particular is not subject to a rigorous critique from

traditional metaphysical/mystical/religious perspective. It is not generally in fashion

in critical circles to wrestle with the philosophical presumptions of the great

protagonists from a perspective from which absurdists take departure. Major critical

schools are either explicitly antitraditional or distance themselves from it.

Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructionist, new

historicist, cultural materialist – to name major schools only – all

 Shah 14

are hostile to traditional metaphysical and religious outlook that nurtured traditional

civilizations and literatures which hardly knew such things as despair or other fruits of

nihilism such as absurdism.

Samuel Beckett, a key figure in the absurdist movement that depicts modern

man’s sorry state in a world without transcendence, has made, or rather echoed, certain

important Nietzschean-Heideggerian-Sartrean arguments against both the traditional

humanistic and God-centred worldviews. He has depicted a world of characters that show

incredulity towards traditional theology and philosophy. He has postmodern distrust of

traditional logocentric philosophy. He has vividly depicted modern disillusionment with

rationalist progressivist worldview. He has not provided an alternative philosophy but

problematized the case for both traditional and humanistic pictures of it and exposed

futility and impotence of all substitutes of God that modernity has been worshipping. He

has not argued for resurrecting the traditional God either but has demonstrated why

modern gods are also dead or are fictions. He has primarily made a case against Western

philosophical and theological tradition and has not deeply engaged with the Eastern

metaphysical and mystical thought. In this thesis it is proposed to situate Beckett in

traditional metaphysical (as understood by the traditionalist perennialist metaphysicians)

and mystical thought currents.

Engaging with Beckett’s complex and weird philosophy, if at all one could label it

as philosophy, can always be tricky and I have attempted to rely on the most

respected Beckett scholars for distilling his key anxieties, arguments and final positions

that I have then approached from a perennialist metaphysical viewpoint. Quarrels over

his meaning or viability of any project that seeks to wrest some meaning from

his works not

 Shah 15

withstanding, it can safely be asserted that some of his conclusions show marked affinity

to those reached by the East although he parodies other key elements in traditional

outlook.

Beckett’s whole literary oeuvre is an exegesis of this one sentence: “We are fallen

beings without any possibility of salvation.” It appears to be nihilistic diagnosis of life

although it may be our inability to be nihilists despite the vanity and meaninglessness of

life that he is emphasizing. His whole art is geared towards bringing home the point made

by the “skeptical” author of Ecclesiastics “vanity of vanities—all is vanity” and the

Upanishadic dictum “there is no bliss in things finite.” Regarding the joy of the Infinite or

more precisely the possibility of accessing it he seems skeptical. Our life is an absurd

punishment. ‘‘Time is a cutting sword,” forms the refrain of his thought. Time

disintegrates everything and nothing, not even art (which for him is an inescapable

imposition with no power to save) can defeat it. We are conscious suffering beings. There

is no exit for the vast majority of men. Our journey is from nothingness to nothingness.

There is no providence, no saving grace, and no cure for pain ordinarily available.

History is junk. Life is a poor joke. To be is to suffer and suffer for no cause at all, no sin

of ours, for no worthy end. Life is a lengthy and perhaps irremediable exile from the self,

the essence, the heaven. Only bad eternity is achievable. Abul Ala Maari’s dictum that to

be born or have being is the sin (“wujuduka zambuq”) is illustrated in the works of

Beckett. Both life and art are mysterious punishments for some unknown crime – (that of

being born perhaps), “each is the vain and unremitting search for an impossible language
 Shah 16

of the self which would allow one at last to lapse into the silence of eternal self-

possession.” Our only hope is the hope of the impossible and we are condemned to hope

it, or hope against hope. He announces the failure of man rather than his triumph over

suffering and ignorance. It is not the smile of a Buddha that has the final word. For

Beckett Intelligence (buddhi) doesn’t save man and neither does beauty. He has little clue

what for is intelligence if not to know the heart of reality and conquer ignorance.

Beckett exposes the dark side of modern thought and experience which, long

since the Renaissance, has been clothed in such colours as Enlightenment, humanism,

positivism and other such ‘isms’ that promise to substitute traditional religious narrative

and solve the problem of man and his sorrow. The only option available now, as God is

also dead, is to laugh away the absurdity of life, an ironic awareness of triviality and

futility of all things and of all the uses of the world. There may be light at the end of the

tunnel but it is not to be found easily or necessarily. Missing it rather than finding it is the

rule.

From a perennialist viewpoint Beckett’s theses are based on twisting the solid

empirical notions and selectively reading the given. Mystics face precisely the same

problem that most Beckettian characters encounter but they emerge with quite different

and not despairing results. Most of characters of Beckett and Camus suffer from certain

flaws and presuppose certain notions that lead them to despairing situations. There is only

purgatory and hell and no heaven in Beckett but this is often of their creator’s own

choice. But with the mystics purgatory and hell though encountered in their odysseys are

finally shown to be unreal. There is no hell. It is created by man’s ignorance. Beckett’s

and Camus’ characters are, generally speaking, myopic, irrational creatures suffering for
 Shah 17

the sin of ignorance. From the mystical viewpoint we are all in heaven though we don’t

know. There is of course no cure for certain pains as long as we live in the world of space

and time but that doesn’t mean we are condemned to hell as long as we live. For

perennialists all problems are traceable to ignorance or objectively wrong perception of

things. Culprits in case of our selected writers seem to be their unwarranted view of the

self (especially in Camus), reason and sacred (both Beckett and Camus). Theological

context of their works makes their diagnosis as well the treatment of the diseased

condition of man problematic.

Camus’ is perhaps the most articulate, lucid and influential exposition of absurdist

(anti)thought. As a rebellious child of modern age which he could neither afford to

disinherit nor embrace without guilt he gave voice to its central contradictions or

absurdities. Inherting a picture of the world that is characterized by the extreme

obtrusiveness of evil as Joad rightly notes in his God and Evil due to presumed death of

God (Nietzsche and Sartre) or his absence (Heidegger) or his taking leave (Kafka) he, as

a moralist, saw the problem or challenge before modern man as how to be saint without

God or how to find meaning in meaninglessness and hope in hopelessness and goodness

and redemptive grace in evil and suffering, eternity in time, heaven in hell – in short the

kingdom of God in the territory of the Devil. Camus’ whole endeavour lies precisely in

attempting this in all his works, literary and philosophical.

th
Nietzsche, whose figure looms large on the literary landscape of the 20 century

and who seems to be in the background of the works of Camus and Becket, has been

largely misread or misrepresented by the major modern critics according to the

perennialists though they are not themselves agreed over the interpretation of Nietzsche.
 Shah 18

However there is enough warrant from other quarters to allow interpretation of him as a

mystic though an eccentric one. Nietzsche is a mystic and he holds a position which

could be reconciled with the fundamental tenets of perennial philosophy as far as they

apply to concrete enterprise of living and facing the tragic sense of life. This task is

admirably done by Coomaraswamy. Modern literature (including the work of Camus and

Beckett) that mourns the absence or hiddenneess or death of God is misguided by its

misperception of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a perceptive critic of psychology that posits

personal God and props and consolations against the naked truth. He is a critic of the

humanist notion of self that is at the root of modern view of despair and life. In this thesis

I have assumed a quite different reading of Nietzsche and this has a bearing on my

perception of Beckett and Camus and liquidation of nihilism with which they, largely

unsuccessfully, wrestle.

Central to Camus’ absurdist thesis shared by many influential twentieth century

writers is what traditional philosophy and philosophy of religion treat under the heading

of the problem of evil. So I shall attempt to focus on Camus’ approach to the problem of

evil to scrutinize his absurdist thesis. The problem of evil has been presented by most

detractors of theism or religion as death knell of the latter. Most modern authors

following Nietzsche such as Mann, Joyce, Gide, Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham

see in the presence of so much evil and suffering the sufficient warrant for their disbelief

in traditional theistic God and the associated belief in the meaning of life or universe.

Camus’ position could be better appreciated in this context and I have attempted to show

how his critique of theodicy loses its force when we substitute metaphysical
 Shah 19

understanding of evil that we find argued very cogently in Schuon and Pallis whom I

have liberally quoted on the issue.

Mystery is the key word in religious/mystical perspective and this is

characteristically absent in modern rationalist worldview. Postmodernism resurrects the

notion but disassociates it from the sacred and this sense of the mysterious is failure of

knowing. This is suffocating and frightening. It is in this sense that we encounter

mysterious in Camus and Beckett. The Sacred is something that dissolves the whole

universe of absurdity and meaninglessness. If we compare mystical and absurdist

responses to the mystery of existence we observe a great difference.

Mystical traditions, as it will be argued, provide the elusive light that Ionesco

prized above everything and which redeems existence from its absurdity. From the

perennialists metaphysical perspective that is the light of the Self. God is the “light of the

heavens and the earth” in the Quranic phrase. Mysticism endeavours to bring that light

that illumines everything, that makes everything look marvelous, an abiding miracle. To

recapture that wonder of existence or life and to live life in that awareness of the light is

the purpose of religions, mysticism and traditional metaphysics. Higher literature too

endeavours to enchant the deserted wasteland of our hearts. Absurdists rightly point out

the illusory nature of the idols modern Western man has constructed. But they don’t see

clearly the other world that lies deep within every one of us in which lies the source of

the light that never was on earth but that illumines everything and that redeems all the

suffering that our body and mind are heir to. Their failure to see this is attributable to

their absurd demand that conceptual intellect must comprehend everything and man

should be able to scan God. They are not ready to die before death in the sense mystics
 Shah 20

demand and thus perfect the organ of perception of noumenal world or world of forms.

One doesn’t get convinced without seeing oneself. Buddha, Plotinus, Acquinas and the

great saints of all traditions had experienced the supernal joy and illumination and that

explains why they were not troubled by the problem of evil or density and opacity of the

world. Choosing to live outside grace has cost them despair that can’t be cheered away.

It is because religion sees the absurdity of our fallen condition or contradictions

inherent in the life of this world, in the domain of time and becoming, that it asks for

transcendence, for eternity, for paradise, for God. This it achieves by appropriating the

“given” and then asking us to transcend it. It shows us the way to achieve transcendence.

It looks squarely at the face of the absurd without becoming absurdist and pessimist. It

shows how one can transcend or fight absurdity without rebelling against God or

heavens. By grounding itself in the Absolute and referring everything to it, every

mundane activity becomes meaningful. By transcending ego life becomes a benediction,

creative, blissful. By dropping the letter “I” i.e., negating the separative principle of ego

in the word “live” it becomes “love” and what else is God if not love as Krishnamurti

used to say. When we transcend thought and its sound and fury and become one with the

whole by transcending or dissolving ego everything becomes beautiful and in a way

meaningful. This is an empirical truth which all the mystics unanimously testify and

artists quite readily see.

All questions disappear for a gnostic (the term understood in primordial and

nonsectarian sense as by the perennialists). A traditionalist doesn’t feel uneasy over the

failure of reason to provide hope, unity and harmony. He sees both “hope” and unity

through intellective intuition of which metaphysicians speak (especially metaphysicians

 Shah 21

of the perennialist school). He celebrates the mystery of Existence and it is faith in this

Unseen Mystery that constitutes the essence of faith or iman. Religion celebrates mystery

and refuses to logicize it, rationalize it. The sacred is mysterious. Religion sees beauty in

the mystery of existence and our inability to answer certain fundamental questions in

logical rational terms. A modern mystic defines religion as refusal to demystify existence.

Thus not everything which Camus brackets into the category of the absurd in reality

qualifies as absurd. It is a particular context of philosophical presuppositions or

inferences (that he hardly questions) of Camus’ thought that is responsible for seeing

absurd where it is not and to opt for a solution that only complicates the problem. Only

by dropping out individual claim and harmonizing our will with the cosmic will, with fate

(this isn’t passive resignation but “ vital appropriation of the whole universe” and

God’s attributes), when there is no need of opposing cosmic will or divine will because

it isn’t the other of man’s will, could absurd be defeated. God represents the ideal or

perfection of man’s true self according to traditionalists.

Against this Unitarain vision of saints and prophets (as perennialists read their

vision) the identification of God with a silent subject who is out there, totally Other to

His creation yet all powerful and merciful to guard His creation in all its interests

according to the sentiments and demands of the creatures is the basic humanistic error

from which Camus’ discovery of absurdity of life (death and despair) and his idea of

metaphysical rebellion take their birth.

Despite sharing the same starting assumptions of fall or God abandoned world,

original sin (or original despair as Camus rephrased it for himself), vanity of all things –

all endeavors, all ambitions, all science – transience of beauty and our state as impossible
 Shah 22

anomaly in time and space and tragic predicament of our earthly existence, (all the

ingredients of absurdist vision) traditional religious worldview differs radically in

conclusions and in interpreting the significance of all these points. It is not led to despair

of man or his larger destiny.

The demand for meaning and purpose needs some elucidation. For traditions

meaning of life is some sort of happiness. Felicity and beatitude, the two terms that

Augustine uses in the City of God are almost universally recognized ends of life. Not

mere pleasure but joy and this joy is associated with the very structure of reality. Vedanta

calls Ultimate Reality Ananda although it too is an approximation but we need to

recognize that accessing reality is some sort of fulfillment or release which are naturally

accompanied by joy. Sorrow is simply alienation from reality as Simone Weil asserts.

Thus we can well say the purpose of life is knowledge of reality. Ananda is indissolubly

connected with knowledge. Thus life is its own purpose. Life lived under the aspect of

eternity, love, in joy or celebration is what is its fulfillment and thus its purpose. There

can be no external purpose to which men are called to serve. Ultimately purpose must be

within as everything is conceived in tradition as an aspect or projection of self or pure

consciousness. Absurdity results when one can’t affirm life in its proper sense, when

something is felt jarring, when one has a complaint. Life lived under grace and vivified

by Holy Spirit is what Indian traditions refer as life of ananda. It is an art and a science to

learn to enjoy life and not lose it in living. For those who find life meaningless

something is wrong either with their pattern of living or attitude towards it. In their case

it seems to be at root a utilitarian demand that presupposes the reality of a separate ego

and arises only in a dualistic context. What purpose could one assign to God
 Shah 23

or heaven? (and is not Life/Self the real God? Is not God identified with Life in many

traditions)? One can’t ask what they are for. It is not a logical question what is Self or

Life for. Life with all its beauty, mystery and grandeur is its own meaning.

Camus like Beckett abhors generalizations and abstractions and for him

metaphysics is exactly these things. He is apparently committed to a sort of

phenomenological analysis of experience. He wants to have no distorting spectacles of

beliefs, opinions or ideologies while perceiving the truth of life. He wants to look at life

naked stripped of all illusions. His thorough going empiricism leads him to despairing

conclusions. But tradition is also committed to the truth of experience and if it talks of the

supraphenomenal or nirvana it is what can be called as an experience. Experience is not,

however, identified with sensory experience alone. The Buddha’s is the most thorough

going “empiricism” in the history of human thought. Mysticism or the esoteric core of all

religions does away with all ideologies, constructs, propositions, generalizations,

abstractions and is committed to pure concrete existential experience.

Life, according to mystical traditions, becomes a problem only when we

approach it logically, linguistically, propositionally, or when we talk about it or approach

it from the head. Adam in the primordial Garden didn’t see things from such a

fragmentary and divisive perspective. Approaching truth in terms of propositions, in

terms of subject and object is a legacy of the Fall. The problems of life, tensions of good

and evil, of truth and ignorance, of God and the devil, arise only when we approach it

non-existentially and conceptually. When one gets situated out of time, out of mind, out

of language then there dawns the truth. The traditions are primarily interested in method,

in crossing the dark night of the soul and the truth comes itself. God needn’t be
 Shah 24

discovered by human effort and neither can He be. We must receive Him by virtue of

grace. He initiates revelatory discourse. We are only required to be choicelessly aware, to

wait and wait. In fact that very waiting is grace. Grace is not purely gratuitous as Camus

would seem to think. It is there but man is unable to receive it by refusing to be fully

open to the disclosures of the Real. Mystical discipline leads to transcendence of all

sound and fury of thought, of mind. The mystic remains silent and then on truth takes

care of itself. When “I” is no more, when chattering mind is no more, when thought and

time are no more, when thinker of problems, of this and that is no more then grace dawns

or we say God has a space to be. God and “I” can’t exist together. God is a jealous God.

He can’t tolerate the duality of I and Thou. Man must not be so that God or truth is. To

perceive the ‘what is’ one must be one with ‘what is.’ Cartesian duality of subject and

object – that haunted Beckett – must be overcome but the Western thought that Beckett

inherited is ill equipped to do so as Haas has attempted to show in his Destiny of the

Mind: East and West. And that explains why it hasn’t been able to discover the self or

God and has no answer to the problem of suffering and death – the choking feeling of

absurdity. It despairs of both man and God because it doesn’t know either of them.

Although literature on perennial philosophy has been proliferating in recent years

there is hardly any literature available on perennialist appraisal of contemporary

literature, especially absurdism. I had to be content with the scattered remarks in

perennialist writings in certain passages about absurdism and existentialism and related

themes for my study and have attempted to apply insights from general study of

perennialists on the specific case of absurdism.

 Shah 25

Certain selected works of both these authors are discussed in detail though no

important part of their work that has a bearing on the construction of our view of their

position has been ignored.

Though not directly concerned about the criticisms of these thinkers from other

quarters I have appropriated them when this fitted in or complemented the view that

follows from the position (metaphysical) adopted here. Perennialist criticisms may be

seen in certain places as echoing other critics’ but that is incidental.

My construction of the ‘mystical’ and the mystical perspective might be objected

on this or that ground but this validation is beyond the scope of the present work. Suffice

to point out that I have largely adopted perennialists understanding of it and have

appropriated certain postmodern mystics and postmetaphysical thought currents that

seem to converge with the perennialist understanding of mysticism in this study.

The thesis first traces geneology of absurdism in Chapter 3, proceeds to present

the case of Camus as rebel and his plea for salvation through art in Chapter 4 and

Beckett’s engagement with nihilism and art of failure in Chapter 5. It then engages with

certain key assertions of Camus and Beckett in Chapters 6 and 7 respectively

followed by an exploration and attempt of recovering the sacred that artists have

little difficulty in accessing as a rejoinder to absurdist thesis. It then compares absurdist

writers, especially Beckett, with Simone Weil whom Camus admired for exploring

the possibility of avoiding conclusions of absurdism by taking recourse to Weil’s

reading of mysticism. Finally it meditates on the theme of waiting to put Beckett’s

Waiting for Godot in perspective and concludes with highlighting perennialist

response to key claims of absurdist writers.

 Shah 26

Review of Literature
My attempt has not been a close study of selected works of Beckett and Camus or

hazard a new interpretation of them or excavate some hitherto unnoticed elements there

but an appraisal of key elements in what constitutes a sort of “worldview” of these

authors in which the idea of absurdity is the key governing idea from a perspective of

which neither English nor Philosophy or allied department like cultural studies take due

cognizance. I have drawn on major works by both the writers while focusing mainly on

The Myth of Sisyphus and The Plague of Camus and Waiting for Godot and Trilogy of

Beckett as central (anti)statements of respective authors for more detailed treatment while

not ignoring other important works and occasionally alluded to lesser known works as

well to identify the key claims and arguments that the authors or their key protagonists

seem to share. My approach has been to dissect the idea of absurdity in its different

ramifications – which include, among others, the following:

• Rejection of models of theodicy which underlie any attempt to reinstate meaning

or justifying life or divine handiwork.

• Rejection of full fledged transcendence as understood in the works of great

mystics of diverse traditions (sampled, for instance, in Aldous Huxley’s Perennial

Philosophy).

• The belief that man can’t realize his dearest dreams and projects that require

participation through intellection and theosis culminating in some sort of

 Shah 27

Mahatma or jivan-mukta or to use closer home idea with which our absurdists

were quite familiar, superman.

• Rationalist instead of intellectualist/intuitionist epistemology that can’t find

human meaning in the cosmic drama.

• Methodological naturalism that refuses to look at super-terrestrial founts of

meaning and is content with earthly hopes and despairs only.

• Rebellion as against submission as key humanistic attitude towards the great

Other on the premise that this alone wrenches some meaning in otherwise

meaningless drama of existence and behooves a courageous person who dares to

look face to face at the enormous wasteland of life that is not bathed in the

showers of transcendence.

• Rejection of traditionally assigned grand status to aesthetics/art as fifth Veda that

leads to salvation in this age of decadence – kaliyuga – and instead pinning all

hopes in a doctrine of art that is antitraditional and wedded to an epistemology

and ontology that restricts potential of man to transcend himself and

synthesize/appropriate all the perfections of which he is capable according to

traditions through the medium of art let alone other modes of working on self.

• Misreading religious/mystical position on many accounts and constructing

unwarranted binaries like the binary of “hope for another life” and losing “sight of

the implacable grandeur of this one” and similar ideas that Beckett and Camus

inherited from the ruins of modernity – the wasteland of spirit.

 Shah 28

In view of the stated objectives – metaphysical appraisal of literary creations that reject

transcendence with a focus on absurdist works – and this involves

foregrounding connection between art and metaphysics – and the approach adopted here

to the problem there is a need to refer to the fact that there is a huge body of work

produced by perennialists that takes modern art head on accusing it of promoting

ugliness, lacking understanding of traditional symbolism and consequently failing to

either instruct or delight (that are traditional functions of literature). Almost all major

perennialist writers have written on issues related to art although it is Coomaraswamy,

Titus Burckhart and Martin Lings who have left behind systematic works on art and

literature. We may include Katheline Reine who produced magesterial works on Bake –

Blake and Tradition

– in this camp. Martin Lings focused on Shakespeare and wrote Shakespeare in the Light

of Sacred Art. Approaching Camus and Beckett in light of insights from what can be

called perennialist approach to literature, I have attempted to foreground something that

is passed over in silence in our academic institutions or critical circles. In the process I

am questioning the merits of many Beckett/Camus studies that assume metaphysics as

understood in perenniaist perspective irrelevant or simply dismiss it. As the critical lens I

am using is quite different from usual critical approaches I have not much relied on

critical Beckett/Camus studies except for the sake of explicating the position of Camus

and Beckett. As there is no systematic or detailed work on the theme published so far by

any art critic or perennialist critic I had to apply insights gained from perusal of

perennialists writings on general themes that may have bearing on the current subject.

Thus I had to rely primarily on primary works of both perennialists and absurdists.
 Shah 29

For the sake of a review, one may proceed by noting the increasing corpus of

writings of perennialists that implicate a view of art and literature that is informed by

traditional metaphysical principles. There are few direct scattered brief allusions to

absurdism in many writings by different perennialist authors from Hasan Askari and

Saleem Ahmed who have written in Urdu to Schuon and Nasr who have written in

French and English respectively. We find, for instance, Schuon dismissing it in Logic and

Transcendence and other works without engaging in detail with it. Schuon has hardly a

full passage, not to speak of a full article devoted to the problem. He has, however,

discussed existentialism, especially Kierkegaard in one of his longish letters. In this he

has made one of the most devastating criticisms of what he calls irrational intuitionism

and irrationalism that he finds associated with existentialism of Kierkegaardian variety.

By the time of Coomaraswamy’s and Guenon’s death absurdist movement was not yet

crystallized and popular. Nasr takes it slightly more seriously and alludes to it though

very tangentially and hastily in Islam and the Plight of Modern Man, Knowledge and the

Sacred, The Need of a Sacred Science and other works. Huston Smith has made very

brief direct references – of course dismissing them – to Camus and Beckett in his

different works including Beyond the Postmodern Mind and Essays on World Religions.

However one can infer what a perennialist engagement with absurdist writers would look

like by extrapolating from the brief remarks and, more consistently, by foregrounding the

metaphysical claims that are at the heart of perennial philosophy and then putting

absurdist arguments in perspective. One can also attempt to derive inferences from some

of the key concerns and hermeneutical principles deployed by perennialists. Here a brief
 Shah 30

review of perennialism and its impact on diverse disciplines with particular focus on

literary criticism is in order.

Literary world came to appreciate some points in perennialism through Aldous

Huxley’s popular work Perennial Philosophy. Although mainstream perennialists have

been critical of Huxley’s credentials as a spokesperson for perennial philosophy the work

has come to stay and helped to popularize the idea of transcendent unity of religions and

literary value of certain mystical writings. Eliot’s traditionalism is also quite well known

and had been very influential but again his idea of tradition has been criticized by

perennialists including Hasan Askari. Some famous scholars of comparative religion

including Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and Henry Corbin (1903-1978) appropriated

many theses from perennialists in their hugely influential writings. Huston Smith,

amongst the most famous writers on religion today, is a thorough perennialist. One may

best introduce perennialism through its famous trinity of Guenon, Schuon and

Coomaraswamy for an appraisal of what it stands for and why we need to study it for

approaching the problems in modernist and postmodernist literature especially the

selected authors Beckett and Camus. I would argue that some of the most enigmatic

aspects of their works are better understood in light of perennialist perspective. I

would also attempt to show that we can make better sense of both their despair and

hope in this perspective. We will see why absurdist movement of which Beckett

and Camus were different expressions is better contextualized and its

characteristic aporia transcended through application of perennialist approach.

Both of them shared with the traditionalist movement a similar disillusionment with

the achievements of modernity and their responses were largely motivated by a similar

quest for a wisdom that could help us survive the ruins of nihilism.
 Shah 31

It is to the problem of desacralization that Camus and Beckett respond with their

quasimystical sensibility. Eliade thus described the process of desacralization:

The completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent

discovery in the history of the human spirit...Desacralization pervades the entire
experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence,
he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of
religious man in the archaic societies (The Sacred and the Profane13).

According to Eliade, the task today is to provide the modern man, haunted by nihilism,

with a new access to the Sacred. He explains:

It is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the
conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is
impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring
a meaning on man’s impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real
and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the
sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived
the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich,
and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and
dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and
disappearances (The Quest Preface).

He further points out that the

“sacred” is an element of the structure of consciousness and not a stage in

the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living,
considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-gettting,
sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be - or
rather to become – a man signifies being “religious” (The Quest Preface)

To adequately answer to the “Death of God” we need “illuminated scholars” professing a

new gnosis rooted in traditional esoterism as Wesserstrom points out. In our view it is
 Shah 32

perennialists who best fit the label and come handy in this regard. There is no problem in

the received worldview based on the primacy of the Sacred that so much bothers our

absurdists. The problem is really their constricted epistemology that they have inherited

from modernity. We simply need to understand traditional religious/mystical position

better to put their position in perspective. Nihilism at the heart of modern desacralizing

worldview that Beckett and Camus engage with and fail to adequately transcend has to be

geneologically addressed to dissolve the so-called problem that made them blaspheme

against both God and man conceived in God’s image. Rooted as it is in the traditional

metaphysics and condemning post-medieval rationalism, empiricism and scientism

(metanarrative of Enlightenment Modernity) and attempting to speak from the

perspective of the Absolute rather than from the human (in fact infrahuman)

perspective of humanism, the Transcendence or Sacred, in perennialist perspective, is

primary reality for them. They evaluate from that Divine Norm everything in temporal or

secular domain. It isn’t man but God who is at the center. It isn’t this world and this

worldly peace and equilibrium but that world, the Eternity and man’s salvation

that is of primary significance. For them religion has “its archetype in the Divine

Intellect and possesses levels of meaning and reality like cosmos itself” (The Need of

a Sacred Science 56). Modern age is cursed, Iron Age or Kali Yuga and another stage in

the degradation (rather than progress or evolution) of man and history, a second

fall indeed according to perennialists. Against antitraditional relativist modern

worldview the traditionalists believe that

…there is a Primordial Tradition which constituted original or archetypal man’s

primal spiritual and intellectual heritage received through direct revelation when
Heaven and earth were still ‘united.’ This Primordial Tradition is reflected in all
 Shah 33

later traditions, but the later traditions aren’t simply its historical and horizontal
continuation. The anonymous tradition reflects a remarkable unanimity of views
concerning the meaning of life and the fundamental dimensions of human
thought in worlds as far apart as those if the Eskimos and the Australian
Aborgines, the Taoists and the Muslims” (The Need of a Sacred Science 57).

It is against this collective heritage of mankind that modern antitranscendentalism and

absurdism situate themselves. It is as if prophets and saints, traditional philosophers and

artists of all climes were fundamentally mistaken or naïve in upholding the traditional

view of man in relation to Absolute. Perennialists have written masterly expositions of

traditional wisdom that they claim can only understand and not judge or modify in view

of some change in intellectual fashions of some age. Their point is that these traditions

are expressions of discoveries of suprapersonal Intellect and can’t be challenged by any

empirical or rationalist methodology. As such perennialists have concentrated more on

presenting and explicating traditional position than refuting other competing theories. We

find prophetic tone in most of their writings. Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World and

Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times are devastating denunciations of modern

spirit and its various expressions including its art. Martin Ling’s Ancient Beliefs and

Modern Superstitions is also very provocative work that mercilessly attacks modern

secular humanism (that informs absurdists thought). Nasr has also strongly denounced

modern academia and its prolific productions in his Knowledge and the Sacred.

Burckhardt’s Mirror of the Intellect shows what has been lost to moderns in art. There

can be nothing new under the sun, only progressive forgetting or degeneration and

absurdism is one such phenomenon. There may be elements of profound analysis or

observations scattered here and there in their writings but what primarily counts is the

grounding and orientation of art or literature. From the ruins of modernity and various
 Shah 34

reactions to it in the frameworks that are themselves complicit with some of its key

assumptions nothing really profound can come. The truth that saves and knowledge that

sanctifies belongs to the Tradition. Absurdism, as an essentially modern phenomenon that

rejects transcendence or First Principle can’t but come for severe thrashing in the

perennialist perspective.

Absurdists have forcefully pointed out what is wrong with the modern man and

how deep his trouble is and what radical rethinking of his attitude and worldview is

needed to put him back on the track. Key modern thinkers see nihilism as a problem that

needs (dis)solution. The role of perennialism lies in pointing out how this alternative may

be worked out and why it can’t be worked out in the framework absurdists have adopted.

Perennialist thought promises to offer an alternative way for approaching, solving and

dissolving perennial problems that contribute to the problematique of modern man. What

emerges from the approach of perennialists regarding modern thought currents informing

its art and aesthetics is summed up below.

Perennialists convincingly show the poverty of modern antiintellectualist thought

that ignores the sacred by relying exclusively on the mental faculty of reason. The revolt

of existentialists and postmodernists debased reason. From rationalism to irrationalism,

the postmodern cult of unreason has unleashed subrational forces, infrarational

intuitionism being one of its manifestations. It is no wonder that it has almost

renounced traditional faith in reason and intellection and thus capacity to know the

Truth, the Absolute. It has renounced traditional discipline of philosophy and has no

use for any notion that traditional philosophers called wisdom. There is no room for

either knowledge or wisdom now. There are no essences,

 Shah 35

no transcendent foundations or grounds of things. It is maya all the way. There is avidya

but no gnosis. There is no reason ultimately, no order, no principle of harmony and

equilibrium, no light, no illumination, no clarity, no purpose, no meaning, nothing to gain

ultimately. Absurdism articulates all these things. With the loss of faith in reason’s

traditional claims which were based on its integral view in which it is not severed from

Intellect and the loss of faith in transcendence and thus all traditional values hitherto

grounded by it, absurdism pictures a desolate, chaotic world. Modern thought is

characteristically nihilistic and all attempts to moderate its nihilism, to overcome it or

mitigate its corrosive effect have failed to deliver. Modern h e r o doesn’t know why he

is there to question his own meaning. The mystery of things kills him. He has lost even

the hope in some possibility of redemption. He is increasingly abandoning, in

postmodern age, even the search for solutions, the search for essences, for truth, for

meaning and purpose. He is increasingly losing even the consciousness that he is losing

something great. The only hope, according to perennialists, is that modern man, true to

the deepest aspirations, having won his freedom from the tyranny of idolatrous

thought associated with exotericist and other inadequate models of transcendent

principle rediscover his lost or rather forgotten Tradition which, contrary to what

many believe, resists modern and postmodern criticisms.

I am bringing in transcendence because modern literature gives a lie to the thesis

of certain protagonists of secular modernity that modern man has come of age and needs

no dialogue with or appropriation of transcendence. Its darkness laments the lost light,

the light that is perhaps there though so elusive that modern man fears it not there.

Existential darkness, the hell of despair, nameless guilt, vain search for meaning outside
 Shah 36

or without God, the failed experiments and beliefs of misplaced transcendence, utter

disgust with all the uses of the world, quiet desperation and failure of such myths as

progressivism and scientism all show that man is radically in need of proper orientation

to transcendence. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and existentialists and more specifically

absurdist writers all show need of some degree or form of transcendence for restoring to

man his motivation to live. Camus shows that we can’t do without faith in relationships

and some meaning, howsoever vague and that life, beauty, love, freedom, goodness

and compassion are valuable in themselves although failing to ground them in

transcendent principles or anywhere. Beckett shows that nothing immanent or

phenomenal can give rest to man although he fails to affirm transcendence in its

traditional sense and thus is generally unable to show the exit from the purgatory or

hell in which his characters are languishing. Though they show how transcendence

or its marks in the world of phenomena are crucial for life they are not able to

show how to be properly oriented towards transcendence. It is perennialists who are

of help here to point out where modernity has erred in misplacing ground of

transcendence and point the way, by resurrecting and freshly interpreting age old

symbols of transcendence, back to God/Life.

Emphasizing the great significance of officially ignored or supposedly discredited

knowledge of First Principles traditionally transmitted to us and prized treasure of

traditional cultures in coming to grip with absurdist impasse that also bedevils much of

postmodernist literature, this thesis aims to open new vistas for critical appreciation of

modern literature as well as questioning the nihilistic pessimistic message of them. It

complements Marxist denunciation of the ideology that is served by the philosophies of

despair or meaninglessness.
 Shah 37

The project of recovering the Sacred or Meaning involves engaging with modern

and postmodern criticisms of metaphysics. Here one needs to only point out that the

metaphysics of which perennialists talk has hardly been known in the Western academia

so the question of criticizing o f l i t t l e r e l e v a n c e . Traditional metaphysics comes to

the rescue of philosophy in the postmetaphysical postmodern age. Postmodernist and

absurdist critiques of rational metaphysics don’t apply to the traditional understanding of

Greek philosophy understood in the perennialist sense – Orphic-Phythagorean-Platonic

sense – and to nondualistic metaphysics cultivated in India and elsewhere as it is centred

on intellect instead of reason that sees rather than speculates on matters transcendental

and one of its versions is Buddhist Emptiness with which postmodern thinkers have little

difficulty in engaging with.

The thrust of perennnialist critique of modern art and literature is wedded to

certain aesthetical outlook and we can appreciate it as converging with certain typical

modern figures who argue for salvation through art or justifying existence in aesthetic

terms. Aesthetic turn as a substitute for metaphysics, however, can’t go very far.

Aestheticism is attacked by perennialists like Coomaraswamy in very strong words

although they have made ample use of the idea of the aesthetic in their “theodicy.”

However important ideas that aesthetes or protagonists of salvation through art seem to

invoke are parasitic on certain notion of transcendence that they otherwise seem to edge

out. Perennialists are able to situate these ideas in larger metaphysical framework centred

on transcendence. These include, among others, the following that help to put

in perspective philosophies of meaninglessness:

• Taking the world of name and form as play.

 Shah 38

• Emphasizing our role as actors/witnesses of the play of life.

• Deploying the images and motifs of arts in conceptualizing the fundamental

experience of the union with the divine.

• Positing of salvation as certain way of seeing rather than doing.

• Unity of aesthetic and cognitive realms at the deepest level.

• Conceiving the ultimate reality in terms of ananda or bliss that aesthetic rapture

approximates.

• Positing of loss of ego as prerequisite of both aesthetic contemplation and

enlightenment.

• Rejecting life of purpose for life as a value in itself and proposing innocence of

becoming – the mode that a thoroughly committed artist or actor appropriates – as

the way of authentic living,

• Identifying the Good and the Beautiful.

• Conceiving art as ritual for purification and discipline and thus support to

contemplation leading to the vision of essences and delivery of man from samsara

or his reconciliation to the ground of existence.

One can argue that the thesis that God or Meaning is dead is an invention of decadent

philosophy and at root a rationalization of certain economic and political order that Homo

sapiens, made in the image of God, a pontifical creature can’t and has not accepted.

Poetry continues to be written even after Auswitzch or “death of literature” and art

continues to be a mode of worship for countless millions in the secular world. Men

continue to aspire for wholeness and meaning and refute the despairing contention that
 Shah 39

life is pointless. Transcendence – its fragmentary images of course – nourishes modern or

postmodern man as it has been nurturing traditional man.

The thesis puts in perspective absurdist work not just by framing it in metaphysical

perspective of perennialists but also by comparing it with contemporary mystical

responses to the problem that Camus and Beckett encountered. Simone Weil is amongst

the most significant mystical thinkers of the twentieth century who has dealt with similar

problems that absurdists encounter. Camus admired her a lot. Her important work

Waiting on God analyzes similar problem as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but reaches

very different conclusions. Such classical works as Ashtavakra Gita are, despite sharing

much of nontheistic presuppositions of modern existentialists, classical rejoinders to

modern absurdist philosophies. Camus’ important writings are, from the traditionalist

position, quite problematic. His rebels are a tissue of contradictions. He appeals not as a

philosopher but as an artist of absurdity. His advocacy of detachment, pagan affirmation

of life, commitment to earth with all its pains, are all partly mystical in inspiration though

bedeviled by contradictions. A traditionalist critique may affirm what is valuable in

absurdist writers – their critiques of the notions of substantive self, exoteric theology,

dogmatic rationalism, progressivism, historicism, etc. – but it shows its inadequacies

quite glaringly. We need to explore this alternative though ignored critical position at this

moment of crisis for man and literature when many are led to believe in the “end of

literature” and “death of man.” It is high time that academic world responds to the

challenge of life and death for literature and literary culture. Traditionalist metaphysical

approach promises to be a saviour of man and literature. It gives us solid ground against

philosophies of despair.
 Shah 40

Camus/Beckett criticism has mostly concentrated on explicating the texts and on

wrangling over divergent interpretations of the same but the real question, according to

the traditionalist school, is how far does a literary work succeed in creating an alternative

world or providing access to the depths, and soul-vivifying wonder and mystery of the

real world through employing symbols in which man can live soulfully or meaningfully.

Literature is a criticism of life as ordinarily lived, a fresh opening into the complex and

obscure world, a fresh illumination of the darkness called existence. It uplifts and

enlightens and delights. It deepens our perception of reality or truth. The present work

shall approach the works of selected writers keeping these assumptions in mind despite

the great vogue of theories that dissolve literature in politics or economics or other such

contexts and deny the role traditionally assigned to it from Aristotle to Leavis.

Taking absurdism as fundamentally an aesthetic project that smuggles transcendence

through aesthetic route to give some semblance of meaning and order to the mess they

find everywhere (Camus’s celebration of beauty of nature, of youth, of women and

human relationships and his plea for saving function of art or Beckett’s laughter at the

face of the absurd that somehow alows us to go on – nothing is funnier than unhappiness

– are aesthetic gestures) my approach throughout has been more aesthetic than

theological and attempted to appraise absurdist probematique with transcendence through

appropriating traditionalist doctrine of art that is steeped or grounded in the symbolism

and knowledge of First Principles. I have highlighted aesthetic undercurrent of tradition

to make my point. My fundamental point of departure is Eastern metaphysical or

perennialist understanding of aesthetics that sees it as something beyond worldly

experience – Abhinavgupta has used the word Alaukika’ to distinguish it from the
 Shah 41

mundane experiences. Aesthetic experience and mystic experience are not very different

when we penetrate deeper into the phenomenology of experience as has been argued by

scholars of diverse persuasions. Art is in fact formal expression of mystical vision or

perception of Ideas in contemplation. As aesthetic experience is also cognitive in certain

sense – Knowledge is Joy and distance or alienation from reality is sorrow and God is

Bliss or Ananda – exploring aesthetic route to transcendence is quite fruitful to bridge the

gulf between those who find God or transcendence a species of mythology or incredible

and those who find God everywhere or everything a symbol of the Beyond. God catches

most people through the net of beauty, said Plato and aesthetic argument is something

that can convinces almost all. Nietzsche and many postmoderns agree that existence is

justifiable in aesthetic terms. Creation narratives across traditions seem to imply aesthetic

motives to be fundamental in explaining the why of creation. Beauty is its own

justification. No other arguments are needed when one understands something is

beautiful. God is Beauty and Joy according to different traditions. Mystics agree that all

experiences may convey the taste of the Beyond. Artistic perception involves effacing the

ego resulting in transcendence which is joy. So the mystic’s argument against absurdists

is simply an invitation to cleanse the doors of perception and encountering things

aesthetically which is what seeing things in God is like. All things in God are glorious

and beautiful. “Beauty is the splendour of Truth” as Plato said. Beauty may be

incomprehensible at rational plane but it is soul ravishing and that evaporates the need to

comprehend it. The universe as an embodiment of bliss, as an aesthetic object is what

mystical approach to it shows it to be. ‘There is no beauty but Beauty’ is how Islamic

declaration of faith has been rendered by Sufi metaphysicians. Everything is perfect as it

 Shah 42

is according to saints but seeing this is what demands transcendence of passions and ego

and attachment to samsara. For a nirvanic consciousness all things are bathed in

transcendental gory. Buddha saw everything smiling when he attained nirvana. There is

nothing to be explained, no need to explain anything for the twice born. There is

everything to be contemplated, loved and enjoyed. This constitutes the crux of traditional

view of things and this view is available to all and sundry. Religions, commandments,

mystical disciplines all are ultimately meant to achieve this vision. God is nothing but

attention or attention without distraction as Simone Weil would say and this is what Sufi

practice of farzi dayim (constant or eternal vigil or consciousness of every breath) is all

about. Mystics have no real interest in pretensions of any occult or secret knowledge.

Their chief claim consists in perfecting the virtue of openness to real or experience or

letting things be, of waiting and seeing, waiting for no object or end but for the joy of

waiting. What is to be sought? Nothing but what is as Augustine would say. There is no

problem of finding a meaning in life. It disappears when we formulate the issue as one of

the art of encountering life. The question is not that the universe appears indifferent and

cold and silent but whether we can master the art of love, of selflessly seeing phenomena,

of transcending thought or mind that divides the unitary experience. The onus lies on

man. The moment one is capable of amor fati, of unconditional love, of affirming even

eternal recurrence one is delivered and the universe loses its indifference or density and

appears a perpetual miracle, an object of endless wonder that delights the soul, a gift for

which one needs to be eternally thankful, a festival of lights and a celestial musical

recital. There are countless mystics of all ages who bear witness to this and one can’t or

needn’t review mystical literatures of the world here that describe God as Joy and the
 Shah 43

Other as Beloved and thus the universe as the veiled Garden of Eden. I have appropriated

evidence from mystics of different hues and traditions throughout the thesis to situate the

claims of those who complain against God or universe and then have really no defense

against ensuing ennui or nausea. Meaning of the universe has to be received in a purified

heart and decreated soul. It is given to those who have perfected the art of waiting and

seeing. Here I briefly review the evidence that mystics and ordinary believers of different

traditions may cite for their conviction that we are not living in an indifferent universe

but in the Garden of Eden in which all kinds of gifts and blessings are extended by its

host. There is a beautiful book God’s Art by Greg Smith in which he meditates on our

aesthetic notions to state the case for a royal road to transcendence freely available to

anyone who cares to see. I quote from the jacket of the book:

In the entire universe, there seems to be one constant that most everyone
shares: the notion of beauty. This fact is not scientific, it is not logical, and
the value of this knowledge is hard to assess. But the certainty is absolute
as every one of us looks into a meadow of weaving flowers, gazes at the
surf and the sea, or looks deep into the night sky at the stars and beyond…
Why is not the universe grey instead of such a rich incredible range of
colours? Why is there so much variety in al things from flowers to sun
flakes to galaxies? Why are we blessed with an appreciation for all this
wonder if it does not contribute to our survival? (G. Smith)

This beauty that saves, that dissolves all skepticism and claims of indifference and

absurdity, is everywhere for the seeing eye, even in the terrible aspects of phenomena.

“Clouds, storms, the brazen sun, all of these are part of a holy canvas – always. Their

meaning is taken by every soul who witnesses them, and asks not what or how, but is

deeply satisfied with the knowledge of why” (G. Smith 25).

 Shah 44

Eastern traditions have approached the question of meaning at aesthetic plane. Even

cognitive domain is expressible in terms of aesthetic one for them. Knowledge is

appropriating and tasting an object and that tasting is expressible in terms of joy. Life if

enjoyed is not felt as alienating or absurd. The absurd is what is incomprehensible and in the

list of these incomprehensibles is pain. Lovers while loving don’t ask what does it all

mean. The moment we watch something stunningly beautiful we simply enjoy it and just

say Ah! What is God but the feeling of Ah when encountering anything as has been

remarked by Nikos Kazantzakis. What is wisdom in Greek thought but a portal of

wonder? The wise simply marvel at the sight and sound of everything. Mysticism is

orgasm with the universe as Osho often used to define it. Satyam Shivam Sundarum is a

famous equation in Indian metaphysical framework that grounds its aesthetics as well. For

Abhinavgupta art is a form of yoga that leads to Absolute. Although the bliss enjoyed by

a Yogi may be somewhat more intense the joy given in aesthetic rapture is not

incomparable to it. Coomaraswamy’s masterly explorations of the relationship between the

aesthetic and the mystical experiences demonstrate quite cogently their essential unity.

Extrapolating from this convergence I have argued here that we can answer absurdists by

framing their queries in aesthetic terms and providing solutions at aesthetic plane.

Cognitive queries that trouble our absurdists are a product of fragmentary approach to

life, a dualistic epistemology and ascetic nonaesthetic attitude. Eastern approach is to feel

first and know through feeling, to be one’s object of knowledge. It is knowledge by

presence, by participation that it advocates. To know an object is to be that object. And

to be that object is to feel a kind of joy. All knowledge is joyful. Knowing reality is to
 Shah 45

participate in the joy that constitutes reality. Religions offer means of entering heaven of

bliss and thus conquering sorrow which leads us to ask the question of meaning.
 Shah 46

3
Genealogy of Pessimistic Absurdism

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists
of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
-Albert Camus

The history of man is the history of metaphysics. Man is a metaphysical animal, a

meaning-seeking animal. All his endeavors somehow revolve round seeking meaning.

Religion, art, poetry, philosophy, science all are connected with this meaning-seeking

endeavor or in fact could be seen as explorations in discovering/seeking/expressing

meaning. Life itself is synonymous with meaning for those who choose to live instead of

die or commit suicide. To be is to assert that this act of being is somehow meaningful as

the opposite of this choice has been rejected. To assert one is free to choose and give

meaning to otherwise meaningless life is itself implicit acceptance of significance of

search for meaning. Man is ever in a process of meaning creation. Declaring something

meaningless or absurd presupposes one has an intuition of meaning in the light of which

one declares that thing absurd. Absurdism in the precise and extreme sense of the term

has been an aberration in the history of thought until recent times when it gained

respectability. Failure to find meaning has never been accepted as an end of one’s

philosophy. This has to be overcome. Nihilism is a problem and modern thought, even

the absurdist thought is aimed at overcoming it. Man can’t assert that nothing matters or

declare value as devoid of value. To be man is to be value conscious. Consistent

absurdism will deny all values rather than revaluate them and what transpires in the name

of absurdism is revaluation of values rather than a consistent negation of meaning. We

can only talk of greater or lesser degree of affirmation of values or meaning rather than
 Shah 47

presence or absence of meaning. Only a crude materialism postulates values as

superfluous though practically it values them like any idealistic or spiritual philosophy.

Do what he may, regardless of his material conditions and ideologies, man always

finds that there are some fundamental, inevitable and inescapable questions that he has to

confront as a thinking being, a metaphysical animal. These fundamental questions are

what man (or life/ existence) is, what for, and why, or how he flourishes best, finds

peace/ contentment/ fulfillment and overcomes sorrow or pain.

Man is condemned to choose values or reduce himself to beast, to dust. Man lives

by virtue of the light of the Absolute. The fact that we are free shows we are in the matrix

of values.

According to traditionalist authors all traditional civilizations have given similar

answers to these questions and it is only Western thought that has been led to give a

partly different answer though the answer of traditional Christian West has not been

different from other traditions. In fact the founding fathers of Western thought have also

not given a different answer. But there were certain orientations in the Western thought

from the ancient times much developed in the West than in other traditions where such

attitudes and orientations were effectively contained that concealed a nihilistic/absurdist

seed. That is why scholars trace absurdism to ancient Greeks.

Before inquiring into the genealogy of absurdism we need to define the problem

of meaning and consider modern objections to the traditional formulation of the problem.

What are we really asking when we inquire about the meaning of existence or life? We

are asking about our relationship with the rest of the universe. We are also asking about

significance of our life, our endeavors, our hopes and dreams and aspirations. We are
 Shah 48

asking what for is all this strange, frightening, wonderful, painful and mysterious journey.

The traditional view has been, in the words of Leibnitz, that “there is nothing waste,

nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe” and that the universe is created not for jest

but in all seriousness – in the Quranic phrase bil-haq (in truth). But the dominant view

today that informs modern thought and literature is that life and rationality are,

cosmically speaking, local and untypical features of reality: nature is predominantly

blind, irrational, gratuitous, pointless, dead. The goal and destination of all our plans and

projects is, in the end, nothing.

Of course there have been attempts to dismiss or circumvent the question of

meaning of life. This is one of the grand questions of philosophy that was found to be a

pseudo question, a meaningless question. It was asserted that meaning is a notion

properly confined to the arena of language (words or propositions could be said to have

meaning), and couldn’t be applied to objects or events in the world, like the lives of

humans. The most advanced of critics of metaphysics would pride themselves on

dissolving the problem altogether by imagining that the hunger for metaphysics or

meaning of life is itself absurd, quite accidental or superfluous. Amongst major literary

critics Eagleton has systematically treated the problem. In his The Meaning of Life: A

Very Short Introduction he seeks to downplay metaphysical aspect of the question of

meaning.

But somehow, as John Cottingham notes in his Meaning of Life, the search for

life’s meaning, confused or not, retains as powerful a hold on us as ever. The question

“What is the meaning of life?” despite the veto of certain linguistic positivists, remains

one of the most pertinent and challenging question man has ever asked and continues to
 Shah 49

ask. The fact that modern literature e n g a g e s w i t h t h e i s s u e s h o w s i t i s

important and philosophical attempts to dissolve or explain away

t h e q u e s t i o n a r e i r r e l e v a n t . M o d e r n l i t e r a t u r e concerns itself with this

question and its response gives characteristic identity to it. Its greatest masters

were seriously concerned with this question. Modern literature is largely about

coming to terms with the despairing answer suggested by contemporary science and

philosophy and modern literature has been a mirror of this malaise of this age. The

questions of suffering and its conquest or realization of highest values are related to

the question of meaning. Thus the problem that our authors selected for this study put

before themselves is quite significant and a proper answer to it one of the most

important things that humanity needs. The present study is undertaken with the

conviction that modern man has not rightly approached and thus failed to get the

proper answer to this all important question. Despairing tone of modern literature and

huge rise in violence, addiction, crime and number of psychiatric patients in the modern

societies constitute enough evidence for this claim.

The question whether man is concerned with finding meaning could be answered

by everybody for himself. However I think Glenn Hughes answers the question for most

of us, if not all of us. To quote Hughes:

We are concerned, in short, about the meaning of our existence, our parts
in the human drama. However, the purpose of one’s participation in the
human drama could be known fully only by knowing the meaning of the
drama as a whole – through comprehending the ultimate truths pertaining
to the whys and wherefores of human existence and history. For each of
us, then, our questioning is, whether we like it or not, and whether we
acknowledge it or not, a desire to understand the ultimate meanings that
would explain for each of us the significance of our participation in the
cosmic process (Transcendence and History 19-20).
 Shah 50

Is it possible to find the answer to the question by purely empirical investigations of the

world and purely rational speculations? Again Hughes’ observations are revealing:

A person’s search for ultimates…leads to the realization that that human

curiosity about the whys and wherefores of existence could never be
adequately answered on the basis of knowledge about the finite universe.
This is because the entire universe of objects and relations in space and
time is not a complete or sufficient explanation of its own existence. All
finite reality is contingent or dependent reality, that is, its existence
presupposes prior causes, and contingent reality in its entirety ultimately
presupposes a nondependent – a necessary – reality as the intelligible basis
or ground of its existence. Why this is so? Because an infinite series of
dependent causes does not answer the question, “Why does the universe
exist? It instead extends the question indefinitely without hope of rational
resolution. The universe is not rationally complete, is not graspable as
fully intelligible, unless the series of dependent causes comes to rest in
cause that itself does not rationally a prior cause…if reality as a whole,
including our participation in it, is to be fully intelligible – and our
unrestricted desire to understand the meaning of our own questioning
operates on that assumption – then the contingent, finite universe that is
not self-sufficient must have its ultimate origin in, be somehow
“emergent” form, a necessary, nonfinite reality that is self-sufficient and
self-explanatory (Transcendence and History 20).

Modern man excludes nonfinite reality or excludes accessibility of it to man and

searches for meaning independent of it. Failing in this endeavor he logically concludes that

the world is absurd. The history of absurdism is the history of atheism, agnosticism and

nihilism, the history of attempts that deny man his essentially supernatural vacation, his

hunger of the Infinite, the history of attempts that deny transcendence and interpret away all
 Shah 51

evidence of the supernatural or eternity. History of all materialist philosophies is also a

history of absurdism. I have used the term loosely and just wish to point out that all

philosophies that deny transcendence are necessarily absurdist in some sense.

Absurdism, though in many ways a modern phenomenon unprecedented in

history, is discernible in certain ways throughout history especially in the Western history.

Absurdism understood in its broader sense that sees life as a morass of ambiguities and

contradictions and doesn’t trust mythologies of hope and progress while aware of acute

limitations of both reason and science regarding approaching dark mysteries of life and

universe is the hall mark of twentieth century literature though it has always been with man

but somehow it didn’t develop into full fledged philosophy. There is a lot of disagreement

on the meaning and genealogy of nihilism. This implies that one can’t give a coherent

history of absurdism also. However it is not the purpose of the present work to deliberate

on this issue in great detail. Our focus is critical appraisal of contemporary absurdism

which however needs to be situated, for introductory purposes at least, in the historical

context.

In The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life (1994), Alan Pratt demonstrates

that existential nihilism, in one form or another, has been menacing the Western intellectual

tradition from the beginning. Genealogy of absurdism is to be traced in ancient Greeks

because the first great adventures of unaided human reason and thus its failure were to be

found there. Empedocles' observation that "the life of mortals is so mean a thing as to be

virtually un-life," for instance, captures the essence of absurdist thesis. The task that Camus

issues for the absurd hero Sisyphus is one where man lives on without the hope of

transcendence. Again, in the notes to The First Man Camus earmarks this theme by

invoking Empedocles, the Greek philosopher, who lived alone. As Pratt notes: “In
 Shah 52

antiquity, such profound pessimism may have reached its apex with Hegesis. Because

miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible, the philosopher argues, and

subsequently advocates suicide.” One may perhaps begin the history of absurdism with the

pessimistic Ionians such as Theolognis and Sophocles, who were concerned about the

uncertainties of life, the certainty of death, the darkness of the future, and so on.

(“Nihilism”). Nietzsche traces nihilism to Leucian’s statement. Sophists were logically

committed to a sort of nihilist thesis.

The philosophical foundations of absurdism can be traced in the margins of pre-

Socratic philosophy. With the development of what Rene Guenon calls “profane

th
philosophy” in the 6 century B.C. the “Greek mind” reveals itself more as “analytical than

synthetic, rational than mythical and political than mystical” (Crisis of the Modern World 6)

the seeds of absurdism were born. Earth-centric man-centric reason bound outlook

culminates necessarily in absurdism as it builds a closed universe emptying it of meaning

and significance. Absurdism is parasitic on rationalism. It is the bad child of profane

rationalist thought. The history of rationalism is the history of absurdism and the attempts to

contain it. Although one cannot ignore the exceptions but the representative ‘Greek mind’

especially as revealed in philosophy and art and religion was tending to develop what later

with Descartes came to be known as Rationalism. In this connection James Shret observes,

“a glance at any literary product of the Greek mind evokes the feeling that its generative

source was a love of precision… a tendency to analyze and define… emphasis on measure

and number and ‘limit’ … and define the rhythm of even the ‘most’ elusive process” (Shret

4). Divesting the cosmos of mystery that rationalism does is necessarily divesting it of

meaning and significance as well. The world or man is nothing, void in relation to the
 Shah 53

Absolute. Any attempt to make them absolute misfires and one is ultimately led to reject the

worship of idols. Modernity is demystification of everything and thus reduction of

everything to dehumanizing gratuitous absurdity as it is as sacred mystery that life can never

cease to fascinate us.

Absurdism was ultimately a development of those ancient modes of thought that put

too much emphasis on a narrowly defined notion of reason. Shret has traced the story of

development of proto-rationalism in Greek philosophical thought. He writes: “The

characteristic note of all this development was a growing on ‘independent reason,’ a

devotion to logical precision, progressing from myth to logos. Rationalism permeated the

whole social and cultural development so conspicuous in the age of Pericles” (Shret 5).

Guenon has pointed out purely human character of this philosophy that substituted rational

order for the genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom (Guenon, Crisis of

the Modern World 6-7). Agnostic humanism of Sophists was a logical development of this

trend. This bargained certainty of the Absolute for the chimeras of relativism and

“independent” or “free thinking.” And this heritage has been appropriated and developed by

modern skeptics and absurdists.

What Sophists did was to shift the quest of philosophy for wisdom and preparation

of death to more mundane concerns which would be revived in different sense during recent

history. It gave birth to individualism as if knowledge/wisdom was not a suprapersonal

affair and subjectivism as if intelligence doesn’t demand the objectivity of the Absolute.

Man and not what transcended and grounded him was now the object of inquiry. What

grounds their values is human will, human craft (politics) and not something divine. The

rationalist-sensate epistemology ruled out the suprarational out of court and thus our access
 Shah 54

to transcendence. For Gorgias there is nothing supra-rational because “if it were, it could

not be known; [due to the limits of Reason] if known it could not be communicated.” In the

same vein Protagoras said: “I cannot know either they [gods] exist or that they do not exist,

or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of

the subject and the shortness of man’s life” (Roochnick 212). It was essentially this anti-

intellectual anthropocentric philosophy which S. Radhakrishnan terms as positivist and

indifferent to the higher aspirations of man or fate of the soul that marked the birth of the

Renaissance and the modern world in various derivatives such as humanism, individualism,

progressivism and the like. And absurdism can be read as a response to and a revolt against

all these ideologies.

Rationalism culminates in absurdism because it rejects transcendence which alone

can ground meaning. Rejection of the supernatural culminates in rejecting the natural as

sacred or meaningful. Nothing finite or contingent sustains itself or justifies itself. Reason

and logic fail to demystify or explain away existence and thus create the category of the

absurd. Rationalism has its seeds in repudiation of esoterism and excessive importance

attached to reason and deliberate disavowal of the supra rational order or mystery as Rene

Guenon has noted (Guenon 7).

Meanwhile the Christian theology with its narrow personalist vision of the

transcendent principle of Godhead and its interpretation of history and life from an narrowly

conceived theistic view point which came into conflict with certain interpretations of

modern science inspired the project of modernity and Enlightenment, also had a significant

role to play in the genesis of absurdism which culminates in Nietzsche, Sartre, Samuel

Beckett and Albert Camus. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a consequence of Christianity’s moral
 Shah 55

interpretation. Denigrating the phenomenal world and positing a beyond or otherworld as is

done by Christianity according to Nietzsche is a move that ultimately culminates in nihilism.

The Great Chain of Being sustained medieval God-centered vision and a symbolic

cosmos which implies that the world was an “enchanted garden.” The Great Chain of Being

ensured that nothing is accidental and that man as the image of God is supremely

significant. It was the Spirit-centric view of cosmos and man that posited transcendence to

sustain the world of finitude and change. Without something permanent and changeless the

world of becoming loses meaning or ground. Metaphysics has traditionally been search for

permanence. In fact all traditional philosophies and religions posit such permanent,

changeless, uncreated ground. Buddhism too posits in the notion of nirvana, the

unbecoming, uncompounded element. Lovejoy’s famous book The Great Chain of Being

argued against the tenability of the idea as traditionally formulated. However we can still

argue for that picture if we reformulate it in perennialist terms that shows how Being and

Beyond-Being, personal God and impersonal Absolute are both to be affirmed and can be

seen to be affirmed by Sophia perennis that distills the essence of world religions.

Employing the metaphysical instead of theological approach perennialists are able to show,

as we shall later when discussing the problem of evil, that there was simply no metaphysics

available in the Hellenic-Christian philosophy to properly ground theological discourse and

dissolve various problems that later philosophical developments posed.

Perceived failure of theodicy is an important factor in modern man’s turn to

secularism. Modern man became a rebel against this God because He doesn’t appear to be

concerned with the fate of man on this planet. The literature of revolt derives its sap of

despair, anguish and rebellion from the apparent indifference of this God towards creation.
 Shah 56

Camus’ revolt and idea of absurd are rooted in the loopholes that Christian theology failed

to fill. Man is thrown into wilderness to suffer aimlessly and an omnipotent-omniscient

personal God of Christianity looks silently. God does not save man for reasons unknown as

Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot asserts. Modern rebels like modern Prometheus and

modern Job raise the question of divine justice.

In absence of complete Unitarian metaphysics philosophical and theological dualism

was gradually brewing in the intellectual history of the West. We note the metaphysically

inadequate Thomistic synthesis that married Aristotelian philosophy (that has for incomplete

metaphysics according to perennialists) with the Christian theology in the thirteenth century.

The outcome of this religio-philosophical assimilation was that the role of intellect as a

direct perceiver of transcendental truths was reduced to somewhat sentimental Christian

conception of Love. Reason began to be more and more privileged as symbolic spirit

gradually withdrew. The downward movement toward terrestrialization of man who was no

longer Imagio Dei began to question traditional emphasis on our celestial vocation. Exoteric

theology that had largely forgotten its metaphysical roots couldn’t resist the drive for

secularization. Meanwhile science was making great impact and displacing theological

mode of thinking. With the rise of scientific outlook modern man’s negative response to

Christianity that had hitherto given meaning to the universe intensified. As Attas notes:

In the development of science in the West, the logical result of this

rationalism and secularization of nature was highlighted by the
Copernican revolution in physics in which the decentralization of the earth
in the cosmos brought repercussions that reduced the importance of man
himself therein. It finally led to man being deprived of cosmic
significance; he became terrestrialized and his transcendence was denied
him. Already in the Western Christian world view he was conceived as a
 Shah 57

fallen creature, and this terrestrialization indeed seemed to conform to the

salvific purport assigned to the doctrine of Redemption… Man began to
be conceived more and more in terms emphasizing his humanity,
individuality and freedom…In the Renaissance, Western man seemed
already to have lost interest in Christianity as a religion. They engaged
eagerly in the pursuit of knowledge…materialization and secularization of
the ideal man in an ideal society… Thus while Christian philosophers
sought to erect a science of metaphysics, they were in fact – by virtue of
the secular elements that had since many centuries penetrated into its
metaphysical structure – only leading their metaphysics towards final
dissolution, corroded, as it were, from within by those very it harboured.
Christianity was ultimately blamed as having forfeited the confidence of
Western man in revealed religion (Al-Attas 33-34).

As Ideas of Plato and thus talk about essences was getting discredited there came the great

executioner of traditional philosophy who formally laid the foundation of dualism on which

much of the modern philosophy is built. From Descartes onward the mainstream of western

philosophy was rationalist which couldn’t but culminate in absurdism because rationalism

excludes transcendence or mystery which alone gives meaning to the world. Schumacher, in

his A Guide to the Perplexed has brilliantly traced the roots of modern malaise in a host of

domains including the anthropological picture that conceives man in his horizontal

dimension only to Descartes. It is hardly surprising to note we find Cartesian

presuppositions in many of Beckett’s heroes and this contributes heavily to their problems

in search of identity and meaning.

Having denied heaven and the hierarchy of existence, individualism that excluded

suprapersonal wisdom flourished in the modern world. Man could not understand beyond
 Shah 58

‘pure and practical reason,’ as Kant argues, for the age of Enlightenment was the age of

scientific or ethical reason not that of intellectual intuition or mystical realization which

alone can convince man of his great destiny and significance and restore faith in life and the

world. Man lives by certainty and by becoming the object of knowledge he breaches the gulf

between the subject who hankers for meaning and the object of which the meaning is

sought. If knowledge is limited and doesn’t penetrate the essences one may well perceive

the world of phenomena as absurd as their secret is not known and one is in perpetual

darkness. When all that can be knowledge has to pass the acid test of human reason and

ratiocination one ignores or disavows knowledge or realization that makes possible

immediate communion with the things, the knowledge of essences. Things are not dense or

opaque to the faculty that sees through them, that penetrates the heart of existence as one

modern mystical philosopher has put it.

Modern philosophy was increasingly severing its ties with religion and metaphysics

as traditionally understood. It became impoverished and dismissive of man’s access to

knowledge of reality or the Absolute which is the cornerstone of traditional religions and

philosophies. Qaiser points out degeneration in the Western philosophy as it distanced from

traditional foundations:

He [Kant] declared that metaphysical speculation had no constitutive role

in human knowledge except “an initial regulative function in the scientific
quest.” Since things-in-themselves which constituted the noumena were
unknowable, therefore, metaphysics as an attempt to gain knowledge
beyond the phenomenal reality was an impossibility…“Modern
philosophy thus ends by wishing to substitute the theory of knowledge for
knowledge itself, which amounts to an open confession of impotence on
its part, nothing is more characteristic in this respect than the following
 Shah 59

declaration by Kant: ‘The chief and perhaps the only use of all philosophy
of pure reason is, after all exclusively negative, since it is not an
instrument for extending knowledge, but a discipline for limiting it’. Do
not such words amount purely and simply to saying that the only aim of
philosophers should be to impose upon everyone else the narrow limits of
their own understanding (Qaisar 10).

Philosophy traditionally used to guide man to the secret of things, to God who

grounds all meaning. Religion and philosophy went hand in hand in order to make possible

the vision of the world of forms, the vision of that Beauty in the face of which all worries

and inquiries get dissolved and everything gets justified. Modern philosophy has ultimately

culminated in skepticism in traditional claims of philosophy or metaphysics. It declares as

folly the wisdom of countless centuries and all traditional civilizations. In fact philosophy is

no longer the love of wisdom as “wisdom” is not there to be got from anywhere. Major

currents of modern philosophy are agreed in denying man knowledge of Reality – of

Absolute, of essences, of truth. In fact metaphysics has never really recovered after Kant

and when man is denied knowledge of God absurdism in one or the other guise creeps in.

Name any major modern writer and one can point out the note of despair in him/her.

Absurdist philosophy is only a strong statement and characterization of this despair that

constitutes modernity. There is no major writer who could be called Christian and it is in

Christianity that we meet the opposite statement of meaning, hope and fulfillment. We can

point out to Renaissance spirit in unleashing forces that ultimately gave birth to modern

absurd hero. Marlowe’s heroes are foreshadowing modern rebels. William Shakespeare

gave voice to such a mood in Macbeth’s famous words:

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Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing (act 5 scn. 5).

Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers also carried the legacy of flattening

rationalism forward and despite the dissident voices of Romantics, Transcendentalists and

others to culminate in the movement of death of God.

Revolt against traditional faith was brewing in Victorian age and therefore we can

see pessimism regarding man and his destiny there. Pessimism is the dominant concern in

the Victorian poetry in which man was torn between heart and head, faith and reason,

tradition and innovation and religion and science. Authors like Arnold, Clough and

Thomson foreshow the sensibility of the future generation of absurdists such as Camus and

Beckett:

What is the course of the life

Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about
Here and there – eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die-
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been (Rugby Chapel 58-68).
In Dower Beach Arnold laments the same as:
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Ah love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night (29-37).

Hardy’s notorious pessimism will later be shared by absurdists. Evolutionism

questioned traditional faith in the grandeur and significance of life and its transcendent

origins and destiny. Nietzsche well diagnosed the modern mood in relation to transcendence

which sustains faith in meaning and significance of life when he declared that modern man

has killed God. With no heaven above, no destiny beyond, no true world anywhere, meaning

and purpose in the traditional sense are no more.

In the twentieth century, the great upheaval of world wars spurred atheistic

existentialist movement. Sartre’s attack on essences was a counsel for abandoning illusions

bequeathed to us by theology and idealistic essentialist philosophies. Consulted neither at

our arrival nor at our departure and hurled into the indifferent and even hostile environment,

ignorant of our origin and end, journeying from nowhere to nowhere for no knowable

reason, our situation is barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning. It's

a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Albert Camus observed that Sisyphus’ futile

struggle really presents the tragic story of modern man.

The triumph of Cartesian spirit in philosophy and its ultimate transformation into

handmaiden of science or study of language in one dominant school meant that wisdom that
 Shah 62

philosophy traditionally upheld as an ideal got converted into knowledge and information.

With this life was lost in living as Eliot would say. Absurdist characters are just living. Life

that is essentially transcendence is gone. Versions of transcendence proposed by Nietzsche

and post-Nietzschean philosophers, theologians and writers including Nussbaum, Derrida,

Taylor, Eco and Pamuk are simply failures if we evaluate them in terms of mitigating

nihilism.

We can see modern absurdism as a species of nihilism and accordingly treat it.

Modern absurdism appears to be a particular variant of nihilism and skepticism. Skepticism

is of ancient origin and absurdist conclusion can’t be escaped by skeptics, ancient and

modern. Both nihilism and absurdism however don’t believe in human reason’s power to

unveil the dark mystery of existence. However both are great rationalists. The irrational is

there but needs to be taken as irrational, absurd, inhuman and something which ideally

should not have been thus. Man knows nothing about the ultimate issues and can’t know as

long as human reason is trusted, intellect denied, grand metaphysical structures laughed

away. Absurdism is the consequence of excessive faith in reason which betrays its

pretensions. In the East there is not this credulity towards claims and pretensions of reason

and thus absurdism didn’t develop as a consequence. Faith in reason, human self and its

autonomy and separation are prerequisites for the birth of the absurd. Both are absent in the

traditional view. In fact nothing is more absurd than the dogmatic belief in reason and

declaring that absurd which escapes its tracking. Christianity dissolves the absurd by

emphasizing non rational modes of encountering and trusting reality. One can declare

anything as absurd only in the light of any prior apprehension of meaning or standard of

meaning. Where from does one get the certainty of laws of reason and logic? In a broader
 Shah 63

sense all non idealistic philosophies and all those systems of thought that reject theological

picture as well as mystical picture are more or less absurdist.

The history of a g n o s t i c i s m / atheism is largely a history of absence of

meaning even if some atheists may construe some semblance of meaning and value of

life. Atheism and agnosticism in the sense of complete rejection of transcendence

necessarily imply absurdity of life a s m e a n i n g i s a n a t t r i b u t e o f t r a n s c e n d e n c e .

Absurdism seen as the declaration of man’s futility and life’s irrationality and

uselessness of all ideas is the dominant note of contemporary (post)modern thought.

Postmodernism may well be described as an extension of absurdist movement. It situates

itself against the history of transcendence. It declares life gratuitous and celebrates

absurdity. Anti-foundationist postmodern thought rules out search for metaphysical

absolutes. It emphasizes impotence of reason but doesn’t give any substitute for reason to

make knowledge of reality possible and certain. Absurdism is thus a dominant

contemporary reality. Beckett but not Camus has not been usually regarded as a

postmodernist. However Camus’ central themes regarding impotence of reason to elucidate

the problem of life, meaninglessness of life, sensate epistemology, paganism and disbelief in

all unifying narratives and transcendence are key themes of postmodernism as well.

However absurdism is seen as a problem by key (post)modern thinkers that needs

 Shah 64

(dis)solution. S h o w i n g h o w p erennialist thought c a n h e l p i n d i s s o l v i n g i t is

the burden of the following chapters.

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Albert Camus: The Absurdist against Transcendence

The wise man has the sun and the moon by his side. He grasps the universe under the arm.
He blends everything into a harmonious whole.
Tchuang-Tseu

It is with Albert Camus’ name that the term absurd is popularly associated. In fact he

gave it a currency and respectability though he only restated, in a compelling tone,

contemporary mood and despair of reason in solving the problems of knowledge and life and

didn’t invent it. His is a classical case for modern man’s rejection of transcendence though

unwittingly smuggling it here and there. He wrote both literary and philosophical works. His

is a lucid statement of pessimistic absurdism in modern literature and philosophy.

Camus’ problem is how man can be happy without God or transcendence or how to

escape from the paralyzing consequences of nihilistic despair ingrained in the world without

transcendence. Camus takes modern man’s declaration of the death of God for granted

and argues for an absurd universe that needs to be heroically encountered without recourse

to transcendence. In his view any notion of transcendence dilutes the joys of this life. In his

war against transcendence he employs a battery of arguments in his different works which

we shall be presenting here under different heads with little commentary here and there
th
from our side reserving that for 6 chapter. Camus’ apology for modern disbelief in

transcendence and his substitutes for it in art and an affirmatory ethic have been hugely

influential, much admired but never subject to what is here called perennialist metaphysical

appraisal that would have shown how contradictory it is and how it is parasitic on the very
 Shah 66

discourse that it supposedly replaces. The crux of this appraisal is it is not possible for man to

say no to transcendence without dehumanizing himself. The objective of this and sixth chapter

is to restate old scholastic formula “homonon proprie humanus sed superhumanus est (to be

properly human, you must be beyond the merely human) in such terms as not to be refutable

by Camus’ approach. Man can’t live without the bread of transcendence.

The Absurd Universe

Camus’ fundamental assertion is that “absurdity” is the key description of the universe

as man experiences it and the proper response to it is defiance or revolt. He thus describes his

point: “Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which man protests against his condition and

against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it disputes the ends of man and

creation” (R: 29). Thus he is making grand metaphysical and philosophical claims. A

scrutiny of these claims in these pages is proposed here, especially of the response that he

suggests. For Camus it is evil and injustice of the creation that entitles man to revolt against

whatever power planned and organized this universe. Camus’ problem is to search for human

happiness and a response worthy of man in the face of incomprehensible and alien universe.

The eternal injustice revealed in the confrontation of man and his human condition could only

be resisted; it can’t be accepted or tolerated or changed. It is bleak tragedy. His revolt is

primarily “against the sky rather than against the world.” The metaphysical revolt is revolt

against the creation as man finds it. His statements about God and evil clarify his conception

of metaphysical revolt. In his The Rebel he says that God’s existence would imply that he was

“indifferent, wicked or cruel” (MS: 29). Sentimentalist rather than a philosopher in him

asserts that “….a longer contemplation of this injustice, a more bitter approach transformed

the ‘even if you exist’ into you don’t deserve to exist,’ therefore you don’t exist’” (MS: 74).

He declares that “If evil is

 Shah 67

essential to creation, then creation is unacceptable” (MS: 50). He finds no principle by which

the misery and happiness of the world can be explained (MS: 63).

Camus distrusts the myth of progress, the metanarrative of science and science driven

enlightenment and claims of purely rationalistic philosophy. Nothing can lift the veils of dark

mystery and incomprehensible logic of life for him. “The universal reason practical or ethical,

that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man

laugh” (MS: 29). Seeing the impotence of rationalistic science and philosophy a direct path to

truth has been recovered by Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Chestov, phenomenologists and

Schiller as Camus notes but he is not convinced of their claims. He asserts that they all grant

the fundamental premises of absurdist philosophy. They all see clearly the fundamental

absurdity at the heart of our existence. He is not convinced that they have really discovered

the Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets in this “ravaged world in which the

impossibility of knowledge is established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only

attitude” (MS: 31).

For Camus the “rhythm of abstract depersonalized, uncreative activities crumbles into

absurd chaos before the question ‘What does it all mean’?” Some of the elements of the

absurd as Camus envisions in his The Myth of Sisyphus are infirmity, ignorance, irrationality,

nostalgia, the impossibility of distinguishing the true from the false, our radical inability to

know ourselves or others and the implacable mystery of the world. It is the sum total of all the

antimonies and contradictions man is heir to. It arises from reason’s inability to induce

motives of hope, unity and harmony. The logic of the absurd necessitates suicide. However

he rejects this conclusion as it is an act of cowardice, of bad faith. Like the mystical hero

Sisyphus man must accept limitations of his condition. He must accept absurdity with lucidity
 Shah 68

and conquer it through sincerity and loyalty. In the face of the absurd Camus banks

upon the values of love, justice, loyalty, courage and compassion that are foregrounded in

Camusian ethics – Camus’ The Plague is impregnated with charity as has been noted by

Camus critics. It is only the western philosophical and theological tradition t h a t

C a m u s h a s i n h e r i t e d that is disturbed by the problem which Tarrou thus formulates:

“Can one be a saint without God?”

For Camus salvation in an absurd universe could be possible only in knowledge, in a

sort of gnosis which negates the absurd. But that knowledge doesn't come at the rational

philosophical plane. But he is adamant like a hardcore rationalist in his demand for solving

the riddle and mystery of Existence:

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is

impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The world itself, whose
single meaning I don't understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could
only say just once: 'all is clear' all would be saved (MS: 34).

Inscription on a stone memorial to Camus at Tipasa shows this terrible fact that glory and love

will not last and man dies and is heard no more. The inscription states:

Here I understand what

They call glory:

The right to love

Without limits (qtd. in Talbott 37)

Camus the Rebel

He protests against the incompleteness of human life, expressed by death, and its

dispersion, expressed by evil (MS: 30). The rebel is not an atheist but a blasphemer. “He
 Shah 69

simply blasphemes, primarily in the name of order, by denouncing God as the origin of death

and as the supreme disillusionment” (MS: 30). “The rebel defies more than he denies.

Originally, at least, he doesn’t deny God; he simply talks to him as an equal. But it is not a

polite dialogue. It is a polemic animated by a desire to conquer” (MS: 31). Death for him“is a

closed door. I don’t say that it is a step to be crossed but that it is a dirty and horrible

adventure” (MS: 63).

The rebel’s desperate wish is to “create, at the price of sin if necessary, the
dominion of man” and thereby “justify the fall of God” (MS: 31). The
rebel’s incurable alienation and his tragic conditio are thus
depicted:…man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity
of escaping from it. In fact men cling to the world and by far the greater
majority doesn’t want to abandon it. Far from always wanting to forget it,
they suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to possess it completely
enough, strangers to the world they live in and exiled from their own
country ( MS: 226).

Camus’ concept of rebellion goes beyond resentment though one cannot always

distinguish these two. He emphasizes the passionate affirmation that underlies the act of revolt

distinguishing it from resentment. His rebel rejects the disordered, imperfect and unjust

universe and attempts to put justice, order and perfection into this universe. Camus wants to

preserve the individual human being, the human life as it is lived naturally on a purely

physical plane (Thody 66).

It is Dostoevsky's Ivan who seems to be spokesperson of Camus’ rebel. Camus quotes

him approvingly in his The Rebel. “If the suffering of children serves to complete the sum of

suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now onwards that truth is not

worth such a price” (R: 31). “I would persist in my indignation, even if I were wrong.” “All
 Shah 70

the knowledge in the world is not worth child’s tears” (R: 31). As Camus puts Ivan’s position:

“He doesn’t say that there is no truth. He says that if truth does exist it can only be

unacceptable. Why? Because it is unjust” (R: 31). Modern man refuses salvation or he

demands heaven of his own making; he dictates terms to Reality. He not only refuses to

acknowledge his sin but also any saviour or need of salvation. He wishes to rewrite the logic

of Existence. Even if offered eternal life he is not ready for the surrender to God. Ivan is an

outspoken and defiant spokesperson of this Promethean viewpoint. To quote Camus from The

Rebel:

Ivan incarnates refusal to salvation. Faith leads to immortal life, but faith
presumes the acceptance of the mystery and of evil and resignation to
injustice. The man who is prevented by the suffering of children from
accepting faith will certainly not accept eternal life….He would accept
grace unconditionally and that is why he makes his own conditions (R:
51).

There is indeed certain heroism in the absurd hero of Camus. He doesn't despair, he

doesn't hope. He has no need of any consolation. He accepts fate though he is not resigned to

it. Camus believes that this revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation

that ought to accompany it (MS: 31). It is revolt that gives life its value “….it restores its

majesty to that life. To a man devoid of blinkers, there is no finer sight than that of the

intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it” (MS: 34). He doesn't wish to be

relieved of the weight of his life. He can carry it alone. He rejects the possibility that a

skeptical metaphysic can be joined to an ethics of renunciation. He can drain everything to

the bitter end and deplete himself. He is ready to die skeptical. His truth consists in

defiance (MS: 53). The great truth of self knowledge, the truth that delivers, counts hardly

for Camus. “Socrates' Know thyself has as much value as the ‘be virtuous’ of our

confessionals… They are sterile exercises on

 Shah 71

great subjects” (MS: 54). He can’t take the leap that Kierkegaard, Jaspers and many others ask

us to take. He is too much a rationalist to betray it when it comes to encounter its limits, its

impotence. The mind will be satisfied only if it can reduce Existence to terms of thought. A

crude animistic anthropomorphist assumption rather than a sound philosophical insight is

discernible in his declaration that “If man realized that the universe like him can love and

suffer, he would be reconciled” (MS: 54). Nostalgia for unity and appetite for the absolute he

wishes to satisfy on his own imagined terms. He drags the Absolute to his own relative and

finite level. He, without caring to philosophically justify his position, assumes subject-

object duality to be absolute. His following assertion is in line with the dualistic Western

philosophical thought:

For if, bridging the gulf that separates desire from conquest, we assert with
Parmenides the reality of the One (whatever it may be) we fall into the
ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its
very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve.
This other vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes (MS: 54-55).

The important point is that the rebel doesn’t and cannot rebel against life itself. He consents to

live despite logic. Logic demands suicide but neither Ivan nor Camus would accept this. Ivan

will live, then, and will love as well without knowing why. “When the meaning of life has

been suppressed, there still remains life” (R: 52). The point is that religion also demands only

life, more life, larger life.

Camus’ romantic celebration of this worldly life can’t substitute man’s love for God,

for eternity and immortality. His Nupitals sings a paean to the sea and the Algerian earth,

supplemented by equally rapturous prose canticles in honour of the “invincible summer.” He

sings the pagan song of life’s splendour and majesty. He celebrates the body. The motto is a

pagan and passionate affirmation of this world and a vehement denial of any longing for
 Shah 72

another life. He concludes his Nupitals with the oft quoted statement “The world is beautiful

and outside it, there is no salvation.” He writes with great passion of the “beautiful face of the

world” and his own sun drenched youth amid the “vast libertinage of nature.” He celebrates

desires and love. “To embrace a woman’s body is also to retain, close to one, that strange joy

which descends from the sky to the sea…. I love this life with abandon and I want to speak of

it freely.” Here Camus echoes Gide’s Fruits of the Earth, Montherland and Giono wanting to

suck all the juice from the life like Fitzgerald’s Umar Khayyam. The notion of hell appears as

a pleasant joke, as Marlow’s Dr. Faustus had once imagined. Camus' zest for life is founded

on the principle that life is irreplaceable and irreducible to any abstraction. He believed that

life with all of its tribulations and indignities was his only love, only faith.

His concern had always been for what Unamuno called the individual man of flesh and

bones in The Tragic Sense of Life. The individual, Camus argued, ought to be the main

concern of all genuine humanism and not an abstract ideological rendition of man. It is

because he esteems individual over everything that he is led to absurdity and rebellion

because nature doesn’t respect individual. Autonomous individuality is an evil, a problem that

needs to be overcome according to different traditions. The individual of flesh and bone is a

product of sin or fall and any philosophy that bases itself on it is only a product of delusion.

The conflict between the demands of the body/mind and spirit forms the basic narrative of

different religions. Flesh revolts against the demands of the Spirit. The body and its kingdom

of desires is the demon against which spirit fights a protracted battle. But Camus is too aware

of his body to mind the claims of the spirit. That is why he rebels.

Czeslaw Milosz has argued in To Begin Where I Am: Collected Essays that Albert

Camus was a modern-day Cathar in that if he denied the existence of God, it was perhaps
 Shah 73

because of his love for God, and his inability to justify such a being. This argument gets

certain validation by consideration of the overall tone of The First Man. Milosz as well as

others critics have speculated that perhaps Camus was beginning to soften up his views on

God and the absurd at the time of his death.

Camus laments that we lack man’s pride which is fidelity to limits, lucid love of his

condition (MS: 171). He praises precisely those elements in “Helen’s Exile” which

perennialists also hail and in fact the perenialist critique of modernity converges on many

points with that of the Greek’s. “Admission of ignorance, rejection of fanaticism, the limits

of the world and of man, beloved face, and finally beauty – this is where we shall be on

the side of the Greeks” (MS: 171).

He laments that...through all her diverse ways, she (Europe) glorifies but
one thing, which is the future rule of reason. In her madness she extends
the eternal limits, and at that very moment, dark Erinyes falls upon her
head and tear her to pieces. Nemesis, the goddess of measure and not of
revenge, keeps watch. All those who overstep the limits are pitilessly
punished (MS: 167).

He says that the Greeks didn’t negate the sacred but we did (MS: 167). He wishes that

“dreadful walls of the modern city will fall to deliver us – ‘soul serene as the ocean’s calm’–

Helen’s beauty” (MS: 171). He deplores the absence of myth in modern philosophers who are

imprisoned in reason (MS: 169). He points out that we have deserted great Hellenic heritage

(that includes a dose of Platonism as well?) and are its renegade sons. Placing history on the

throne of God we have turned barbarians. The myth of progress that perennialist and Camus

detest follows from this faith in history. Like perennialist he finds such Hegelian deification of

history and modern age detestable. “Only the modern city offers the mind a field in which it can
 Shah 74

become aware of itself” (MS: 169). He notes that in this world of big cities we have been

deprived of all that constitutes its permanence such as:

nature, the sea, hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness is to be found

only in the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets this is
the edict. And consequently our most significant works show the same
bias. Landscapes are not to be found in great European literature since
Dostoevsky. History explains neither the natural universe that existed
before it nor the beauty that exists above it (MS: 169).

He notes insightfully: “It is Christianity that began substituting the tragedy of the soul

for contemplation of the world. But, at least, Christianity referred to a spiritual nature and

thereby preserves a certain fixity. With God dead, there remains only history and power”

(MS: 171). For he seems to express his own feeling by quoting Saint-Exupery’s remark “I

hate my time” (MS: 171). But “this time is ours and we can’t live by hating ourselves”

(MS: 171). He doesn’t seem to think of the possibility of misdiagnosing the problem of our

times or our attitude towards them as a problem. He is not prepared to consider the possibility

that we can still talk about live things that transcend history and power.

Mystical Romanticism against Nihilism

Camus has refuted the charges of nihilism levelled against his thought. He wants to go

beyond nihilism. But the point is that he can’t do so. One can proceed beyond nihilism only

through negation of it through orienting positively towards transcendence – a vision of God

who incarnates or symbolizes triple values of goodness, beauty and truth. Only Eternity can

show us that time doesn’t exist or is relative and doesn’t count and thus show us the way to

proceed beyond time which is the realm of sorrow or evil. Nihilism gets its warrant only if we

constrict our vision to the domain of time. Only one who has tasted the bliss of heaven can
 Shah 75

accept/ justify all the suffering of the world, can walk countless billions of miles through hell

for getting a moment in heaven. There is no escape from the plague of life for the man who

can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Only life eternal justifies this life, the value of

tears. Nihilism can’t be transcended at the plane at which Camus is situated. Therefore he has

to somehow smuggle transcendence and that is what explains his almost mystical

romanticism. This is seen in his absolute love for life. Life is the only good according to both

Camus and Christ. But one identifies life with alienated fragmented creaturely existence and

that extends to a few years or only to a few moments and yet believes it to be heaven while

the other extends it to all eternity. In the kingdom of heaven there is no time, no becoming, no

want, and no misery. Christ rebels against the God of Camus who is lame, blind and miserable

in the name of his God who is synonymous with life, with the infinitude of Self and does see

the God as supreme principle of Beauty and Truth (God is in fact the other or ideal pole of

man, the Father of man in traditional religious perspective). Christ rebels against the rule of

gods in whom modern man (Camus) believes amongst which the chief one is human ego, who

alienate and enslave man. If man’s problem consists in pursuing the expansion of his

existence and in recovering this very effort as an absolute as Simone de Beavoire says then

Camus fails to solve the problem. This problem can’t be solved from a perspective that can’t

move beyond absurdism or reject it as metaphysical principle. Thorough going absurdism is

self-defeating. It can’t escape the hell of nihilism. Everything is cursed except the

remembrance of God and everything is liable to be destroyed save the face of God, as the

Quran says (55:26).

Camus is all praise for man and the beauty of the world. “It is because life so

completely ends in death, and because there is no transcendence to give it significance, that its

price is infinite” (Thody 9). Human individual’s life as lived on a purely physical plane is
 Shah 76

infinitely valuable to him and needs to be preserved against the absurdity of the universe. He

ignores human wickedness and foregrounds the fact of human suffering. He refuses to accept

that men are responsible for evil.

Camus’ ideal of freedom and life is perhaps best expressed in the following words of de

Beavoir:

To wish man free is to wish for being, it is to wish for the revelation of
being in the joy of existence….It is when our movement towards freedom
takes on the consistency of pleasures or happiness, that it assumes its real
and palpable form in the world….if we do not love life in our own selves
and through our fellow man, it is useless to try to justify life (qtd. in
Doubrovsky 40).

How should we respond to death according to Camus? Here Camus takes recourse to

irrational leap of faith that he resisted otherwise in other contexts. For an absurdist death

consumes everything; it levels everything. There can hardly be any logical ground for

rejecting Caligula’s reaction to his sister’s death.

Although Camus probably intended Caligula as a mistaken response to absurd as

Cruickshank has argued yet he has to own this possible response which seems to follow from

his premises quite logically and here many things find expression which are so dear to Camus.

The following dialogue captures the problematique of absurd man that Camus saw as his hero.

Caesonia: You can’t prevent the sky from being the sky, or a fresh young
face from ageing, or a man’s heart from growing cold.

Caligula [with rising excitement]: I want … I want to drown the sky in the
sea, to infuse ugliness with beauty, to wring a laugh form pain.
 Shah 77

Caesonia [facing him with an imploring gesture]: There’s good and bad,
high and low, justice and injustice. And I swear to you these will never
change.

Caligula [in the same tone]: And I’m resolved to change them… I shall
make this age of ours a kingly gift – the gift of equality. And when all is
leveled our, when the impossible has come to earth and the moon is in my
hands – then, perhaps, I shall be transfigured and the world renewed; then
men will die no more and at last be happy (C: 48).

Camus is content to live life at its abysmally low pitch because he feels condemned to

love on dualistic plane. The mystic is after greater and greater fulfillment, more and more

intense life. But only a truncated version is possible for those who deny that Love is God and

may justify everything. He seems to insist that one can realize values even in the absurd

world. How? He has to resort to some sort of transcendence. This seems to be implied in his

endorsing the following quotation of Nietzsche and then commenting on it.

“It clearly seems that the chief end in heaven and on earth is to obey at
length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for
which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue,
art, music, the dance, reason, the mind – something that transfigures,
something delicate, mad, or divine” (MS: 62). Oriental thought teaches
that one can indulge in the same effort [that Camus upholds of revolt] of
logic by choosing against the world. That is just as legitimate …But when
the negation of the world is pursued just as rigorously one often achieves
(in certain Vedantic schools) similar results regarding, for instance, the
indifference of works.. In a book of great importance, Le Chiox, Jean
Grenier establishes in this way a veritable ‘philosophy of indifference’
(MS: 62).
 Shah 78

Comparing the absurd and mystical conceptions of freedom Camus’ remarks show

convergence between the two at certain plane.

By loosing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they become

secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery they recover a deeper
independence…. Likewise, completely turned towards death (taken here
as the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from
everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him (MS: 57-
8).

Critique of Theodicy

Camus’ critique of theodicy is on Epicurean-Humean lines arguing that the presence of evil

of such a magnitude is incompatible with the belief in omnipotent and good God. He follows

especially Dostoevsky’s presentation of the problem in his The Brothers Karamazov through

Ivan. The test case of suffering of innocent children is so poignantly argued by Ivan. The

Plague of Camus echoes it.

Camus presents his case though the hero of The Plague, Dr. Rieux. One of the most

poignant scenes in it concerns the death of a child in the plague in presence of Rieux and

Father Paneloux. As the child dies in great agony Rieux leaves the room hurriedly but

Paneloux stops him. Rieux turns on the priest fiercely, saying, “Ah, that child, anyhow, was

innocent and you know it as well as I do.” Rieux leaves the building, and Paneloux follows

him outside, where he finds Rieux sitting on a bench:

“Why was there that anger in your voice just now? What we’d been
seeing was as unbearable to me as it was to you.”

Rieux turned toward Paneloux.

“I know, I’m sorry. But weariness is a kind of madness. And there are
times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.”
 Shah 79

“I understand,” Paneloux said in a low voice. “That sort of thing is

revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we
should love what we cannot understand.”

Rieux straightened up slowly. He gazed at Paneloux, summoning to his

gaze all the strength and fervor he could muster against his weariness.
Then he shook his head.

“No, Father, I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I
shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture”
(P: 106).

Panlaux representing traditional Christian attitude (though he is no metaphysician or great

theologian to defend this position against Rieux) accepts this evil as disguised good even

though it is beyond his understanding how God will, in the end, transform it in accordance

with his purposes. Rieux, most probably the mouthpiece of Camus, can only revolt against

what he has seen. This is unlike Ivan’s attitude who wanted to return the ticket to God. I

quote Thomas L Hanna’s formulation of Camus’ argument to such a test case of evil.

Camus’ response to this problem is simple. That is, if this is world in

which innocents must be tortured and if there be a God who rules,
guides, or sanctifies this world, then God is unjust. The given evidence of
evil is there and if the idea of God is introduced, then there is no other
conclusion. If men are to speak of God, a personal and sovereign God,
then there is introduced into human experience an infinite gulf between
the sufferings of men and the designs of God – a tension which demands
submission or revolt. If God rules, the God is responsible: this is a first
consequence of the idea of a personal God which first appeared in the Old
Testament.

His solution consisted first of all in taking on their condition. The

God-man suffers also – with patience. Evil and death are no longer
 Shah 80

absolutely imputable to him in as much as he suffers and dies. The night

on Golgotha has so great an importance in the history of men only because
the divinity, ostensibly abandoning its traditional privileges, lived through
to the end the anguish of death and despair. Thus is explained the lama
sabactani and the awful doubt of the Christ in agony. The agony would
be light if it were sustained by eternal hope. That God might be man it is
necessary that he give up hope (227).

Camus rejects Christianity because it can’t justify the ways of God to man, because it is

unable to appropriate evil in the world or account for it in rational terms. As Camus puts it in

The Rebel: “…in its essence, Christianity (and this is its paradoxical greatness) is a doctrine of

injustice. It is founded on the sacrifice of the innocent and the acceptance of this sacrifice” (R:

19). Paradoxical greatness of this attitude lies in “the metamorphosis of injustice,

minimization and transcendence of the abiding reality of human suffering.” Thomas L. Hanna

rightly notes:

It is here that are found the fundamental motives of the Christian faith as
well as Camus’ own thought, that is, in the problem of evil and death. For
Camus the first data of religion and morality are the evil and death that are
part of the abiding condition of men. Whether or not there be goodness or
God is not a primary evidence of human existence – suffering and death
are. The question is what this primary evidence teaches us and what we do
about it. Only after the reality of human evil is given does the question of
God and ultimately man’s submission to or revolt against God arise.
These theological questions have neither meaning nor reality without this
primary reference (228).

Camus takes up the case of innocent suffering as particularly compelling evidence of evil

and the justification of the response of revolt. His response to this problem is simple and

“logical.” Echoing Ivan Karamazov he argues that if this is a world in which innocents must
 Shah 81

be tortured and if there be a God who rules this world then God is unjust. The presence of evil

creates an unbridgeable gulf between the innocent victims and the designs of an omnipotent

and good God. This creates a tension which demands submission or revolt. Needless to say he

opts for revolt. He points out that with the appearance of a personal God to which he attributes

a juristic character in the tradition of anthropomorphic theology there also appears religious

guilt, crime and revolt. The prototype of this is Cain and we according to Camus are the

children of Cain by way of this inheritance. The New Testament and Christ are interpreted as

responses to this condition:

The Christ came to solve principal problems of rebels. His solution

consisted first of all in taking on their condition. The God-man suffers
also – with patience. Evil and death are no longer absolutely imputable to
him in as much as he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha has so great
an importance in the history of men only because the divinity, ostensibly
abandoning its traditional privileges, lived through to the end the anguish
of death and despair. Thus is explained the lama sabactani and the awful
doubt of the Christ in agony. The agony would be light if it were
sustained by eternal hope. That God might be man it is necessary that he
give up hope (Hanna 228).

Camus allows only “all or nothing response” to the existence of evil. As a Christian, Father

Paneloux is driven to the wall by the horrors of plague. He maintains his faith that God is the

ultimate ruling force, bringing good out of all the evil with which he allows to afflict men

(either plague is a punishment for sins or a part of incomprehensible design of God).

or he takes his place with Dr Rieux, Tarrou and all the rebels of the earth
in maintaining that this evil and this death are unbearable and that either
there is no God and men must ceaselessly struggle with their single
powers against the plague of life or else, if there be a God, he is
 Shah 82

murderous, unjust and incomprehensible being who is the supreme enemy

of man. Given human evil and death, God is innocent and men are guilty
or else God is guilty and men are innocent. The death of a child poses the
alternative of all or nothing for the Christian Faith (Hanna 229).

However Camus himself has a strange “theodicy.” One must imagine that all is well

even if nothing is well. Life is tragic. Things couldn’t have been otherwise. Wisdom lies in

imagining that all is well. This is the absurd logic of Sisyphus which Camus upholds.

According to Camus Sisyphus concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth seems

neither sterile nor futile” (MS: 110). It is Oedipus’ remark that all is well which Camus

endorses as sacred.

Camus shows the same outrage and indignation that is felt by Gilgamesh on the death

of his best friend Enkidu. Camus is above all a moralist and that is why he judges the universe

in moralistic terms. It is anthropomorphic, anthropocentric bias. But this metaphysical outrage

is fortuitously transformed and elevated into an appreciation of the sublime. For him man is

condemned to be alone, to live and fight the absurdity of his condition alone. He was a great

Hellenist, a great devotee of universal beauty. It is because of his Hellenism that he abhorred

ugly and “tortured and aimless” modern art.

Salvation through Art

Camus expressly states that art sustains him and it is faith in art that makes life endurable

for him: “What has helped me bear an adverse fate will perhaps help me accept an overly

favorable outcome –- and what has most sustained me was the great vision, the very great

vision I have of art” (FM: 320).

It is the “very great vision” of art which sustains Camus in the face of misfortune. Here he

appropriates something like the religious vision. What is religion if not a sort of art? For Zen
 Shah 83

it is an art. It is simply changed perception of reality. Mountains are mountains at the end of

the mystical path but one no longer is the same subject. One moves with one foot above the

ground. Art is a mode of perception that creates an imaginative space beyond the normal one.

Camus’ defense of artist against those who live in bondage to history and utopia is that

he fights for freedom. And he links this with passion for beauty (MS: 170). He rightly says

that “Man can’t do without beauty” (MS: 170). Only one remark may suffice here that

aesthetic view that Keats famously expressed in the words “Beauty is Truth and truth beauty”

is specifically Eastern attitude. A. K. Coomaraswamy has expounded this masterfully in his

magisterial works on art and aesthetics.

Following Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both Camus and Beckett see art as one of the

ways of salvation. It is through art that the moon that Caligula sought is brought to earth by

Camus. Camus paid a tribute to spiritual value of music in Sud Essai sur la muasique” “In

general and to conclude really fertile Music, the only kind which will move us and which we

shall really relish, will be a Music of Dream which will banish all reason and all analysis.”

Here he comes close to the mystic and the ecstatic. Nietzsche was precisely an ecstatic mystic

and unconditional affirmation or yes saying is possible by virtue of mystical ecstasy and love

alone as Giles Fraser has also argued.

Camus thought that salvation was possible but not through the unfathomable, the

mystical, but “through man’s own will.” This seems to be echo of Nietzsche whose superman

wills in that heroic moment that everything eternally recur.

We thus see Camus opening to transcendence is evident in his reflections on music, on

art, on beauty despite his anti-transcendence rhetoric. His youthful passionate lyricism is a

move towards transcendence. The note he left beside his sleeping wife hints at this.
 Shah 84

Camus unlike mystics doesn’t find love eternal. “All the specialists in passion teach us,

there is no eternal love but what is thwarted. There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

Such a love culminates only in the ultimate contradiction of death” (MS: 70).

There are various ways of committing suicide, one of which is the total gift and

forgetfulness of self (MS: l70). Mysticism’s call for the denial of the self is thus a kind of

suicide. The self is too dear to Camus to love the universe with all its pains and trials. The self

is too dear to him to be consumed in the fire of love, the love of non-Self, the One or All.

Camus asks “…Is there something behind the wet skies?” (MS: 71). Though his head

refused to entertain any such thing his heart did feel that there is a secret meaning to

everything. However the problem with modern way of life is that it refuses to have trucks with

this secret. It seeks to avoid encounter with the Light, the knowledge that negates modern

man’s cities and his comforts. Modern man has chosen to live without the sacred, to be earthly

and true to the dust of earth and Camus though inwardly unhappy over this choice, chooses to

be with modern man, with all his illusions and untruth and his blindness to the world above

that alone contains answers to all his problems, all his sorrows.

Camus’ narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall notes what future historians will

say of us. “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers”

(F: 7). This is Camus’ estimate of our times. Indeed modern man has little heroism, dignity,

charity or love. He has lost knowledge in information and therefore newspapers suffice for

him. He doesn’t know what is love, love eternal that Jesus worshipped as God. He knows only

a poor image of that love of which Plato speaks and of which mystics speak. He could not

become a superman or saint without God. What makes Camus and Beckett pessimistic is the
 Shah 85

wretched state of modern man who distrusts all t h e claims o f traditional philosophers

and mystics that love is eternal and fails to replace traditional God with his manufactured

idols.

Clemence’s judgment applies to Camus as well. Refusing knowledge of God which is

available to the Intellect and not to the reason he reduces all knowledge to newspaper

gossip and trash, to news of the present day, trivial things of mundane life that alone

interest him.

Camus thus shows absurdity and its wrecks. He resolutely fights against

despairing consequences of nihilism which is a presupposition of modern thought that he

largely takes for granted. Although he stands for the forlorn abandoned man in the

face of the “incomprehensible” and apparently indifferent if not hostile world he fails – as

we shall see in greater detail in chapter 6 – to be either consistent in his no to transcendence

or convince us against looking for transcendence for fulfilling our higher destiny or be

truly humans that saints and prophets of all traditions urge us to do.
 Shah 86

Samuel Beckett: The Absurdist Confronting Transcendence

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so
they can see that it's not the answer.
-Jim Carrey

Samuel Beckett’s message is not easy to decode and it may well be his resistance to

the idea of art having certain definite message that we need to keep in consideration. One

can argue for a variety of interpretations of his work from Christian to secular existentialist

and nihilist. I am not interested in his message that he may be reluctant to give and may

be too ambiguous to paraphrase but what I intend to do here is assuming dominant

interpretation for which there is definitely certain warrant and then to approach that from a

metaphysical perspective. I think there is almost a consensus that he had problem

with received understanding of transcendence and there is no dispute that he was more

interested in depicting failure and his world is not cozy or uplifting but deeply

disconcerting. We can also reasonably assume that he was haunted by the problem

of meaning and his confrontation with transcendence that is best illustrated in his art of

failure constitutes his key theme.

Beckett has problematized both the traditional humanistic and God-centered

worldviews through a reading of theology and bringing in his own eclectic mix of

philosophical arguments. In this chapter it is proposed to present, as a prelude to a

metaphysical appraisal later, broad outlines of Beckett’s vision in relation to his central

concern – failed quest for transcendence informing his critique of received humanist
 Shah 87

rationalist scientific worldview, his quasimystical anti-epistemology and skepticism and his

case against man and God, reason and metaphysics.

(Anti)Philosophy and (Anti)Epistemology

Though not a philosopher in the conventional sense, Beckett’s whole work is

constructed around certain philosophical theses that we can critically appraise regardless of

how the artist in him may have perceived them. It is vain to assert that artists are artists and

not philosophers and could not be subject to philosophical appraisal. The question is,

as the Buddha said, all attachment to views is a cause of suffering and needs to

be transcended. Beckett’s attachment to certain views he inherited and appropriated

from diverse sources including Proust, Descartes, Guenlincx, Melbranche,

Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein and Sartre, and from certain mystics and most

importantly from his morose temperament is well known. His conclusions show marked

affinity to those reached by the Eastern sages although sometimes they seem to be parody

of them.

Beckett advocates a sort of antiepistemology that critiques received Western

epis;8temologies which trust either senses or reason or intuition and revelation and claim

that knowledge is possible of the world/ self/ God. He is a skeptic and a solipsist. He

doesn’t understand how perception is possible and comes to distrust it. Knowledge

and the instruments that create it are subject to a sort of deconstruction by him.

Beckett rejects intellective intuition of the mystic and revelation of the prophets and

is committed to rationalism despite his acute awareness of its limitations and ultimately
 Shah 88

seeing its failure to make anything comprehensible he nevertheless trusts its verdict even if

he deploys it to destroy its own foundations. Like their creator, Beckett’s people are

uncompromising rationalists as Richard Coe has remarked in his insightful reading of

Beckett in his paper “God and Samuel Beckett” to which I owes much in this chapter. The

questions which his people ask, however reasonably, are precisely those which reason, left

to its own devices, can’t ask. Their reason (and they have no other resource at their

disposal) can’t tell them with certainty a single thing they want to know (what really

matters, which is not a piece of information or which science could know); not so much as

whether (perhaps) they are already dead, or (maybe) still alive. Of the origin and end of

things, of their whither and whence, of purpose and meaning in their lives, of the reasons

for which they have been “punished,” or of the sin they have committed and most

importantly of their (or possibility of) salvation they don’t know much. They are all

strangers and sojourners in the current dimensions of existence. They don’t know how to

escape from these arbitrary absolutes, from the net of illusions or maya jal or the net of

samsara, the hell they are in by virtue of being born. As their attempts of escape are futile

they allow themselves to be

mutilated, becoming armless, legless, featureless, in an effort to

approximate their quintessential “selves” they stagger to stand still, now
bedridden, now propped up against walls, now stuck in vases like sheaves
of flowers, in order to escape from the tyranny of movement and its
despotic corollaries, or else they try to die, and dying, strive to detach
their selves from the unhappy accident of incarnation, hoping thereby to
redeem at last the catastrophe of spatial and temporal identity- only to
discover that heir “personality,” against all odds, survives ( Fanizza, 74).
 Shah 89

Beckett, following Descartes, discovers in himself a thinking thing and that thing

becomes his self which thinks always about something as Husserl had asserted that

consciousness must always be consciousness of something. So all knowing and knowledge

is confined to something: finite domain of time and space and its law of constant change.

Beckett remains confined in this domain yet struggles hard to come out of it but he fails

because he is convinced, like Husserl, that there is no knowing and knowledge possible out

of this self-imprisoning consciousness – subject-object oriented consciousness of one’s

own self. Having no experience of mystical intuition and thus having rejected revelation

and Nirvana, Beckett characters burn and mutilate themselves in the burning samsara.

They fail to escape their own selves.

Everything is ambiguous in the world of Beckett. Nothing is clear cut. Nothing can

be known absolutely. He doesn’t know whether there is anything to know. He isn’t even

interested to know. Gnosis of which mystics speak is something quite unknown to him or a

fairy tale. He is obsessed with guilt. As Lance St. John Butler suggests, Beckett depicts a

Sartrean universe though not exclusively:

It is typical description of the project of man identifying itself with a

desiring ego which fears encounter with nothingness. Because time is
taken to be real and believed to provide some sort of salvation one goes
on groping towards future to find rest or fulfillment In the Sartrean reality
to which this corresponds consciousness is confronted with the freedom
of the future into which it must project and it creates its world as it goes,
always dissatisfied with the past and always aspiring to a future in which
it can catch up with itself and come to rest. But the ego can never reach
essences, to its own centre in nothingness and be dissolved or
transcended in the moment of illumination (Butler 121).
 Shah 90

The following passage from Texts for Nothing shows this Sartrean parallel as Lance

notes.

I know it is not me, but it is too late now, too late to deny it… what
manner how you describe yourself, here or elsewhere, fixed or mobile,
without form or oblong like a man, in the dark or the light of heavens, I
don’t know… and if I went back to where all went out and on from there,
no, that would lead nowhere (TN: 82-83).

In Heidegger, Beckett and in mystics we see a silent or poetic “astonishment” in the

face of the ontological. More Pricks than Cricks and Proust develop towards silence

though they abound in extravagantly verbal. Heidegger echoing mystics calls to “exist in

the nameless” and Beckett echoing Heidegger strives to be in the “nameless” world. As

Butler argues, Beckett is not seeking silence as such but the Being beyond words for which

silence is a metaphor. A “nameless” world is a silent openness to Being and this is what

Beckett has been attempting to show (UN: 179).

As Butler puts it: “A world full of ‘names’ or ‘beings’ is the world of ‘mere misery’

of The Three Dialogues (Butler 122) and in this world there is something for the artist

(Masson, Beckett) to express. In the silent astonishment that is man’s disposition towards

Being there is ‘nothing to express’” (Butler 179).

The Absolute knowledge, the goal of art, religion and philosophy, depends on a

relationship between self and Self, man and God, consciousness and Substance (in

Beckettian terms, between I’ and ‘he’). In the end he has to invoke the metaphor of religion

– man can achieve not merely the intuition of the divine but also a partaking in the Self-

intuition of God himself. Mure explains in mystical terms: “God creates man’s

consciousness as an element in his own (God’s) self-consciousness and therefore man’s

 Shah 91

consciousness of God is self-consciousness, consciousness of himself as a constituent

element of self-conscious God” (qtd. in Butler 188).

The central problem is to find the self, to be one with the Absolute. But as for Hegel,

man is as much God as it is possible to be without being God. In league with monotheistic

theologies which emphasize Creator-servant polarity and declare that man qua man can

come nearer and nearer to God but never be one with him – in other words the relative can

never be the Absolute, Hegel maintains that human consciousness approaches the Absolute

but remains one step away from being the Absolute. Beckett similarly sees man reaching

nearer and nearer but not into the heart of reality, the essence, the core of the self. In

confronting the Absolute man finds himself as irremovable obstruction. As Butler puts it,

he can’t get rid of himself in order himself to meet the Absolute. In For to End Yet Again,

the skull in the void seems an adequate preliminary symbol for consciousness confronting

the Absolute. And then, from consciousness a world emerges; faced with the void man

must fill it, or, as Hegel has it, human spirit, aspiring to Absolute Spirit, must connote

Absolute Knowledge. There is in the end a picture of the skull (consciousness) dreaming of

a real end. This corresponds, according to Butler, to man’s hopeless desire for an end to

mere knowledge and a union with the Absolute (Butler 191). There is longing for the

“space with neither here nor there” in the absolute space (and time) or a realm transcending

space and time known as infinity. This text is thus “parable for the anguish of an unfulfilled

consciousness, a parable for the last ontological gasp of the Hegelian dialectics” (Butler

192).

Mahood typically confronts the situation of epistemological failure. He says, “I

cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. Now, all is not clear.
 Shah 92

But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric” (TR 7). Charles R

Lyons elaborates the point further when he says that:

Creating a discourse provides Beckett’s heroes with the illusion of self-

analysis, but that analysis remains illusory because consciousness cannot
verify the material it considers. These narrators recognize the
epistemological problems – the uncertainty of their knowledge … they
also recognize that sustaining the discourse keeps the silence at bay …
that [discourse – silence] have no core of meaning apart from its utility in
creating a sense of time. Mahood says that one must say words as long as
there are any (Lyons 27).

Beckett characters remain lost in the fragments of thought, language, despair and

useless repetition of broken, meaningless and distorted and deshaped sentences and

words. Pauses, silences and dotted lines abound in Beckett’s texts. The mystical and artistic

genius of Beckett lies in exposing the insufficiency and incomprehensibility of language in

so far as the realization and communication of Reality is concerned.

Beckett people, generally speaking, neither know how to live nor how to die or how

to smile at the face of death and how to die before death to take rebirth in the kingdom of

eternal life and to be in a state beyond both life and death. They don’t know theology even if

they are always involved in some sort of theologizing (knowing only its exoteric version

that holds fast to dualism of creator and created positing a personal interested God as the

Absolute and of course finding this untenable and instead of worshipping, praying to him,

they curse him, pity him, laugh at him) and metaphysics and that is why they ask what

unspeakable Being has conjured up a creature who can’t know himself, imprisoned for no

conceivable reason in a duration which is hard to endure. He rejects materialistic as well as

the traditional Christian theistic theses. Beckett’s people know from the evidence of their
 Shah 93

experience and their irrefutable logic that temporal and spatial reality is an illusion, and that

their “real” selves exist in another, non-material dimension.

In the postmodernist vein Beckett upholds that all expression, whether in art or in

life, is necessarily a deformation of Reality. “Both knowledge and will cut up reality and

give a shape to Chaos” (Ramakrishna 142). Winnie’s effort to impose the “old style” on an

imponderable situation is a deliberately chosen mechanism to hide from herself, to avoid

encounter with her darkness within, her solitude. It is a hiding behind the factual. Language

is what prevents access to Reality in the Beckettian prison called world. But outside

language is what shows itself and is thus somehow accessible to us as Wittgenstein

affirmed. The thesis that language is an impenetrable veil has veiled the postmodern world

from the vision of that which makes possible to see the world in heavenly glow, under the

aspect of eternity. True, man can’t fully transcend temporality, linguistic prison, bodily

limitations and pain that flesh is heir to – that seems the whole thesis in Murphy – but who

thinks he can? No religion or theology worthy of name. Nirvana is not a state of

disembodied abstraction. Seeing God is not failure to see the world at its own plane with all

its limitations. Man has access to essences or he is blind. This access to essences is seeing

things in their particularity as Zen would say or recognizing every stone has a Buddha

nature or dharma kaya and asserting with Father Zossima that this very garden is the

Garden of Eden. Even after his enlightenment Buddha suffered from bodily

ailments and when Ananda questioned ‘Lord! Are you suffering?’ he smiled in reply.

The Christ was nailed on the cross and Muhammad suffered from fever. Man can access

or be immutable consciousness but the body doesn’t drop off after he sees himself in that

way. Enlightenment is how we look at the world: it is not escaping its boundaries.
 Shah 94

Uncertainty, weakness and failure are all recognition of the intractability

of the Real. Beckett lets his characters and the spectators know that it is
impossible for them to arrive rationally at any metaphysical or even
ethical certainty. He shows us the futility of expecting total answers to
our questions about the metaphysical or even the practical world
(Ramakrishna 143).

He makes us realize our “ultimate penury.” Life drags us on. There is an irrational

will to live, an unknown impulse to act, to express, to go on, to keep on living, talking,

planning, thinking. “This is precisely the clown’s endeavor. He alone has the resilience to

endure because he accepts the right to fail” (Robinson 239).

Murphy is a solipsist who denies the reality of the external world. Alone “is the only

word that has reality and significance, the world of [one’s] own latent consciousness” (P:

3). One is forever imprisoned in self-consciousness. “We are alone, we can’t know and

can’t be known. Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, who knows

others only in himself” (P: 48-49). Beckett assumes our inability to know everything

“except what goes on inside our heads” (Fletcher 134). All Beckett’s heroes are

solipsists. “Consciousness can know only itself” writes Hassan, “this is the condemned

epistemology of Beckett… The solipsism of mind reduces all its activities to a closed

game” (Hassan

207). As Mayoux explains: “When all fabrications of what we call civilization, all objective

structures, are rejected as illusory, when all worldly activity is viewed as vain, useless,

ridiculous, nothing remains but the consciousness of ourselves, and the forms of expression

which we can give to that consciousness” (142).

Not recognizing or knowing the intellect (which is to be distinguished from reason)

or intellective intuition and knowing little of traditional metaphysics, of universal

principles, typical Beckett characters such as Vladimir and Estragon are incapable of
 Shah 95

anything more than mere beginnings of impulses, desires, thoughts, moods, memories and

impression. They are in a twilight state, half conscious and they don’t qualify to be human

as they aren’t rational metaphysical beings. They are living on the most primitive level––

nay animal level. They have nothing worthwhile to do, to know, to celebrate but indulge in

sado-masochistic and absurd games to pass the time. They live the most inauthentic life

(authentic life can come only by being oneself. And not alienated and estranged and exiled.

Modern man is a stranger or an outsider and indulges in vain rebellion but all this

intensifies his fallen and exiled status and makes him incapable of reckoning with the

plague of life, not to speak of enduring and contemplating death.) Because everything that

makes life meaningful and purposeful is vetoed on a priori terms. The Beckettian world is

peopled by not a single Man but by tramps, vagrants, hoboes, and other vagabonds. His

world isn’t creative—but sterile.

Although Beckett condemns us to hell on whose door is written, “Abandon ye all

hope who enter in” there is nostalgia for lost God, lost values and this too is killing.

“Beauty, grace, truth of the first water, I knew they were all beyond me.” And they are

beyond modern man as Beckett sees him. The universe far from being joyous leila or play

of God, creative exuberance and radiation of goodness of a Being who is all-good as Plato

or Augustine would characterize the creation, is, a nightmare for Beckett. There is no

answer to Pozzo’s cries for help implying man lives and dies like a dog, inauthentically.

Man isn’t a theomorphic being, a being made in the image of God, or would be God, a

potential God, or perfect man of Sufism who appropriates all the divine attributes and

houses God’s secret (sirr in Sufi terminology) but bloody ignorant ape for Beckett and he

deplores the fact that he isn’t prepared for evolution, for psychological and spiritual
 Shah 96

maturation. Between two nothingnesses, between two nights of the womb and the tomb

flickers for an instant the light of life.

On the level of artistic creation, Moran’s journey is from the “Apollonian

microcosmic world of “individual existence, reason, beauty, and will to the Dionysian

macrocosmic” world of the “eternal, the universal, the immaterial, and the mythical”(Kern

40). This echoes the mystic’s journey.

In Beckett’s early works we see a “search for freedom, and the right to live his own

life.” His later works show a constant vigil to keep the freedom gained and to “search for

reality that lies behind mere reasoning in conceptual terms” (Esslin 35). There is terrifying

portrayal of man’s suffering in the face of unending uncertainty. For Beckett man’s tragedy

is his inability to know not only others but even himself. He encounters abyss in this search

for the self.

The narrator in First Love experiences all the problems of perception that are to

torture his successors. Nothing outside the subjective space – nay even memory is to be

trusted. The dualism of subject and object, never to be convincingly bridged again in the

post-Cartesian Western philosophy was now a malaise. The problem of perception begins

never to be effectively tackled as reason replaced Intellect. Because Cartesian view posits

two parallel universes of soul and body, subject and object in the absence of any notion of

intellective intuition, the outside world loses its objectivity. As Beckett said in Proust, “the

individual is a succession of individuals, the world being a projection of the individual’s

consciousness.” Words like “love” and “beauty” remain enigmas to this lover, qualities he

has read about but is liable to apply to the wrong situations. Mutually annihilating

antitheses that we find in plenty in Beckett implicate incomprehensible nothingness of

 Shah 97

reality rather than a vision of some unifying transcendent principle which dissolved

dualisms though retained duality of experience. As L. Ramakrishna puts it: “All certitude in

perception is false because what we see is only what we think we see. Doubt (which is the

constant motif of Beckett’s themes) is truer than certitude and doubt is an admission of

failure of the rational intellect” (Ramakrishna 149).

However we do see lucidity and awareness, approaching mystical witnessing

consciousness in the creator-heroes:

But the characters of Beckett are not fooled: they know that they are
seeking only a brief diversion and are, even so, conscious of the
crudeness of their deception… their concentration on the game breaks
down frequently. At such moments, abruptly, their words have another
ring. There is no longer a game being played, they are fully steeped in
horror, and their words suggest a gamut of reactions from the sarcasm of
lucidity to the outcry of anguish that rises from depths that are beyond
any vision (Grossvogel 102-103).

Beckett thus shows how hard the process of overcoming delusion is and how sharp

like a razor’s edge is the path of salvation. The devil is often invincible.

This awareness is quite different from reasoning faculty and corresponds to some

extent to the practice of sharpened awareness in mysticism. Leila Ramakrishna identifies

this faculty with the pure consciousness that observes the self that expresses itself as

personality. It is the awareness which remains strong in the tramps of Waiting for Godot, in

Hamn and Clov (Ramakrishna: 32).

Artist and Philosopher of Failure

Samuel Beckett has described himself as an artist of failure. Avertz has described him as the

artist of deprivation and terminal depression. Failure is indeed key to his whole oeuvre.
 Shah 98

Failure to find one self or one’s identity, to communicate or even to express, to find

meaning and purpose, to know his whither and whence, to find peace and fulfillment, to

know anything, to comprehend or make sense of the world, to escape from hell or

purgatory that this world is, to accept the world, to love, to believe, to trust anything even

senses and to live fulfilled life. Theodicy fails to justify God’s actions, philosophy fails to

illumine the dark mystery of existence, religion fails to be credible now, art fails to save or

substitute religion, science fails to deliver and life fails to roll any mass. All ends in ashes

and dust. Almost all important concerns that haunt his works are expression of this failure.

Foregrounding man’s misery, helplessness and portraying life as farce, as sound and fury

signifying nothing we find in Beckett almost all the corollaries of this theme of failure.

Failure to realize values – truth, goodness, and beauty – makes the world of Beckett a

wasteland, a nihilon. But it must be noted that Beckett has not invented this mess, this

thesis that man fails. He has only presented objective picture of contemporary wasteland

and mess that he found around him. We can summarize Beckett’s themes as failure and

futility of all human endeavors, inaccessibility of timeless reality that takes us beyond

suffering, suffering of being, incomprehensibility of universe, impotence of reason, failure

of communication, elusiveness of meaning, dreamlike quality of all that we cherish,

delusion of self, mirage of desire, circularity of time and disbelief in human action,

impossibility of transcendence and real love, utter absurdity of our constructions, vanity of

philosophy, blindness of theology, stubborn refusal of man to face truth, staleness of all the

uses of the world, fall of the world and fall of man.

Beckett like many key modern figures experiences God negatively which amounts to

not experiencing him in the traditional sense. As Anders points out: “their [Rilke, Kafka or
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Beckett’s] religious experience springs, paradoxically always from religious frustration,

from the fact that they do not experience God and thus paradoxically from an experience

they share with unbelief” (Anders 145).

Art according to Beckett attempts to elucidate the impossible. Reality is chaos,

unrepresentable, best captured in silence beyond all signifiers. The artist must fail because

“to create in art, that which is not art, which can’t be, because as soon as it is realized in

concrete terms (paint or words) it ceases to be itself” (Beckett 4). As an artist Beckett can’t

create and define “that which, created and defined, ceases to be what it must be if it is to

reveal the truth of the human situation: Man as a Nothing in relation to all things which

themselves are nothing” (Beckett 5). “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. Failure

is his world” concludes Beckett in the “Three Dialogues,” with Georges Duthuit (qtd. in

Esslin 18). The narrator of the Texts for Nothing expresses this failure of artistic enterprise

as “No, but one last memory, it may help, help to fail yet again.”

The theme of failure is elucidated in the most fundamental quest for the Self.

According to Beckett there is a possibility of coming closer and closer to this ideal, our

essence, the Nothing at the heart of self, and even perhaps discovering, “in the very

process of grappling with the impossibilities, some new synthesis of the Self, detached

from time and space and above all from language, for whom the very fact of

annihilation is a promise of a rebirth in some new dimension” (Beckett 5). But

somehow we don’t find saintly serenity that accompanies this great discovery. Some

Beckett heroes such as Murphy and the Unnamable do come close to heaven but

nevertheless are separated from it by a great gulf.

Lucky’s famous speech presents the theme of failure very forcefully. It shows

failure of philosophy, religion, science and other human disciplines to cure man’s
 Shah 100

alienation, suffering and imperfection. It is a lament for “man in short and man in brief,”

who everlastingly “wastes and pines,” and whose inexplicable existence seems “for reasons

unknown to shrink and dwindle.” Towards “the great cold the great dark the air and the

earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas… the stones… so

calm…Cunard…finished” (WG : 42-44).

Alienation is the chief mark of Beckett heroes. We don’t find identity being achieved

or the still centre of reality being found in the sense traditional mysticism would have it as

otherwise some of his heroes who have traveled farthest in search of essences would be

saints or would-be-saints. Knowing oneself is what these heroes are ever seeking but

failing. In The Unnamable the problem is presented in its worst form. The hero who insists

that he has never seen or met himself and can therefore not identify himself (UN: 228), is

harassed by inquisitors for his lack of identity. The agonizing search for oneself, for

identity, for essence, for the space of no words or no-mind where the still centre of reality

is and man becomes forever free, despirated, jivan-mukta, stimulates “such feverish, though

inconclusive, verbal and mental activity in all the later fiction” (Radke 58). The experience

of existence is nothing more nor less than the “experience of the self” (Rickels 136). The

Beckettian hero resists self-contemplation, flees self-perception. Only after he has tried

every escape route imaginable does he come to accept that “the preoccupation… with his

own self is primary.” “What must concern him,” writes J. C. Oates, “is himself alone, and

there remains only the blackness of self, ‘short of all its accidents’; here there is

metaphysical chaos, no dimensions, no time, no relatives, no absolutes beyond the

fluctuating absolute of the ‘I’ which continues on but which finds no rest because there is

no final answer” (Oates 164). According to Oates, in Beckett’s characters “the ‘I’ moves
 Shah 101

inward to a frank, brutal…consciousness of its own essence” (Oates 160). Indeed, the

confrontation with the hollow self is frightful. “Terrible is the awareness that takes

possession of man in his solitude – that he exists for nothing” (Radke 146). Self-knowledge

is above all an encounter with the inevitability of death, with the utter gratuitousness of

existence.

Esslin writes that for Beckett

The novel is not an act of communication or story telling, it is a lonely

and dedicated exploration, a shaft driven deep into the core of the self. It is
a self-contradictory, quixotic…attempt at expressing the inexpressible,
saying the unsayable, distilling the essence of being and making visible
the still centre of reality” (Esslin 129).

This means he shows failure of language to correspond to reality. It is an argument against

all literalism – in philosophy, in theology and in art. But then he has no symbolism to

substitute this and that leads to meaninglessness.

For the traditions man is condemned to go for search for God or Self and there can

be no respite from it even after death. In Beckett we find this theme. Tyrannized by

persistent self consciousness, one can’t, however, abandon the search either. As Copeland

says: “An endless sentence that the artist can never serve out, the quest for self is

experienced as the punishment for some mysterious crime, and the effect of an unalterable

condemnation” (Copeland 183). As Copeland notes that in the later fiction the hero

recognizes that his duty to expiate the sin of existence involves the quest for self (Copeland

183). In The Play even after death the characters are compelled by self-perception to seek

the truth of their past and present situations. The play repeats itself and its peace remain

unattainable in this play. The characters must undergo endlessly what has been called
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“Beckett ordeal” to invent the right story to get peace. Art as evasion is replaced by art “as

a kind of absurd but inescapable imposition, a ‘pensum’ exemplary of the absurd

punishment that is our life” (Chambers 152). Speaking of the other plays he continues:

“Hamn can never die. Clov never leave, Godot never come, just as the Voice of Cascando

can never hope for “no more stories…sleep.” There is no end to the punishment inflicted

on man for having been born” (Fletcher 72-73). Life itself is “a pain that will not end”

(Glicksberg 41). No self or truth is found and therefore no expiation.

Beckett fails to connect to the world and nothing can reconcile him to life because he

has quite a negative view of transcendence. For Murphy “to be born is to be strangled into

respiration” (MU: 52). We may contrast this view with the attitude towards breathing in

Sufism where every breath is consciously taken and God glorified.

Beckett’s stage is the world of decay, disease and decadence. Beckett’s characters

die without reproducing themselves. Perpetuation of the species is considered one of the

poorer jokes of God. Since birth culminates in death and the interval between the two is a

sea of misery, to reproduce is a folly, as Ramakrishna notes (Ramakrishna 17). Time being

nontelological for Beckett, there could be no history and no children in the Beckettian

world (Ramakrishna 17).

As Beckett finds the Other incomprehensible or really alien and man quite fragile

dog’s life is an appropriate metaphor for our lives. Lived on whatever terms life is a “dog’s

life” according to the Unnamable. The individual in relation to the world is like a dog that

understands nothing “that always gets the same filth flung to it, the same orders, the same

cajoleries, the same threats (TR: 362). The Other can’t be assimilated in love either. For

Beckett relationship with women fails to deliver. Belacqua’s lifelong endeavor to attain a
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god-like omniscience from sex is doomed to failure in a godless world. There are more

pricks than kicks to life in every sense” (Finny 66).

Weariness is one of the important motifs in Beckett. “So there you are again’ (WG:

9) “Why this farce day after day” (EG: 18), and “that bloody awful day, long ago, before

this bloody awful day” (EG: 32). In Beckett’s plays we notice weariness and decadence

even at the beginning. Only progression is towards greater weariness and decadence. Grim

images and pictures of misery and frustration abound. e.g., In Theatre I, A., who is blind

starving beggar, seems miserable enough but he isn’t miserable enough to let himself die.

“That was always my unhap, unhappy, but not unhappy enough” (E&O: 23). “Even the

broken shape of the word ‘unhap’ reveals the inconclusiveness, the prolonging of the agony

of the one who is dying but not dead... He has nothing but distaste for the sound of the

human voice, he has no links with people, no memories he wishes to retain” (Ramakrishna

83).

All images of life are problematic for Beckett. Birth is recognized as a moment when

“Eternity enters time, Being enters existence. The crime is to have been born, the

punishment takes the form of remaining alive” (Pilling 120). Reproduction is really a

crime. Love is impossible. Beauty and grace are inaccessible. We see a persistent mood of

brooding decay throughout. His anti-heroes are not presented as resourceful, virile human

beings but, instead, as crippled human beings. They are wrecks and failures in physical if

not spiritual terms as well. Watt is a hunchbacked dwarf who walks awkwardly, Molloy is

a bed-ridden parody of man; Nagg and Nell are legless, while Hamm is blind and confined

to a wheelchair. His characters are often unable to perform normal physical and
 Shah 104

physiological functions. Minds too are afflicted with painful memories. There is neither

honour nor dignity. They are often old and indeed wretched of the earth.

Beckett’s fiction could be seen as an expression of cursing imagination. A curse on

humanity, rationality, intelligence, order, fate, God, language, life, perfectibility, art,

philosophy, love and values. It is scepticism in its most disgusting form that mocks man’s

knowledge of God or self or truth. It is a world where ugliness triumphs and man is

defeated. Man finds neither otherworldly nor this worldly heaven. All hope of evasion is

abandoned: “unhappiness like mine, there is no annihilating that.”

Modern man has failed to build metaphysics after rejecting the one he received from

above, from sages and traditional philosophers. Futile search for metaphysical systems that

unillumined reason and empiricism have weaved forms the dominant theme of Beckett’s

works.

The search for meaning in Beckett is doomed to failure because the characters are

not sure what they are searching for. With Molly, it becomes an inconclusive search for his

mother’s room. Malone, crawling on his belly, looks for Pim, who he finds lying in the

mud. Without knowing why, Estragon and Vladmir seek a meeting with Godot whom they

do not know. In Sufism we say that those who travel on the path without a Master have the

Devil as their master. The search for self is the most adventurous and difficult of journeys

as it is the greatest treasure that there is. There is a great science for this that we call

religious and mystical traditions. There are well defined stations on the way. Beckett has

gone for the great project without mastering the traditional science of it and one can dispute

if he had the necessary qualities for pursuing it in all humility. One wonders at the audacity

of him who laughs away achievements of the science of the inner discipline that has been
 Shah 105

perfected for millennia and has been yielding fruits as evidenced by a huge number of

saints, sages, traditional thinkers and exemplary people who lived in tune with cosmic

rhythms.

A profound sense of loss pervades all Beckett’s work as it pervades Nietzsche and

certain other writers who know what it means to lose God. There is not the glib

contemporary casualness towards the death of God. His nostalgia for buried values ( “of

no longer usable bicycles, crutches, painkillers, quotations, which are being used all the

same”), may be interpreted as desperation for fragmentary images of transcendence.

As Kennedy puts it:

The agnostic probing of former certainties is itself sorrowful, and haunted

by a memory of lost values and styles… The haunted, melancholy voices
tend also to be accompanied by a paradoxically intrepid, stoical, voice –
Sisyphus inexplicably persisting on rolling his stone (as in the otherwise
different vision of Camus), with variation on the text of “I can’t go on, I
must go on” (Kennedy 157-158).

Kenedy recognizes in Company and That Time the remnant of the old Platonic or Romantic

longing for essences; for a future union of word and being, self and non-self. And it is

probable that the Beckett world, for all its fundamental skepticism and drive towards

‘nothingness,’ is guided by a much stronger remnant of those immortal longings – essence,

union, communion, divinity – than are likely to be admitted by most contemporaries

(Kennedy 162).

Beckett is no ordinary agnostic. For him God is a useless hypothesis. His impotence

and unconcern is writ large on the face of the world, in the very structure of things. Even if

one grants God’s existence man’s loneliness and absurd predicament in a cold indifferent

universe can’t be wished away. Nothing will lighten man’s burden and nothing will
 Shah 106

reconcile him to it. O! “light gleams an instant only” says Pozzo, then death, darkness.

Metaphysical inquiries are useless. Man suffers and there is no cure for that. That seems to

sum up it all.

The theme of failure is there because Beckett’s metaphysics and epistemology

necessitates it. He finds philosophy as a failure having failed to clarify the fundamental

problem of existence. Beckett has strong arguments against rationalist metaphysics. Both

Heidegger and Beckett perceive the futility of even asking many of the traditional

philosophical questions. As Arne Naess paraphrases Heidegger’s point in Vom Wesen

Wahrheit: “Man misunderstands himself when he seeks the light, seeks ‘the meaning of his

existence,’ or a ‘goal’ which will be illuminated for him. Beyond the light giving function

which man, as Dasein, himself is, there is no further source of illumination” (Naess 239).

The Buddha long before recognized this point and that is why he said, “Be a light unto

yourself.” Eckhart repeated it so often. The great sages and saints whose discoveries

perennialists seek to advocate have never looked for any illumination outside one’s own

self. Intelligence is needed for metaphysical inquiries. But Beckett’s characters badly fail in

doing or practizing metaphysics and even are not in a situation in which metaphysical

inquiries could be carried out. They are too busy and occupied with fight for survival and

petty concerns to do metaphysics, to think hard and consistently or perfect the virtue of

attention or method of contemplation.

The idea of working through words towards the silence of Being, manifested

appropriately by Heidegger and echoed in Beckett sees ultimate reality as of the nature of

chaos and ridicules man’s attempts to create order or semblance of order. (e.g., Belacqua’s

lunch ritual, Watt’s endless lists, Winnie’s stocktaking). There is terrifying portrayal of
 Shah 107

man’s suffering in the face of unending uncertainty. The two tramps are incapable of

anything more than mere beginnings of impulses and memories. Everything that arises in

them sinks back into forgetfulness before it arrives anywhere to make possible thought and

this is why Beckett is charged for deriding intelligence. And this is a sin for which

perennialists for whom intelligence is central to definition and dignity of human can’t

forgive Beckett.

An excursion in the Beckettian world is descent into hell, to use Altizer’s expression

who considers Beckett a seer who demolishes cherished idols and exposes hollowness of

modern substitutes of God and illusory nature of all attempts to escape from the

nothingness at the heart of ourselves and the world.

Time lacerates and what is needed from man is decreation as Simone Weil has

emphasized. Suffering could be a providential means for laceration. The encounter with the

dark night of the soul is full recognition of the horrors of life in time. The self stops to

pursue life in time although it continues to be here on earth when it has an overwhelming

awareness of failure, of self disgust, of boredom, and insignificance, when it perceives

everything as not I, as ashes or dust. But after this comes the light of eternity in the

world of mystics unlike in the Beckettian world where time reigns all the way and is

displaced by what has been called bad eternity. Eternity traditionally implies joy which is

not there for Beckett heroes in general.

In Beckett’s works we don’t see the state of the self as having arrived at its

destination. In mystical traditions one never arrives in the sense that one need not travel

further. Restlessness knows no end. Arrival is a really a starting point where we learn how

to look at life and move on.

 Shah 108

Beckett is haunted by the problem of death though his characters don’t fear it. In the

majority of his writings he is concerned to find from a non-religious perspective a meaning

for that which obliterates all meaning, including its own, and an explanation for that

inexplicable. The central theme of the futile and purposeless death of the individual in his

earlier works is subsumed in an “apocalyptic terrifying vision, not of one man, but of Man,

the senseless extinction, not of the individual life, but of all life, leaving a frozen or a

burning planet to wander for all eternity in the absurd infinity of space.” This echoes

Russell’s oft quoted version of modern science’s view of the probable end of the universe.

This, of course, is the main theme of Lucky’s vision in Waiting of Godot of “the earth in

the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas

alas….” This vision of senseless final extinction and annihilation reaches its climax in

Endgame where Hamm and Clov represent the last of living things in a burnt-out landscape

of stones and dust. Hamm and Clov embrace death and are horrified by life. Hamm is

frightened by contemplating that rats and fleas, which symbolize life, exist. In Endgame

we find horrifying foreboding of apocalapstasis. Endgame is about death. The heroes

dream not of the fair Helen but, as Adorno says, they live by “dreaming of their own death

in a shelter where it is time it ended”(Adorno 86). Man’s only fate is to die and then suffer

even after death. As Tom Stoppard puts it, the fate of man is “death followed by eternity –

the worst of both the worlds” (Stoppard 52). The “exploded personalities” of Endgame

utter a “cry of anguish over the insufferable state of being human.” Existential revolt is this

cry. This is apparent in the attempted prayer or inability to pray or parody of prayer: “We

find disappearance of one side of cosmic equation causes the anguish which is
 Shah 109

presented by Beckett. ‘The majesty of God + nothingness of man = the universe’ as

Duckworth puts it (Duckworth 15). Beckett considers as futile the proposed attempts by

humanists and progressivists to compensate the loss of faith.

What sustains man is faith in human relationships though absurdists can’t imagine

any reason to hold this faith. From the perennialist viewpoint this faith preserves enough

reflection of God to make life endurable for the secular humanist. But Beckett is there to

shatter all images of love and faith. Filial love, love of neighbours, love of friends – all are

mocked at. Both Hamm and the old man are in some way cruel to their parents. “I left my

mother to die alone in a ditch.” Ruby Cohn sees Endgame as a “bitterly ironic version of

creation and resurrection.” “The dramatic action presents the death of the stock props of

Western civilization – family, cohesion, filial devotion, parental and connubial love, faith

in God, empirical knowledge, and artistic creation” (Endgame: The Gospel according to

Sam Backett 233). John Unterecker sees Endgame as “funny, grim account of the species

man’s terrible anguish of survival in a post-Darwinian meaningless world” (Unterecker

161).

What undoes man is time and for Beckett it is the villain, the devil that spoils

everything, the instrument of bondage. It is the fruit of the Fall – nay it constitutes the fall

of man. Living in time is burden, a punishment. Time, the dimension of the absurd is an

unceasing hemorrhage of existence for Beckett.

Pointing to the temporal dimension of the self the Unnamable asserts that “Time is

one thing I another” (TR: 383) but still one is condemned to live in the world of time with

all its horror. The mystic is light because he has finished his business with time. Time can’t

crush him. By living in essential self or perfecting the art of detachment it is possible to
 Shah 110

conquer time. But Beckett fails to perfect this art. And that is why we find even in the

Unnamable who has traveled quite far in the search of essential self the killing effect of

time. Beckett thus presents the point:

The question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn’t pass, doesn’t
pass from you, why it piles all about you, instant to instant on all sides,
deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, other’s time, the time of
the ancient dead, and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by
grain, neither dead nor alive, saying any old thing your mouth full of sand,
oh I know is immaterial, time is one thing, I another, but the question may
be asked, why time doesn’t pass (TR: 393).

Time doesn’t seem to have any such function that religion attributes to it of God’s

means of soul-making, of decreation and preparation for eternity. Time lacerates, it

doesn’t pass. “…time runs out at an infinitely slow pace… This is the world of

entropy… of the symptomatic void” (Hassan 14). For Beckett Time is “an enormous

prison” (TR: 130). It is “not a road moving towards a goal but a labyrinth in which one

wanders lost, around and around”(TR: 131).

Beckett brings home the message that man fails and necessarily fails in finding

fulfillment, rest and home in this world. He is in exile and has lost the address to his

homeland. This world is not man’s home. Nothing in the world of time or what man can

conceive of brings him peace. But man is condemned to seek home or rest. He seeks and

finds only and that is why he can’t do or live without finding his home. But finding this

home, finding the beyond is e x t r e m e l y u n l i k e l y i f not impossible. This

constitutes his tragic pessimistic vision. Seeing Godot as a symbol of rest or

 Shah 111

homeland Beckett drives home his painful verdict that the search for home, for the yonder

land of no-sorrow, for the sanctuary where Love resides is vain and futile.

Time for Plato is the moving image of Eternity but is cursed in Beckett’s works.

Estragon furiously replies to Vladimir’s question—why lucky became dumb.

Have you not been tormenting me with your accursed time? It is

abominable…. one day, isn’t that enough for you? One day like any other
he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we will go deaf, one day we
were born, one day we shall die, the same day., the same second, isn’t that
good enough for you.”(WG: 57).

But one day one could be enlightened, delivered from dukkha—from death itself. Here

now one could be reborn in the kingdom of God, in heaven. However, that day and that

instant never comes for Beckett.

Beckett presents the agony of Self Seeking and man’s failure or reluctance to

consent to die to the self, to be nothing, to renounce all possessions and thus consequent

misery.

The quest of Beckett heroes is analogous to mystical quest that however fails. They

remain with ‘why’ in exile unanswered and all that they can see is sin: “All here is sin,”

says the Unnamable, “you do not know why, you do not know whose, you do not know

against whom, someone says to you…”( TR: 407).

For Beckett it appears that we are thrown into the world and it would have been the

greatest good if we were not born at all, if the calm of death and inexistence weren’t

disturbed, if we never had become conscious personalities having an ego separate from the

universe as a whole. Hardy quotes Sophocles to the effect that life offers no good than the

knowledge that it is the only good not to be born at all. Beckett along with Schopenhauer
 Shah 112

would perfectly agree. Suffering (e.g., the suffering of animals) isn’t such a stupendous

problem but the fact that we are conscious, self-conscious sufferers is the problem. We

know we suffer and that is killing. Beckett is effectively saying the same thing. Beckett’s

man is utterly in a state of disequilibrium, at peace neither with the stars, nor with the trees,

nor with himself nor with God. He desperately seeks equilibrium but identifies it with the

peace of grave. He unsuccessfully seeks a state which Nietzsche called “innocence of

becoming.” He could never accept his being in the world and neither the becoming. He

resents becoming. What he dreads most is consciousness because he couldn’t see it as

identical with Bliss. He knew only dukkha and had found only quasi-nirvanic state and that

too occasionally for his heroes. He is skeptical of idea as well as deed, or of faith as well as

action. He doesn’t believe in prayer or meditation either. What Moran feels at one time is

almost universally true about Beckett heroes: “Then I was nothing but uproar, bulk, rage,

suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain. Just the opposite of myself, in fact” (TR:

108). However this shows he somehow knows his self is serenity and joy and not these

things but the problem is finding oneself.

Truth is ever deferred, and thus unreachable. Dieter Wellerchoff thus sums up

Beckett’s failure in his attempt to demythologize:

In all the strivings of his imagined creatures we have the triple

ridiculousness of a fool who is looking, with inadequate strength on a
wrong road, for a goal that perhaps does not exist at all. But the laughter
ceases in the presence of the intensity of the effort. We are watching the
compulsive action beyond the reach of irony, a furious mono-mania from
which no laughter can liberate us. This is happening in earnest. Beckett
himself, who wants to unmark madness, is deeply enmeshed in it
(Wellerschoff 107).
 Shah 113

In spite of their insistence on impotence and ignorance, Beckett’s narrator heroes are

unable to relinquish the old Greek quest for the metaphysical meanings of the self, the

world, and God. But

“…it is a hopeless quest, to be sure, since there may be neither mind nor
body to undertake it, and language may mistake it. The unnamable begins,
unbelieving in his ‘I’, unbelieving in his beginnings, knowing only that the
discourse must go on. Towards the end he asks himself “whether I am
words among words, or silence in the midst of silence.” Implicit in his
long monologue is Heidegger’s haunting question: Why is there any Being
at all and not rather Nothing” (“Philosophical Fragments in the Works of
Samuel Backett” 176-177).

Not only is life too painful for contemplation but also too opaque for intelligence.

Intelligence is not cut to the measure of absurd mystery that the universe and life present.

Nothing can justify the ways of God to a finite rational consciousness. Existence can’t be

analyzed, labeled or understood; it resists all our naming and pigeonholing into some

meaningful form. Nothing answers the question what is it. So it is better to believe that

there is no problem. “There is no key, there is no problem” he asserted in an interview

when asked whether the preoccupation with the problem of being posed by the

existentialists might not be a key to his works. He declines to be an intellectual and is

content to be “only a sensibility.” To quote from Malone Dies: “But what matter

whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing

as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor why I am, nor where I am, nor if I

am” (MD: 65). “And if I ever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be

said, even though all has not been said, even though nothing has been said”
 Shah 114

(MD: 77). “God does not seem to need reasons for doing what he does, and for omitting to

do what he omits to do, to the same degree as his creatures” (MD: 89). He is not desperate

to solve the riddle of existence; it is reason’s vain endeavor to try to scan existence. We are

here to endure experience and lament that it is hard and painful; we are not to comprehend

it. We need not the lies of philosophy or theology but strength to honorably face the trial

that life is, to patiently suffer the punishment for an unknown crime. Why we are born he

doesn’t know and is not interested in knowing it either. Why we suffer he doesn’t know

and is disinclined to know. He is only aware, painfully aware, that we suffer and are

condemned to suffer. He makes metaphysical assertions, despite his attempt to avoid

metaphysics, that we can’t be saved, that there is no eternity, that there is no enlightenment

(in their traditional senses). The universe, according to Moran, is made of silence, the

terrifying silence which seems to be “the inhuman reality of stasis.” Beckett’s definition of

man is that he is a suffering animal. He is different from other animals only by virtue of his

consciousness of suffering; he suffers more intensely and consciously. There is no release

from the purgatory of life. The end result of his philosophy is best captured in Pyrhho’s

words in Lucian’s “Philosophies for Sale” as “ignorance, deafness, blindness.” He reduces

man made in God’s image, (God is Intelligence according to traditions) to a lowly worm.

It is the imagery of dogs and worms that figures so prominently in the Beckettian world.

Men are apes, not theological and philosophical apes but the apes that suffer and find

themselves condemned to hell for reasons unknown. Man is not potentially a god or

destined to be some worthy thing in future. No paradise awaits him though he seems to

have lost one.

 Shah 115

I quote certain statements of his characters from his works that are more or less

representative of him and express something of his disjointed and inchoate philosophical

vision. “What is wrong with me, what is wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my

skull, out of my skull, oh to be in atoms, in atoms”(Mrs. Ronney in ATF). “Are you

listening to me? Is anyone listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is any one bothering

about me at all?” (W1 in Play) “Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain

amount of both. They being one, perhaps it is more wickedness to pray for more” (W1 in

Play).

story… if you could finish it… you could rest… sleep… not before… oh I
know …the one I’ve finished… thousands and one… all I ever did… in
my life… with my life… saying to myself… finish this one… it is the
right one… then rest… sleep… no more stories… no more words… and
finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest… straightaway
another… to begin… to finish… saying to myself finish this one… then
rest… this time… it is the right one…. This time… you have it… and
finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest…” (Voice in
Cascendo).

“You are on earth, and there is no cure for that” (EG 43). We see abundant images of

cursing, of abuses, of disease, of alienation and madness in Beckett’s works. Nothing

human or superhuman is worth celebrating for Beckett. Only transcendence is unalloyed

perfection and could be glorified without qualification. But there is little or only negative

transcendence in his view. All the beauty and goodness that we see around doesn’t

mean much. Beckett doesn’t bother to inquire where from has goodness and beauty come

despite his rejection of materialism. Trapped in immanence he feels the stink in

everything. Beckett doesn’t arrive anywhere and isn’t interested in arriving either. He has

nowhere to go and no worry to go anywhere. Just to endure like Sisyphus. Not a heroic

endurance. Not
 Shah 116

with a stoic spirit of resignation either. He tells stories that say nothing and for nothing.

Like Heidegger who reported that the world is that in the face of which one experiences

anxiety and like Camus who refers to the world as one to which he is opposed by all his

consciousness, Beckett puts us in a difficult situation. He wouldn’t much approve of

suicide but he has not even a single cheer for the will to life/love either. He sees us in a hell

from which there is no exit. He is pained to see himself hurled into life and laments that

there is no cure for that. All the great works of human spirit and reason, philosophies,

theologies, works of art and countless monuments of human civilization amount to nothing

in his scheme. Man, in this bleak vision, is indeed the scum of the earth, the puny little

vermin, the sticking dirt. The following description we find in Malone Dies is

perhaps representative of Beckett’s vision of the meaning and destiny of man.

But it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I
gave up trying to play and took to myself for ever shapelessness and
speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long stumbling with
outstretched arms, hiding. Such is the earnestness from which, for nearly a
century now, I have never been able to depart. From now on it will be
different….But perhaps I shall not succeed any better than hitherto.
Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark, without
anything to play with. Then I shall play with myself. To have been able to
conceive such a plan is encouraging (MD: 6).

While mysticism has envisaged an ascetic ideal as a means to an end that is a discovery of

life, larger life, life glorious and blissful, Beckett seems to envisage asceticism as an end

and there is no discovery of the splendour of the life of Sprit as a result of that. It is

asceticism of the one who is frustrated and repelled by the ups and downs of life. It is a

cynic’s asceticism, a kind of Maarian-Schopenhaurian asceticism. While the mystic

 Shah 117

achieves disinterested witnessing consciousness that is utterly at peace with the

phenomenal world and even sees it quite transformed and soul ravishing, Beckett achieves

at best lifeless neutrality that just endures without much resentment the succession of

phenomena. The mystic’s doors of perception are opened wide as the “Mind at Large”

becomes activated as Aldous Huxley saw, and perceive the world as if in a dream, more

colorful, more refreshing, more lovely, more meaningful. However Beckett is led to a

myopic constricted vision. To quote from Malone Dies again:

My sight and hearing are very bad, on the vast main no light but reflected
gleams. All my senses are trained full on me., me. Dark and silent and
stale, I am no prey for them. I am far from the sounds of blood and breath,
immured. I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among
them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That
which is seen, that which cries and wreathes, my witless remains.
Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide off the mark.
It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too can’t
be quiet (MD: 14).

While the mystic loves nature as he perceives the essences, the vision of ideal forms being

granted to him and he identifies his Beloved with the greenness of the leaves, and redness

of roses, Beckett’s characters rarely find joy in nature and hardly ever love it. Their view of

nature is hardly a match for mystical and Romantic view of the same. To quote Beckett

again in Malone Dies:

Sapo loved nature, took an interest in animals and plants and

willingly raised his eyes to the sky, day and night. But he did not know
how to look at all these things, the looks he rained upon them taught him
nothing about them. He confused the birds with one another, and the trees,
 Shah 118

and could not tell one crop from another crop… The sun, the moon, the
planets, and the stars didn’t fill him with wonder (MD: 20).

Sapo is a strange ascetic. “In the midst of tumult, at school and at

home, he remained motionless in hi place, often standing, and gazed
straight before him with eyes as pale and unwavering as the gulls” ( MD:
22).

Beckett says that man is expiating for an unknown crime or sin. As he writes in Malone

Dies:

The idea of punishment came to his mind, addicted it is true to that

chimera and probably impressed by the posture of the body and the fingers
clenched as though in torment. And without knowing exactly what his sin
was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or
that this atonement, and so on, as if there could be anything but life for the
living. And no doubt he would have wondered if it was really necessary to
be guilty in order to be punished but for the memory, more and more
galling, of his having consented to live in his mother, then to leave her.
And this gain he could not see as his true sin, but as another atonement
which had miscarried and, far from cleansing him of his sin, plunged him
in it deeper than before (MD: 82).

Lest it be concluded that Beckett gives up and despairs of man or frightens us by

foregrounding ordinary man’s failure and civilization’s hollow claims. Beckett doesn’t

qualify as a thorough going pessimist. He qualifies both his negative and positive

judgments by a big “perhaps.” He doesn’t seem to be a happy atheist or even sure that men

are without God. The tramps continue to wait for Godot, Winnie proclaims herself happy

and nothing like despair haunts her. “Happy Days” is a “poem of despair, and forbearance

and optimism” (Clurman 235). Helsa says: “The weight of despair is exactly balanced by
 Shah 119

the weight of optimism, the meaningfulness of compassion equalizes the meaninglessness

of isolation and ennui” (Helsa 145).

Beckett advocates positive values of love and compassion as the chief values.

Beckett’s greatness lies in asserting the need of self reliance and rejection of all external

props or agencies as helping in salvation. Hamm in Endgame and Winnie in Happy Days

realize that no external agency will come to their rescue. The Man in Act Without Words

tries to work towards self-awareness in this spirit. In Come and Go and Not I, the

characters successfully try to overcome their anguish by love and compassion. Vladimir

says “Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which cruel fate consigned us.”

Vladimir thus finds that he can lift himself to the level of saints. There is a real sympathy

which overflows. “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?”

Beckett feels deep kinship with such writers as Schopenhauer and Leopardi, and

shares their repudiation of happy optimism but this doesn’t lead him to renunciation. Like

his character Bon in Murphy, no doubt, he hears “Pilate’s hands rustling in his mind’” but

he does not give up on that account. It has been asserted that Beckett is a meliorist or has

faith in man and man’s love for life despite all evidence to contrary. Vladimir and Dido are

incorrigible optimists because they go on despite Godot’s not arriving.

Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the incorrigible and

resolute will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an incomprehensible world.

The words of Nell—one of the two characters in Endgame who are trapped in ashbins,

from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—may be taken to summarize the

themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period:

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the
most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in
 Shah 120

the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story
we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any
more (EG: 20).

Beckett is beyond both hope and despair as Coe has pointed out. Hope implies a certain

predictable continuity in time – which Beckett questions. As hope is related to its

opposite despair Beckett can’t be characterized in such terms. On the positive side he

does seem to opt for life instead of death despite all its tragedies. He refuses to yield to

the crushing burden of time and continues his search for the essences, for the still centre

of reality, for courage to face nihilism and wreckage of our props that conventional

religions and science provide and move, hoping against hope, towards fulfillment of the

aspiration for the Absolute.

We now discuss Beckett’s vague and confused attempt (as seen from perennialists

perspective) to achieve what he considered his ideal of questionless existence, or choiceless

awareness in Krishnamurti’s phrase. Gunther Anders in his perceptive study on Waiting for

Godot rightly remarks that he attempts to answer how such a life, despite its aimlessness,

can actually go on. He answers that

life doesn’t go on, rather it becomes a “life without time.” Since “time”
springs from man’s needs and his attempts to satisfy them, that life is
temporal only because needs are either not yet satisfied, or goals have
already been reached, or objectives reached are still at one’s disposal. But
in case of Estragon and Vladimir’s lives, objectives no longer exist.
Events and conversation are thus going in circles (Metman 132).

Metman emphasizes the final endurance of man in the short mime Act without Words. After

his total defeat he sits motionless and erect until the curtain falls and this expresses a

dignity and concentration which stand in vivid contrast to the meandering semi
 Shah 121

hopelessness of the figures in Waiting for Godot. Such an “enduring” Heidegger calls an

“out-braving the utmost” and he says that together with a “standing in the openness of

Being” it constitutes “the full essence of existence” (Metman 136). But Buddha like

enduring and Nirvanic outbraving the utmost is a far cry from this enduring stoic calm and

resignation that Beckett may be suggesting though occasionally it is comparable to

mystic’s joy. Beckett doesn’t abandon himself to meaninglessness and Anders calls tramps

of the Waiting for Godot as ‘metaphysicists’ because they are incapable of doing without

the concept of meaning. They conclude from the fact of their existence that there must be

something for which they are waiting; they are champions of the doctrine that life must

have meaning even in a manifestly meaningless situation. They aren’t nihilist, rather the

incorrigible optimists. Man can’t be nihilist, even in a situation of utter hopelessness

(Anders 144).

From their standpoint man is an absurdity and God too, in the logical sense, is

impossibility, and it is just as impossible that He should not exist as that He should. And in

either case, the fault is His. As Fanniza puts Beckett’s contradictory position:

Hamm puts the case more strikingly. “Let us pray to God,” he orders.
There is silence, at the end of which he concludes, “The bastard! He
doesn’t exist! – an affirmation which is immediately qualified by Clov’s
“Not yet.” But even Hamm, who comes closer to despair than any other
Beckettian character, is anything rather than an atheist in the accepted
meaning of the word. Hamm’s black fury is directed at God; God’s non-
existence is the last and dirtiest trick which the sadistic Creator has played
on his victimised and miserable creation (Fanizza 74).

The evidence of evil is there to prove that the thesis of creator personal God does not stand.

A God who could create a world of suffering, absurdity and death, and yet still give man an
 Shah 122

inherent notion of beauty, happiness and significance (The Unnamable) can only be a being

so cruel and so utterly cynical as to pass all human understanding. For Beckett’s people,

God may well be a monstrous and inconceivable evil. He can’t be lightly dismissed. How

can there be salvation when reality can’t be trusted as well-meaning and good?

Man is a hopeless contradiction for Beckett. As Fanniza quotes Boisdeffre:

How many ages of accusation against the world reach an end: man’s
humiliation, which from Rousseau to Kafka, paralyzes so many writers,
culminates here in a world of abjection and ignonimity. Beings judge
themselves ‘in the tranquility of decomposition,’ reviewing their life as if
they were already dammed, and mingling forever with their solitude, their
humiliation, and their unhappiness before disappearing in an ocean of
ordure (Fanizza 73).

One thing is painfully brought to light in Beckett’s works: Goal is hardly ever reached by

his people, though they continue to hover around the threshold. Though reason may in

fact know that the goal exists, that there is the light at the other shore but what constitutes

human predicament is that the other shore is not reached. The ultimate self needs an

ending in order to know itself and escape from the dimension of time, space and language

in order to know itself. But time isn’t dissolved in Moment or Eternity in Beckett. Man

lives in time and dies in time. If time were not all would be fine but we are condemned to

live in time. But there is no salvation in time. But alas! There is no possibility for his

heroes to find salvation outside time. The pole of eternity is before them but the problem is

its accessibility. Malone vainly struggles in search of that ending of time. Coe elaborates

this point:

Like Vladimir and Estragon, like Hamm and Winnie, the dimension of
eternity into which he attempts to plunge proves a mirage. As they are
 Shah 123

moving instants slow down towards timelessness, their progressive

deceleration means that they take longer and longer to reach the goal—and
the nearer they reach to that goal, the slower they approach it, so that in a
universe controlled by rational logic, it is strictly impossible that they
should ever achieve it (“God and Samuel Beckett” 100 ).

It becomes as impossible as it is for material particle to attain velocity of light. The closer

it approaches it greater its weight and thus more and more difficult to accelerate. Coe

demonstrates this point in his essay and here is the relevant quote.

Two symbols dominate both the Trilogy and the plays: Zeno’s parable of
the “little heap of millet”, progressively augmented by half the quantity
remaining to be added from the total ( this becomes the “little heap of
days” in Endgame and Winnie’s mound in Happy Days); and secondly,
the recurring decimal or irrational number( Moran’s son’s dentist bears the
characteristic name of Mr Pi), which proceeds by ever-decreasing degrees
towards a logically definable objective, which objective, how ever can
only reach them when zero becomes a positive number. A “positive zero”
can be a solution to the Beckettian riddle. We know that, of necessity, it
must exist; we know equally well that we can never reach it(“you must go
on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I will go on,” says The Unnamable,”
you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’(414); and meanwhile, we can but
wait, caught up in the anguish of impossibilities—wait for the end of the
decimal, or the completion of the heap, for the materialization of the
dynamic Void, or whatever we like to call it. For of course, whatever we
call it, it remains by definition that which can’t be defined, except in terms
irrelevant to itself. So why not call it provisionally “Mr Knot”… or
“Godot”? (“God and Samuel Beckett” 106).

He can’t say anything but he can’t be silent either. Silence has however no beauty for him.

No God is revealed in silence. No revelation is communicated. It is nullity and negativity,

pure and simple. Language fails him. Past or tradition is valueless. He parodies academics
 Shah 124

and ‘ologies.’ He condemns all abstract generalizations. He doubts everything – all

knowledge claims, scriptures, wisdom traditions. He depicts man as a lone figure, without

hope of comfort,

facing the great emptiness of space and time without the possibility of
miraculous rescue or salvation, in dignity, resolves to fulfill its obligation
to express, weighing absence in a scale, attempting to enclose nothingness
is words. He is a builder of ruins who undermines his edifice at the very
same time as he raises it. He makes the trajectory of disaster. Every novel
is in a way the story of disintegration—either of the hero, or of time, or of
life. He has ventured very far in search of an absolute that is a minus
quantity (Esslin 14).

Work as Curse

Beckettian characters fail to find any meaning in work. It is not even a means of distraction

and not to speak of being a possible means of salvation as in karma yoga. Work is a

compulsion, so is walking or keeping breathing. “Difficult not to forget in your thirst for

something to do… that there is nothing to be done, nothing special to be done, nothing

doable to be done” (TR: 388). Clov is busy in the kitchen for nothing as the larder is

depleted. He incessantly looks out of the window though there is nothing on the horizon.

Lucky staggers under the weight of his bags carrying nothing but sand. It hardly matters

why man is condemned to drag on whether society or self compels him.

Once upon a time work was not compulsion; there was something divine in it. It was

not mechanical, drab and soul-killing always. However with mechanization,

industrialization and disappearance of traditional crafts and traditional work ethics it seems

boring, soul-killing, and trivial. The sacks carried by A and B in Act without Words and the

Unnameable’s transfer of water from one container to another endlessly in thimblefuls

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symbolize the trivial, mechanical and puerile nature of all work in a technological society

as L. Ramakrishna notes (Ramakrishna 19). A life engrossed in the phenomenal (the

dimension of “light”) is a “radiant abstract of the dog’s life” says the narrator in Murphy.

Dog’s life can’t be but a burden. As L. Ramakrishna points out the pacing of May in

Footfalls gets slower and slower. Maddy Rooney just wants to flop on to the ground like

jelly out of a bowl (Ramakrishna 18). The Unnamable is “tired of being matter – matter

pawed and pummeled endlessly in vain. Or give me up and leave me lying in a heap that

none would ever be found again to try and fashion it” (TR: 350).

Renunciation and Salvation

There is, in Beckett’s works, a level of consciousness which resists the withering

effect of Time. This awareness is quite different from rational intelligence. There are some

characters on Beckett’s stage quite indifferent and detached from their situations as they are

very much aware of the false nature of thought and action, of all appearances and

happenings in time. He pities many characters which live as if anaesthetized being

immersed in the “spray of phenomena.” Friendships, personality, language, filial

relationship, all are questioned and man forced to see himself naked, not unlike Lear and

the fraternity of mystics. As the self becomes more and more lucidly aware and sees vanity

and insubstantiality of all things, and staleness of all the uses and pleasures of the world

and nothingness at the heart of all existents, it becomes more and more disgusted with

ordinary concerns of life and “desires the End of all manifestation and is nostalgic for a

state before rebirth” (Ramakrishna 4). Beckett longs for a state of undifferentiated Being,

for the “matrix of surds,” for the primordial Chaos, silence and darkness reminding us of

certain apopathic theologians and mystics.

 Shah 126

Detachment is adopted by the Unnamable who dissociates from the voice and

manifest self. “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me” (TR: 293). The

protagonist of Not I tries to dissociate herself from all that she expresses, and also rejects

the identity offered by others in society. Murphy admires the inmates of asylum for their

“self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of a contingent world” (MU: 117).

One can well say regarding the tone of Beckett’s work that it echoes Schopenhaurian

disgust and despair of life and it illustrates the thesis that ‘where one is worth nothing, there

one should want nothing.’

Beckett shares with the mystics the diagnosis that nothing in the social world, no

commitment or engagement to any ideal in the world of time counts or gives man rest.

Murphy preferred the little world of his mind to the ‘big world’ of the social system. “I

am not the big world, I am of the little world” was an old refrain with Murphy. Against

this, a mystic would renounce this little world as well – he renounces all the worlds that

there are, the world of mind, the world of objects, the next world – nothing short of

Nothing or Unmanifest Absolute or zikr of God gives him rest.

Like Schopenhauer, whom he greatly admires, he feels that Will is evil, and that

desire is the source of our misery; such happiness as there is, therefore, can only be

obtained by the “ablation” of all desire. This, he says, in Proust, is “the wisdom of all the

sages, from Brahma to Leopardi,” the 19th century Italian poet whom he admired. Here are

some of Leopardi’s verses.

Now be for ever still,

Weary my heart. For the last cheat is dead,
I thought eternal dead. For us, I know
Not only the dear hope
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Of being deluded gone, but the desire.

Rest still for ever. You
Have beaten long enough. And to no purpose
Were all your stirrings; earth not worth your sighs.
Boredom and bitterness
Is life; and the rest, nothing; the world is dirt.
Lie quiet now. Despair
For the last time, Fate granted to our kind
Only to die. And now you may despise
Yourself, nature, the brute
Power which hidden, ordains the common doom,
And all the immeasurable emptiness of things (qtd in Batra 80).
The artist is to undertake the only authentic journey viz., journey into the heart of himself,

descent into the abyss of self, because there is no truth in phenomena. Art is the

“apotheosis of solitude” he wrote in Proust (P: 47). “The only fertile research is

excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but

negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the

core of the eddy” (P: 48). The artist must attempt to coincide with the intangible

nothingness at his core, “the dark absence beneath the surface husk.” The descent into the

self is the only authentic activity for the unutterable condition which is man’s. Religion

asks for a similar thing from the believers.

The Question of Identity

Beckett’s philosophical conclusion to the problems posed in his writing is reached in

The Unnamable “language exists in order to make silence possible.” Malone says, “I tell

myself so many things, what truth is there in all this babble?”(TR: 216). Similarly:
 Shah 128

My sense of identity was wrapped in namelessness hard to penetrate…and so on

for all the things…when all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no

things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. What do I know now

about them, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and

the world dies too, foully named (TR:

216).

Similarly we see “Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically

closed to the universe without” (TR: 56) which is further divided into three zones: the light,

the half light and the dark. Murphy’s adventures in these zones again shows that Beckett’s

searching self examination remains lost in the darkness visible in which the dead head

floats without ever attaining beatific visions that mystics have.

Eschatology

Beckett is the artist of the limit situations, endings and exhaustion. His concerns are

eschatological. “It presents the end of a man (The Unnamable, Krapp’s Last Tape), a

woman (Happy Days) a social order (the bourgeois culture represented by Pozzo) or the

whole world (Endgame)… Time is dawning to an end, its prisoners soon to be

extinguished” (Ramakrishna 8). The “ashes” are inherent in all manifestations of life and

the audience is made aware through the depictions of images of the End.

In Beckett’s eschatological perspective, the body, mental processes, societal

structures, all succumb to entropy whereas the awareness of the end, of decay remains

sharp. Clov says: “Let us stop playing.” The protagonist in Not I has some kind of

awareness that is “begging” the mind to stop raving, “begging” the lips to stop pouring out

words. It is a faculty that watches her thought and action. It is detached from the

contingencies or particulars of life. This choiceless awareness is in Krapp also. In fact the
 Shah 129

strength of Beckett’s characters is that they continue to be aware of themselves despite

various kinds of degenerations in senses, in physical faculties etc. as Esslin points out

(Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays 7).”Awareness then is what matters for

Beckett. He seems to prefer the Buddhist ideal of choiceless awareness more suited to a

dramatist whose concern is with the irrevocability of human suffering”(Lamont 201).

We may here summarize key themes that constitute metaphysical or philosophical

theses inviting response from those who believe in man’s grandeur and dignity and

accessibility of the Real.

Waiting for Godot: Waiting for nothing but inability to give up waiting for nothing.

Uselessness of philosophy and theology and institutions.

Endgame: Depression, some great catastrophe, ageing and senescence, physical

disabilities, despised parents, devastated present and on the road to ultimate deprivation

while hating imminent death, nostalgia for lost world of feeling, consolation of memory

of past events that had some emotional richness associated with them. Hamm remembers

all those he might have helped. Nell reminds Nagg of their amorous youth and exploits

on Lake Como.

Krapp’s Last Tape: Memory or what is functionally a sort of day dreaming, lost past and

sour present, old age “What is a year now? The sour cud and iron stool,” failure as writer,

changing personality, unhappy events of past like unhappy love affair, Krapp’s father’s

illness, his own constipation, mother’s death.

Happy Days: Triviality, memory of past happy days and need to talk and talk, refusal to

see approaching decay and death, no conception of life’s higher destiny or adventures.
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Play: Compulsion to talk ceaselessly and that too about sordid little story, failure to be

oneself or face solitude, hell as wages of the sin of lust and hatred, impossibility of

suicide or release from consciousness.

All That Fall: Physical disability in addition to obesity, desire to murder a child and death

wish, failure to cope up with the loss of their daughter.

Watt: Uselessness of systems when confronted with that which eludes rational
analysis.

Trilogy: Failed search for self, compulsion to talk, decay.

I take up the task of metaphysical appraisal of important theses of Beckett in chapter 7.

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6
Albert Camus: A Metaphysical Appraisal
My son, you consist of pure consciousness, and the world is not separate from you. So who
is to accept or reject it, and how, and why?
-Asthavarka Gita

Albert Camus is not seriously taken by the perennialists, as is none of the absurdists

or for that matter any major modern writer. They find all the major currents of modernist

thought shallow. They have little difficulty in dismissing existentialism as a philosophy and

its offshoot absurdism – Camus’ distancing himself from existentialism doesn’t alter the

validity of the critique of perennialists as he shares their distrust of transcendence and

humanism. Whether Camus qualifies as an existentialist (he explicitly rejected

existentialism) absurdist doesn’t affect the perennialists critique of him either because

what the perennialists criticize in leading figures of existentialism is shared by Camus

(posture against transcendence, humanism, subjectivism).

Absurdism and Nihilism

Camus is an absurdist in the sense that he declares reality to be absurd,

incomprehensible, opaque, meaningless. Regarding the question whether he is a nihilist

one may observe that he would qualify if he denied all the vestiges and forms of

transcendence by upholding consistent and thoroughgoing atheism. His atheism, like his

absurdism, is not quite sincere despite his belief to the contrary and his inability to see

contradiction. He said: “I don’t believe in God, but thereby I am not an atheist.” One

could well argue that there is hardly any respectable philosopher who is a nihilist as

Dostoevsky would construe the term. Nihilism is a problem rather than the
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position of any existentialist/absurdist thinker. Twentieth century thought following

Nietzsche is largely an attempt to proceed beyond nihilism. Camus is a thinker in this

tradition that seeks to proceed beyond nihilism. Camus is a humanist who encounters nihilist

impasse with great faith. If we ask what is it that seeks meaning, what sustains Camus’ faith

in man, what is it that endures after everything is subject to deconstructive critique that

Nietzsche fathered, why people love life despite all its pain and misery and why suicide is

only an accident or exception in the great adventure of life we will not be provided by any

convincing answer. Religions have answered these questions by positing an entity that

precedes thought which determines everything and defines our primordial nature. It is the

consciousness of Absolute, our theomorphic nature, our intelligence that transcends all

individualities, all limitations. Because modern thought doesn’t understand intelligence it

debases reason as perennialists allege. Most of nihilistic absurdist literature is a product of

this debased reason and equally misdirected sentimentalism. All important questions it

leaves unanswered. Values it leaves ungrounded. Existence it leaves unjustified. Man it

condemns to nullity.

Is the World Absurd?

Camus’ central passage explaining his position on the absurd character of the world

is the following.

The world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what
is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for
clarity whose call echoes in the human heart … Man stands face to face
with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for
reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need
and the unreasonable silence of the world (MS: 26).

A few comments on it from the mystical-perennialist perspective follow. The

world in itself may not be reasonable but one can make such a judgment only if one
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limits the world to what non-mystics limit it to – what is experienced by senses and

captured by thought and science. The world thus limited and severed from another world

of which it is a projection or reflection is of course not reasonable. We need to note also

that science has shown that at many planes this universe is comprehensible though why it

is comprehensible may not be comprehensible easily. Einstein’s famous statement that

the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible amounts

to refutation of Camus if he means that the world is not made for intelligence to grasp

at all. Another question that perennialists ask is why there is the wild longing for

clarity. This is easily explainable on perennialist grounds. Man is a microcosm. His

intelligence is made for knowing the Absolute. The Intellect is not to be reduced to

reason and as a transindividual faculty it grasps the secret of the universe. The universe is

ultimately of the nature of thought as certain modern physicists would tell us.

Lest that absurdist may claim to be on the side of reason or intelligence against

sentimentalism and wishful thinking of believers it may be remarked that they have abused

intelligence and sinned against reason. Kierkegaard is the target of severe criticism at the

hands of perennialists for his disparagement of reason. The claimed fidelity to reason and

experience by such men as Camus would be rejected in no uncertain terms. Schuon

elaborates the limits of rationalist’ philosopher’s intelligence with regard to ‘total

intelligence’ in the following words:

For the sin of philosophers consists, not in relying upon

intelligence as such, but in relying upon their own intelligence, hence
upon intelligence severed from its supernatural roots.

Two things must be understood: first, that intelligence does not

belong to us, and that what does not belong to us, and that what belongs to
us is not intelligence in its entirety. Secondly, that intelligence, insofar it
belongs to us, is not sufficient unto itself, but has need of nobleness of
soul, piety and virtue if it is to rise above its human particularity and be
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reunited with intelligence as such…Intelligence in principle is infallible;

but it is so through God and not through us. Through God: through its
transcendent root, without which it is fragmentary: and through its volatile
and affective modalities, without which it is condemned in the last
analysis to being no more than a play of the mind. Inversely and a fortiori,
neither will nor can sentiment ever be dissociated from intelligence, which
enlightens them and determines their applications and operations (The
Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon 151-52).

The longing for happiness and reason is not unreciprocated or rejected by

experience. The existence of mystics and many artists is enough to prove that the world

does give us happiness. There is an uncreated center access to which gives joy

eternal. Mysticism is the art and science of tapping joy that God is. Consciousness/

intelligence is central to constitution and organization of the universe. Mysticism makes

the world speak and appreciates the music of celestial spheres and the praise that

everything offers to God.

Absurdists are the philosophers of time and contingency. No wonder that for

perennialists absurdists are most pernicious misologists and misosophers. Here is a flimsy

piece of philosophizing from Camus who chooses time over eternity finding the later

doubtful.

There is God or time, that cross or this world. This world has a higher
meaning that transcends its worries or nothing is true but those worries.
One must live with time and die with it or else elude it for a greater life …
One can compromise and live in the world while believing in the eternal
that is called accepting. But I loathe this term and want all or nothing … I
want to ally myself with time (MS: 81).
 Shah 135

If Camus is interested in one thing it is to affirm and love life despite its pain and

transience. But he defeats his aim by conceding suicide as logically and even practically

irrefutable option after experiencing absurdity.

Killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too

much for you or that you do not understand it…It is merely confessing
that that ‘is not worth the trouble’, Living, naturally, is never easy. You
continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons,
the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have
recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the
absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that

daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering (MS: 13).

This is unanswerable from the logical viewpoint that Camus adopts. However he

is inclined to take a position against suicide though again has very flimsy arguments for

such a choice. More consistently he should have committed suicide like Hemmingway

though it has been speculated that perhaps he did it by intentionally driving his car too

fast leading to accident in which he died. Eternity that Camus distrusts is accessible to

all and sundry and something that few philosophers in history have rejected as a

valid concept and empirically warranted notion.

From mystical perspective we can experience the state of transcendence of sorrow

and angst. As Osho (who, like Krishnamurti, puts the position of perennial philosophy so

lucidly though at times he distorts it as well. Osho and Krishnamuri have been

occasionally alluded to only when they have not added individual opinion to received

wisdom but only given beautiful expression to the Tradition) puts it:

Mahamudra is an experience of nothingness – simply you are not. And

when you are not, then who is there to suffer? … to be in pain and

anguish? … to be happy and content?... If you feel you are blissful you
 Shah 136

will become again a victim of suffering, because you are still there. When

you are not, completely not, utterly not, then there is no suffering and no

bliss – and this is the real bliss then you can’t fall back ( Take It Easy 1:

14).

The Question of Death

The central problem for Camus is death. This colours his whole worldview. It

destroys his faith in the grandeur and joy of life. A tragic sense of life because of its

transience qualifies his affirmation and love of life with all its contradictions. From the

perennialist perspective Camus’ central assumption, his central problem and the way he

approaches it, are all questionable. From the perennialist perspective there is no death. So all

hue and cry of Camus is uncalled for or besides the point. Camus assumes that death ends

everything and this is based on a prior assumption regarding the constitution of man. If there

is nothing in man that can defeat death all talk of grandeur of life and humanism is vain.

Why should anything be important if man is nothing but chance accumulation of sentient

matter? Nothing matters if man can be wiped out by a bullet or a virus or a volcano. The

question is should we worry about meaning if nothing endures? Death is indeed absurd only

if one asserts that life is meaningful or immortality is desirable.

Many critics have pointed out contradictions in Camus’ thought. I think that these

arise because he is loyal to neither man nor God and he isn’t at peace with either earth or

heaven. The totality of existence he is not able to accept stoically or heroically. He is

simultaneously for life and yet against it if considered in its totality because he is unable to

accept death as a part of life. He can laugh but he can’t accept to weep. He is sad why our

desires, our grand ambitions get frustrated. He can’t accept the evil and suffering as part of

life and he can’t accept Reality as such thereby affirming his state of exile – an exile that is
 Shah 137

absolute as there is no home coming in his worldview. Life is a thankless Sisyphean task.

Suffering is meaningless. There is a choking sense of waste everywhere. Man rolls no mass.

The Devil is almighty. Existence or the universe is simply gratuitous. Life is useless

passion as his one time friend Sartre also believed. Neither in history nor outside it is there

any meaning, any salvation. There is every reason that man should go for suicide and

Camus wonders why he doesn’t and comes up with an apology for life that hardly

convinces. Camus’ world is the world of universal condemnation to death. Man hasn’t

sinned but he still suffers. He can’t accept the thesis of sin and thereby he can’t accept

suffering. Death is simply nauseating for him. But life too for most of men is nauseating

and is no better than hell. His pagan affirmation of life is thus self defeating.

The modern West hardly provides any insight or positive solution to the problem of

death or suffering after one keeps God out of the picture. How do we, on the supposition

that God is dead or absent, affirm life that is so full of suffering. The question is not how to

justify God’s ways to men but how man faces tragic sense of life. Camus, Becket, Ionesco,

Eugene O’Neil, Kafka, Camus and others are all failures as far as the positive approach to

the issue of suffering or evil is concerned. Tragic waste is unavoidable in the Hellenist-

Neitzschean-Sartrean Western world view. Man ends as a failure. What a conclusion! I

think the fruit of this tree of thought itself shows some deep problem with the whole project.

Countering Nihilism?

Camus, like other existentialists, confronted nihilism as the most vexing problem

of the twentieth century. Although he argues passionately that individuals could endure it

and his philosophy is a prescription in the same direction, his most famous works betray

the extraordinary difficulty he faced building a convincing case as one critic has noted.

Caligula tries to escape the human predicament by dehumanizing himself with acts of
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senseless violence, fails, and ultimately commits suicide as he surreptitiously arranges his

own assassination. The Plague (1947) shows life to be a plague that kills and overcomes

our effort to see it otherwise, change it, or cure this malady. It shows the futility of doing

one's best in an absurd world. One is reminded of Socrates who thanked providence when

he drank hemlock because he had at last been cured of the prolonged malady called life

(Spirit limited by conditions that earthly existence imposes). Individuality is the problem

and the sooner one gets out of this delusion the better. All actions are futile. No action

can save man, can wring the meaning out of absurdity. We have to relinquish action and

effort. All is vanity. Man’s salvation lies in let go.

Camus, true to his modern scientific heritage, can’t imagine what is so obvious for

the mystic – the world is his own exteriorized self. What he calls the world’s denseness is

hardly any problem for an easterner. There is no separate self or world. So what are we

talking about?

Although he comes close to the starting point of the mystic in his estrangement from

the world that he feels is not there to last or could be possessed but is unable to see that the

real cause of the modern malady that he attempts to describe in The Myth of Sisyphus is the

faulty metaphysics and methodology he (and modern man) employs while dealing with the

fundamental issues. He despairingly says: “Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring

into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal

renunciations” (MS: 25).

Camus belies his own assertion that “life…will be lived all the better if it had no

meaning” (MS: 53). His hero Caligula parallels in many respects Marlowe’s Faustus’

ambiguous relationship with Christianity. Faustus is domed because of his rebellion

against heaven and Marlowe shows how his Renaissance individualism and pride are
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doomed. Faustus curses himself for his blindness. Similarly we perceive that in Caligula

Camus’ absurd hero fails on every account and shows impossibility of consistent

absurdism. It appears Camus is ironically portraying him. One realizes that Camus is for

creating some meaning as otherwise man will commit suicide. He firmly believed that

man has meaning. As Caligula puts it: “To lose one’s life is a little thing and I shall have

the courage to do so if necessary; but to see the meaning of this life dissipated, to see our

reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable.” One can’t live without

meaning.

Why Revolt?

Christianity is rightly concerned with sin. Our sin is an existential fact. We need no

scripture to remind us of that. The agony of cry of a child is a sufficient proof of it. We

register our complaints both at birth and death as Gibran has remarked. Pascal’s

disparagement of the world – the world of sin and misery – is amply warranted. Dukkha is

the lot of samsaric life. One can’t be reconciled to it as Camus wants us to. Religion is

optimist regarding man’s destiny but pessimist regarding man. Camus’ position is exactly

the opposite. And the fact is that one can’t be an optimist regarding man or life as such. All

religions and most of the philosophies and the great names in world literature are unanimous

in their pessimism regarding man although not so regarding his destiny. There can be no

denial of sin, of fall, of dukkha that characterize our state in the world. Sartre is more

realistic than Camus in recognizing our predicament. Revolt accomplishes nothing. It

only exacerbates our estrangement, our alienation. Lucifer can have no say. He is

condemned to hell. To revolt is to be in hell. Although one must grant that there is a

sense in which revolt alone constitutes human dignity and to live is to rebel. In that

sense religion is essentially revolt. Buddha is a great rebel. No religion accepts the state of

dukkha, the ordinary state in which we are in. Religion

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is rebellion against given alienated fallen state. It is transcendence. It is no acceptance of the

state we are born in. There is no such thing as hope and resignation in the sense Camus

understands them in religion. Buddha asked man to be light unto himself. All religions

declare that salvation/immortality has to be won actively, with great effort and it is man’s

own prerogative to win it. No simple hoping would come to our rescue. Getting nirvana or

heaven or vision of God demands hard and painful struggle. Religious man isn’t resigned;

he is involved in great endeavour of saying yes to the crushing burden of personality. He is

the yes-sayer that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is. Life of the spirit is the life of creativity and

love. The religious person accepts fate and the world as divine. He blesses existence in true

Nietzschean sense. (The traditional Islamic practice of blessing the Prophet is to be

understood as blessing the existence as the Prophet in metaphysical perspective is the Pole

of existence. Schuon has put forth this point in detail in Understanding Islam.) He is

actively rebelling against the hell he is in and attempting to perfect his personality by

appropriating God’s attributes in himself. Belief in God implies active striving for realizing

the divinity of one’s self. Belief in God means self realization. It is unwarranted claim that

belief in God is an escapist strategy – the strategy of resignation or bad faith.

This is exactly what religion also says. Religion is primarily concerned with

salvation of man rather than the existence of some supernatural being or theism’s God and

this is the common denominator of all religions. This explains why some religions have not
 Shah 141

invoked belief in a personal God. God’s function, speaking from the salvific perspective, is

geared towards salvation. God is the name of the metaphysical principle which ensures

apocatastasis – that evil is ultimately negated as everything returns to God in the

end. If we read Coomaraswamy’s metaphysical interpretation of primordial sacrifice

myth (in his Hinduism and Buddhism) we can appreciate the divergence from literalist

theological conception. The question of rebellion doesn’t arise if we understand what God

is and what sacrificial victim is and what it means to be human in relation to the Absolute.

For Camus salvation is in the present, here and now, moment to moment as it is for

mystics. Action is deceptive because it isn’t rooted in the world of the present in life itself.

All action is charged with anguish. It can’t reach the absolute which is found only at the

level of being, so it is imperfect. The world of becoming or the world of desiring self is

necessarily self defeating; it brings dukkha. But Camus is because he revolts and here is a

contradiction. Revolt belongs to the world of action, of becoming, of existence which is

sound and fury signifying nothing and thus absurd. Religion replies to all absurdists by

privileging being over becoming, eternity over time, non-action over action and submission

over revolt.

The kingdom of God is found within and not without according to Jesus and action

belongs to without; it is an imposition from without. The kingdom within is the realm of

being. It is the realm of chiocelessness. It is when our will is in harmony with cosmic will or

God’s will, to use theological language. Religion frees man from angst of choosing as well

as from the traps of bad faith by asking him to surrender his will and thus find freedom in

God’s will. Not ours but heavenly father’s will be done as Jesus put it. Properly understood,
 Shah 142

this is the way to defeat the “absurdity” of life. All action is inauthentic or escape into bad

faith. No action, creaturely action, the action of ego could achieve real transcendence from

the absurd. That is why Sankara links all action to bondage or what is called as karmic debt.

Bad faith always introduces itself in any way of giving a meaning despite what Sartre may

have us believe if meaning is given by deeds alone. Religion is innocence of becoming and

choiceless awareness as sages have always interpreted it. Faith is transcendence of ego and

other directed or outward action. It denounces all utopianism and all Faustian

aggrandizement. Religious critique of Marxism is essentially on Camusian lines although he

doesn’t recognize this. For Sartre consciousness is the illness of being but for religion pure

consciousness is atman as well as Brahman although self (separative) consciousness, the

ego, the desiring self is the illness of being. Camus comes close to realizing this basic

“dogma” of religion which alone cures all alienation (as the subject of alienation doesn’t

exist) and reconciles “for-itself” with “in-itself” and makes man God, so to speak, which is

the ultimate aim of man but which Sartre’s and Nietzsche’s men are unable to achieve and

thus get ever frustrated. Absurd arises only in relation to a certain subject who finds no

objective meaning and purpose and fulfilment of desires and ambitions (what Hardy calls

the tragedy of unfulfilled intentions) and encounters the silence of the stars and the silence

of death. Religion does away with man as man (as humanism constructs him), as desiring

seeking self or subject who is a distinct entity from object, (which is Existence or God in

mystical traditions). It is only in the dualist western philosophical and theological tradition

that theodicy becomes an issue. In the Unitarian framework of mysticism there is no

dichotomy of subject and object, of man and God and thus no problem of evil in relation to

God. Camus in his The Outsider seems to do away with the idea of permanent self. But his

absurdist philosophy implicitly assumes it and he is unable to do consistent metaphysics. He

 Shah 143

comes very close to Buddhist conception of self and suffering and consequent absurdism of

ego based action oriented project of life. Camus’ thought revolves round the dialectical

tension between man and God, earth and heaven and is unable to make peace between them

and tries to passionately negate the other term in the binaries. The only option to him was to

passionately deny God and hope and that world so that man and this life could be affirmed.

The dialogue between Casenoea and Caligula quoted previously shows how

problematic is the absurd hero who rebels against the metaphysical order of the things. This

shows why absurdism is impossible and it demands of man something that is impossible and

this impossible prerogative makes man unhappy. Reading between the lines it appears that

Camus has shown why absurdism is impossible. He gives mere living ample meaning – life

is its own justification. This is precisely what religion teaches – life itself is holy, and

therefore meaningful. It need not have any externally imposed meaning.

For religions life alone (or God alone) is enough reason for living. Camus too

maintains this. In The Stranger (1942), for example, having rejected the existential

suppositions on which ordinarily men – the uninitiated and weak men – rely, Mersault

just moments before his execution for a gratuitous murder realizes that life alone is

reason enough for living. A truly religious man demands no meaning beyond what life

itself has. Are not a child’s smile, a nightingale’s song and a flower’s bloom enough

justification? All is sacred. Everything partakes of divinity as a thing and not in relation

to some outside thing. A Sufi dances because life dances everywhere. For a dancing man

dance dissolves all questions, all demands.

Salvation through Art?

Having felt disenchanted with or alienated from the God, “who holds all goodness

in his hands” as the Quran puts it, having abandoned the faith in the God who dies to save
 Shah 144

the world, modernity has created substitutes and among these substitutes art is one. It is

poetry that takes the place of religion and it is art that saves the world according to modern

prophets. Faustian and Promethean rebellious spirit of modern man is intimately connected

with disregard of or incredulity towards traditional worldview where God claims all

sovereignty and man is asked to surrender to Him and to acknowledge his creatureliness

(and sinfulness) and the need of Grace. He has no faith in providence that shapes our ends.

He doesn’t comprehend the ways of God and tries to make life endurable by turning it into

art or by escaping into the heaven of artist’s making. These are desperate gestures of

rebels. Having failed to make peace with God, to clear his debt that he owes to God, to Life,

to the Universe, he finds the odyssey of life as meaningless, absurd and farcical and repeats

it in Sisyphean spirit. Traditional belief in the kingdom of God is connected with the belief

in the kingdom of the Son of God or divinity of man and life’s sacredness and Nature’s

sacredness in general. Modern man’s disbelief in traditional God means disbelief in man and

his cosmic significance, his vicegerancy of God and his salvation.

Life and Transcendence through Love

It is because of his impoverished understanding of love that Camus doesn’t find love

eternal. Mystics know of no god but Love. They love and love intensely. And they get

convinced that the object of their love is the most real. Compare the vision expressed in

Sufi mystical poems with absurdist view one can appreciate the two versions – the one that

has moved the Sufis and convinced them of the reality of their Beloved, the reality of

their own eternal fount of love in their heart and the one that denies love any superior

ontological ground or depth. The mystics who have experienced love at its most intense

and in its most sublime form will laugh away

 Shah 145

the assertion of Camus that there is no eternal love and death contradicts love. There is

another love that the Spirit feels, that Plato spoke about, that Sufis have sung of.

The mystics like Eckhart live without appeal as Camus’ absurd hero does.

Krishnamurti is a contemporary example. No appeal, no authority, no bad faith, no wish to

see things sentimentally. One may well ask who knows this art of life, life at its highest

pitch? If Underhill’s account is to be trusted, the answer is mystics. It is mystics who have

loved most passionately, who have sung most beautiful songs in praise of life and love, who

have danced with gay abandon in all the seasons of life. It is mystics who have out braved

the utmost to bear witness to God’s goodness as manifested in the world.

He is for maintaining awareness or consciousness of ‘what is.’ But isn’t mysticism

the same thing? The world of gods is a state of feeling enjoyed by the beloveds of gods here

on earth of which others are ignorant. If kings become aware of the taste of love of God they

will leave their kingdoms in a moment as Rumi said.

The right to love without limits is possible only in loving the Infinite, which is not in

the world. It needs to love earth so deeply that it leads to heaven which lies in its depths.

Camus assumes that there is no such thing as Intellect, that essences can’t be known, that the

veil of phenomena is impenetrable, that the universe is dead, that death ends everything, that

God is dead, that values are still to be sought in the absence of God, that nothing is

justifiable, that the problem of evil has no solution, that man has been in vain given longing

for the Absolute, the Good, that eternity is mental construct devoid of substance, that the

self is real and that individual should count. If we analyze more deeply he fails to achieve

what is dearest to him.

The point is to accept life on its own terms rather than the way we want it to be.

Camus despite his attempt to maintain lucidity in all conditions does impose or wish to
 Shah 146

impose certain meaning and values when he despises death, absolutizes life of ego and

rejects all reconciliatory approaches. Camus emphasizes living in the present and not

resisting it but death too is in the present for a subject from which he wishes to escape.

Fidelity to the present is the superhuman virtue that characterizes Sufis and other mystics. It

is another way of speaking about love of God. In fact the Sufi is described as ibn-al-waqt –

the child of the moment. And the absurd man builds a hypothesis, a metaphysical one, on

what he assumes to happen to him in future.

If we really accept and enjoy ‘what is,’ the question of scorning one’s fate and

being a rebel doesn’t arise. Here Camus is imposing his own constructed scheme of

meaning when he chooses to uphold love of life against fear of death and acceptance of

fate.

For the existentialists there is no Absolute, there is no fate, there is no answer to

“why we are here.” But to say that “Life is above all” is a sort of Absolute, and if Life is

the absolute, totality is not, what is is not. This means one accepts conditionally and can’t

claim what Nietzsche called love of fate. In fact how one takes evil shows one’s attitude

towards what is. Camus can’t accept it and is not reconciled to the order of the world. So

we can’t accept his assertion that one should maintain supreme indifference or lucidity or

affirm what is.

Camus’ problem from a traditionalist perspective is that he thinks for himself.

Ananda Coomaraswamy has masterfully dealt with the modern man’s penchant for

thinking for himself in his letters and other writings. This is typical problem of modern

man.

The journey towards “unknown waters” of which Camus speaks is none other

than seeking God, the Holy Grail. Here love leads to transcendence. And what else does
 Shah 147

Jesus proclaim when he asserts that man doesn’t live by bread alone. It is the hunger for

the Infinite that makes man move and consent to live, to live against all odds. In the very

act to be, in the act of refusing to take arms against the slings of misfortune, in choosing

life instead of death in Gospel language one is powered by superhuman resources.

According to mystics and perennialists it is the sense of the Absolute that nourishes us

and in its absence man loses will to live. Will to live is an expression of will to believe.

“The whole law of human existence,” Stephan Trofimovich says in The Possessed, “is

that man should worship something immeasurably great. The Immeasurable and the

Infinite are as necessary to man as is the tiny planet on which he lives” (Dostovesky, Part

3 Ch.8).

In his “Return to Tipasa” Camus says that in the countryside he tried to capture

that strength that helps him to accept what is when once he has admitted that he can’t

change it (emphasis mine MS: 176). But the question is how did Camus come to know

what is. What is is we have no permanent soul, no fulfillment, no rest in the world of

appearances; we live only in the Void, in God. What is is sat chit anand according to

countless adventurers of spirit and great number of traditional thinkers.

Phenomenological inquiry also leaves this analysis unquestioned. The question is: Has

Camus discovered what is? What is is discovered only when one is open, receptive and

not projective. This is possible through meditation/prayer only. Camus’s point regarding

our guilt as put forward in his last novel The Fall implies, as Pratt notes, that “everyone

has bloody hands because we are all responsible for making a sorry state worse by our

inane action and inaction alike. In these works and other works by the existentialists, one

is often left with the impression that living authentically with the meaninglessness of life

is impossible” (Pratt, “Nihilism”). Camus takes away God but doesn’t take away guilt,
 Shah 148

the sense of imperfection or sin, or failure to live up to one’s theomorphic nature or

divine image which are all expressible in terms of failure of orienting towards

transcendence achievable through love.

Despite his atheism (though he is too religious or mystical to declare himself as a

straightforward atheist) Camus is unable to extricate himself fully from the great

Platonic-Christian tradition. Take his first book, A Happy Death. It is death which is the

philosophical problem according to Plato. Camus’ answer is similar to Plato’s. Camus is

not indifferent to the issues of traditional philosophy and religion though his answers may

be quite different. Camus seeks to live for something that goes farther than morality. “If

we could only name it, what silence” (AHD: 182). This is the ideal of mysticism – to

transcend morality or be beyond good and evil, be in a realm, to quote a Sufi, where

‘neither good nor evil entereth.’ Camus is concerned with living a good life in order to

have a “happy” death. Camus’ main contention has everything to do with Socrates’

notion that all philosophy is a preparation for death through a conscious readiness to die.

Religion too consists in dying before one dies, dying every moment, dying to the past and

dying to the mind and all that it signifies – division, conflict, time. In A Happy Death,

Patrice Mersault, the autobiographical main character, realizes that idleness is a fatal

condition to existential stagnation and mediocrity. In The First Man Camus equally

follows through with this same concern that he had as a younger man in A Happy Death.

Mersault and Jacques desire transcendence, though Camus attempted to argue the case

for living without transcendence in his works as if man could live by bread alone. If one

acknowledges that one doesn’t live by bread alone one grants the need of transcendence

or God or His image even though one may name it something different and deceive

oneself that he lives with lucidly without God. Even Nietzsche, the most deadly opponent
 Shah 149

of God or transcendence is one of the most God-intoxicated philosophers as

Coomaraswamy is able to show in “A Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche” that figures in

his The Dance of Shiva. There has not been any man who didn’t worship God or His

images such as beauty and love. Whatever is reflection of the divine in forms and man

worships formless through forms – even the diehard atheist. Religion only asks one to

refine one’s mode of worship, to see God in all forms and in the Formless. It is not that

men deny God – that is impossible as we are created in the image of God and are

“condemned” to worship Him, consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly.

Man seeks and lives by and for something more, something that transcends him in

goodness or beauty.

Camus, like the mystics, has advocated detachment though he has quite an

impoverished conception of it. Without detachment life can’t be tolerated. Both Camus

and mystics agree that happiness originates from having a pure heart and the necessary

will to implement the virtues thereof. This is essentially Platonic mystical concern and

solution. The fact that Camus is concerned with what has been called a Robert Musil

theme – the search for salvation of the soul in the modern world – shows he is in the

tradition of religious and mystical philosophers though his answers may differ in certain

respects from the mainstream religious one. As Clemence says: “Ah, mon cher, for

anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is

dreadful” (FA: 99). Some kind of love of fate requiring great endurance and will to be

detached is needed to endure this loneliness. And, speaking from the mystical

perspective, one may ask what is God if not witnessing consciousness that watches

everything detachedly.
 Shah 150

Rene Guenon has explicated the means and the end of the way of spiritual poverty

which he interprets in terms of detachment. To quote him:

The attachment to multiplicity is also, in a certain sense, the Biblical

“temptation”, which, by making the being taste the fruit of the “Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil”, moves him away from the original central
unity and stops him from reaching the “Tree of Life”; and it is just by that,
in fact, that the being is subjected to birth and death. the seemingly endless
path of multiplicity is depicted exactly by the coils of the serpent winding
round the tree that symbolizes the “Axis of the World”; it is the path of
“those who are led astray (ad-daalliin), of those who are in “error” in the
etymological sense of the word, as opposed to the “straight path” (as-
siraat al-mustaqiim), in vertical ascension along the axis itself, the path
that is spoken of in the first chapter of the Quran. (“Al- Faqr or Spiritual
Poverty” 18)

Invoking the Mystical

Camus is resolute to keep intact in himself “a freshness, a cool well-spring of joy,

love the day that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light” (MS:

180). He sought the element of permanence in the sky and that memory and beauty kept

him from despairing after his return from Tipasa (MS: 180-181). Any mystic could have

written such sentences. Will to live without rejecting anything of life is what Camus

honours most (MS: 181). And this is possible by virtue of detachment.

Camus remarks that when one has had the good luck to love intensely, life is

spent in trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination (MS: 177). This echos

mysticism – bhakti marga, the way of love. The mystic lives only by virtue of love of

God. Once his Beloved shows him His Face, he is besides himself, ecstatic. The rest of

his life is spent in recapturing that moment, in invoking the Beloved to come again. The

following passage expresses Camus’ mysticism quite eloquently.

 Shah 151

A day comes when thanks to rigidity, nothing shines wonder any more,
everything is known, and life is spent in beginning over again. These are
the days of exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls. To come alive again
one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certain
mornings, on turning a corner, delightful dew falls on the heart and then
evaporates. But its coolness remains and this is what the heart requires
always (MS: 178).

Ironically Camus, in a truly modern spirit, worshipped reason and was condemned to

absurdism as a consequence of this idolatry. Despite his stated opposition to Christianity I

think Camus is a Christian, a believer if belief is practically reducible to affirming life,

declaring life worth living, refusal of all props and consolations other than the “consolation”

from God or All or Life or what could well be described as the order of things.

Camus shifts his faith from theology’s God to human all-too-human values and

aspirations. He believes in love, love for one’s neighbour and all the sufferers, for all

mankind. He believes in man’s innate goodness. He believes in charity. He believes in

beauty. Here one may ask what else the idea of God signifies in functional practical or

concrete terms? The Christ said that God is love. One could also say with mystics that

love is God. Charity and love and faith in beauty and truth are the values signified by

God. Only a nihilistic conclusion is consistent with Camusian thesis of life’s absurdity.

But Camus isn’t a nihilist self-confessedly although he is also not a believer either. He

is in a half way house between belief and unbelief. He, like Nietzsche, is at heart a

mystic. But his head makes him pagan. He is the typical divided man of the twentieth

century suffering from schizophrenia – his heart pitted against his head. The heart makes

him perceive that life is holy, divine, beautiful and thus worth living despite all odds.

And that is precisely the proposition of a believer as William James says in his famous

essay “Is Life worth Living?” But his head (he once claimed that the past few centuries

of knowledge couldn’t
 Shah 152

be unlearned and returning to belief in God demands precisely this according to him) had

convinced him that values of love and charity and goodness and truth have no objective

grounding in any God. Belief in values without believing in God who symbolizes and

grounds those values is contradictory. Perhaps Camus’ statement that “I don’t believe in

God but thereby I am not an atheist” is to be understood in this light.

The world of a saint is not the other world that Camus would reject but this world

seen sub species aeternatatis. Seen by a gnostic, seen within God or the Infinite it is a

miracle and it is beautiful beyond all imagination of a person who doesn’t know what it

means to see with the eyes of God. As a thing of beauty which is a joy forever nothing is

dense or opaque to a mystic who sees everything by the light of God. Penetrating the veil

of phenomena through the cleansed perception he ever sees the freshness, the cool shade,

the wonder, the beauty that Camus longs to capture forever. It is love and beauty which

save according to Camus and what is God but the personification of love and beauty.

It is the Eastern understanding of action that clarifies the problem existentialists

face. Detachment is not generally hailed as a virtue in the West. However in Camus we

find detachment advocated with great gusto. And here, as elsewhere, he borrows from

mystics. What redeems to some extent Camus’ work and gives him some points against

nihilism is his appropriation of mysticism. He fails to recognize that mysticism is the

heart of religion he despises. Minus personal God Camus takes almost all the key things

from religion and that makes him worth reckoning and contributes to his appeal. He is not

an atheist despite his disbelief in personal God.

Truth and Consolation

The fundamental question for Camus ‘what value abides in the eyes of the man

condemned to death who refuses the consolation of the supernatural?’ traditional religion
 Shah 153

rejects as tautological. Authentic religion has always refused the consolation of the

supernatural. Buddha shows this so pointedly. For him there can be no consolation from

any outside authority. Man must be light unto himself. The Prophet of Islam made the

same point in his own way. He puts onus of salvation on man. No external authority can

save man. It is self-knowledge and the dispelling of avidya in irfan or gnosis (mystical

and metaphysical realization) that can save.

Hope

For Camus hope is resignation and to live is not to be resigned. Theodicies have

usually made much of hope and they stand on it. It can’t be denied that hope springs eternal in

the human breast and it alone sustains man. But what does it mean in world religions? Not

resignation or facile optimism. It is not to be understood in the sense that rests on future

promise or reversal of fortune. It is simply another name of faith and trust in existence and its

mystery. God symbolizes hope. Hope is the bread of soul and man doesn’t live by bread

alone. There is a sense in the declaration of mystics that religious man is hopeless as he has no

need of hope having renounced the hoping self which is a form of desiring self. He lives in the

present and not in the future. There is no time and thus no hope in his world. He is utterly

contented with his fate and has no need of consolation. Truth is his consolation.

Where is the Sting of Death?

Religious persons die before death, to be reborn in the timeless and deathless

kingdom of God. When the desiring self is no more, when the seeker of consolation is no

more as it has been dissolved in the experience of fana or nirvana the question asked by

Camus doesn’t arise. No “nihilism” can go as far as the Buddha has gone, as all mystics

have gone. ‘Mu’min (believer) is one who smiles at the face of death’ as a great Muslim

mystic has put it. The Buddha believed in no supernatural being (in the
 Shah 154

sense Camus construes the term) and yet he smiled and smiled just before death. Personal

God (that too understood so crudely, so exoterically by Camus) isn’t the impersonal

Godhead, the Beyond-Being, and the Absolute of mysticism. There is no “other” to the

Self. God isn’t an object or a being among other beings. Religion, from a salvific

perspective, has nothing to do with faith in or consolation of the supernatural being. It is

the mystic’s demonstrated assertion that he transcends death, both in literal and symbolic

sense of the term. Death is when time is. But when one is in contact with the timeless,

when one has died unto himself and when there is no separate subject or self that time

could victimize, there is no death. A mystic is ever blissful – possessing that bliss with

which joys of a romantic pagan like Camus can’t be compared. Everyone knows that the

mystic dies smilingly, rather he commands his death. It is he who in the true sense of the

term celebrates it as part of life, as an opening to that life which a pagan like Camus can’t

conceive of. He has seen the Beloved and is very eager to meet Him.

Frithjof Schuon, thanks to his metaphysical approach, has little difficulty and no

embarrassment in engaging with the critics of theodicy who construe death as evil and

find life meaningless because it is always haunted by death and for whom the suffering of

innocent children is inexplicable. To Dostoevsky’s Ivan and Camus’ Rieux he has an

answer, though only an answer in principle. “The cause of death is the disequilibrium

brought about by our fall and the loss of Paradise” (Dimensions of Islam 83). For him the

levelling justice of death is infinitely more important for us than the diversity of earthly

destinies. The experience of death is essentially the lifting of the veil. It is seeing the

Beloved face to face. Its experience resembles that of a man who lived all his life in a

dark room and suddenly finds himself transported to a mountaintop where his gaze would
 Shah 155

embrace all the wide landscape. Projected into the absolute ‘nature of things’ man is

inescapably aware of what he is in reality; he knows himself ontologically and without

deforming perspective in the light of the normative ‘proportions’ of the universe

(Dimensions of Islam 85).

Religion, William James observed, is characterized by the belief that life is worth

living and the goodness of life overweighs its evil. Life is never defeated or devalued. Life,

with a captal L is an attribute of God. But modern man finds nihilism irrefutable

logically and invents many things to refute it because he is not prepared to be consistent

and commit suicide. All arguments against suicide from Camus and others look flimsy.

Religions embrace life and nihilism embraces death. Buddha smiles and there is no

doubt about it. But we must imagine, despite evidence to contrary, Sisyphus happy.

A happy death is impossible according to The Myth of Sisyphus.

The Question of Renunciation

The man of God is also aware and quite resigned to the fact that we have only this

life at our disposal and he does not even cling to this life as he renounces all possessions,

all claims to a separate identity as a person So and so as Coomaraswamy would

characterize the ego consciousness whose illusory character is least suspected by

humanist Camus. It is the ignorant or unenlightened Buddha who renounced the world,

his wife and palace but after his enlightenment he returned home to his wife and had no

answer to his wife’s question why enlightenment couldn’t be won at his home. Islam

amongst all religions has emphasized that the kingdom of God is obtainable in this world,

in the midst of hustle and bustle of the world. A watchful look at sunset is enough to

transport one to heaven. Renunciation is not from the life but from the alienated life, the

life of “one in they,” as Heidegger would put it, the life of conformity in which one fails
 Shah 156

to encounter one’s aloneness and dissipates in the crowd trying to escape loneliness and

nothingness he encounters at the heart of his life. For a mystic, like Camus, salvation is

not outside this world, this life, but in its depths, in here and now. For him God is to be

experienced here or nowhere. If Camus is contended with this life but so is the mystic.

The difference is that the former can’t suck all the juice from its marrow. He seeks only

happiness and even feels guilty about it and justifies it by extending it to others. He can’t

celebrate death and he sees injustice at the heart of things and sees the universe as evil

because it isn’t a creation of good God. How can he be really happy here? Logically he

must be pessimist philosopher and that he is par excellence. How can he be happy (let

alone blissful which is the prerogative of saints) when he sees man as “a lonely exile

struggling for happiness and meaningfulness beneath the immense and senseless burden

of existence”? Only the one who has submitted to the will of God, who has seen in the

world the face or reflection of the Beloved, who is enamoured of the beauty, the

sacredness, the wonder and the divinity of all life, who accepts everything because it is

from his Lord and thus doesn’t resent the innocence of becoming could be blissful.

Purpose of Purpose

In traditional metaphysical view, all things are the product of God’s command to

be (kun) and that is their glory, their purpose and their meaning. They are celebrating the

feast of living, thanking God for their existence and that accounts for their not

committing suicide. They have all submitted to God’s command to be. One fails to

understand what meaning is there in any question on meaning of existence. It stands by

itself – beautiful, mysterious. And God is Mystery. One could well ask what is the

meaning of heaven or the meaning of God or the meaning of Bliss. Purpose and meaning
 Shah 157

are anthropomorphic terms and God or Reality or Existence least care for man’s vanity,

his vain imaginings.

The present that mystics experience – the timeless now – is a joy that gives meaning

to everything. Meaning is sought only by those who are unhappy. A joyful soul, a dancing

soul, a lover doesn’t ask the question of purpose and meaning. Absurdists find all beauty

fading, transient and see nothing eternal. They are not happy; they can’t accept death and the

order of the world. People die and they are not happy. However the absurd hero Sisyphus is

imagined happy by Camus. Life can be great even without meaning for Camus. This means

he too transcends the need to find meaning in order to be happy. It is difficult to characterize

this position as mystical though equally difficult to dismiss it as facile or childish or

defeatist.

Pointlessness of Revolt

The world of Camus is the world not worth living but man prefers to live as a

gesture of revolt. We have been alienated from the eternal by the very revolt which taught

us to apprehend the eternal in the instant, and we have now been handed over to history,

that is, to the will to power. Modern man, the man of the absurd has lost his way in time,

stranger to himself like Mersault – man without a past accomplice of baseness,

“unwilling murderer who lives at the edge of his own nothingness.” He is carried away

into a world, which is nothing more than the stage on which the tragedy of power is acted

out. The postmodern existentialist man is in a world whose barbaric character is best

described by Nietzsche. Camus has no faith in history; history can’t deliver man. But he

has no faith in anything that transcends history even if he might think that he does have it.

Luciferian Promethean Faustian rebellion leads to disaster and is self-defeating. It

leads to hell, the hell that modern man finds himself in from which Camus desperately
 Shah 158

and unsuccessfully wants to extricate him. According to perennialists it is

humanism’s vain pretension that it could find heaven in this world and that man

needn’t look beyond for his own perfection. Camus doesn’t know that the hell

religion speaks of is what he himself so clearly perceived in the sense of the absurd,

the alienation, the plague, the exile and death. His whole endeavour was to take modern

man out of the hell he is in. To be in time and to be resigned to it and not to yearn for

the life eternal, for the Bliss that abideth is to be resigned to be in the fallen world, in

hell. It is Camus who is resigned to the fate, to the sensorial world and its limitations and

pins all his hopes on this world alone which is the domain of dukkha, tainted by sin and

fall. It isn’t religion, which accepts the world at its face value or is resigned to the

absurd tragic lot. A truly religious person lives and lives abundantly, orgasmically, to

appropriate the expression of William James that Osho is fond of quoting, joyously and

experiences eternity here and now. No death can terminate his love for life. Death isn’t

a closed door but a gate to heaven, the heaven of Life Eternal. A mystic expects no

rewards. He has burnt heaven and cooled the burning hell and worships or loves God

purely for the sake of love as one of the greatest Muslim saints Rabia says. Ethics of

Rieux and Torrou which is based on selfless service that expects no reward is the

ethics of saints, the truly religious in the mystical eastern perspective.

A rebel wants answers o n his terms and this implies he refuses to see things

objectively. This is, in the perennialist view, a legacy of the Fall. Camus has absolutized

the fallen perspective of things since he isn’t concerned with the Origin and the End.

Thus there is only sham freedom, sham truth and sham existence and ultimately sham

revolt. There is the world of shadows, of untruth, of illusions and of man condemned to

live in them, unable to get out of their prison or cave of which Plato talked.
 Shah 159

Camus takes note of evil such as suffering of children but then how does he

explain away the presence of good? If one can ask wherefrom has evil come one must ask

the same question regarding good as Boethius has pointed out in his Consolation of

Philosophy. If there is much that is apparently absurd there is also the fact that there is

much that is intelligible and as Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible

thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. The very existence of logic and

mathematics contradicts the absurdist thesis as put forward in The Myth of Sisyphus. The

perennialists have cogently argued that we can know the essences though not at rational

plane and that all that is real is knowable. It implies we can’t judge the whole as evil or

absurd or opaque or dense. Camus’ doctrine of revolt thus falls to pieces in absence of

objective evidence of human incomprehension, ignorance or opacity of the world. Of

course we don’t know the answers at merely rational or human plane as postmodern

theologians are reminding us. But the wonder that we feel in encountering the mysterious

seems to impart knowledge and joy in its own right and thus can be seen as a station of

gnosis. Ibn Arabi calls the highest station as the station of no station, the station of

bewilderment. This is a species of knowledge rather than ignorance. A few remarks to

clarify the point are in order.

The Pure Absolute or Essence (Dhat) – the First Principle of traditions – in its

fundamental aspect – and thus Meaning/Truth/ Presence/ Identity/ Reality per se – is

beyond the human quest and all attempts to reach It, track it, pinpoint it, catch It in the

net of language or realm of the finite or time, to conceptualize It, to imagine It, to speak

about It, to affirm anything of It are doomed. Before the Ipseity or Dhat one can only be

bewildered according to Ibn ‘Arabî. The world is ultimately a Mystery, a Mystery of

Mysteries and no rational or scientific approach could finally and completely demystify
 Shah 160

it. The world will never cease to be an object of wonder and fascination and Beauty never

cease to be worshipped or sought. This is the implication of the demand of scriptures for

ceaselessly glorifying God. That is fundamentally a movement towards transcendence.

Man must travel ceaselessly as love will never be satiated and man’s quest for the

Absolute will have no full stop in all eternity. Artists, scientists, mystics, philosophers

and lovers shall never be out of business. Rationalization, familiarization, demystification

and descaralization of the world that ultimately make it inhuman, alienating and absurd

and disrespectful towards the environment can’t happen in the Akbarian perspective that

sees one essence and divine face in everything.

Attempt at Demythologization

Camus is involved in that great sin of demythologization which modernism has

committed against tradition. This is the tragedy of modern man that he can’t believe in

the traditional notions of God, sin, hell, grace etc. but he can’t do without them either.

So what he does is to interpret them in human, all-too-human terms, to imagine God in

his own image. This is what perennialist metaphysicians reject.

Camus’ Gospel

His great faith in the gospel of charity and loving kindness which forms the

essence of religion as Augustine says in De Doctrina Christina, shows his essentially

religious answer to some dimensions of the problem of evil. Nostalgia for Eden, for the

heaven of faith is always there. However, he seems hopeful about man if his

consciousness is transformed. It is the transformation of consciousness that forms the

requisite of religion’s promise of victory over evil. His Caligula puts this idea quite

forcefully. We can find this idea, carried to its limit, in the conception of the perfect man

in religions and quasi-religious philosophies. Aurobindo in Life Divine, Al Jili in Insani-i-

 Shah 161

Kamil, Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra and others have explicated essentially the

same idea of transcending our present fallen condition. Nirvana in one or the other guise

is the ideal of all religions. The cessation of suffering or dukkha is possible only when we

radically transform consciousness and affirm life despite its pain and absurdity.

Enlightenment is changed attitude towards the world which continues to be ridden with

pain because of being caught up in space and time. Even the Buddha suffered the pains

that flesh is heir to.

One may find in Camus’ pessimism essentially miscarriage of religious instinct.

Pessimistic diagnosis of man’s present worth or status and his past is shared by the

religions of the world. The Book of Job calls man “a worm.” Satanic question mark on

man’s excellence and the angelic irreverent skepticism (in the story of genesis in Quran)

seem to have been vindicated by history. Impressive record of human vices, human folly,

infidelity, waste and irresponsibility seems to vindicate the satanic reservations about

Adam and his descendents as Akhtar notes (Akhtar 140). “Human history, from Cain

onwards is mostly bad news” (Akhtar 140). Pessimism, remarked William James in his

essay “Is Life Worth Living?” is essentially a religious disease. It is only the religious

soul who hankers after meaning, purpose, peace and harmony that turns pessimistic when

confronted by an apparently indifferent or hostile world that is full of pain and suffering

and seems to have no discernible purpose and meaning. But religion has always created

“poetry” out of tragedy. Camus has made poetry out of mutability as Buddha has made

religion out of impermanence and mutability without need of permanent soul and

personal God. He refused, as a typical religious sensibility does, to be carried away and

killed by the fact of evil or pain as a thorough going pessimist would. The religious

person finds life worth living, despite the overriding and disturbing fact of pain and
 Shah 162

suffering. He sees some way of finding meaning or appreciating beauty of the world.

Religion’s is ultimately a Yes saying attitude to life. Camus faces the task of making

“poetry” out of ‘experience which has no invested meaning’ without investing it with a

private mythological or religious significance. He has the religious faith in love. He

abhors suicide. There are abundant lyric images that through their sensitive and loving

observations celebrate joys of life. He had an intense love and reverence for all living

things, a hatred of violence and cruelty and an innate need for a religious explanation of

the universe. These emotional predispositions though reduced by his experience of reality

to a sense of tragedy, colour all his work. He mourns, but he never fears death and the

passage of time because they consume the vitality and possibilities of the present which

he loves. He enhances life, sucking its juice deeply fully conscious that it is marred, as it

was for Hardy, by a ‘thwarted purposing.’

Metaphysics and Theodicy

If the problem of evil is posed in the Epicurean format and one holds tenaciously

to exoteric theology (reducing Beyond-Being to Being or Absolute to personal God and

assuming that omnipotence extends to Divine Nature itself, denying the crucial doctrine

of Maya and attempting to solve metaphysical problem at theological level) theism is

indeed in a difficult position. Epicurean logic appears unimpeccable indeed and

satisfactory theodicy must reject Epicurean formulation of the problem and that is what

Schuon has done as will be seen in the later in this work. At the theological plane through

a purely rational inquiry it is not possible to solve the problem of evil. From a

metaphysical perspective through an intellectual rather than rational means the problem

disappears. Such theological notions as personal God, creation ex nihilo, man-God

duality, Creator-created rather than Absolute-relative framework etc. are themselves to be

 Shah 163

qualified or subsumed under higher metaphysical framework. When we do this

transposition of theological to metaphysical realm the problem dissolves as will be

argued later in this work.

Schuon points out, which applies to Camus’ construction of theology, two

fundamental errors in the formulation of the voluntaristic theologians and philosophers:

…firstly, the attribution to a single Divine subject (in fact humanized) of

cosmic effects which is reality are related to different universal sources,
since the Divine Functions are not substance or Being, and since Being is
not Beyond –Being; secondly the use of word “will” for causes to which
this anthropomorphic analogy is only very partially applicable (Islam and
Perennial Philosophy143).

Thus theologians are to be blamed for the failure of theodicy. The perplexing issue

of God's indifference and thus his "absence" and remoteness from the affairs of the world is

easily understood if we take a deeper view of the Divine Subject. To quote Schuon again:

The supreme subject, Beyond-Being, Atma or Paramatma can not “will”

cosmic manifestation; being able to will only Himself, His absence of
creative will must manifest itself in some fashion even within creation –
the latter being willed by the creative Hypostasis of Atma – and this is the
mysterious cause of what we call evil; the creative and conservative “will”
of Being vehicles in a subtle and mysterious manner the negative
indifference of Beyond-Being (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 141).

Thus we see that Camus’ critique of theodicy presupposes unwarranted

construction of traditional theological position and is answerable through metaphysical

approach of eastern traditions that he doesn’t properly understand.

Regarding the question of innocent suffering he says:

Our existence as such is like a still innocent prefiguration of all

transgression – innocent yet the generator of misery; at least it is so
 Shah 164

inasmuch as it is a demiurgic ‘coming out’ from the Principle, though not

when regarded as a positive ‘manifestation’ of the Principle.

One should never ask why misfortunes befall the innocent: in the
sight of the Absolute all is disequilibrium, ‘God alone is good’, and this
truth cannot fail to be manifested from time to time in a direct and violent
manner. It the good suffer, that means that all men would merit as much;
old age and death prove it, for they spare no man. The sharing out of
earthly good and ill fortune is a question of cosmic economy, although the
immanent justice must also sometimes reveal itself in the light of day by
showing the link between causes and effects in human action. Man’s
sufferings testify to the mysteries of his distance and separation and they
cannot not be, the world not being God (Dimensions of Islam 84-85).

There are five basic tendencies, from the traditional religious point of view, which

drag Camus to conclude the absurd as the ultimate end of man in pursuit of truth. They

are: ignorance (avidyā), ego-feeling (asmitā), attachment (rāga), aversion (dvesha) and

fear of death (abhinivesha). Camus is horrified by death because he, unlike a mystic, does

not know the nature of death; “[I] gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my

jealously and horror … I fear death most, attaching myself to the fate of living man

instead of contemplating the unchanging sky (O 79).”

We shall now specifically comment on certain remarks of Camus quoted in the

beginning to concretely illustrate the Eastern perspective, championed by the

perennialists, on the same. Camus’ assertion that God if he exists is “indifferent, wicked

or cruel” applies only if we identify God not with the Existence (the totality of all that is,

both immanent and transcendent) or al-Haqq or Reality or undifferentiated non-dual

Absolute but with the anthropomorphic personal God which is a being among other

beings and not the Being as such. Anthropomorphic Paramatma is metaphysical

monstrosity as Schuon says. Understanding the metaphysical notions of Infinite and All-
 Shah 165

Possibility is crucial to understanding the Divine Nature. One cannot extend omnipotence

to Divine Nature. The Divine names or attributes are not the Essence, the impersonal

Divinity or Godhead. No propositional statement applies to God at the literal level as

Stace has cogently argued in his Time and Eternity. So Camus’ argument is

fundamentally flawed as it ignores metaphysical and mystical understanding of God that

has been at the heart of Christianity and other religions and emphasizes only the

theological (and that too not quite well understood) approach which admittedly is unable

to solve the problem of evil or justify existence/manifestation/creation.

Camus’ declaration that creation is unacceptable if evil is necessary to it is not

philosophy but anthropocentric prejudice. Could there be a creation without evil?

Metaphysically the serpent has to be present in the paradise. One can't wish the world to

be and at the same time demand that it should not be the world as Schuon says. To quote

Marco Pallis, a perennialist author again:

He is the creator of the relative, as required by His infinity; of that relative

the thing we call evil is a necessary function, being in fact the measure of
the world’s apparent separation from its principle, God – an illusory
separation in as much as nothing can exist side by side with the infinite,
however real it may claim to be at its own relative level…. A world is a
whirlpool of contrasts (the Indian word samsara expresses this). It is not a
unity in its own right. It can’t be a limitation on the Almighty that He can’t
produce another Himself. The world is there to prove it (Pallis 41).

One could ask Camus what order and unity could be found in the world of relativity
which can't but be made of contrasts. Human viewpoint can't but be fragmentary; no
unity can be found by discursive reason. Camus' point is based on his unexamined
epistemology that disallows such notions as objectless consciousness, intellective
intuition and metaphysical realization. God is not the origin of death because there is no
death or if there is one it is life in another mode where space and time conditioned
consciousness is transcended.
 Shah 166

Camus' assumption that one could talk to God as an equal is hardly warranted.

Only an absurdist could digest it. God, if this word has any meaning, can't be talked to as

an equal. He by definition transcends the human world and human reason. Although he

owes an explanation to intelligent man or wishes to owe it because He has created man in

His own image as Schuon also grants it is preposterous and absurd demand to make Him

a party against whom a suit could be filed. It is very crude anthropomorphic conception

of God and unwarranted anthropocentric humanist logic that informs Camus' assertion

here. If truth is dear to Camus as he elsewhere states and his standard for evaluating

every ideology then it may be noted that anthropocentrism has hardly anything to do with

truth. Why should Reality or Truth respect human vanity, desires and dreams? If the

notion of separate individuality or personality, the seeker of unity and order, the subject

who wants to know something by first construing it as a separate object out there is an

illusion (all that is not Self is an illusion according to mysticism) why should Existence

conform to its illusory demands? Individual doesn't count in the scheme of Existence or

Truth. One should accept this fact and surrender to the immanent Logic of existence as

Islam demands and renounce all clinging or desires of fictitious empirical ego as

Buddhism says. The desiring soul doesn't exist; it obstructs objective vision of 'what is.'

Intelligence is made for the Absolute and its demands are respected. God being

Intelligence “wishes” to owe men explanation for His doings as Schuon has emphasized.

But ego is vain and illusory so its demands can’t be accommodated.

Camus as a representative modern mind doesn't mind sinning as he fails to

understand the notion of sin. A remark about sin is in order. Sin is failure to be true to

oneself, betrayal of self, failure to read the real, the true, misplacing things, rejection of

objective balance, equilibrium and norm that is impersonally constituted. If men knew

what it to sin in the light of Absolute, he would die rather than sin. It is simply concealing
the truth or forgetting one's own self. The dominion of man in the sense humanist

tradition would demand is an impossible dream. The Superman has not yet come and

postmodernism from a different context has announced the death of man and exposed the

lie of humanism. The fall of God has coincided with the death of man. Man has failed to
 Shah 167

endure the solitude of which Nietzsche spoke in Thus Spake Zarathustra; he has failed to

transcend himself and be a superman. He has failed to justify the fall of God. In fact

without God man becomes subhuman; he loses his own soul as the Quran says. That man

could conquer the universe or God is a vain delusion. The Greeks were wiser; if man

soars high his wings get burnt. It is wiser not to challenge gods or defy fate or the

inexorable and inevitable. To deny man’s creaturely status and challenge Lord's lordship

is the height of fully. It ends in creature's destruction.

What Camus calls "dirty and horrible adventure" is described in mystical

literature in sensuous terms resembling his own description of love and life in Nupitals.

It is the fear of the unknown, of void, of no-mind that is behind such a nasty description

of death. Krishnamurti offers a masterly portrayal of this state of mind. One who has

not experienced the unknown can't dogmatically generalize about what others

have experienced or could experience.

Against his assertion that the price of individual life is infinite because death can

finish it any moment Schuon would maintain that without transcendence life has

absolutely no price and is horrible and dirty adventure, and compared to it death and

suicide are good options.

Camus doesn’t ask himself simple metaphysical questions on the status of

individual. About whom is he concerned? What constitutes man? He seems to assume

man with flesh and blood and all kinds of desires is the real man or there is no real man

as essences are rejected by him. He asks us not to condemn – judge not – fellows but has

no charity for Totality, for God. What Camus assumes to be man is a problem from the

objective intelligence-centred perspective of metaphysics.

We will now take up technical discussion of certain key assertions of perennialists

 Shah 168

to put Camus’ position in sharp contrast. There is an unbridgeable divergence between

absurdist polemic and perennialist approach to the issue. Limitations of absurdist

“metaphysics” become quite evident. We need to shift the perspective and everything

becomes clear without there being any need of crucifixion of intellect or appeal to wager.

The Myth of Sisyphus appears to be a bad piece of unfounded metaphysics, and lacks

coherence of a philosophical argument. Neither on logical nor on empirical basis is it able

to unproblematically make its point.

Schuon as a metaphysician takes up the basic question whether Reality is ‘good’

or ‘bad’ and takes recourse to no mystery mongering or unfounded assumptions and

doesn’t demand a priori commitment on our part to belief or faith in God’s goodness. He

addresses the matter as an astute logician. He writes in this connection:

To the question of whether Reality is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ there are logically

two answers: the first is that Reality is neither good nor bad; the second is
that it is good. If good exists, it is because the ground of Existence is
beneficent; if good can be absent – to a minute degree when the world and
the cycle are envisaged in their totality – it is because the ground of
Existence, or absolute Reality, is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ because it can’t
be enclosed in an alternative or an opposition. The thing is that it is
important to understand that this indifference or transcendence is
essentially of such a nature as to reveal itself as good; that is to say, good
essentially reveals the nature of indifference that is superior to it. The part
can be relatively an evil, but the whole is good, whatever may be the
degree of reality; in this sense the world is a positive manifestation,
despite the negations it shelters positively. Or again, if a thing is bad, it
can only be so by virtue of its fragmentary nature and not of its totality.
Evil makes things fragmentary, as good makes them whole; good dilates
whereas evil contracts. God manifests Himself only in perfections, not in
their absence; where they are lacking there can’t be either totality or
 Shah 169

centre. A bad man is no more than a fragment of himself (Dimensions of

Islam: 41).

Although this seems quite similar to aesthetic solution to the problem of evil

which has been subject to some telling criticisms by many philosophers of religion

including Stace, it is not so. Schuon’s assertion that the whole is good he himself

qualifies in the beginning and what he seems to say should be understood in the context

of another premise of t r a d i t i o n a l metaphysics which takes Being as Good and non-

being or

‘adm,’ to use Muslim scholastical equivalent term, as evil. It amounts to n o more

than an axiomatic statement that Being equals God and God is good and desires radiation

of good as manifestation (Beyond-Being desires good as radiation, manifestation or

world, whereas Being desires good as the participation of things in the Divine Good as

Schuon explicates the Augustinian formulation that “the good tends essentially to

radiate itself” (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 165). Every existent is good by virtue

of its very existence, and by that alone. Schuon for his theodicy is compelled to

criticize traditional Muslim (and Christian) theology on various accounts, the

primary ground being metaphysical. In fact he is for transcending the theological

approach which is committed to dualistic framework based on the mutually exclusive

categories of Creator and created and other dichotomies which can be bridged by an act

of faith only, and lacks adequate doctrine of God as Reality, Absolute and Infinite,

and operates without the crucial notions of Beyond-Being and Divine Relativity

(mainstream theology lacks an adequate knowledge of the Principle as absolute and

adequate grasp of the meaning of relativity, of levels and hierarchy of existence, of the

relatively real and of what Schuon calls the

‘relatively absolute’). He asks for leaving behind an “anthropomorphist and moralizing

ontology.” His perspective is metaphysical rather than theological and then alone is able
to dissolve, rather than solve, the problem of evil.
 Shah 170

Anthropomorphist Muslim scholasticism (Kalam) is critiqued from the view point of

traditional metaphysics. Schuon observes:

The great weakness of the protagonists of Kalam is to apply

anthropomorphism to what is in God most completely eludes being made
anthropomorphic namely Beyond-Being or the supraformal Essence and to
confuse Beyond-Being with its ontological self determination namely
Being which creates, reveals and saves. This is to confuse, in the absence
of the notion of Maya, two totally different Divine subjectivities, the first
corresponding to Paramatma and the second to Ishwara or even to
Buddhi, according to the degree envisaged; and it this lamentable
confusion that constitutes the characteristic infirmity of Ash’arism in
particular and of kalam in general or even of all doctrinal exoterism to one
degree or other (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 141).

He rejects the notion of anthropomorphic Paramatma as something monstrous,

and all speculations based on it as bad metaphysics and cautions against confusion of

pure Being with the determinative and existence generating qualities, which amounts to a

mixing of two universal subjectivities which are in fact different, always without

prejudice to their essential unity. He argues that it is impossible to practice integral

metaphysics and theodicy on the basis of axioms treated apart from the key notion of

Maya or Divine Relativity (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 142).

Theology tells us that God created the world out of love, and that love, being His

intrinsic nature, He cannot help but love us, or to use Sufi expression, to express His hidden

treasures. The Good couldn’t but be radiated. God desires us in turn to love Him – to love

Truth, Beauty and Justice, which are but His various names. On the pain of hell we have

to be true to our transcendental Ground of being, our Heavenly Father, our divine or

what amounts to the same, truly human image. As Rama Coomaraswamy puts it:
 Shah 171

Had He created the perfect world, a world in which we could not choose
Truth, Beauty and Justice, a world in which we could not love, we would
be robots and would lack even the possibility of dignity. Instead of raising
the 'problem of evil' we might well ask why God bothered to create the
world at all. In fact, why do we exist? (“On the Nature of Evil”).

Pallis explicates the idea of creation’s gratuitousness to which theology has been

committed to but then it has been very hard for it to explain why evil in the creation

should not be attributed to God. Why did God create a world at all which is cursed by

evil? For Pallis the theological doctrine of gratuitous creation is intended to affirm God’s

absolute freedom and not to deny His infinite necessity. The infinite nature of divine

possibility includes the idea of manifestation and therefore also requires it. He clarifies

that God’s perfection and unchangeableness is not thereby compromised. To quote Pallis

again:

He is the creator of the relative, as required by His infinity; of that relative

the thing we call evil is a necessary function, being in fact the measure of
the world’s apparent separation from its principle, God – an illusory
separation in as much as nothing can exist side by side with the infinite,
however real it may claim to be at its own relative level (Pallis 40).

He quotes Schuon in this connection: “one can’t ask of God to will the world and

at the same time will that it be not a world.” A world is a whirlpool of contrasts (the

Indian word samsara expresses this). It is not a unity in its own right. It can’t be a

limitation on the Almighty that He can’t produce another Himself. The world is there to

prove it (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 175).

The question why do things exist is devoid of intrinsic sense. It can’t be

discussed at the discursive rational plane. As Pallis says:

 Shah 172

Our existence is not something of which the question ‘Why?’ can validly
be attached in expectation of a solution comfortable to human logic, itself
an apanage of the existence in question. Existence is something one can
accept only for what it is. All argument about things starts from there; it
can’t be pushed further back thanks to some subterfuge of the discursive
mind. Only the eye of the intellect not to be confused with reason or
conceptual intellect that is as an individual faculty but understood as
intellective intuition – the third eye’ of Indian traditional symbolism – is
able to pierce beyond the existential veil because something of what lies
beyond is already to be found in its own substance; it is not for nothing
that Meister Eckhart called it ‘uncreate and uncreatable.’ But here we are
outside the discursive realm altogether (Pallis 40).

Thus as Pallis says as long as the existence or creation is a possibility (as it

evidently is at its own level), that possibility will in due course be called to manifestation

because the divine All-Possibility can’t be limited in any manner whatsoever. “This is

enough,” declares Pallis, “to account for the existence of the relative, the cosmic

unfolding in all its indefinitude of becoming, including that apparent opposing of relative

to real, of world to God, that constitutes, for beings, their separative dream” (Pallis 41).

It may be mentioned here that in the perennialist scheme the theological notion of

creation from nothing is not opposed to the idea of creative emanation. This helps to

tackle otherwise serious criticism of theistic thesis that posits a beginning to the universe

and overemphasizes God’s transcendence and perfection and unchangeability. The

relative in itself amounts to nothing in the presence of the real, though by its own limited

reality it manifests the real at a given level, failing which it could not exist. The world

and thus the evil, in the ultimate analysis, are unreal or illusory in reference to the Real. It

lacks being in itself. This follows from the notion of All-Possibility.

 Shah 173

It is man on whom onus for misuse of freewill and consequent evil lies. God’s

freedom cannot be questioned. He cannot be accused of willing or not preventing evil on

account of being free not to have created at all or created only good. Against humanistic

critics of theodicy Schuon defends God’s Freedom while as he shows man prone to

misusing his freedom and thus puts blame squarely on man and exonerates God. He says

that only God, who is the absolute Good, has the right to absolute freedom as He wills

only good. God being Unity and Totality can’t sin by going outside himself as man does,

whose existence is limited to a single individuality and whose activity affects existences

other than his very own (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 175). He argues that when God

appears to do what would be evil if man did it, He compensates for it by a greater good.

This follows necessarily from the premise that God is the absolute Good. God’s nature

thus necessarily includes a compensating attribute which precludes evil as such. But man

is contingent by definition and can’t possibly enjoy the compensating attribute which

derives from Absoluteness and Infinity. The evil man does is not a virtuality of good, but

is evil pure and simple as he is a fragment and not the whole (Islam and Perennial

Philosophy 189).

All relativity can, and must, ultimately be transcended. The world can’t be made

to disappear, but “it can be rendered transparent so that the light, ever shining, may

illuminate our existential darkness. The centre is everywhere, this room included; and

where the centre is, there is the beatific vision” (Islam and Perennial Philosophy 200).

God, the Bliss Infinite and Good, is ever close at hand – “closer than your jugular vein,”

as the Quran calls it. As Pallis says: “The tree of Life is standing in this room, as certainly

it stood in Eden; it is a pity if we will not use our eyes” (Pallis 44). The real issue that

should concern us is neither the existence of the world nor the world remade in
 Shah 174

accordance with our heart’s desire, but solely how to find our way home, to God who is

the Origin and the End, to be realigned on the axis of Buddhahood, to “rejoin our own

centre which is also the centre of all things, the Tree of Life, the axis uniting heaven and

earth” (Pallis 51). And religions are revelation or gifts from Heaven that shows the means

to unite man to his Origin, to his home. Thus the question is not to defend God but to

help man in fulfilling his vocation and conquer sorrow. Religions are pragmatic here

leaving speculating business to those who wish to outsmart God and advise him how He

should have managed the affairs of the world.

Human, All-too-Human Meaning?

The rebel is a man who is determined on creating a human situation where all the

answers are human or, rather, formulated in terms of reason. But this is denying man his

humanity that finds merely human and merely rational unacceptable and seeks that which

transcends human. Only

transcendence that escapes all appropriation at a rational plane can give answers worthy

of man. Reason can't appropriate in its categories the transcendent, the universal, the

infinite, the sublime. Man is the only creature who refuses to be merely human. What

man can objectify, appropriate or comprehend can't be the object of his highest devotion.

Man cannot accept to consent to the kingdom of things or objects. God is valuable so far

as he is not a thing of the world. Stace has expressed this point beautifully:

Religion is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the
inconceivable. This isn’t something which merely happens to be, an
unfortunate accident of disaster which befalls it in the world. This is its
essence, and this is its glory. The religious impulse in men is the hunger
for the impossible, the unattainable, the inconceivable – or at least for that
which is these things in the world of time. And anything which is less than
 Shah 175

this is not religion – though it may be some very admirable thing such as
morality (Stace 4-5).

Camus refuses hope and consolation. In this regard it may be pointed out that

religion doesn't offer any consolation for suffering and Camus wrongly believes this to be

the Christian position. Guenon in his Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines has

pointed out that Truth need not be consoling though it is weakness in certain men to be in

need of consolation. Camus has failed to understand the subtler aspects of the symbolism

of cross. It is instructive to see how a mystic like Simone Weil understands the mystery

of incarnation and crucifixion. In fact Camus' reading of this central event of Christianity

is based on diametrically opposite conception of self and its relation to God to that of

traditional Christian conception of the same as Weil shows. This has been discussed in

chapter 9.

Camus sees no reason for God's silence. Heavens don't respond to the cry of an

afflicted soul. Here one needs to note why God didn’t answer even Jesus on the cross.

God’s silence is the answer. From the metaphysical perspective it the self’s or subject's or

the mind's demand to be spared the encounter with its own nothingness that really is the

problem. If we are frightened by the infinite silence of the stars it is because we fear to

see squarely nothingness at the heart of being, the emptiness of all empirical or

phenomenal things, the illusion of ego. We fear to have a dialogue with the silence that

was before the word and in which alone is our salvation. In fact the vision of God that

dispels all darkness and fear for good is the renunciation of all chatter, all sounds, and all

desire to be heard, to be anything. A faint echo of this experience is heard in Lear who

attains the sublime tragic understanding when he escapes in the dark rainy night with

nothing to shield him, with all worldly attachments gone, naked before the vast silence of

the heavens. Peace is a t t a i n e d only by returning home, to our Origin in the dark

abyss of
 Shah 176

Godhead. Serenity of God or heaven is the serenity of nonexistence that was before we

came and that will be after we are not.

Lifting the Veil

Camus sees himself as a stranger in the world and laments that nothing can lift the

veil and make it familiar. But one wonders if this demand is in the interests of man at all.

Familiarization connotes demystification and descaralization. The project of profanation

that instrumental rationality undertook has landed us in an unprecedented disaster –

ecological, moral and spiritual. Even Marx’s (who was a champion of rationalism and

science) many arguments against dehumanizing Capitalism included his famous cry “All

that is holy has been profaned.” Man needs mystery as he needs his daily bread. Art’s

value lies in defamiliarizing the world as Russian formalists have noted. Camus is

himself an artist who finds some semblance of meaning in his eye for beauty or art that

lifts us. Art transports us not by virtue of any process akin to familiarization. I think it is

fortunate that champions of scientific and rational knowledge have learnt to be humble

and dropped the pretension that science will make the world familiar. The material world,

the realm of manifestation doesn’t contain its principle of existence in itself. Science

can’t lift the veil of ultimate mystery from existence as Camus notes as the finite can in

no way comprehend the Infinite. ‘Science flounders into metaphor and poetry as it

encounters the sub microscopic world.’ Philosophical rationalism too fails to

comprehend the world, to reduce the reality to terms of thought. Poets or artists would

be out of business in a completely objectified or demystified world. But the sacred

mystery of which traditions talk is not to be confounded with subrational

irrationalism that insults intelligence. We have the instinct to know and unify and must

have suitable answers. We can appreciate why all those who laud the irrational and

see in it deliverance fail to

 Shah 177

impress Camus as his fundamental demands for clarity and unity and comprehensibility

remain unsatisfied. His only problem is he imposes conditions on what is essentially

unconditioned and seeks Infinite. It is not at a purely rational plane that we can

comprehend the matters intellectual. Seeing and seeing with joy (vision of intellective

intuition) is higher understanding of which traditions talk when they say that the Real is

knowable. Traditionalists talk of scientia sacra – science of the sacred – and not mystery

mongering that obscures and relativizes or confuses. Nothing short of the full-fledged

intellectual perspective and metaphysical realization could lighten this darkness. Since he

doesn’t acknowledge intellectual intuition and God, the Infinite that is “the Light of the

World,” his conclusion couldn’t be but despairing. Western philosophy, not knowing

traditional metaphysic, hasn’t been able to deliver the goods that it had traditionally

promised as the perennialists have argued. The science of the Infinite is beyond its ken.

Lucky in his famous speech in Waiting for Godot has not quite unwarrantedly parodied

the various disciplines of philosophy and science. Because existence doesn’t conform to

his terms of reason and his demand for comprehending the universe at the rational plane

without reference to transcendence he finds only “poisoned peace produced by

thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations.” The traditionalist by changing the

methodology and the background metaphysics is able to bring that peace that passeth all

understanding in the state of no-mind or “thoughtlessness” by cultivating the virtues of

detachment (that modern sentimentalism would dub as lack of heart) and the ethic of

renunciation.

The Night of Metaphysics

In certain concrete instances of evil that are too horrible for contemplation

metaphysical notions may sound too abstract. Existentialists are not entirely unjustified in
 Shah 178

their critique of metaphysics that seems to swallow the existential reality of man. Here

we can appreciate the function of religion that is meant for taking into account man as

man with all his limitations and anxieties and then save him. Metaphysics can’t take into

account what is simply individual or sentimental and states truth only. The reason man

needs art according to Nietzsche may be extended to his need of religion. The truth pure

and simple may be too much for most of us. It simply devastates. Religion may be a fall

from pure intellectuality but man needs it that way.

Another point in this connection is that we need to recognize that somehow the

element of mystery crops up and at certain moments we must have recourse to faith that

constitutes the raison d’etre of religion and just surrender with all our heart and mind to

the will of God which is not the will of man and neither could that be appropriated at

purely human, all-too-human plane. Here comes the crucial role of faith in the unseen

(iman bil gayyib), to use the Quranic phrase, and the importance of simple but total

submission which is the sine qua non of Islam. “Only God knows and man knows but

little” as the Quran puts it. Iqbal rightly says that one has to pass the boundaries of pure

thought and affirm the religious doctrine of eventual triumph of goodness (Iqbal 70).

“God is equal to his purpose, but most men know it not” the Quran asserts (12: 21). God

and His goodness have the final word.

Conclusion

Camus is not an absurdist in the sense that he despairs of life and finds no motive

for living. A living man is a standing testimony of life’s meaning, grandeur and

goodness. Camus emerges as a great life-affirmer but with a very narrow vision of what

life and its glory and joy consists in. He can’t block transcendence and it is precisely

transcendence disguised in his worship of art, beauty and life that gives some semblance
 Shah 179

of significance and meaning to his vision. He wavers between mysticism and atheism. He

illustrates and embodies the modern man’s divided personality, uncertainty and divided

loyalties.

Camus doesn’t appreciate that traditions have a simple answer which can neither

be disputed nor ignored by those who want to speak for man. Traditions simply assert

that our separative dream of ego or self consciousness has exiled us from the Garden of

Eden which is otherwise ours and to which religions invite us. Enlightenment is not

something added to us, it is already ours though due to avidya we are ignorant of it. We

have to lose nothing but the chains of egohood to enter the garden as satisfied souls. God

is the name of a feast that religions promise us here and now. It is for us to choose to

participate at the cost of our dear self, our limited personality or ego. Of course as

humans we can’t afford to distance ourselves from this feast as otherwise we will be

reduced to subhuman status. Every experience of beauty, of goodness, of truth, of

wonder, of mystery, of love is really the experiences of transcendence or the divine. All

creative expressions partake of the divinity. Living life in its fullness, in gay abandon, as

celebration with a sense of gratitude to whatever/whosoever has showered this gift on us

is prayer and communion with the divine. Celebrating nature is celebrating God as nature

is His symbol. We live, move and have our being in God. Nirvana or vision of God is

only the fullest and most intense form of experiencing the joy rather the bliss of life, the

bliss of consciousness unfettered or unencumbered by the limitations of ego. How can

we, in the interests of man or in the name of so-called humanism, refuse all these things

that uplift, vivify and soothe? In fact Camus seeks all these things in his own way. Man

can’t, by virtue of being a man, refuse God who is All-Pervading and constitutes our

Environment.
 Shah 180

In light of these points it clearly emerges that absurdists fight against an

imaginary God that is of their own making and converted into an Other. For traditions

God is our own deepest self as theology is autology as Coomaraswamy phrases it.

Literary criticism that takes the slogan of death of God too seriously (much of

Camus/Beckett criticism takes this for granted) needs to come to terms with the doctrine

of Absolute as formulated in different traditions or it becomes ultimately a part of a

nihilistic ideology that dehumanizes.

 Shah 181

Samuel Beckett: A Metaphysical Appraisal

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a
bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life
implies.
Erich Fromn

Beckett is not a philosopher in the academic sense of the term but he gives powerful

expression to a set of beliefs and philosophical propositions inherited from certain

philosophers, writers, and mystics. Most importantly he gives voice to modern disbelief and

distrust of traditional narratives of religion and philosophy. He was more a critic of

orthodoxies than a creator of some new or alternative philosophical viewpoint. It is difficult

to ascribe this and that position or belief to him as he detested propositional thinking, beliefs

and doctrines, and systems of whatever kind. But even this distrust itself constitutes a

philosophical position. Advocacy of silence itself is a philosophical position. Despite his

abhorrence of systematic thinking we can identify, albeit loosely, certain beliefs and

assertions that inform his vision. We have already discussed them and given textual

evidence for the same. Beckett scholarship is more or less agreed on these points that I list

here for critical appraisal from the perennialist metaphysical perspective.

• The Self is unattainable.

• Life is punishment.

• Time lacerates and kills and nothing positive comes from it.

• Watching self is not utterly peaceful.

• There is no cure to the sickness called life.

• Civilizations are built upon great lies and delusions.

 Shah 182

• The grand claims of philosophy to comprehend the world, to access the truth or

resolve the contradictions that life presents are void.

• Life is absurd. It achieves nothing. Man rolls no mass.

• Different metanarratives, traditional and modern, are incredible.

• Darkness at the heart of existence can’t be illumined.

• This world is not our home. We are exiles here and do what we may and nothing

is able to reconcile us to it.

• Sciences clarify nothing.

• The myth of progress that modern man has upheld is a delusion.

• The world with all its beauty means nothing.

• Love that men indulge in as spouses, parents, neighbors is not something sacred,

something divine, something that redeems or transports one out of time. It is not

a reflection of the Love of God.

• Art points to transcendence.

• There is no way to move from phenomena to God, to transcend by means of

symbolic vision the world of forms or phenomena.

• God or Self or Ultimate Reality appears as negative thing, as darkness rather than

Bliss although must be encountered.

• Peace, harmony, contentment, beauty, love, health, and almost all positive things

are not granted to us or justify life or make us reconcile to life.

In the following pages these propositions are subject to a critical appraisal in light of

traditional metaphysics and aesthetics.

 Shah 183

To begin with we need to acknowledge Beckett’s contribution in elucidating the

perennial problems as faced by modern man at a critical moment in the history of

consciousness. Beckett’s greatness lies in insisting on the ‘perpetual presence of existence,

to make experience existence rather than theorize about it and label it or avoid it.’ He isn’t,

like Joyce, writing about something but letting that something itself speak. He distrusts all

attempts that try to shape experience or subsume it in any narrative framework,

philosophical or theological. He faithfully represents the chaos that experience is. He is

neither didactic nor escapist. For him only honest literature is what imposes no pattern on

experience, and eschews all external meaning or transcendental signified. Nothing answers

our metaphysical quest for centers, for anchors, for order and significance. We can’t evade

the utter dissolution that awaits everything. There is no permanence in any experiencable

thing, in any existent. Nothingness at the heart of everything is there to stay and can’t be

evaded, do what we may, as all the evasions come to grief. We can invent numerous ways to

kill time, to distract ourselves from time with theological or mathematical speculations but

nothing can be done to avoid being ditched into the hole of death, the Inferno. As O’Hara

put it:

A lifetime becomes a perpetually incomplete process, diversified at first

by learning, travel, sex, and the desire for love, but dwindling at length
into the mere sex, and the desire for love, but dwindling at length into the
mere existence of a mind sick with thought and fastened to a dying
animal” (O’Hara 3).

Esslin called the theatre of the Absurd as holy theatre. Altizer sees in Beckett a

modern seer. Indeed there is a sense in which these designations appear quite warranted. We

indeed see him rejecting the most cherished beliefs and props of secular humanism. He
 Shah 184

shows how everything in the world is afflicted with the disease of existence and is in deep

disequilibrium. It is only in silence, in nothingness that other dimension that transcends time

and thus clots the bleeding wounds of existence is possible. Beckett’s message is essentially

mystical, at least, up to a certain limit. There is no salvation in the things of the world.

Simone Weil’s observations on finding no good in the world underscore the same point.

However what distinguishes Beckett and Camus from Weil and Stace is belief in our access

to this good or God at the end of the tunnel. Though Beckett seems to concede its reality but

he seems to primarily focus on our failure to return to that silence. There are failures in the

great adventure to the inner self. History of man is indeed primarily a history of failures.

Most are condemned to “rebirth.” But where traditions assert emphatically that rebirths will

be ended and salvation is our destiny ultimately and in the end everything falls in perfect

order, Beckett doesn’t seem to be committed to such a belief though he affirms its

possibility and some of his characters are quite close to some sort of nirvanic ideal. What

distinguishes him from traditional mystics is his inability to provide a way out of the

impasse in which modern man finds himself. There is dukkha and there is a way to end this

dukkha according to Beckett. But what is this way he doesn’t clearly state. Ascetic

withdrawal is not the ideal mystical method to reach the end of the tunnel, at least not for

the modern man. The popular critical appraisal of Beckett as a nihilist is not wide off the

mark. However the accusation of nihilism is countered by certain critics by locating ‘the

screaming silence’ of Beckett’s ‘No.’ Beckett’s denial is affirmative as it points to a

dimension that can only be indicated by ridicule of accepted codes, be the traditional

negative way that describes what it is not. The Theatre of the Absurd performs precisely this

job.
 Shah 185

Beckett darkens more than illumines the problems and dilemmas man faces.

Obsessed with the failure he loses sight of the great vision that more adventurous explorers

of consciousness called mystics have unearthed though starting from his assumptions and

adopting thoroughgoing empiricism. He presents a worldview that must be interrogated for

its grand claims regarding grand failures of man. It is existence that victimizes Becket’s

characters and thus nothing can be done against its absurdity and injustice. Against this the

mystics discover life as a festival of lights, a perpetual wonder, an expression of the great

Beauty, something for which the giver of life needs to be praised and man needs to be

eternally thankful. Developing a new way of perceiving life, a new method of tapping the

founts of joy that lie concealed in it, a reorientation of our habitual or ordinary modes of

reacting and responding to the world, a changed attitude towards the revelations of

experience, sharpening of our intelligence and strengthening of character, mysticism offers

something that all those interested in life and its glories and joys and its mystery and wonder

need to seriously consider, especially at the time when man finds himself defenceless

against the corrosive effects of nihilism that modern thought has brought into the world

through its deconstruction of traditional philosophy and religion. There is no such thing as

ennui, boredom, frustration, alienation, no asylum, no schizophrenia, no crippled, maimed,

shocked, people and sighs and tears in the mystic’s view because they have got access to the

rasa, the juice of life.

God is the Origin and the End and traditions are very clear on the point that

everything returns to the End and judge everything from that End. The Last Day humbles

every human pretension. Beckett in many works focuses on the End. Giving up pertains to

foregrounding the End. Ordinarily man doesn’t give up until death, until severely crushed.
 Shah 186

But see the statements in Beckett’s works. “Nothing to be done,” “It is finished,” “running

out” and “can’t be helped.” It is only the self aware of itself, its atemporal life that can

relinquishe hope and action and need not express or assert itself. This awareness is

available to the self after it consents to be nothing, after it is lacerated by suffering and

decreated. One can feel boredom of existence of life in time to which habit adjusts us, when

one refuses petty distractions and vain illusions of ordinary social roles. Then one can work

out one’s salvation with diligence.

If there is nothing to express it could well be because there is nothing in the world

that answers man’s quest or man doesn’t need to express, to talk in the presence of the Void.

Saints don’t talk or babble. They have nothing to express and no obligation to express

except when they wish to share their joy abounding with others. There is nothing to be

worried by the fact that language fails us. Our most beautiful experiences are not expressible

in language. Language is a barrier between us and reality. Love and most of beautiful

things bloom in silence.

On the one hand we have the unanimous verdict of prophets and sages that God or

Truth or Self is knowable, the real is knowable, there is an end to sorrow, time is

conquerable, nothing really decays (all things in God are ever there), life ever moves while

as for Beckett all these assertions are questionable on the other hand. According to

traditionalists God has always spoken to men in all climes and all places and traditional man

had no difficulty in communicating with heaven and accordingly in giving meaning to life.

It is modern man’s misfortune that he has chosen not to heed God..

 Shah 187

Frustration, weariness, boredom, all mean that seeking self – security seeking self,

rest seeking self – is still there. Mystics are on the other shore, free of all seeking. Nothing

to be sought. A mystic is not time’s slave (not attached to past or future although can’t

escape certain kind of suffering that temporality and body necessarily imply). He has

nothing to do.

Hardly any of Beckett’s characters is heartily reconciled to the world or finds peace

and joy. Love of God is understandable as the love of life. This love of life isn’t the message

of Beckett. The mystic goes on despite all the tragedies and pains that life offers. And he

goes on serenely. There is no such thing as frustration, resentment, anger, lamentation. He

has discovered the art of detachment from the sound and fury of the world. Beckett’s

characters don’t move one step above the ground.

Beckett rightly recognizes that in order to find oneself, one has to situate oneself

outside the game, outside the world or samsara. It is not easy to say however where this

leads according to him, whether to the new world or to the destruction of the old and

nothing more. One feels as if Beckett does only the first part of the job of the mystic which

includes turning away from the illusory world of ego and desire. He sees Maya as Maya and

abandons all hope of finding salvation in the world of time and space. He recognizes the

necessity of non attachment, of fana, so to say. But he does not reach the other shore of

nirvana or heaven and the Bliss Unspeakable that is only in the Infinite. Language gives no

access to thing in itself or reality, to transcendence. No Beckettian hero or character is able

to attain his essence or identity as access to reality is denied to thought. But the tragedy is

that the demand for truth is the very raison d’etre of man. Man is willy nilly a metaphysical

animal. He is made for the Absolute and to know the Absolute as Schuon would assert. He
 Shah 188

lives by it. But for Beckett the demand for truth becomes the more urgent the more clearly it

appears incapable of fulfillment. It grows with the effort that wants to disprove it. Thus

Beckett, with illusion of an arrival, at the same time destroys that other ‘illusion’ that the

vain quest can end. He lacked that faith, that vision and that light of which mystics speak.

The traditional conception of work as duty, as sacrifice to God (explicated by

Coomaraswamy, among others, in his numerous works) so that one no longer feels its sting,

its deadening or soul-destroying effect is not there in Beckett though occasionally he does

approach it. Work is of the domain that Weil calls gravity. But in religion and mysticism

we have the notion of grace to counter it. The Zen mystic doesn’t feel anything as burden.

He walks one step above earth so that no thorns on earth can bleed him. The wind of grace

lifts a man to such heights where nothing, not even the severest affliction of body and mind,

can disturb the detached consciousness.

Some characters of Beckett detest and loathe the very natural phenomena of

reproduction and birth. They resist the descent of soul into this phenomenal world. In

contrast, mystics such as Whirling Dervishes would celebrate birth and death by singing and

dancing in whirls on the occasions of birth and on the departure of human soul because the

former event manifests God in the finite world while as the latter event reflects absolute

freedom that God is. The Beloved playing hide and seek in this drama of birth and death,

joy and suffering, escapes their gaze and they feel caught in a meaningless painful samsara.

Mystics are not unfamiliar with these doubts and pains but thanks to faith and grace they

cross the ‘dark night of the soul’ (purgation) and celebrate. Here is one instance from a Sufi

who celebrates after crossing in the following verses:

Uncertainty,
 Shah 189

Illusions, deceptions

Have all been burnt into ashes;

The mere name of the Other

Has been washed from my heart.

Eternal and eternal existence

Has made manifest itself to me.

Whether at home or whether on wayside

I can see Him now, see unchecked

………………………………………..

Now, Farid, every pain

Is a melody of soul to me.

The doctrine of “All is He”

Has opened new vistas

And given new life to me (qtd. in Qaiser 82).

The tragedy of Beckett lies in that he builds the prison of language and thought

around him while missing the inexpressible that shows forth or that symbols symbolize.

Krishnamurti shows how one escapes Beckett’s prison of language:

Now a mind that seeks security surely can’t find the real, the true. To
understand that which is beyond time, the fabrications of mind must
come to an end. Thought can’t exist without words, symbols, images. And
only when the mind is quiet, free of its own creations, is there a possibility
of finding out what is real…To formulate opinions about God is really
childish.

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete

negation-which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a
 Shah 190

totally different state in which all thought has ceased – only then is it
possible for that which is unnamable to come into being (On God 9).

Rumi in his Masnawi says that he thought of rhymed couplets for communication

with God, but He said that he wants him to think of nothing but vision of Him, and that “I

[God] will throw word, sound and speech into confusion, so that without these three, I may

converse with you” (Khosla 156). However in the Beckettian world we see only sound and

confusion and no conversation with God. Richard N. Coe observes in this connection:

The essential self is timeless and deathless; But the “I,” the “self” I know,
is condemned to death, to unbelievable suffering, mutilation and absurdity,
and this gratuitous futility and misery can only have been ordained by the
cruel caprices of a “God” who is himself of the same element – words –
and who understands what he is inflicting. The “True God” can only be a
macrocosmic equivalent of the microcosmic Void of the “True Self” ; The
preacher’s “God” – a God who is conceivable, can be nothing but a
malevolent and monstrous projection of the pseudo self, or, in Sartrean
terms, either of the “In – Itself” or of the “Other.” If there is a total reality
(all Becket’s people realize there must be), it is the eternal pour soi, the
Absolute unnamable (“God and Samuel Beckett” 107-108).

A few selected themes will now be discussed in greater detail.

God and Salvation

Beckett’s scheme of salvation involves a certain form of asceticism that denies or

seeks an escape from senses and time rather than transcends them through

detachment though sometimes we do see certain detachment in his characters but it is

not quite the same as Eckhart’s disinterest and the Bhagvad Gita’s renunciation of

the fruits of action. Detachment involves abandonment of action – the path of action to

liberation is impossible in his scheme. Bhakti yoga too isn’t possible for he hardly finds

love. Jnan marg alone is

 Shah 191

left for him but of this he has only a vague intuition. The knowledge of the Void is not

uplifting or edifying. His via negativa is not the same as that of great Indian, Buddhist and

certain Christian mystics. It is through and through negative and being exclusively so it ends

not in some serene state as in the latter. It is annihilation but not subsistence which comes

after annihilation. Purely negative view or annihilation is not the end of mystical path in any

tradition. The end is nirvana, annihilation of all that obstructs pure perception or joyful

contemplation of essences, the beatific vision, the celebration of life. He seems to deny the

possibility of salvation though he does achieve in some of his works an impoverished

version of traditional notion of salvation.

One important interpretation sees Godot as caricature of God. Caricatures of God

and Christ in modern art and literature (as in the figure of Godot) show only the perverted

modern sensibility. Man constructs God in his own image and that constitutes the supreme

idolatry against which all the prophets have warned. And idolatry translates itself as self-

alienation. Not only perennialists but modern psychologists like Eric Fromn have argued

this point. One hardly needs to prove that all the modern fads for dealienation have failed

and Beckett is pessimistic like O’Niel primarily for this reason. Modern man isn’t able to

create new God to fill his spiritual void as Will and Ariel Durant eloquently testify in their
th
study of great 20 century European writers Interpretations of Lives. He has killed only

himself by killing God. He could be revived only if he makes himself a child again and

unlearns huge mass of modern ignorance (so- called modern knowledge) that makes him

scan or judge Absolute without judging himself in the light of the latter. This couldn’t be

done by reviving exoteric theology of the church but by traditional metaphysics, the

perennial philosophy and it is the eclipse of metaphysics (understood not in Aristotelian

 Shah 192

sense but as the science of the Invisible, the Supraphenomenal, the Infinite by means of

intellection or noetic vision) reflected in the eclipse of spirituality or mysticism in the

modern age that is behind the eclipse of the Sun of the Spirit. This will be discussed later in

detail. Man must be a light unto himself and not project his problems and guilt to some

metaphysical entity. Salvation can’t descend from above. It is man who has to win it.

Waiting for the God of exoteric dualist theology is inauthentic approach not only for Beckett

but also for all traditional religions. If modern man has gloriously misunderstood anything it

is his God or religion and its intellectual content, its metaphysical basis. If he is ignorant of

anything that is “one thing most needful,” his ultimate concern, his ground of being i.e., God

– God who is only the other pole, the ideal pole of his own self, his hearing and seeing, to

use the Quranic phrase. Modern man’s cardinal sin in his spiritual and metaphysical

blindness and nothing could dispel this darkness except the coming of light.

What redeems the universe of certain post-Nietzschean writers like Iris Murdoch is

their great ethic. Living in the shade of the Platonic Good the death of an image of God that

Nietzsche talked about doesn’t seem to lead to nihilism. The problem of ethic in the

Beckettian world complicates things and intensifies corrosive effect of nihilism. We see

such vile things as the fantasy of Ham of the Endgame in which he refuses to give a man

food to save his child because, as he passionately argues, life “on earth” is “beyond

remedy.” Macmann, like Molly before him, is satisfied with having “eluded charity all his

days,” and is stunned when it is forced upon him. However, Beckett, for all his deep sadness

at the sorry and sordid state of affairs that fallen man’s life presents, doesn’t give up the

search for life, for beauty, for eternity, for essences, for the timeless self. He isn’t an

incurable obdurate pessimist. He doesn’t take sides; only mercilessly exposes, dissects.
 Shah 193

Metman’s conclusion that in Beckett’s plays, the carriers of life, future and wholeness

prevail over those of negation, despair and defeat, does contain a grain of truth. Pessimism,

as William James remarked in his famous essay “Is Life Worth Living?” is essentially a

religious disease. Only a man who is unable to commit himself to absolute despair mourns

over man’s inability to transcend his miserable state. Although Beckett doesn’t share

religious man’s ultimate optimism regarding man’s destiny and his faith in salvation of all

humans but there is a yearning for some sort of salvation. He occasionally approaches very

close to religious ideal of nirvana, but on the whole he sees only bad eternity, “bad infinity.”

Refusing to look towards the sky of transcendence, towards the Infinite, (key to which is

contained in those doctrines or traditional metaphysical wisdom of Christianity which he

dubbed as myths in true demythologizing rationalist humanist spirit) and pinning his vision

on the realm of the finite, he could not obviously be granted the vision of God.

According to traditional metaphysics Truth is not nothing or something rather it is. It

is the very ‘isness,’ the very nature (svabhav) of things; as distinguished from nothing it is

‘no-thing’ to ‘no-thingness.’ Anything (mental or material) can be either nothing (that which

also exists) or something therefore finite. Whereas the truth is no-thingness therefore infinite

and formless, “the wordless Godhead,” “the nameless Nothing,” as Eckhart terms it. This

point is argued with great force and beauty by Deepak Chopra in his Power, Freedom and

Grace. The Buddha said that Nirvana does not exist because it is beyond the human realm

of binary opposition of what exists and what does not. This is why Stace calls it negative

divine in his masterpiece of lucidly argued philosophical essay on mysticism Time and

Eternity.
 Shah 194

Religion squarely encounters limit situations in which Beckett was interested. It too

has no faith in action or deed seeing it leading to bondage. Jnana yoga or irfan or via

contemplativa does away with action. Its theory of time is also circular. Nobody comes and

nobody goes in the mystic’s desert when he encounters the Divine Darkness, the Abyss, as

he delves deep into the nothingness within. But it isn’t awful for him. A mystic delights in

no-action, in choiceless awareness. He sees no “other” to complain to, to possess, to

dominate or to conquer and then to suffer or make others suffer. He is as resigned as a tree

or a stream. He doesn’t desire to be. And that means he can’t suffer nausea or angst. He has

already committed suicide by killing the ego thus having solved the problem that perplexed

Camus.

Like Camus Beckett will not qualify as a straight forward atheist and like the mystics

Beckett’s people can’t reply to the question “does God exist?” This is because, as Richard

N Coe says, if “that which exists” is positive, or finite, or definable, or in any way verbally

to be differentiated from other existent or non-existent phenomena, then “God,” void,

infinite, undifferentiated and abstracted from the dimensions of time and space, is precisely

“that which doesn’t exist’’(“God and Samuel Beckett” 106). Stace and others have

formulated this argument in more convincing terms. Buddhism describes God as Nothing, as

Shunyata, as nonbeing because no predicate, even the predicate of existence can’t be

attached to It. God can’t be named, he can’t be characterized. No words have defiled the

Absolute as Ramakrishna used to say. Nothing answers the question what is It as al-Jili, a

Muslim mystic, has said. It is utter darkness or the light that never was. It is the

impossibility of all signification. God as Beyond-Being neither creates nor reveals nor

saves. It doesn’t exist or it transcends the category of existence. To name God as does the
 Shah 195

Preacher in All That Fall, to define his attributes, to circumscribe his essential Non-Being or

Beyond-Being as though it were a positive phenomenon which could be imprisoned in

words and in the logic of time and space, is to defile (in Ramakrishna’s phrase) or distort the

Absolute into a false absolute, or pseudo-God. Beckett is unable to see any meaning in the

concept of the God of conventional theology. For him that which is a lie (and all words are

lies) is unendurable. The essential self is timeless and deathless; but the “I,” the “self” I

know, is condemned to death and suffering. It is heir to all the ills that constitute the fact of

‘world-pain.’ This “gratuitous futility and misery can only have been ordained by the cruel

caprices of a ‘God’ who is himself of the same element – words” (“God and Samuel

Beckett” 108). God identifiable with words is of course a lie. Beckett’s can’t deny pure

being; he only has no trust in any positive image of it. Once phenomena and all the creations

of language have been bracketed off from the truth of being we are left with pure abstraction

or Void but due to absence of science of symbolism Beckett has nothing positive in his

“theology.”

It is not clear if Beckett’s ontology has the room for the supernatural part of the soul

that isn’t affected by evil or time. There is vague groping approximation to such an ideal but

most of his characters are not seeking to cultivate this uncreated timeless entity; they are

hardly conscious of such a thing. Almost all the works portray the dark night of the soul and

there are few hints that this night is over in few cases. Beckett’s art is about our failure to be

mystics, our failure to find the essences. If there is an uncreate part of soul of which mystics

like Eckhart have spoken a great deal Beckett’s anxiety gets liquidated. We need to also

note that time’s providential functions are appreciated in traditions so it too is not vilified.

The soul-making endeavour is possible through the corrosive action of time. Time exposes
 Shah 196

the fillers of void that imagination contrives in order to escape confrontation with

nothingness.

His exposure of the genteel and habitual in our behaviour patterns takes him closer

to mystical diagnosis of contemporary afflictions. His uncovering of the mask of language

that we put between reality and ourselves is also mystical. For him language is rather like a

“bowtie around a throat cancer.” “This long sin [Language] against the silence that enfolds

it” (TR: 345).

God as conceived by man can’t be the true God. Because Beckett has such a

negative view of language and reason in approaching the Infinite he is skeptical of all

theology except perhaps some apophatic version that is hardly of much use for traditional

theology. To quote Coe’s presentation of Beckett’s thesis:

The “true God” can only be a macrocosmic equivalent of the microcosmic

Void of the “true self”; the Preachers “God” – a God who is conceivable –
can be nothing but a malevolent and monstrous projection of the pseudo-
self, or, in Sartrean terms, either of the “In-Itself” or of the “Other.” If
there is a total reality (as all Beckett’s people realize there must be), it is
the eternal Pour-Soi, the Absolute Unnamable; as soon as the Preacher
calls on “God”, and says what he will or will not do, all he does is to
create a corresponding En Soi (the Void’s own pseudo-self or “vice-
exister”), concocted out of human words and reflecting human evil”(“God
and Samuel Beckett” 107-108).

What troubles Beckett is his wish to solve the problem of life, to capture in rational

terms that which refuses such an approach or straitjacketing. Zen long ago encountered

life’s contradictions and dissolved them through a different approach. Beckett’s

characters try to solve the koans of life and are not able to do because they can’t be solved

with the means they employ for it. Explicating Zen use of Koans Gai Eaton observes:
 Shah 197

The koan is the image of life itself, which, in terms of reason, must always
present a completely insoluble problem. But because we are always
cheating and trying to solve human problems by some short cut… we need
to be reminded that such problems are not given to us to solve, but to live
through and live out, until the problem itself is shattered and falls away. C
Jung has said that, in most cases, a neurosis cannot be cured; it can only be
transcended. And the same applies to every problem of which the Koan is
a representation in miniature. The mind, struggling to find a solution,
rushes from one extreme to the other; it takes counsel from a confusion of
voices; ‘Murder would solve it! Forgetting one side of the matter would
simplify life! Escape! Escape!’ But the only real solution is to admit that
there is none, within the term of the situation from which the problem
arose…Between birth and death, human existence is a splitting of what is,
in truth, whole and indivisible into fragments which the mind keeps
asunder, but which experience re-unites…Self-consciousness is the book
we are allowed to read only during the suspension of life; that is the
tragedy of self-consciousness. We would catch ourselves, know ourselves
in the moment of loving; but, so long as we watch, the moment does not
come; and when it comes sight is eclipsed (Eaton 113-114).

This shows that koans are employed only to dissolve the intellectual endeavour of

the mind. So Beckett, being at heart a rationalist (though in the end a disillusioned one) does

not/ cannot succeed in reaching the other shore.

Seeing God Everywhere

A person after experiencing Zen enlightenment has “nothing further to do.” But how

is his life after that? Quite unlike Beckettian heroes who have nothing to praise, nothing to

live for, no motivation to live, nothing to glorify and nothing to worship in the spirit of

gratitude. A Western Zen student after practizing it for seven years was asked to describe

the kind of life that Zen training leads to. He answered: “No paranormal experiences that I
 Shah 198

can detect. But you wake up in the morning and the world seems so beautiful you can hardly

stand it” (Smith: 136). The world in now robed in new heavenly light. The most marvelous

miracle of sitting quietly by oneself that Beckettian characters seek in vain happens with

Zen practice. As Huston Smith elaborates:

Simply to see things as they are, as they truly are in themselves, is life
enough…. Zen wears the air of divine ordinariness: “Have you eaten?
Then wash your bowls.” If you can’t find the meaning of life in an act as
simple as that of doing the dishes, you will not find it anywhere (137-38).

A Zen mystic has thus expressed the knack of inviting grace and traveling light in

the world.

My daily activities are not different,

Only I am naturally in harmony with them,
Taking nothing, renouncing nothing,
In every circumstance no hindrance, no conflict…
Drawing water, carrying firewood,
This is supernatural power, this the marvelous activity
(qtd. by Smith 138).
Smith’s comments here are again pertinent:

With this perception of the infinite in the finite there comes, finally, an
attitude of generalized agreeableness. “Yesterday was fair, today it is
raining”; the experiencer has passed beyond the opposites of preference
and rejection. As both pulls are needed to keep the relative world turning,
each is welcomed in its proper turn (138).

To see God is to see the world bathed in eternal glory. Beckett’s people have not

mastered the art and science of perceiving God here and now, everywhere and nowhere.

Love of God is the key to the metaphysical project that Beckett undertakes but to him this

key is not given. One may quote Schuon to note the poverty of Beckett’s people:
 Shah 199

To see God everywhere and in everything, is to see infinity in

things, whereas human animality sees only their surface and their
relativity; and it is to see at the same time the relativity of the categories in
which man moves, believing them to be absolute. To see the infinite in the
finite is to see that this flower before us is eternal, because an eternal
spring is declared through its fragile smile; to see relativity is to grasp that
this instant that we are living is not ‘now’, that it ‘is past’ even before it
has arrived, and that, if time could be stopped, with all beings remaining
fixed as in a river of ice, the human masquerade would appear in all its
sinister unreality; all would seem absurd, save only the ‘remembrance of
God’ which is situated in the immutable.

To see God everywhere is essentially this: to see that we are not,

that He alone is. If, from a certain angle, humility can be called the
greatest of the virtues this is because it implies in the last analysis the
cessation of egoity, and for no other reason. With a small change of
viewpoint one could say as mush of each fundamental virtue: perfect
charity is to lose oneself for God, for one cannot be lost in God without
giving oneself, in addition, to men. If love of one’s neighbor is capital, on
the strictly human plane, it is not only because the ‘neighbour’ is in the
final analysis ‘Self’ as are ‘we’ but also because this human charity – or
this projection into the ‘other’ – is the sole means possible, for the
majority of men, of being detached from the ‘I’; it is less difficult to
project the ego into ‘the other’ than to lose it for God, although the two
things are indissolubly linked (Gnosis: Divine Wisdom 119-120).

What perennialists emphasize is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

Wisdom consists in disinterested seeing without judging. It consists in seeing in God which

implies just seeing and not imposing any mental or egoistic construction on it. This seeing is

ordinarily available to mothers who see God in their children, to lovers who forget both the

worlds in each other’s embrace, to lovers of nature who see perpetual miracles in what
 Shah 200

appear to others as just natural phenomena, to artists who see with the eyes of imagination

another world full of wonder and beauty and to craftsmen who are one with their work.

Siddharta’s search for Truth in Hermann Hesse’s novel S i d d h a r t a takes him on a

chequered journey and the maze of conventional philosophies and personal whims regarding

truth which ultimately force him to shun all teachings and find truth in the world of

phenomena or experiences including sense experiences. Nothing was ultimately to be

shunned or subjugated.

I am telling you what I have discovered. Knowledge can be expressed, but

not wisdom. One can discover it, one can live it, one can be born along by
it, one can do miracles with it, but one cannot express and teach it… A
truth can be expressed and cloaked in words only if it is one-sided.
Everything that can be thought in thoughts and expressed in words is one
sided, only a half. All such thoughts lack wholeness, fullness, unity. When
the venerable Gotama taught and spoke of the world, he had to divide it
into samsara and nirvana, deception and truth, suffering and liberation.
There is no other possibility, no other way for those who would teach. But
the world itself, existence around us and within us, is never one sided.
Never is a person or an act wholly samsara or wholly nirvana; never is a
person holy or sinful. That appears only to be the case because we are in
the grips of the illusion that time is real…The sinner that I am and you are
indeed is indeed a sinner, but in time he again be Brahma, in time he attain
nirvana, be a Buddha. But see here, this ‘in time’ is an illusion, only a
metaphor…The world is not imperfect or confined at a point somewhere
along gradual pathway toward perfection. No, it is perfect every at
moment… In the depths of meditation lies the possibility of cutting
through time, of seeing the simultaneity of all past, present, and future life,
and within that, everything is good, all is perfect, all is Brahman… It all
only requires my consent, my willingness, my loving acceptance and it
will be good for me, can never harm me…I needed sensual pleasure,
 Shah 201

striving for possessions, vanity, and extreme debasement and despair in

order to learn to give up resisting, in order to learn to love world, in order
to cease comparing it to some imagined world that I wished for, some
form of perfection I had thought up, and let it be as it is and love it and be
glad to be part of it (Hesse 141-42).

Godot, if interpreted as God, is here and now and the tree that lies on the Beckettian

stage proclaims him loud. Every event is His message. Every smiling face, every beautiful

object, every impulse in the heart for the unconditioned Good, every gesture of love, every

act of gratitude and celebration is His messenger. Even the “accursed” time through which

Eternity gradually forces its presence proclaims Him.

Words and Silence

Beckett is desperate to decondition his people from words, from everything

borrowed so that they encounter reality or self in all its nakedness and horror. However he

doesn’t recover in the debris of mind, at the far end of the road after excavation has been

complete, the treasure of Spirit or Self. Krishnamurti does the same job but he discovers at

the end of the journey into the self not horror but what Buddha discovered – peace that

passeth all understanding and bliss infinite. Treasures of the Self are unimaginable. He too,

like Beckett, refuses all consolations, all bad faith. He strips all the veils, peels all the layers

of the onion of ego that hides our own essential nothingness.

 Shah 202

Beckett is also unable to see the beauty of language opening into the infinite. He is

unaware of the Sacred that permeates whole of the phenomenal order that sanctifies it, that

makes it a channel of grace. (Even such Buddhist metaphysicians and sages as Nagarjuna

find samsara as essentially nirvana when looked from a nirvanic consciousness). He seems

to deny God’s immanence in the world of things. Eternal order permeates the temporal order

through and through and in fact can be tasted here and now, in time. This world though

Maya from a certain perspective, reflects or mirrors Atman also. Maya is really not an

illusion as ordinarily interpreted but creative energy or activity, the mode by which

Brahman manifests. There is no illusion, nothing unreal, no falsehood ultimately from a

nondualistic perspective. If the world were not enjoying reality even though derived it

would not exist. So there is no real turning away, no real asceticism in the traditional

religious worldviews. The world doesn’t fail to reflect the perfection and goodness of the

Source. The harmony, order and beauty of the cosmos are the imprint of the absoluteness of

the Principle in manifestation. The traditional view of the negative divine is only a reflection

of this sacred mystery and utter perfection of the Absolute. Religion binds this world to the

other world, the relative to the Absolute and by virtue of that it delivers us from the finitude.

The rationalist in Beckett as in Camus would like to appropriate this mystery, this

“absurdity” in rational terms, in the net of words, although he is painfully made aware by

encountering the limit situations that the impossible is there standing by itself about which

nothing could be done.

Esotericism talk existence or God and not about existence or about God as

Krishnamurti and others have been emphasizing time and again. God is Reality itself, Al-

Haqq as the Quran calls it and as Sufis interpret it. Whatever is or whatever truth known and
 Shah 203

unknown is, is God. To God belong all beautiful names as the Quran says. Thus all things

noble, all things grand and worthy of human pursuit are included when traditions speak

about worshipping God. God as the Ground of being grounds all our endeavours. There is

no space for escaping God. One can only lament at the impoverished or distorted

construction of this most holy word in certain exoteric theological accounts or in the

dialogue between Nell and Hamm or in Lucky’s speech. What esotericism or Unitarian

metaphysics understands by this term may be glimpsed in the following passage of Ibn

Arabi.

If we gaze, it is upon Him; if we use our intelligence, it is towards Him; if

we reflect, it is upon Him; if we know it is Him. For it is He who is
revealed in every face, sought in every sign, worshipped in every object of
worship, and pursued in the invisible and the visible. The whole world
prays to Him, prostrates itself before Him and glorifies His praise; tongues
speak of Him, hearts are enraptured by love for Him, minds are
bewildered in Him. (al-Futûhât al-makkiyya III, 449-50).

Creating Meaning

A vital point of distinction between religion and Beckettian approach may be noted

here. Religion doesn’t merely show how life can be worth living but makes it so. It creates

meaning even if it isn’t objectively there. What existentialists attempt (i.e., create meaning

or values in a meaningless situation or valueless universe) has been very successfully done

by religion. It has made life worth living for countless millions throughout history. Even the

supposedly life-denying pessimistic religions have made life worth living. Buddhism, for

instance, nurtured beautiful civilization that produced great art. Faith in transcendence

signifies faith in meaning, not by virtue of some future life or heaven but by a changed

attitude or perspective by virtue of which one sees eternity in this moment and consents to
 Shah 204

fate, to even eternal recurrence if that were the case. It makes life a celebration, a feast, a joy

everlasting. It doesn’t merely promise or postpone these things. They are realized here and

now.

As God is understood in traditional metaphysics as Infinite and All-Possibility one

can never exhaust contexts and thus meanings as God signifies precisely this impossibility

of exhaustion and determination. Creation has no determined meaning and thus it has

infinite signification. Each moment God is in new glory. He never repeats. Each moment is

original in the life of God (and the life of universe). Because the universe has no given

determinate meaning we can give it one. The deeper motivation for Sartre’s whole project

is to secure an indeterminate universe where there is room for freedom or creativity and

nothing is imposed from outside. I think we have ample room in perennialist metaphysics or

ontology for accommodating the spirit of such a humanitarian project.

Meaning of the Fall

The traditions enunciate the doctrine of fall, i.e., that man has committed a crime

(even if it is just an act of forgetfulness) that has necessitated his fall, led to man’s being

outside the Divine center and thus made him fragmentary and in a state of disequilibrium.

To be born is to expiate for the sins committed during one’s “former” life. We have

forgotten that we are the children of immortal Bliss, that our ego isn’t our real self, that our

home is Eden, that we are, by the very fact of being born in time severed from our timeless

essence, that existence and thus becoming has condemned us to a state where essence is

hard to be found, that we have usurped the divine privileges and tasted the forbidden fruit of

knowledge, inductive knowledge and thus direct access of truth, pure intellection or the

faculty of intuitive intellection has been lost (though not irretrievably according to
 Shah 205

perennialists). Beckett too recognizes this fallen state but doesn’t believe that we originally

were/are innocent, immortal, pure enjoying our abode in heaven. He has no metaphysics to

tell him from where he has come; similarly he doesn’t believe that we are ever going to

regain the paradise as he doesn’t know anything of the End either. He is resigned to the hell

he is in. He has come from nowhere for no reason and has been condemned to hell by devils

(“they” of The Unnamable). Because of his rejection of metaphysics or the knowledge of

universal principles, of first and last things or of the Origin and the End, it is no wonder that

he can’t explain man’s guilt consciousness, the unknown crime that he has committed and

which has necessitated his suffering and why he is obliged to express nothingness of his life,

why he is here to mourn his state of exile and expiate for the sins he hasn’t committed. He

can only see destruction brought by Time that in his view only inflicts wounds (and doesn’t

heal them) until the cup is full when one is no more to complain of its ravages.

Language and Truth

Like Camus Beckett abhors generalizations and abstractions and for him

metaphysics is exactly these things. He is apparently committed to a sort of

phenomenological analysis of experience. He wants to have no distorting spectacles of

beliefs, ideologies while perceiving the truth of life. He wants to look at life naked stripped

of all illusions. His thorough going empiricism leads him to despairing conclusions. But

mystics have also shown great respect for the empirical. And in their quest for pure being

they bracket off mental constructs, propositions, generalizations and abstractions and are

thus committed to “pure” experience (one may, with most modern philosophers implicating

linguistic turn in modern thought, concede involvement of language in all experience and

the irreducible linguistic and thus cultural construction of all discourse. However this
 Shah 206

doesn’t alter the validity of the phenomenological project or mysticism’s claim to pure

experience as these are aimed at reducing the intrusion of linguistic or cultural constructs to

minimum possible to let experience be perceived as it is. Irreducible elements including

language and laws of thought that frame all experience can be construed as constituting

what we here designate as what is or the Real). The mystic’s distrust of language and logic

and thought doesn’t, however, lead to despairing conclusions. Existence becomes a problem

only when we approach it logically, linguistically, propositionally, or when we talk about it

or approach it from the head. Problems of life, tensions of good and evil, of truth and

ignorance, of God and devil, arise only when we approach it non-existentially. Language

creates problems as Wittgenstein said. Mysticism has been pleading for transcendence of

both language and mind. The mystic attempts to be silent and then on truth takes care of

itself.

Art and Transcendence

Some observations on Beckett’s views of art are in order as here we can see his

salvific scheme in operation. His is a picture not quite unlike Joyce and Proust regarding the

vacation of the artist. In fact religion’s function has been increasingly usurped by art in the

twentieth century as Arnold had prophesied. Nietzsche is the greatest champion of prophetic

view of artist and salvific view of art. Moran finds peace in “another’s ludicrous distress.”

His artistic vacation seems to be fulfilling his dharma; it is a call from the beyond or

transcendence as he is harnessed to a task which transcends himself as well as the object of

his endeavor. He is doing what he does for the sake of a cause, which, while having need of

us to be accomplished, “is in essence anonymous, and would subsist, haunting the minds of

men, when its miserable artisans should be no more” (M: 114). Thus the world is saved only
 Shah 207

through art “that pierces the outer turmoil’s veil,” and discerns our quarry and senses “what

course to follow.” Art, the Dionysian art in which like Nietzsche Beckett consumes himself,

reveals the supraindividual and thus immortal essence of man. Music and not the Apollonian

reason expresses this and Beckett’s aesthetics emphasizes this point. Like Proust’s

protagonist and approximating in certain sense mystical purgatorial path, Beckett hero in the

trilogy discovers his essence in the “inaccessible dungeon of our being to which Habit does

not possess the key” (M: 18). As mystics are in search of the repose of being, the still centre

at the heart of our being, Molloy’s quest for his mother is interpretable as quest for the

Mothers of Being. Edith Kern sees a parallel to it in Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s journey to the

Mothers of Being, the ultimate journey to our essence (Kern 192). Both mysticism and art in

Nietzschean-Beckettian view break the spell of individuation and then only the Being, the

universal, the essence, the timeless, the immortal, the unknown, the transcendent, is sensed.

Reason, causality, time and the accident of individuality are all to be transcended. It is not

the individual living in time and space that Moron is but the unmoulded, untamed, timeless

essence of man that Molly is and in whose quest Molly proceeds. In the theologian’s hell

nothing burns except the self will as the Theologica Germanica records. The mystics burn

this self will here on earth. Beckett’s Dionysian aesthetic also insists on the same thing.

Deterioration of Molly’s body and his advance towards anonymity speaks of the same

process of decreation. Molly’s world is a

world without will, without causality, universal and nameless….the world

of the macrocosm where individual existence shrinks into meaninglessness
and human relations are reduced – or heightened – to the universal, the
subconscious, the mythical. In such a world Molly has small belief in the
power of language, the logos, to convey the essences of things (Kern 191).
 Shah 208

The mystic union with the universe which Nietzsche considered the prerogative of

the Dionysian artist and which, for Proust, in the form of music, embodies the highest

achievement of art is at times attained by Molloy in his mother’s room, though the full

splendour of beatific vision, the infinite awareness and infinite bliss that accompany it are

still too far from this mystical experience. Of course there is sought an escape from time,

habit and intelligence and Molloy is no longer that sealed jar to which he owed his cramped

closed well preserved being, the state that is bestowed to a saint or a mystic is quite distant

for him. Beckett has referred to himself in specifically Nietzschean and mystical terms as

“non-knower” and “non-can-er.” His art, like much of twentieth century art, is a crude and

quite inadequate approximation of traditional religious or mystical ideal.

Beckett quite rightly, speaking from the traditional metaphysical perspective, saw

the limitations of traditional theistic thesis especially as understood in a crude exoteric

dualist theological and philosophical perspective that posits God rather than the Godhead as

the Ultimate Reality or First Principle. As Coe points out all his people are aware of a force

at work within them and about them, a force which goads them onwards towards ends which

they themselves would not have envisaged, yet which can neither be analyzed nor rationally

explained, which completely eludes the net of words or the realm of the known or thought.

They all describe God negatively which is familiar to the East in the tradition of the negative

divine. This is the Upanisadic way of neti neti. Watt’s description of nothing resembles the

Upanisadic version in its refusal to compromise with anthropomorphic idolatrous instinct.

They all possess a strong feeling of being caught up in a pattern of salvation and damnation,

of sin and redemption, of guilt and punishment. However they don’t have any clue of what

is going on to them and can’t be equated with conscious travelers on the path. The severe
 Shah 209

discipline that traditions have imposed on those desirous of salvation is recognized to have

borne the results aimed at. All the gods are conquered and whole of the universe is

appropriated in that vital moment of enlightenment. But about Beckett’s people one

wonders what good their extreme asceticism does to them. One is sure at least of the fact

that they lose something (by denying the body, by denying the world, by denying the life –

none of his characters is able to affirm life passionately and sing its songs with that gay

abandon unlike Camus, especially the youthful Camus, the author of Nupitals). None of the

Beckettian characters is able to achieve complete transcendence of the finitude which is the

curse of man as none of them has perfect intuition of the Infinite. The Transcendent

Principle can’t be caught in the net of finitude or immanence. Beckett doesn’t follow the

logic of the Infinite. Within the humanist frame (despite his devastating critique and

exposure of its foundations he remains at bottom a rationalist and humanist and tries to

speak from the vantage point of human, all too human plane and despite feeling utter

disequilibrium in that fragmentary viewpoint) there is no true infinite and thus true

transcendence. None of the major existential thinkers recognized fully accepted the

traditional doctrine regarding locus of transcendence in The Transcendent Principle. For

them human subjectivity was everything blocking their understanding of objectivity of the

Absolute. Immanent transcendence that characterizes these philosophies – as Shahzad

Qaisar, a Pakistani perennialists has noted (Qaisar 17) – comes in the way of Beckett to

achieve the logical solution to his dilemmas. This is especially evident in his aesthetic.

Only in truth does one become free as the Christ said. And absurdist is not free

because he doesn’t know the truth. In fact it is his utter failure to know and to be free that

accounts for his pessimism.

 Shah 210

Love is the Answer

The question is of finding the love which is the principle of dealienation.

Hell is inability to love due to inflated ego or what is called pride in scriptures. The

principle of self transcendence is another name of love. Man’s deepest quest is

translatable as a quest for love. Now love is possible by self knowledge and this self

knowledge is knowing the truth of anatta or denial of the self, or transcending the illusion of

separate self and self-will. When ego isn’t time is not. And all sorrow presupposes the

reality of ego and time. The Kingdom of God is where time is not as the Christ said. So

Beckett’s problem and quest too is for love or self knowledge. The mystics have found love

and sung of it and that is enough proof of their finding the gnosis that delivers, their

discovery of Bliss that God is. It is the inability of Beckett to find love that makes him

pessimist. Eastern metaphysics with its nondualism that rejects ‘self-other’ dichotomy and

identification of human consciousness with universal consciousness could well be described

as the metaphysics of love. Gnosis consists in realizing the illusoriness of ego-directed

attitudes and actions. The difference between the Traditional and Beckettian worlds is a

product of their different visions – one born of love and renunciation of self will and the

other born of one’s inability to love and thus a state of loneliness that Beckett’s heroes

represent.

The mystic is best described as lover and not the one who has ecstatic experiences of

superterrestrial beings. The mystics’ realization of the One is simply translatable as

universalization of love. Mystics sing the heavenly song of love, with gay abandon. There is

nothing comparable to the following lines of Rumi (that show the discovery and celebration
 Shah 211

of love as a result of self-transcendence or disidentification of one’s consciousness with the

ego) from his Diwan-i- Shamsi Tabrez in Beckett, in Camus and in Sartre:

I amn’t of this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise

nor of hell
I amn’t of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan
My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless
It is neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, one I know, one I see, One I call (Nicholson 81-82).

And “Pour out wine till I become wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I

have felt only fatigue” (Nicholson 85).

To t h e mystic is audible the music of the cosmos as the latter is his beloved.

God is incarnate in cosmic dance. Beauty universal he sees in the dancing waves of the

sea, in the waving of the forests, in the wilderness and the stars. He embraces all and

excludes none as he is love. Love like light robes everything with heavenly splendours of

light. To Beckett this appears like a fairy tale. His skepticism regarding possibility or

vivifying effect of love may be traced to his peculiar temperament or linked to his Cartesian

background. Or is love disallowed in a capitalist individualist setting that Beckett

represented? After having experienced the ravages of war one wonders how one’s faith

in love could be sustained. Beckett found around himself a landscape devoid of love. And

if God is dead love too dies and is replaced by broken images of Love that is God.

What ails Beckett is divine athambia and divine aphasia. But this is really an expression

of man’s – the Western dualist fragmented absurdist man’s – own impotence, his own

distorted receptacle, his own blindness that can’t receive grace. Man must accept total
 Shah 212

responsibility, the fact that he has to journey alone from alone to Alone. He must be a light

unto himself. He must cure his own pain and end his sorrow by his own efforts (although

that is actually the work of Spirit indwelling in him).

Altizer is one of the most important theologians who has explored Beckett’s world

for understanding the task ahead for theology. His approach helps us to put Beckett in

proper perspective and ultimately in the service of man seeking a vision in these hard times

of eclipse of transcendence. The following passages, I think, present the essence of

Beckett’s vision regarding the props of self, love, etc. and the solution he suggests is not

very different from Buddhism though it appears that he didn’t envision clear way out of the

nihilistic impasse but he did see clearly what is wrong with the humanistic culture.

For if the full reality of the love which we have known now
appears to us in the form of a negative totality, then Buddhism can be a
way to the dissolution or erasure of that totality, to the absolute stilling of
all active expressions of love or desire. If it is the activity and the
temporality of a Western and Faustian will which have led to the horror
and chaos of the twentieth century, then Buddhism offers stilling of that
will, to an absolute silence and calm in which neither will nor desire will
be present. Buddhist discipline centers upon images of pain and suffering
as a way to the dissolution of the activity and the individual identity of
selfhood, for to know the self as pain and suffering is to be prepared for
liberation from the illusion of selfhood. May we not regard modern
Western vision as such a discipline, as a preparation for the dissolution of
selfhood by way of a total immersion in the darkness and horror of life?
And not only the darkness of life, but above all the darkness of love, the
horror of our profoundest dream and hope. Is the dark emptiness of what
has appeared to us as love a sign for us of the emptiness of everything
which we have known as consciousness and experience, and of the
ultimate nothingness of all which has been present to us as reality and
 Shah 213

world? Is the dark negativity of our emptiness so overwhelming that no

way is present to us of celebrating emptiness as a mask of total bliss
(Altizer 207-208).

The compassion of an apocalyptic Christ is inseparable from the

advent of an actual disintegration of consciousness and experience.
Accordingly, visions of a new apocalyptic compassion must inevitably
appear in the form of madness or chaos to all those who can still find life
or hope in an individual centre of consciousness (Altizer 210).

Modern purgatory constituted by nihilistic atmosphere that negates and negates and

shakes foundations amounts to dissolution of all individual and interior identity and

meaning and without this “there can be no end of an actual center of consciousness, and

thus no vision of the New Jerusalem” (Altizer 212). It is not surprising that mysticism has

often been dubbed as madness. Disintegration of individual centre of consciousness and all

that goes with the name of self necessarily will appear as madness to those who are still

occupied with the world and the self.

The mystic sees things by the light of the Spirit, and to him therefore there is nothing

outside him. The brighter and purer the light within, the brighter and purer everything

appears. If there is darkness inside it is reflected in the outer world also. Ram Thirtha

declared that red rays of the sun were his muscles. When anything came across his eyes, he

robed it in God and then saw that there was nothing else but God. He thus addresses winds:

“Blow, O breezes, mingle O winds, with these words whose purpose is the same as yours./O

laughter! Laugher!/Inextinguishable joy and laughter” ( In Woods of God Religion II: 569).

Beckett’s ‘Perhaps’

It is no virtue to qualify everything with a ‘perhaps’ as Beckett would. We can’t say

we live perhaps. We need the certainty of the Absolute or we perish. The odyssey of life
 Shah 214

involves swimming in a turbulent river in which powerful waves toss us hither and thither.

Here mere thinking and brooding may lead to suffocation and drowning. Action and action

in full faith in oneself and the universe is needed here. Beckett’s desolate world has its

origin in failure to respond as the situation demands.

At another place Tirtha says:

Live that life within you, live that Atman within you, feel that you are

the light of lights, the

Lord of lords, the Arbiter of all justice, vigour and beauty,

And that all existence is due to god, feel that, feel

That! Try these spiritual experiments, and then see! (In Woods of God
Realization I: 401)

The East has been trying these experiments for so long and found that they work;

there is nothing mystical or irrational about all this. The East has been practicing the art of

Bliss for centuries and it has practically defeated the absurdist’s conclusions. By becoming a

mirror to existence, by becoming a witness (shahid) through renunciation of desire and will

and submission to God’s will, one becomes a witness and conquers dukkha and realizes the

splendor and bliss of pure consciousness.

Ultimately nothing is simpler than truth, nothing more natural to us than our

theomorphic nature, nothing more closer to us than God. Nothing is to be done. Nothing

needs to be believed. Nothing is at stake. Nothing is lost. No problem to be solved, no

territory to be mapped, no quest to be undertaken. Everything is as it is and as it should be.

All scriptures are vain and in fact ask for transcendence of all word games, theories,

narratives. Man needs no salvation, no grace, no theology, no philosophy. There is no

nothing at the heart of the doctrines of traditional metaphysics. Truth is not there at the end
 Shah 215

of the tunnel gettable someday. There is no search, no adventure, no truth really from a

strictly nondualistic perspective. The metaphor of search or discovery is quite misleading.

There is no seeker, no sought, no seeking really. To be liberated from truth is ultimate

liberty. Nietzsche’s rejection of slavery to truth has deeper meaning. Religion aims not at

truth but at freedom from every dualistic image or entity, everything that can only be

conceived by its opposite. To speak of truth is to think of its opposite falsehood, error.

Ibn Arabi, amongst Muslim Sufi metaphysicians, has put forward this thesis in his

Fusus-al-Hikam. Nondualistic philosophers have maintained this thesis always across

traditions though common men and many philosophers have great difficulty in

understanding this. The difficulty is that for a person caught in the dualities of samsara

nirvanic consciousness is unimaginable. The difference between heaven and hell is because

of different perceptions. The enlightened and the non-enlightened can’t communicate

because their perceptions, their worlds are different. One can refute nondualist philosophers

and sages only by attempting to experientially verify or refute them. And no amount of

philosophical analysis, no deconstructive strategy will be able to do it.

Conclusion

We may conclude the chapter by restating traditionalist response to key assertions

alluded to in the beginning.

Truth is to be realized and may not need communication. The need for

communication is an inauthentic need. We should learn to be silent. Desire for

communication is an escape from nothingness at the heart of the self. No need to

communicate. Truth can’t be communicated; it is experienced and not expressible in

linguistic communicable terms. Only unimportant non existential things can be well

communicated. All that is important and that which

 Shah 216

concerns us deeply, ultimately is necessarily and expectedly in the silence before the Word.

We have no obligation to express anything. Our obligation consists in being rather than

knowing or saying. There is no truth out there that you can communicate; all that can be

communicated isn’t truth. Just celebrate and listen to silence. The music that will be heard

then in silence is what we need to hear and communicate. There is no ‘thou’ to whom you

can communicate and there is no ‘I’ who can communicate. To live in the symbolic order is

to be dealienated from the Real as Lacan would remind us.

All temporal things are indeed vain. “There is no permanence except in the

Permanent” asserts Islamic shahadah. Devoid of transcendence, the true world, to use

Nietzsche’s phrase, the apparent world, the world of scent and colour also loses its meaning.

If we deny transcendence we deny everything worthwhile and then indeed there is no point

in existence. No flowers bloom, no birds sing. No love justifies the world of pain. The fact

of our temporality does not mean transcendence is not accessible. Time is not to be negated.

It forces one to decreate and that paves way for subsistence in God. It shows we are

creatures also and not only gods. One can detach from past and future anxieties and find the

present moment and that takes much of the suffering that temporality implies. Ultimately it

is only after death that parinirvana is possible.

Beckett’s pessimistic conclusions don’t necessarily follow from his premises. There

is a Saviour who has many means at his disposal and he is not mocked and does succeed in

his work. Descent into hell is needed to reach the kingdom of God and thus is one more

upaya of the Saviour. Beckett is all about our descent into hell – a step in initiation

universally recognized. This explains why his characters are situated in purgatory or hell

and why there is no death in his world. There is only decay. Regeneration is in another
 Shah 217

dimension that is dimly perceived by Beckett. But he does prepare us for that perception as

that demands taking full look at the worst and making peace with all our unconscious and

overcoming the dark forces and obsessions that block our entry to the Kingdom of God.

Man discovers and has to willy nilly discover at the pain of hell his divinity and original

state of omniscience and bliss. The Saviour saves through beauty, virtues, art, Master’s

touch, love, wonder etc. Anything can act as an upaya for saving us. Then all existence

appears enlightened or blissful as the Buddha said that when he won nirvana he felt whole

existence enlightened and flowers blooming everywhere. One has every reason to bless the

existence or life as its original nature is blessedness. According to the Upanisads all

creatures are born from bliss, after being born are sustained by bliss, and in the end enter

into bliss. “We don’t understand,” says Father Zossima, “that life is a paradise [at present],

for we have only to wish to understand this and it will immediately appear before us in all

its beauty.” In the materials of The Possessed we find the intuition of mystics corroborated

in these remarkable words: “Christ walked on earth to show mankind that even in its earthly

nature the human spirit can manifest itself in heavenly radiance, in the flesh, and not merely

in a dream or ideal – and that this is both natural and possible” (Zenkovesky 423). I recall

the statement of Rabbi Herschel “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.” This is what

Beckett could not say and hardly could escape the desire to say it or cherish it in the heart of

his hearts. And this is what Nietzsche meant in his plea for aesthetic justification of life. Life

has to be converted to an art to be endurable and enjoyable. It is then possible that one can

say with Eckhart that man needs only one prayer: Thank you God. Beckett could not say

thank you and even not simply accept without thanking the fact that he has been gifted with
 Shah 218

life. Needless to say that its implacable grandeur escaped him and its stunning beauty that

mystics can contemplate and assimilate escaped Camus.

The absurd is born of the encounter of the self with the incomprehensible world.

Metaphysics drops both the individual and the reason as it encounters or discovers a grand

new world where love alone reigns. The self or soul, so dear to Camus and many absurd

characters of Camus and Beckett who are desperate on preserving identity of a pseudo-

personality, is a curse for the perennialist. One is reminded of Coomaraswamy’s remark on

Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul that this very thing is what Easterners are supposed

to lose so that the Spirit lives. However Beckett himself is convinced that what goes by the

name of soul is a compounded thing and thus transient or mutable. Camus is presupposing

such a soul. Beckett pities men condemned to preserve what is illusory and presents the

attempts at escaping from the painful truth with great force.

What Beckett shows is that the world with all its suffering and boredom compels

man to go for another search or journey that traditions call journey to God. But then few are

saved. Beckett focuses mainly on the story of failures. Moral and spiritual cripples that

modern men are by virtue of living outside grace are shown with all their pathetic

degradation in his works. He found mess only around him and presented it with great force.

What is needed is to show that regeneration is still possible and we can recover the sacred

from the ruins of a profaned world. And that is the task a perennialist undertakes.
 Shah 219

Beyond Absurdism: Recovering the Sacred

Beckett and Camus complain, along with many modern writers, about inaccessibility

of transcendence to modern man. Modern man has lost the smell of the perfume of the

sacred as Schuon is quoted by Nasr to have remarked (“Recovery of the Sacred”). But is

it because God chose to hide or man is absent to receive grace? Schuon’s answer is

definitely the latter. But the question is: Is it possible to recover the sense of sacred or

transcendence? This work has aimed precisely at arguing this possibility. The sacred can

be recovered through various ways which include among others exploring the connection

between beauty and the sacred and meditation on images of archetypal Beauty in

traditional art and symbolic view of nature that can still be found infusing works of many

of our great artists and poets (“Recovery of the Sacred”). The world that has lost the

sense of the sacred is not the whole world. God didn’t die for a vast majority of people

after modernity announced him dead. Wherever modernism has spread there is no doubt a

loss of sense of sacred but what has not been lost is nostalgia for the sacred as Nasr has

pointed out in the above quoted lecture and his works such as Knowledge and the Sacred.

This nostalgia is in Camus and to some extent in Beckett also. And we can indeed get

back the smell of the perfume of the sacred, assert our perennialists.

Here is how one can get hold of the essences – the heart of things and the reality behind

the appearances and see how beautiful is this vision of the “beyond,” the world of ideas.

This answers Camusian-Beckettian problem with the vision of essences. To quote Underhill

who argues, not by turning to mystics but to artists – universally recognized priests of art

that essences are revealed to all those who purify perception:

 Shah 220

The coloured scene at which you look so trustfully owes, in fact, much of
its character to the activities of the seer: to that process of thought – concept
– cogitation, from which Keats prayed with so great an ardour to escape,
when he exclaimed in words which will seem to you, according to the
temper of your mind, either an invitation to the higher laziness or one of the
most profound aspirations of the soul, "O for a life of sensations rather than
thoughts!" He felt--as all the poets have felt with him—that another,
lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders, alive with ultimate
music, awaited those who could free themselves from the fetters of the
mind, lay down the shuttle and the weaver's comb, and reach out beyond the
conceptual image to intuitive contact with the Thing (Practical Mysticism.
13).
Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually

…but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too

arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way.” Yes
finding God who is every leaf and every stone needs “industry and
goodwill” “ a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and
rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed
windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come
to us fully charged with wonder and freshness” Very few strive in the
way of God as they should and those who do this discover that “they
have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of
morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every
thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life” (Practical
Mysticism 13-14).

This experience of the transcendent is far too common to humanity than usually

recognized and in fact the supernatural, the beyond, is far too real for traditional man, for

all those who have not closed their faculties of souls, who have loved with great abandon

and who have died to their selves. We have, arguably, experiences of a transcendent
 Shah 221

world of meaning. In fact our apprehension of beauty is one glaring example.

Cunningham has beautifully presented the evidence:

As simple an experience as that of seeing the colours of leaves in autumn

discloses the world around us as resonating with an astonishing harmony
and richness; it reveals objects as qualitatively irradiated in modalities
which even the most sober of analytic philosophers have agreed are not
fully capturable in the language of physics. When Blake urges us to see
heaven in a wild flower, he was pointing to something that few humans
could honestly deny: our ability, in those lucid moments that Wordsworth
called ‘spots of time,’ to see the world transfigured with beauty and
meaning. Human beings can’t live wholly and healthily except in
responsiveness to objective values of truth and beauty and goodness. If they
deny those values, or try to subordinate them to their own selfish ends, they
find that meaning slips away (Cottingham 103).

What Caligula longs for – the moon – countless people (and not only mystics) have found.

Focusing on Sufis we can assert that they breathe the supernatural. Angels are at their beck

and call. Gods wish for attention from the Buddhas. There are countless tales narrated in the lives

of mystics and by those who have known them – many of them skeptics to begin with – which

clearly demonstrate that there are higher orders of being that transcend what we ordinarily call

natural world with which man can communicate. In fact certain prophets and sages are reported

to have talked to animals and to stones. The universe is not indifferent but our very home for

those who have learnt to attune themselves to its rhythms. ‘If you could maintain God-

consciousness angels will meet you and shake hands with you,’ the Prophet of Islam reportedly

told one of his companions. They did shake hands with Blake, one may recall here. Traditional

people seek messages from the other world through dreams and omens. Ibn Arabi has argued
 Shah 222

that every event is a message and even the lowly worms have something to convey to those who

care to know. A vast majority of traditional people maintain a live relationship with their dead

kith and kin. Who says that people die and are heard no more when the fact is that men have,

generally speaking (exceptions are certain moderns, mostly living in cities who have taken some

flimsy arguments culled from here and there on face value. One can count on fingers names of

important thinkers from any civilization who reject transcendence lock, stock and barrel. Deep

down, man continues to be a metaphysical animal, Homo religiosus) never believed themselves

to be their bodies or minds and thus mortal and they still continue to dispose off their dead

according to traditional teachings? Traditional people are indifferent to death that troubles our

absurdists so much. In fact absurdists represent a few people who have been in minority even in

the age of disbelief, not to speak of the ages of faith. “Men die and are not happy” as Camus’

Caligula would have us believe is not universally held proposition. Men don’t die really and very

few men believe they die. Believers of all traditions are asked to die before death so death loses

its sting for them. Those who truly believe welcome death. Many mystics are reported to have

predicted their time of death and encountered it with supreme indifference. Death is a great

adventure and Easterners have perfected the art of conscious dying. There is no pleasure

comparable to death. Men don’t die and they choose “death” as they chose to be born according

to traditional teachings. There are tribal people still around (for instance in Indian State Orrissa),

who publicly celebrate when someone dies. Muslims have been traditionally celebrating the date

of death of Sufis as day of union with God. It is a modern fashion to despise death and one can

understand only as a symptom of modern nihilism.

One needs to note that we need to invoke old scholastic formula that surmises that subject

has to be adequate to the object to make knowledge possible. To experience the transcendent one
 Shah 223

has to have what Blake called Imagination or that sensibility or sharpened awareness that poets

have for instance as Eleyn Underhill has lucidly argued in her Practical Mysticism. Mysticism

demands the hard the art of being here and now, the process of deconditioning from bondage to

past and future, the demand to be open, receptive excluding nothing from the sphere of

consciousness or perception. To be here now is what is to transcend the mind because reality is

not in thoughts, in past and future but in the present. To see truth is to see phenomena with

unclouded eyes. For the Tradition self knowledge is prerequisite of all knowledge and without it

nothing is really known about the world. The great misery of Beckett heroes arises from the fact

that they have no self knowledge. Neither have great modern writers and their heroes. Self-

knowledge is synonymous with bliss and conquest of sorrow. With self-knowledge comes

knowledge of everything. No more is anything outside oneself and neither are we strangers to the

world. Things reveal their secrets, their essences to the sages. But because one doesn’t know

oneself one doesn’t know anything and it is knowledge which saves according to traditions. To

quote from John Donne:

But we know our selves least; Mere outward shews

Our mindes so store,
That our soules, no more than our eyes disclose
But forme and colour. Onely he who knows
Himselfe, knowes more (Venegeance will sit above our faults: 16-20).

Beckett’s characters don’t know the soul which is the condition or prerequisite of

knowing more of the world and one must first conquer sorrow and then see the world.

Beckett puts cart before the horse. He concentrates on last moments of delivery when

all is pain but then when the child sees light of the day all problems are over. Sages

are these delivered souls. By love alone is God to be approached and known but this

love must not

 Shah 224

be finite or of any particular thing for the sake of that thing alone but for the sake of the

One which alone is and which is the essence of everything. “He must be loved in all with

an unlimited love, even in all His doings, in all His friends, in all His creatures.” In a

prose passage of great beauty Traherne thus describes the attitude towards earth which is

needful before we can enter heaven.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars:.. Till you
can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in
sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your
jewels;... till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst
equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all:
you never enjoy the world.... The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet
no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a
region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of
God.... It is, the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven (Centuries of
Meditation 29-30).

He is forever reiterating, in company with all the mystics, that “It is not the object, but

the light that maketh Heaven: It is a purer sight” (Centuries of Meditation 30).

The perennialist thesis is that – the whole history of human thought and civilization

bears witness to it until the arrival of the brave new world, when man has come of age,

transcended the illusory props that religion and metaphysics provided and could afford to

murder God – man can’t live without God or outside God. According to them hunger for

transcendence – bread of the soul – is built into the human makeup. Huston Smith in his

The World Religions has argued the point that the outreach for transcendence implies

the existence of something in the way that the wings of birds point to
 Shah 225

the reality of air. This reality that fulfills the soul’s longing is God by whatsoever name it

may be understood – and here I have preferred the term transcendence and occasionally

sacred to include those religions as well that have avoided theistic terminology. This is to be

treated, following Rainer Maria Rilke’s suggestion, as a direction rather than an object. For

absurdists transcendence is impossible (a statement that humans qua humans must

immediately contradict and both Beckett and Camus have their own versions – admittedly

impoverished – of transcendence; Camus explicitly acknowledged that he is aware of the

sacred and Beckett’s painstaking search for essence, for the transempirical core of

subjectivity is quite evident) but they are at the same time great affirmers of human freedom

which is in its genuine sense transcendental as distinguished from empirical freedom.

Perennialists, following the Upanisadic dictum that there is no salvation in the realm of

finitude, assert that without God – the Infinite – nothing has any meaning, nothing is

justified, nothing endures. The absurdists caught up in the world of finitude find the world

absurd, hostile or indifferent where man is an alien. Mysticism, in contrast, makes the world

an enchanted Garden, to use Weber’s phrase. The absurdist vision is based on reason (ratio)

and truncated empiricism. The mystical vision, on the other hand, is based on intellect

(nous), sharper and more sharpened faculty of attention and thus a sort of empiricism which

refuses to define empirical in terms of ordinary sensory domain alone.

How, in our day to day life, in every action that we are condemned to do, is meaning

infused by religion? I believe that this question has not been properly dealt with and there

are glaring misunderstandings regarding this issue. Religious approach to the question of

meaning that absurdists reject is itself in need of clarification and I think that the

absurdists have mostly misunderstood it. A few remarks are in order on this issue.
 Shah 226

First it should be noted that Necessity is posited by religion as the sunnatt-al-lah, the

Order of God. And this necessity is not respectful of human self and its vanities, desires

and wishes. Religion asks to surrender our prerogative to decipher humanly

understandable, in human or anthropocentric terms, scheme of things. Things are as they

are and they couldn’t be otherwise and this property or attribute is what religions term

God’s decree or determination of things. To believe in God implies to take things for

granted, to “believe” or consent to the objective state of affairs at cosmic and metacosmic

level. Things are as they are – they can’t be otherwise. Existence is God. God is Totality.

He is the essence of every existent. This implies one can’t assert why things are as they

are. There can be no answer to this question and it is absurd to ask this question. The Fall

consists in seeing things outside God, in seeing things as things, as brute facts. The Fall is

fragmented vision. Looked as a Whole nothing is out of order and can’t be if one really

understands metaphysics.

Understood in one sense, religion and absurdists agree that no reason could be given

why there is anything and not nothing. Both agree that the individual understood as

psycho-physical complex doesn’t matter and man must relinquish hope. However one

vital point of difference has to be remembered. Kass says in The Hungry Soul: Eating

and the Perfecting of Our Nature:

A blessing offered over the meal still fosters a fitting attitude toward the
world, whose gracious bounty is available to us, and not because we merit
it... The materialistic view of life, though it may help put bread on the
table, cannot help us understand what it means to eat… Recovering the
deeper meaning of eating could help (us)… see again that living in a
needy body is no disgrace and that our particular upright embodiment
orients us toward the beautiful, the good, the true and the holy (Kaas, 230).
 Shah 227

The question is how grace vivifies in Zen tea ceremony? How is Buddha in three

pounds of flax? To this question is the answer in traditional life as it has been lived for

millennia. Believers have been living as if under the aspect of eternity or in grace and that

explains why suicides were almost unknown in traditional communities and psychiatric

prison is only a recent invention. A few more remarks below are in order.

The secular man doesn’t enjoy eating as it should be enjoyed. A believer sees his bread

as feast from God. He prays for the daily bread. He receives everything from heaven. What

a pleasure it is to be receptive, receptive to the Whole, to God. Mystics have perfected the

art of enjoying all things by receiving everything as a gift – even the most “trivial” things.

Even losses are no reason for grief for him because he loses nothing – he has no

consciousness of loss. Gift has something of the Good of which Plato spoke. Traditional

civilizations are civilizations of gift. The tag of gift transforms an object into something

precious. Traditionally life itself is privileged as a supreme gift and the fact that we are

humans or gifted with human state itself is treasured and implies we are chosen in some

way. God is named as the Giver in Islamic tradition. We deserve nothing of our own. So

what we are – partakers of divine life – are due to the gift from the Great Giver. Our reality

in itself is simply nothingness and being as such can only be a sheer gift. This theme is

illustrated in many stories in Jewish tradition, especially Hasidism. One needs to read Tales

of Mystic Joy or Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim to get a feel of the argument for thanking God

for all the dappled things. Many works of Rabbi Abraham J Heschel are enough testimony

of life’s transcendent meaning or destiny and I think a best antidote to the depression one

might get by reading Sartre or Beckett.

 Shah 228

How can our every act be a sacrament? A story of a Zen master who was chopping the

word with such absorption and devotion that he didn’t notice the coming of the king who

had come to inquire regarding him. The master explained why he didn’t notice him as he

had poured his whole being into the simple act of chopping wood and chopping wood

became his meditation. The master then offered him a cup of tea and reminded him to just

take tea with total attention and let his whole being become bone with the act of sipping tea

by taking each step with the greatest awareness (qtd. in Keerti 26).

Bringing total awareness into an activity makes it divine. This is the secret that makes

all work a matter of grace, divine. Everything is done by a child in the spirit of joy. To make

everything sacrament one need to be like a child according to Jesus. The child does things,

even the most trivial ones, for the sheer joy of action. He has no utilitarian motive. All life is

yoga as Aurobindo has argued in his Integra Yoga. One can well say that all action, all

work, is a sacrifice to God.

Osho has narrated a story in the series of discourses titled Silence, Bamboos, Cuckoos

of a saintly sculptor who used to make sculptures of sand, which the passing wind razed to

ground any moment. But he was not worried. He was asked why he doesn’t feel bad when

having worked the whole day, and the statue was just going to be complete, and then

something happens and the whole day's work is gone. He replied:

No. All of existence is momentary; there is no question of frustration. I

enjoyed making it, and if an ocean wave enjoys unmaking it, then two
persons enjoyed! I enjoyed making it, the wave enjoyed unmaking it. So in
existence there has been a double quantity of joy—why should I be
frustrated? The wave has as much power on the sand as I have; perhaps it
has more (“Osho World International”).
 Shah 229

This shows why, unlike what Beckett’s characters feel, work is not felt as curse by a

mystic. This shows why nothing is frustrating to a mystic, why every act he offers i s a

sacrifice and thus it becomes a sacrament, a celebration.

In Islamic tradition we have the mantra of zikr as a royal road to taste the bread of

heaven. Zikr, doing everything while remembering God – in God and through God – by

being aware of one’s deed, is the secret of making every work, every action including the

most trivial one, a sacrament. One can roll a stone for eternity like Sisyphus without being

disgruntled by perfecting this conception of work as sacrament, by becoming a karma yogi.

Nothing will disturb his calm, his state of union with God. Every action is done in the spirit

of wu-wei, non acting action as the doer is God.

A mystic sees many sacramental images of Reality in the teeming life of nature seeing

everything in the light of love and charity as Underhill has n o t e d . Mysticism sees the

holiness of every created thing and sees the whole created order as a symbol, a sign of the

One who alone is dancing and singing in the spirit of play for the sheer joy of it and asks

man the question whether he too shares the same freedom of the spirit to make his life a

festival of lights and a song of joy. Absurdists fail to meet the challenge of this question in

positive terms. The question, in the words of Underhill, is “What about your life? Is that a

theophany too?” “Each oak doth cry I AM,” says Vaughan. Do you proclaim by your

existence the grandeur, the beauty, the intensity, the living wonder of that Eternal Reality

within which, at this moment, you stand? Do your hours of contemplation and of action

harmonize?” (Practical Mysticism 83).

Mysticism may be simply defined as remembrance of God or God consciousness. It

means one is not conscious of one’s self or ego and the misery associated with the ego and
 Shah 230

the mind. Absurdism arises from the confrontation of individual/ego/mind with the universe

divested of transcendence. Impoverishment of intelligence, senses, beauty, empirical sense,

sense of proportion and measure and misdirected relationship with the mysterious or the

sacred, lack of such intellectual virtues as attention and such moral virtues as humility,

privileging finite over the Infinite, gravity over grace, object and objective over subject and

subjective contribute to the formation of pessimistic absurdist worldview. Absurdism turns

away from the world of Spirit to the world of self (soul, mind) and ignores the history of

traditional civilizations all of which have refuted the option of metaphysical rebellion in

favour of metaphysical submission and consequently not suffered from the malady of

nihilistic pessimistic absurdism.

 Shah 231

Simone Weil: Mystical Response to Absurdity

The problems of nihilism and absurdism as presented in the works of absurdists

which presuppose a bleak view of the world without transcendence are effectively tackled

by turning to Simone Weil’s philosophy which appropriates key absurdist premises in its

transcendence-centred interpretation of knowledge and experience. Weil’s rereading of

religion appropriates important criticisms from existentialist-absurdist writers like Beckett

and critics of traditional religion. It is possible to transcend absurdist impasse by turning to

Weil. Notebooks of Weil are here read as providing important insights to address absurdist

nihilist pessimist vision.

Beckett’s extremely influential Waiting for Godot has been much heard and

commented upon but there has been paid relatively little attention to another master piece

Waiting on God by his contemporary which challenges and moves beyond the

impasse in Beckettian depressing or nihilistic work. Simone Weil, one of the most

significant names in the history of modern mysticism and mystical philosophy, has dealt

with the unique problems that modern man faces vis-à-vis his faith. Weil encounters similar

problems that occupy absurdist writers but her response and conclusions are very different.

In this chapter it is proposed to compare and contrast Beckett and Weil to show how

transcendence as it figures in Weil’s mysticism dissolves the problems associated with

nihilism in modern thought that plague Beckett’s depressing work.

Robert Cohen has read Godot as a “dramatic companion-piece” to Simone Weil’s

Waiting for God, without, however, the postulation of faith. Both situations are set upon the

site of the crucifixion where, in Simone Weil’s belief, man was farthest from God.

Salvation
 Shah 232

is possible only through extreme affliction. Where Beckett ultimately depresses Weil shows

grace ultimately irresistible by man leading him to the other shore where time’s reign is no

more. Nihilism is overcome successfully in Weil but unconvincingly in Beckett’s works.

Similarities are various and profound. Nihilistic diagnosis of human condition as

ordinarily it appears caught up in the world ‘8of necessity, the world of time, of

appearances, evil and absurdity. If we take the world of time or creation apart from God

the reality then they have similar diagnosis of its illness and similar remedy but

while the one sees impossibility of cure for the sickness of existence and suggests

some desperate half measures that give man a semblance or illusion of salvation the

other asserts ultimate victory for man over himself and over time. They have no use for

personality; it is the obstruction to our meeting the Beloved. Both are as far as

possible from humanistic individualism, perfectionism,

anthropocentrism, utopianism, rationalism, scientism,

progressivism and the like. Both assert difficulty of salvation and pervasive power of gravity

to drag man back to earth. Both see man and the world as fallen and pin no faith in them.

For both our home is elsewhere and our destiny something very different than all this-

worldly philosophies suggest. For both God is absent though so near at the same time. For

both action doesn’t save and man lives and dies alone. No human effort will carry man to

the end that he seeks. Both laugh away man’s stubborn will to live, will to be as an ego

seeking and desiring this or that thing. Outside God man is in hell or purgatory. Life lived

without transcendence is terrible weight. All the dreams, hopes and aspirations are vain.

For both Weil and Beckett, creation as it appears independent or cut off from

transcendence is a sort of abdication of God and bedeviled by evil. Creation is in a state of

disequilibrium. It is the fallen world in need of redemption for both of them identifiy
 Shah 233

creation with the world of autonomous beings and creature with autonomous being as

appears in First and Last Notebooks. “God created because he was good, but the creature

itself be created it was evil. It redeemed I by persuading God through endless entreaties to

destroy it” (F: 123). Material things, by the presence in them of necessity, are in perfect

continuity with God. This continuity will be broken only at the moment when autonomous

beings assume an independent, and thus separate existence: it is a crime to be other than

God, a crime shared by all those who will use their free will, thereby dissolving the bond

Creator-creature (N: 539). “Evil is the distance between the creature and God, and if it

disappears, creation itself will disappear also” (N: 342). Our sin consists in wanting to be

and our punishment in believing that we exist. Expiation is wanting not to be, and salvation

for us consists in seeing that we are not (F: 218). When one encounters pain or privation,

the subtle mechanism of our autonomy starts to hide it with a consolation. For Weil even

belief in the immortality of soul is a mechanism of filling the void and can be only a sublime

consolation devised by our autonomy giving meaning to a phenomenon of which the very

essence is the absence of meaning (N: 492). One should stand completely stripped of

everything, every mask, every protective mechanism and face the void and absence of all

meaning and not encourage the reappearance of supplementary energy by supplying oneself

with a new motive. One should suffer without intent on a reward or ultimate goal which all

pertain to the realm of time so that one in a way lives always in an eternal present. Weil

expresses it thus: “I must not love my suffering because it is useful to me, but because it is”

(N: 266).

Weil argues that awareness of reality is joy and despair or sadness is a loss of contact

with reality. This is her expression of old mystical /metaphysical viewpoint which identifies
 Shah 234

God as ananda, bliss. Weil expresses the identity of joy with the awareness of reality. Since

beauty is manifest appearance, the striking sign of reality, joy can only be a feeling, an

awareness of reality. Weil describes sadness as a loss of contact with reality. Through

sadness we cannot fulfill our vacation – to understate misery of our condition and to accept

our reduction to what we truly are: nothing. The memory of the revelation of reality

through joy keeps us from plunging into despair, and the joy felt in our nothingness can be

inscribed in our sensibility only by suffering. “Joy and pain are equally precious gifts both

of which must be savoured fully, and each in its purity…” (WG: 132). In Beckett there is

nothing of this sort. For him pain may have some positive function of making us aware of

reality – Void or Nothing that Self is but joy has no such role. In fact he has little place for

any awareness of joy leading to awareness of reality. Encounter with reality is terrifying and

Reality is not of the substance of Joy though this statement needs certain qualification as

occasionally his characters attain great joy in experiencing a sort of Nirvana.

Weil privileges suffering over joy as the former is more effective in removing the

obstruction to our contact with reality. Here Beckett will agree though he has other reasons

to believe that it is suffering all the way that constitutes human vacation on earth. Suffering,

for Beckett, is not, generally speaking, a means to joy but to the blankness of Nothing. Man

needs something painful to shun his complacency in self-forgetfulness. Beauty will not

perform this miracle so efficiently. In awareness of the beautiful the self is only forgotten

and suspended, whereas in suffering it is tormented until death. It therefore appears that

suffering has prominence over joy (N: 222).

It is the question of time that forms key to the thought of both Beckett and Weil. All

important theological concepts of Weil revolve around her conception of time. For Beckett
 Shah 235

time has nothing positive about it. Life in time is suffering, bondage, exile. It is punishment

for being born. There is no use of life in time. Time is not the moving image of eternity; it

knows no stop. No perfection in virtue, no goodness comes out of living in time. Monotony

has nothing to recommend itself. Eternity in Beckett is not the same as in traditional

mysticism, It is bad eternity. Nihilism presupposes the world of time is the only world we

are condemned to live in. As the world of time is the world of suffering there is not

therefore any redemption possible. Weil shows how transcendence breaks through the

phenomena and is accessible always and ever retrievable from the abysses of evil and

absurdity.

Weil has a time tested mystical mechanism of ending of time called decreation.

Decreation, according to Weil, means the “end of time.” There is an eternal and hidden part

of soul which has the reservoir of energy “beyond time.” Through it one lives beyond time.

Nihilism is overcome by those prepared to live it to hilt by annihilating the culprit called

self, by eliminating the seeking self which lives in time and rising above the mind which

lives in past and future and never beyond time. Cultivating the faculty of undistracted

attention and intelligence one breaks through the prison of time. Weil is convinced as is

Beckett that there is a timeless dimension which is our home. However for Beckett this

timeless world, this Self that transcends the phenomenal world is not easily accessible or not

accessible without great agony and that means not accessible to the vast majority of men.

And this Self is not clearly identifiable with the traditional idea of it either. Difficulty of

salvation is a perennial theme of religious traditions. On the issue of difficulty in achieving

salvation Beckett and Weil agree. However they differ in proving the pictures of salvation.

In Beckett there is only dubious salvation and it is very difficult to find even one case of
 Shah 236

complete success in dealing with the forces of destruction or nihilism. If for Weil one or two

persons are saved in a generation for Beckett even this figure is perhaps exaggeration and

there is not a single case that could be characterized as truly liberated, as jivan mukta in the

Beckettian world. Beckett laments that, generally speaking, to live beyond time is

impossible.

Time is self’s environment where it pursues its goal of self-expansion. Time is not

only the essential element of personal existence; it can also serve as a chosen instrument for

transcending it. Time is also the Cross, the weight of necessity making the soul feel how

vulnerable and profoundly subject it is to mediation of time. The time shown to be the

instrument of expiation (N: 268) is the consequence of original sin; by his disobedience to

the will of God, Adam was excluded from eternity and imprisoned in time. As Milkos Veto

puts it: “the eternal is reconciled with itself only by time that eliminates itself” (Veto114).

To quote Veto further: “The seed of eternity bears fruit in time…. The earth in which this

seed is planted is the uncreated part of the soul, but the rain and warmth that make it grow

are time. Time is therefore in some way a party to eternity” (Veto114). The entire life of the

self is directed towards the future because its substratum is supplementary energy,

“produced” only by motives whose ends are in the future (or in the past) (N: 184). One

should live in the present breaking the ties with the future and the past. Here Heidegger

comes to mind who sees life as project into future. Being reduced to the present moment

also implies a sinless state, since sin is essentially a claim to mastery over the future, the

refusal of future love or suffering, or the refusal to repent of an evil act committed in the

past: “If we contemplate ourselves at a specific moment – the present moment, cut off from
 Shah 237

past and future – we are innocent… Isolating a moment in this way implies forgiveness. But

this isolation is detachment” (N: 216).

Beckett finds circular activity intolerable but Weil doesn’t. Amongst all sorts of

movements, circular movement is the most perfect, because it is the spatial image of the

motiveless state. If there must be a movement in the world, it must be the nearest possible

thing to repose (N: 406). This is the case with circular movement, at the end of which one is

precisely at the point of departure; it has no goal, unlike rectilinear movement that only

exists with a view to its goal. Movement in a straight line is an image and expression of self-

expansion, whereas an action closing back upon itself represents contemplation, which

doesn’t touch its object (N: 423). The beauty of circular movement is that it is directed

towards nothing (N: 406).

Weil is at her best in showing how one creates the meaning in life by renouncing all

personal meanings, by complete acceptance of submission to the order of the world. One

loves the order of the world through renouncing all personal interests. This is, in practice,

close to Spinoza’s view of love of God by renouncing every vestige of personal interest.

Freedom lies in recognizing our utter dependence on Totality, on God and in fact giving up

sense of illusory autonomy or freedom that we associate with a separate individuality. We

are not asked to do something against which our heart or head rebels but just shifting the

perception in accordance with the nature of things. One is just asked to accept or recognize

the obvious fact that there is the order called necessity, which exists prior to us and which is

there for reasons not necessarily understandable in human terms. Reality is there that

transcends all our estimates, evaluations, desires and constitutes the given and man has no

choice but to accept it by renouncing that which would have led him to rebellion – the sense
 Shah 238

of individuality and freedom outside God. “Where there is complete, authentic, and

unconditioned consent to necessity, there is the fullness of love of God” (N: 267). Other

texts identify the supernatural faculty in us as consent. For Weil that consent is always

consent to the good, and, as such, it is the good itself. Faith is itself this faculty of

submission or consent according to her. Absurdism rejects this notion of consent as a

species of bad faith. Affirming the principle of autonomy and freedom in man independent

of God it can’t but reject consent and consequently suffer alienation, angst and all those

things with which absurdist literature is suffused.

We see a beautiful understanding of flesh in Weil. For Weil the search for pleasure is

only a pretext to avoid meeting with God. “The soul, incapable of tolerating that lethal

presence of God, that burning presence, hides behind flesh, uses flesh as a screen. In this

case, it is not the flesh that causes God to be forgotten; it is the soul that seeks in flesh

forgetfulness of God that hides there”(WG: 92-3). The lethal presence of God is what

Beckett’s characters resent. It means man is no more in the blinding light of God. Man can’t

see God and live, as the mystics would say. Encounter with God is lethal in two respects: its

dazzle is blinding and it annihilates all that man loves so dearly, his self or identity.

All traditions emphasize remembrance of God. Modern mystics such as

Krishnamurti translate it as attention or choiceless awareness. Weil has a similar

understanding. Attention bridges division of subject and object, knower and known.

Attention consists in suspending thought, in making it available and penetrable by the

object. Thought must be empty, waiting, not searching for anything, but ready to receive in

its naked truth the object which will penetrate there (WG: 92-93). For her God is attention

without distraction. It is living as a witness, a detached subject or awareness that watches

 Shah 239

every moment, that lives in the present by transcending thinking which distracts one from

the given, the present. Living beyond the mind, in what has been called as the space of no-

mind where time doesn’t enter and thus neither fear nor hope nor any need of consolation.

God is ‘what is’ and to live in God is to be aware of ‘what is’ without judgment, without

condemnation, disinterestedly.

Time crushes and nothing can be done against its rule. We are, as creatures, subject

to time and there is no escaping that. Even a Buddha must suffer the pain because he is a

creature, living in time. According to Weil it is not possible to escape time and creaturely

limitations. No wish to be spared the ravages of time could be granted. We are here to live

under the dominion of time so that decreation occurs and we consent to return to God that

which is not ours i.e., our being, our “I.” For Weil no saint can ask God to get time move

faster or slower and no miracle can do anything against time (F: 141).

Weil argues that one shouldn’t desire particular things or pray for particular things

because that is slavery. Her argument practically converges with the formula of amor fati

and loving everything as if there is eternal recurrence. This alone ensures unconditional

love. Total renunciation is demanded for loving the order of the world or affirming

everything unconditionally. To quote her:

Nothing can be produced unless the conditions for its production are
brought together.

Such and such a thing calls for such and such a condition. But if one
thinks: everything can be produced, given the conditions, and everything
is equivalent…

If one desires a particular thing one becomes enslaved to the series of

conditions. But if one desires the series itself, the satisfaction of this desire
 Shah 240

is unconditioned.That is why the one and only liberation is love of the

order of the world.

Christ on the cross, the greatest harm inflicted on the greatest good [can
anything be more absurd and more revolting]: if one loves that, one loves
the order of the world (F: 143-144).

Creation is an anomaly as it involves separation from the Good and thus a sort of

sacrifice of God and it is transgression as it involves rights and existence apart from God,

claims of fragments to be much more than fragments. As Weil puts it: “‘Give me my

portion,’ that is the original sin. Give me free will, the choice between good and evil. Is not

the gift of free will the creation itself?” (F: 211). And further: “God’s sacrifice is creation;

man’s sacrifice is destruction. But man has the right to destroy only what belongs to him;

that is to say, not even his body, but solely and exclusively his will”(F: 212).

The Christ’s ‘thy will be done’ involves utter destruction of human will. There is no

will to will this way or that way. That kills the absurd. Camus too kills the absurd when he

talks of unconditional love of what is. But inconsistently he is bent on keeping the absurd

alive. Absurd arises when our will can’t consent to do the cosmic will or divine will. Man

has only two choices – to affirm his will, his autonomy or to affirm divine or cosmic will

and his creatureliness, his nothingness. The first choice pits him against God/cosmos and

leads him to wail and despair for that which is thwarted, which is not honored in the scheme

of things. When one renounces free will and thus choice between good and evil one no

longer wishes good against evil to be done to him. Everything is justified because both good

and evil are really one. (This relative understanding of good and evil is to be distinguished

from that supreme value which Plato calls Good which stands above all relative

distinctions.) Camus finds Christianity based on great injustice as an innocent lamb was
 Shah 241

sacrificed. Weil leaves no scope for any such reading. We too are asked to consent to die, to

be crucified, to love God in utter desolation of the Spirit when He seems absent as He was

when the Christ cried. The only injustice enters in the world with man claiming his portion

and affirming his separation or autonomy. Will has been unjustly taken; creation is in utter

disequilibrium because of its separation from God. Justice could be done only through

apocatastasis. To quote Weil:

In what sense did Christ make expiation for humanity? To expiate is to

restore what one has unjustly taken. Humanity stole free will, the choice
between good and evil. Christ gave it back, by learning obedience. To be
born is to participate in Christ’s restitution. But we are only saved by this
participation if we consent to it. Salvation is consent to die (F: 212).

The drama of birth and death, approached from Weil’s Christian perspective, is perfectly

understandable and there is nothing absurd in it unless we posit absurd before creation in the

Principle itself. To call Existence or Brahman or Totality or What Is as absurd is, however,

unwarranted as Pallis has argued in his A Buddhist Spectrum. For Weil man’s tragedy

follows from his own transgression and it is for him to expiate and win redemption. As Weil

says: “Birth involves us in the original sin, death redeems us from it. The Cross of Christ, as

the perfect model of death, death in itself in Plato’s sense, has redeemed us all. But if we

consent to being born and not to dying, we personally commit the sin of Adam, to our

destruction” (F: 212).

The traditionalist metaphysical perspective (with which one could broadly with few

qualifications needed, align Weil), is completely objective viewpoint and that is why

Kierkegaard’s subjectivism that informs existentialist movement is so repulsive to it. Weil

asks for adapting the perspective of God or the non-perspective of supraindividual faculty of
 Shah 242

intellect (nous as distinct from ratio or discursive reason). For attaining this perspective one

has to die first. One starts from the Absolute and from the perspective of the Absolute, man,

his free will, his dreams, his autonomy, present as anomalies, as a state of disequilibrium. If

individual is engulfed in the Absolute as critics of perennialists point out or as existentialists

argue against monists, it is something for which nothing can be done. If we are concerned

with truth and not sentimentalism there is no escape from the tragic fact that individual or

ego doesn’t count in the face of the Absolute. Are we after truth as such or truth as it

appears to our subjective predispositions, to our heart? God is Truth and man may be in

need of consolation though truth need not be necessarily consoling.

From perennialist/Weil’s perspective the need for consolation is a weakness and a

species of bad faith. We need to be iron-willed, capable of facing utter solitude or Void

(Neant). It is only the strong man, the superman, who can unconditionally affirm and love

fate – a fatalist in this higher sense is a man of strong character – or consent to eternal

recurrence. Weil thus advocates the perspective of God in contrast to man-centric

perspectives that individualist subjectivist thought currents advocate. This appropriates

Keatsian negative capability, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Jainism’s syadvada as all these

imply openness to infinitely nuanced and multidimensional character of reality or truth.

Every man, seeing himself from the point of view of God the creator,
should regard his own existence as a sacrifice made by God. I am God’s
abdication. The more I exist, the more God abdicates. So if I take God’s
side rather than my own. I ought to regard my existence as
diminution, a decrease.

As regards myself, I ought to repeat in the opposite sense the

abdication of God, I ought to refuse the existence that has been given me,
to refuse it because God is good. As regards other people, I ought to
 Shah 243

imitate God’s abdication itself, to consent not to be in order that they may
be; and this in spite of the fact that they are bad (F: 213).

Here is her insightful theodicy that absolves God of evil and puts finger on creatures.

Adam made us believe that we had being; Christ showed us that we are
non-beings.
To teach us that we are non-beings, God made himself non-being
For God, sacrifice consists in letting a man believe that he has being. For a
man, sacrificed consists in recognizing that he is non-being.
God entrusts evil the work of teaching us that we are non-being
The desire of creatures to be, and their illusion that they are, stirs up evil;
and evil teaches them that they are not. God takes no part in this elementary
stage of teaching (F: 218).

She makes an observation on hell that expresses the crux of mystical view of it and that puts

blame on man. This remark answers all critics of hell who find it morally unjustifiable belief

of religions. She says: “Hell consists in perceiving that one doesn’t exist and refusing to

consent to this fact” (F: 218). Beckett has similarly presented one of the most convincing

(mystical) pictures ever penned down of fallen man’s condition as purgatory or hell and no

escaping it because man insists to be, to “claim his own portion.”

Nothing is gratuitous and nothing is meaningless and nothing is out of God’s control,

care and mercy in God-centric view though nothing is respectful of human egoism which

wants things according to the self’s desire. Not a sparrow falls except by the writ of

providence. There is no role for chance. God is equally present everywhere, in all

circumstances. Even rain drops fall in a measured quantity and an angel accompanies every

drop. This is the conviction of all religions, even those who have no personal God to look

into the affairs of the world. However these statements are best understood by those who are

familiar with the strange language of God. One can approach such statements not as
 Shah 244

cognitive verifiable statements that positivist or empiricist could handle but only by being

within a “form of life” and mastering the rules and conventions of the particular game.

Despite the fact that God is “absent’’ for Weil there is providence, the mystery of which is

not decipherable to the uninitiated, to those profane inquirers who refuse to be annihilated in

God and insist on seeing things outside God. The following account is irrefutable on its own

terms by outsiders.

All the events of life, whatever they may be, without exception, are by
conventions or signs of God. God establishes a conventional language
with his friends. Every event in life is a word of this language. These
words are all synonymous but, as happens in beautiful languages, each of
them has its completely specific nuance, each of them is untranslatable.
The meaning common to all these words is: I love you.

A man drinks a glass of water. The water is God’s “I love you.” He

is two days in the desert without finding anything to drink. The dryness in
his throat is God’s “I love you” … Those who are beginning to learn this
language think that only some of its words mean “I love you.” Those who
know the language know that it has only one meaning (F: 128-129).

Here we notice the huge gulf between Weil and Beckett. For Beckett there is no such

thing as ‘I love you’ and nothing like ‘God loves us.’ There is no providence except perhaps

in some negative sense that every experience in the world of time goads one to the ultimate

futility of pinning hope in this world and making one to turn inwards. All experiences are

calculated to prove to man that he is nothing and thus advised to be nothing. All experiences

are outside God and thus meaningless and productive of pain.

There is no providence that pertains to our created nature which itself is a result of

injustice because by definition it tends to be autonomous and in opposition to the whole, the

totality that the term God designates. To be born is indeed sin according to both Christian
 Shah 245

and Eastern traditions because it involves separation from the ground and thus a kind of fall.

(Redemption consists in according to Weil of consenting to return to God what is His, i.e.

our very being or existence. Metaphysically our being is a non-being and God alone is truly

real and the illusory dream of separate existence must be given up and this constitutes

salvation). Providence has, as in Beckett, only a negative meaning, of ensuring decreation

so that the dust returns to dust. Because creation is abandonment it necessarily implies

subjection to necessity and thus, in a sense, absence of providence in the usually accepted

sense of the term.

God abandons our whole entire being – flesh, blood, sensibility,

intelligence, love – to the pitiless necessity of matter and the cruelty of the
devil, except for the eternal and supernatural part of the soul.

The Creation is abandonment. In creating what is other than

Himself, God necessarily abandoned it. He only keeps under His care the
part of Creation which is Himself – the uncreated part of every creature.
That is the Life, the Light, the Word…” (F: 103).

One doesn’t ask of providence to take care of this and that because if one loves the

order of the world one transcends it with all its misery. Love is transcendence. It is we who

are asked to redeem or justify ourselves in relation to the Totality. Love of the world takes

all its pain. Love, in the final analysis, is the one thing needful that solves all problems. Here

Rumi comes to mind who says love cures all ills. As Weil says: “It is sufficient if we

consent to this order of things.” Faith is precisely this demand for loving the world which

God has made and found good. Faith is trust in the order of things. It is gratitude towards

Existence. It is self effacement before the whole, the Totality, the Tao. It is renunciation of

all claims to a separate selfhood over and against the Whole.

 Shah 246

God’s total absence from the world is what can’t be accepted by religions. God is

present in love, in beauty, in compassion, in countless forms and ways. In fact all religions

celebrate the positive divine and that alone justifies the world or gives it meaning. Religions

differ in their different emphasis on positive or negative divine. Attributes of God are

reflected in the phenomenal world. Weil affirms divine presence in her own characteristic

way: “God is absent from the world, except in the existence of this world of those in whom

His love is alive. Therefore they ought to be present in the world through compassion. Their

compassion is the visible presence of God here below”(F: 103). For Beckett also, as Altizer

has noted insightfully in his Descent into Hell, compassion is the value that redeems

everything. Weil and Beckett converge on this point.

God is wherever love is, beauty is, blessedness is and grace is. Seen with the eyes of

love, trust and faith everything appears divine. God is not the name of a person or entity but

the very thingness of a thing, the beauty of beauty, the goodness in the good. As Weil puts

it: “God ‘not as I love, but as emerald is green. He is ‘I love.’ And I too, if I were in the state

of perfection, would love as emerald is green. I would be an impersonal person (like God)”

(F: 129). God speaks these words through all of us who love and more effectively through

those who love so intensely and selflessly as to become love. Beckett’s problems arise with

the positive divine while as traditional mystics have often emphasized this love. What

differentiates a bhakti mystic or Sufi from Beckett is their capacity to love and it is this love

which redeems them. All positive experiences – aesthetic, moral, cognitive – are bridges to

God-realization.

Weil has expressed God’s withdrawal from the world and relative autonomy of the

later and consequent “impotence” of God with respect to what she calls Necessity where
 Shah 247

gravity reigns. She is expressing dramatically what the notion of God as All-Possibility

practically implies. She appropriates much disturbing criticism from critics of theodicy in

her illuminating rereading of traditional theology.

God himself can’t prevent what has happened from having happened.
What better proof that the creation is an abdication? What greater
abdication of God than is represented by time?

We are abandoned in time. God is not in time

God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let
us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we
were created

At this very moment God, by his creative will, is maintaining me in

existence, in order that I may renounce it (F: 140).

Weil has a beautiful interpretation of the experience of waiting that sharply

contrasts with Beckett’s. Waiting in Weil’s perspective is imitating God and not waiting

for God. “Attention without distraction,” choiceless awareness, absolute openness to

experience, absolute vulnerability, waiting without expectation of anything happening in

future, the pure experience of waiting for nothing. Humility is a certain relation of the

soul to time. Waiting lacerates ego if it is waiting without any purpose. Contrary to what

Beckett would have us believe waiting is an important virtue that has great role to play in

life. To quote Weil:

Art is waiting. Inspiration is waiting

Humility partakes in God’s patience. The perfected soul waits for the good
in silence, immobility and humility like God’s own. Christ nailed on the
cross is the perfect image of the Father….

God is attention without distraction.

 Shah 248

One must imitate the patience and humility of God (F: 141).

For both Beckett and Weil death is a great experience that teaches us our

nothingness. Both have no difficulty in accounting for death. To quote Weil:

Reality becomes perceptible for the man who accepts death.

That is the meaning of “By renunciation feed upon this universe.”

What greater gift could have been offered to created beings than the gift of
death?

It is death alone that teaches us we have no existence except as a thing

among a lot of other things (F: 285).

Beckett’s world shows the truth of following remarks though it may not exactly share this

view of genesis of pleasure.

Pleasure is the illusion that there is some good attached to one’s own
existence.

It is a permanent illusion, and even sorrow is mixed with some pleasure.

But at certain moments, brought on by an excess of physical suffering, the

illusion disappears completely. One then sees one’s existence naked, as a
mere fact in which there is no good whatsoever. This is frightful. And this
is the truth (F: 286).

Thus both Beckett and Weil are ascetics. Buddhism and Schopenhauer are speaking

through both of them. However here again Beckett and Weil come to differ ultimately. For

Weil, as for all mystics, God signifies joy. Nothing is really distraction from God as long as

man knows how to see and enjoy all things in God.

It is instructive to see how Simone Weil understands the mystery of incarnation and

crucifixion. In fact Camus' reading of this central event of Christianity is based on

diametrically opposite conception of self and its relation to God to that of traditional
 Shah 249

Christian conception of the same. Camus reads the significance of the night of Golghota

from what appears to be typical humanist perspective. Beckett’s pessimism too is to be

understood from the context of inherited humanistic conception of human self, belief in

progress and individualism. Seeing self as an illusion and all human endeavours as a vanity

he is led to despair of human condition. Jesus consents to be nothing, to be rent asunder at

the time of crucifixion so that He alone is glorified who alone is. Man can enter the kingdom

of God only by what has been called as decreation. We as persons So and so outside God are

nothing and that is our truth. Everything belongs to our heavenly father. However He

chooses to make us everything by consenting to be nothing for our sake. As Thibon

paraphrases Weil: “God abandoned God. God abandoned himself: these words unfold the

meaning both of creation and of the Reincarnation with the Passion….To teach us that we

are nothing (non-etre) God made himself nothing” (Thibon 28). God became a creature in

order to teach us how to undo the creature in ourselves (so that we become perfect as our

heavenly father is. This is death of the self so that Self or Spirit which is not man's but

which is in man may live. Weil sees the essence of incarnational function of Jesus in his

assumption of the human condition with all that is most miserable and tragic in it. The

supernatural part of Jesus’ mission

…consists of agony. The sweat of blood, the cross and his vain calls to an
unanswering heaven. The words of the Redeemer: 'My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me/' which sums up all the agony of the creature
thrown into the midst of time and evil to which the Father replies only
with silence-- these words alone are enough proof for her of the divinity of
Christianity (Thibon 28).

Jesus’ function consists in preparing man to face the cross, the void, to empty the

self and everything that fortifies this fiction. “We must leave on one side the beliefs which
 Shah 250

fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality…The belief in the

providential ordering of events – in short the 'consolations' which are ordinarily sought in

religion” (Weil 13). We must transcend all hope as a means to nakedness of spirit. We must

see the absurd face to face and refuse to kill it, dilute it. Only by the rent of utter absurdity

and death-like shock that lacerates the self is emptiness realized. And that is the realization

of God. As Weil says: “If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us

from loving the universe. We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full”

(Weil 18).

Weil argues that finding “fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the

same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And

this knowledge is extended to our sensibility only through suffering and death” (Weil 37).

And this dissolves the self that asks for meaning and purpose. God is without purpose and

that is absurd as Kierkegaard said. God-centred East is also “absurdist” as it consents

wholeheartedly to the absurd world. But after the self is crucified in the experience of fana

one achieves subsistence in the heavenly Father's mansions. And then it comes to discover

beauty and joy and peace of which the Western absurdism is largely unaware.

There are two ways of killing ourselves: suicide and detachment (Weil 15). Both

Beckett and Weil reject the way of suicide. But Beckett’s characters have not mastered the

art of detachment, the art of transcending the mind and be a watcher, the witnessing

consciousness. And this accounts for their misery. Letting go of the ego and mind gives a

taste of the bliss of decreation and ‘no-mind.’ Consistent detachment would demand self

naughting so that we have absolutely no claims over and above the world or existence.
 Shah 251

Renunciation is not defeat at the face of absurdity. It consists in accepting the absurd as

such.

Weil advocates the love of absent God. God as comforter, as consoler, as dilutor of

misery, as refuge is not the absent God, the silent God of Jesus who forsakes him at the

cross. “We must continually suspend the work of the imagination filling the void within

ourselves” (Weil 14). "We must not weep so that we may not be comforted” (Weil

14). Though Beckett has great love for the world and life like Camus, he is primarily

obsessed with irremediable exile and alienation of man. Against this Weil allows for both

absurdity and love of the world. If one can consent to the absurd world heartily as defiant

ego is killed one can love it.

It is clear from the above observations that though there are important points of

convergence between Beckett and Weil they ultimately differ and these differences result

from their different understanding of what Stace calls positive divine. Beckett’s is a reading

of it influenced by certain currents of thought which run counter to millennial intuitions of

mystics of different traditions. Beckett is essentially a modern thinker who finds it hard to

wish away the presence of other dimension that modern secularity rejects. However he

foregrounds the negative vision of mysticism which taken in isolation is distortion of

different traditions of mysticism. Mysticism doesn’t reject the phenomenal and all that

stands for affirmation of positive values of life though initially it advocates ascetic

discipline of detachment so as to wean man away from the lower self that obstructs his

perception of larger rhythms and beauties of life. Asceticism is a means and not an end and

it is even dispensable as in Tantra and certain other traditions. Beckett could better be called

an ascetic and a cynic than a mystic. Weil takes full cognizance of the negative divine or
 Shah 252

absence of God from the world – absurdity and evil in all its terrifying forms – and this

makes her so relevant to contemporary experience which is suffused by these negative

experiences. One can proceed beyond the Beckettian impasse through some sort of

mysticism that Weil advocates. Beckett is an artist of failure and Weil is a mystic who finds

in the abyss of absurdity, evil, gravity and time that which redeems the world. We can’t

move forward with the vision that concludes with ‘perhaps’ and that finds it hard to go on in

allegedly incomprehensible hostile world. We are “condemned” to be some sort of

believing, trusting attitude that characterizes mystics if we are not to commit suicide. Camus

and Beckett and all those who find life meaningless but continue to believe in some

meaning that justifies their will to go on and not returning the ticket of life to God are

mystics in a way. Weil shows how to find meaning in meaninglessness and move with

“purposiveness without purpose.”

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10
Meaning of Waiting

Our time is a time of waiting; waiting is its special destiny. And every time is a time of
waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time runs forward. All time, both in
history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, waiting not for another
time, but for that which is eternal.
-Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich in one of his sermons, collected under the title The Shaking of the

Foundations, has insightfully appropriated the metaphor of waiting in explicating the

Semitic religious worldview. Keeping Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in our background

that parodies human condition involving waiting we may venture a few remarks on his

explication of the issue. Tillich comments on the following verses from the Bible.

I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning:

I say, more than they that watch for the morning.

Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord

There is mercy, and with him there is plenteous redemption (Psalm 130:5-
7)
He builds the case for the Biblical view of human predicament in terms of waiting. He says:

Both the Old and the New Testament describes our existence in relation to
God as one of waiting….Waiting means not having and having at the
same time. For we have not what we wait for; or, as the apostle says, if we
hope for what we do not see, we then wait for it. The condition of man’s
relation to God is first of all one of not having, not seeing, not knowing,
and not grasping (Tillich 151).
 Shah 254

Rationalist philosophies and sciences have proved nothing contrary to this statement. Man

has not usurped the divine attribute of omniscience. He has not overcome the limitations

imposed by his finitude. The dream to kill God in order to make room for man, to crown

man with the divinity, has been shattered. Superman has remained only an ideal. Tillich

argues that it is not misfortune or a matter of despair to be a waiting creature. If only men

knew how to wait they would have no problem with their creaturely vacation. To quote him:

But, although waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait
for something shows that in some way we all already possess it. Waiting
anticipates that which is not yet real. If we wait in hope and patience, the
power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. He who
waits in an ultimate sense is not far from that for which he waits. He who
waits in absolute seriousness is already grasped by that for which he
waits….We are stronger when we wait than when we possess (Tillich
154).

The Greatest Good can only be contemplated; it is too sublime to be possessed. We

must face annihilation to see God. We must vacate to let God be. The One can’t tolerate

duality. But living as we are on the plane of duality we can never in absolute sense be

granted to have, to know, to possess that which truly is, which alone is. We need to note that

even ordinarily, in our deepest loves and friendships there is always an element of non-

possession. The other never ceases to be the other. As Tillich observes:

How can God be possessed? Is God a thing that can be grasped and known
among other things? Is God less than a human person? We always have to
wait for a human being. Even in the most intimate communion among
human beings, there is an element of not having and not knowing, and of
waiting. Therefore, since God is infinitely hidden, free, and incalculable,
we must wait for Him in the most absolute and radical way. He is God for
 Shah 255

us just in so far as we do not possess him. The psalmist says that his whole
being waits for the Lord, indicating that waiting for God is not merely a
part of our relation to God, but rather than the condition of that relation as
a whole. We have God through not having Him (Tillich 153).

Whitehead’s famous characterization of religion in his Science and the Modern World

captures the importance of waiting as a key note of religious/mystical viewpoint. To quote

him:

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and

within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and
yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet
the greatest of the present facts; something which gives meaning to all that
passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the
final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate
ideal, and the hopeless quest (Whitehead 191-192).

Because God is transcendent beyond he has to be waited for. To human eyes it is not

given the power to see him in his transcendent glory. God is the Last, the End. He is after all

distances because he is not in the net of space and time. He is behind everything and man

can’t but deal with things only, even if these be spiritual things. God is within as well but

within is more distant than any without. In a beautiful Upanisadic narrative it has been said

that in order to conceal the greatest treasure of God it was resolved to put it in the depths of

man’s being, in the inmost recess of his heart to which he ordinarily doesn’t turn. Though

spirit lives in the present moment but man is predisposed to live either in past or in future.

Every spiritual master has declared that the present moment is the home of the spirit. But for

most of us the present moment is very difficult place to reach, despite the obvious fact that

we are already there. Chopra thus formulates this insight “Every second is a door to eternity.

The door is opened by perception” (Chopra 300). But difficult indeed is the art of cleansing
 Shah 256

the doors of perception. Most men choose to live blind instead of clearing the dust that

accumulates on the perceiving lenses of the heart. God is waiting to be realized and in order

to be fully realized man has to pass away, to consent to be utterly annihilated. God is a

“remote possibility.” He is beyond all apprehension, all reach. He is and signifies the

hopeless quest. Stace in his Time and Eternity has beautifully appropriated the waiting

metaphor of Whitehead as the essence of religious/mystical approach. To quote him:

Religion is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the
inconceivable. This isn’t something which merely happens to be, an
unfortunate accident of disaster which befalls it in the world. This is its
essence, and this is its glory. The religious impulse in men is the hunger
for the impossible, the unattainable, the inconceivable – or at least for that
which is these things in the world of time. …. Religion seeks the infinite.
and the infinite by definition is impossible, unattainable. It is by definition
that which can never be reached. Religion seeks the light. But it isn’t a
light which can be found at any place or time. It isn’t somewhere. It is the
light which is nowhere. It is “the light which never was on sea or land.”
Never was. Never will be even in the infinite stretches of future time. This
light is non-existent …. Yet it is the great light which lightens the world.
Religion is the desire to break away from being and existence altogether to
get beyond existence into that nothingness where the great light is. It is
the desire to be utterly free from the fetters of being. For every being is a
fetter. Existence is a fetter. To be is to be tied to what you are. Religion
is the hunger for the non being which yet is ….. So long as there is light in
your life, the light has not yet dawned. Your must see that all things all
places, all times, all experiences are equally dark. You must see that all
stars are black, only out of the total darkness will the light dawn. Religion
is that hunger which no existence past, present or future, no actual
existence and no possible existence, in this world or in any other world on
the earth or above the cloud and stares material or mental or spiritual, can
 Shah 257

ever satisfy. For whatever is or could be will have the curse of thisness or
thatness (Stace 4-6).

What man seeks is impossible, superhuman ideal and paradoxically without seeking

it he can’t rest. Without transcending his humanity he foregoes his prerogative to be human.

Only in something transcending humanity is he truly fulfilled, true to his essence. And God

is not given as an object ready made to be acquired. One has to wait for Him. Man is

perpetually seeking his true home and he must go on seeking it. There can be no turning

back as that means suicide. Man must wait to receive the revelations from Being. Man must

wait for Man. Man is never himself. The moment he becomes himself, samsara ends for

him; he is led to another order where separate individuality or self is no more, where God

alone is. Waiting ends only when man qua man is no more, when he has completely

transcended the illusion that he exists and the world of becoming, samsara, exists. When the

seeker becomes the sought and the whole world disappears waiting too is no more. But man

never becomes his Lord according to Semitic traditions. There is no escape from being a

devotee of the Lord, to wait patiently for the Lord, to invoke Him. Man is created to serve

Lord because he is not the Lord himself. As long as we can meaningfully speak of an

individuality or entity called man, we have to speak of a servant, a creature waiting for God.

As long as we are human, we are “condemned” to pray, to submit, to serve. Heidegger in his

own way has expounded the phenomenology of waiting. Great theologians are ever

reminding us of the covenant with God made in pre-eternity. The Supreme Good that man

seeks transcends him – this is the key assertion of all religions. And he must on pain of

death seek it. And this means he is ever waiting on God, ever waiting for God. And God

comes. Paradoxically God is not out there and he has always been nearer to us than we are

to ourselves. We have drifted far from Him. We have been avoiding encounter with

Him.
 Shah 258

We have been trying to escape Him and He has been really waiting for us. We really need

not wait – we are waiting for nothing. We are ourselves the bridegrooms eagerly awaited.

We are the object of all endeavours, all waiting. Ours is the dominion, the kingdom that

never shaketh. But only in waiting is He received though He is in not in any future time.

Every phenomenon is His symbol, His messenger. He is “the Manifest Truth,” to use the

Quranic expression.

Man is a wave that lives, moves and has being in the ocean called God. A wave can’t

encompass the ocean of which it is a part. It continues to live by virtue of the ocean. Man

never ceases to love God more and more, to move closer and closer toward the

Unapproachable Essence of God. We remain ever poor in relation to God who alone is rich.

Waiting is human; arrival is superhuman. Waiting is life in time; arrival is beyond

time and to be human or creature is to be subject to the bondage of time even if there are

intimations of eternity. As long as man breathes and moves in the world of space and time

he can’t be immune from the ills flesh is heir to. To be human in relation to the Absolute is

to be in waiting – waiting for the End that is yet to come. Even if one is grasped by eternity

the body that is of the world of compounded things, the world of time, is condemned to live

in waiting and exile. The home of the Spirit is not accessible fully in all its splendour as

long as one lives on earth. Parinirvana is not granted to man in this life being attainable only

when all fetters of existence have been cut. A man can’t see God in all his splendour and

live. There is no way to shun our inheritance as creatures of time and our bondage to time.

And time is waiting. Hunger or dependence on elements, on that which is not his, can’t be

relinquished. Living in spirit, in full awareness of eternity, doesn’t mean one no longer lives

in one’s body or with it. Waiting, ceaseless waiting, waiting till eternity has the final word,
 Shah 259

till eternity consumes him fully, is the destiny of man. It is not a purposeful waiting but

neither could it be dubbed as an absurd predicament. What greater glory is conceivable than

to be given a privilege to wait for the Lord who is pre-eternity and post-eternity. Man’s

glory is to participate in the glory and glorification of God and this is possible only while he

waits. Eternity is not at the other pole of time series. It is never in time. For a temporal entity

the only life is to participate in eternity while waiting. If life is something more than a

struggle not to cease breathing it is by virtue of participation in eternity, by virtue of

ceaseless waiting for God through remembrance of Him. There comes no full stop, no

arrival point when That (there) is no longer transcendent.

We are waiting animals and that is why we don’t commit suicide. Man lives because

he waits. What does he wait for? For anything or for nothing but wait he does. To refuse

waiting is to claim superhuman status for oneself. Men continue to live, to choose life

instead of death, to use Biblical expression. Men, absurdists and nihilists included, consent

to live, to love, to move on. Nihilism pure and simple has not been entertained by any

serious thinker though it has been perceived as a problem to be solved. The issue is to move

beyond the impasse of nihilism and seminal modern thinkers are concerned with this

attempt. With every breath that we consciously take we declare our faith in life, our waiting

for life, for that which is yet to come. Men wait and wait. They are waiting for nothing. Yes

they have no objective for waiting. To wait for nothing is to wait for God, or wait in God.

God is Void, Nothing. One waits for God when one doesn’t wait for any particular thing, for

this or that thing. When one surrenders the will to seek, to arrive and accepts finitude, one

creaturely status, one is waiting in God. God too is waiting as long as time is, change is,

becoming is experienced as real. The world of manifestation, of change, is real at its own
 Shah 260

level; it is the shakti of the Lord. It is not illusion pure and simple though compared to the

utter reality/certainty of the Absolute it may be felt as illusory. History is unfolding; the

story of creation is not yet over. God is ever busy in His work, ceaselessly creating. He has

not yet finished his play. As long as history/time is experienced as real and the life of body

as inescapable reality with all its pains and sufferings all too real one is waiting.

Beckett’s Godot never comes because life can never cease to unfold its creative

possibilities. Life can never arrive; it is an eternity of travel, of the moment. This moment is

eternity, eternally creative, eternally vibrant with fresh possibilities. Arrival is in a way

death. There is not a full stop to the life of Ever-Living. The Timeless can’t be imagined to

be subject to the law of dominion of time. Linear view of time is metaphysically

problematic. All traditions, implicitly or explicitly uphold cyclic view of time and in fact

they are all eternity-centric. The notions of arrival in time, of grasping God at some future

time are absurd. Time is not, travel and traveler are not, arrival and straying and failure to

arrive are not from a strictly nondualist eternity-centric perspective. Beckett’s despairing

drama presupposes linear view of time, hardly takes any cognizance of the notion of

timeless and absolutizes the dualist worldview. Bad theology and bad metaphysics create a

despairing situation for Beckett. Meaning in finalistic terms can never be realized; Godot

can never come. Life can’t be subject to any single or finalistic notion of meaning and

purpose. Any notion of purpose that humans can construct will be a product of thought, of

time, of that which is itself theoretically deconstructable or challengeable. Purpose is an

anthropomorphic, sentimentalist and utilitarian notion. Life moves on and doesn’t require

any justification in human terms. Life is not a logical puzzle or a problem to be solved but a

mystery to be lived. It can entertain no questions. It is prior to all attempts to question or

 Shah 261

justify it. It is given before we can detach ourselves from it to analyze it. It is subjectivity

and freedom and it is absurd to measure it by any extrinsic standard. It is a category mistake

to seek to apply dualistic thought categories on what transcends all dualisms. Life as

consciousness is prior to any categorical framework imposed on it from without. Who needs

to arrive and who needs to wait? These are problems only for a person suffering from avidya

or caught up in Maya. Men need to arrive, to meet Godot because they have yet to travel

within, yet to meet their own selves. For the gnostic or sage there is nowhere to go, no need

to go, no need to seek. Men suffer because they have yet to renounce the self that seeks

consolation, that refuses to face the void or nothingness, that seeks its own kingdom in

defiance of the truth that there is no self to be sought or strengthened or salvaged from the

wrecks of impermanence of all phenomenal things. There is no problem except for those

who are problem to themselves, who have yet to know themselves.

 Shah 262

11

Conclusion

The advent of Western nihilism that still bedevils (Post)Modern Literature was based

on certain inferences which could well be questioned. These inferences were in turn

connected to certain misplaced or naïve faith in some ideas that have lost much of power.

Nihilism as a shadow of Modernism poses itself as a formidable problem if we take a certain

view of history, religion and metaphysics too seriously. I have attempted to show that

nihilism is not an issue that we should be much bothered about. This involves taking a more

nuanced reading of such terms as God, True World, Enlightenment and Intellect etc., and

arguing that traditions have in built arsenal against all those who think values have no

foundation in absence of certain theologically understood notion of God. Arguing for the

primacy of Absolute/Reality, reading omnipotence as All-Possibility, dissolving the

problem of evil in Epicurean-Humean format, focusing on images of the sacred that are still

available and historicizing modernity itself I have attempted to show we can ignore much of

Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment reactions or Nietzsche’s dramatic pronouncement

against transcendence. Absurdism that takes these developments seriously and then reacts

almost hysterically to the eclipse of transcendence and absence of meaning has been

censured for its faulty reading of both theology and metaphysics and of the seminal event of

“death of God.” The principle of Dostoevsky's nihilist, that "without God, all is permitted,"

really represents an impoverished reading of the history of philosophy and of religion. For

the traditions there is no problem of God and grounding moral values. In fact right and

wrong, good and evil are relativized in the vision of the One. Transcendence of good and

evil is fundamental teaching in traditional mysticism and metaphysics. And God is not the
 Shah 263

Absolute. Modern man’s problems are with personal God taken as Absolute. “Plato’s Forms

did not depend on God, nor Schopenhauer's sense of justice and compassion (of which

Nietzsche cannot have been unaware),” nor the moral universe of Buddhism, Jainism and

Taoism. Thus, Nietzsche and Sartre base their thought on a false inference.

Both Camus and Beckett show why it is impossible to be an absurdist or nihilist.

Beckett could be characterized as absurdist if he had affirmed only temporal or phenomenal

self. Camus could be if he had chosen for suicide and not uncompromisingly affirmed love,

beauty and art. Transcendence is vetoed by Bazarov. Camus doesn’t take the side of

Caligula or Bazarov and there is no such dialogue to be found in them as we find in Fathers

and Sons:

We base our conduct on what we recognize as useful… In these

days the mostly useful thing we can do is to repudiate – and so we
repudiate. “Everything?”

“Everything.”

“What ? Not only art, poetry… but also… I am afraid to say it…”

“Everything.” Bazarov repeated with indescribable composure.

In the end Bazarov contracts typhoid from the infected corpses and
confesses his love for Mme Odintsov on his deathbed. Thus nihilism is
overcome through the power of love and the novel ends with a Christian
vision of “everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.”

My point that has been made throughout this work is that overcoming nihilism

which Nietzsche and absurdists concern themselves with is far easier and in fact already

achieved by traditions including Buddhism which is foregrounded by certain authors as if

other traditions are “essentialist” or advocate metaphysics of presence.

 Shah 264

We find in Eckhart another mystical approach belonging to the tradition against

which modern men – whom Becket and Camus give voice and interrogate – situate

themselves. In Eckhart we find practically the same mystical and metaphysical view that

Altizer seeks in Buddhism as an alternative to modern nihilism. The genius of perennialism

lies in providing hermeneutical tools for apposing Buddhism and Christianity and in fact all

religions. Modern man needs to return to no new version of Christ, no new demythologized

scripture but to understand original message better and it looks on deeper examination that

original message in the Gospels is essentially the same as in the Dhammapada.

If we read Eckhart metaphysically we find great correctives to traditional theological

understanding of transcendence which absurdists find difficult to accept. It is difficult to see

him advocating any exclusivist dogmatic theses that we need to contest. It is difficult to

distinguish his sermons from the sermons of any Buddhist or Sufi saint. Disinterest, self-

denial, charity, love – these form practically essential religion. Modernity and

postmodernity have essentially no argument against these values and indeed affirm them.

Nihilism has been overcome by a shift in perception emphasized by different traditions in

their own ways.

The question is: Has modern man experienced/discovered something fundamentally

different that he can’t approach the traditional timeless wisdom with the same faith as

traditional premodern people do? Altizer and others seem to believe this and advocate

turning to Buddhism and mysticism. Perennialism does the same but sees profound

metaphysics in premodern Christianity. The modern western man has to only remember

forgotten truth of its own tradition and not turn Eastward as East and West were united

before the advent of modernity. It is modern conditioning, modern science and modern
 Shah 265

philosophy which have created problems from which modern absurd hero or antihero

suffers.

One could argue against characterizing Beckett as an absurdist because in

phenomenal things absurdity leads to search for self which can’t be called absurd and which

takes one beyond time and thus beyond absurdity. However, this seeking, generally

speaking, is impossible and Beckett qualifies as an absurdist.

One could well assert that to be consistently an absurdist is impossible. There is no

absurdist or one’s claim to be read as an absurdist is not to be entertained unless one goes

for suicide or extreme kind of world-denial that involves renouncing the beauty, the joy, the

love, the intelligence, the wonder, the mystery, the sublime that one encounters everywhere

because transcendence pierces through the veil of phenomena. Camus’ Caligula who is a

consistent absurdist shows impossibility of living absurdism. No man could approve of

Mersault’s behaviour. None could imagine himself in place of Sisyphus and still be happy.

Beckett’s heroes are, generally speaking, detestable. None would like to be identified with

them. Absurd heroes are antiheros. Absurdism seems to get ironical treatment by Camus and

Beckett and one wonders how we can characterize them as absurdists. Man can’t afford to

be absurdist and continue to live. Life is God and the faith in life is too primordial to be

uprooted. Even a person who commits suicide most often dies because he feels he is not up

to the values of life. It is because one has failed to realize meaning in one’s life or live life

not in quiet desperation but livingly and lovingly – where the life is lost in living – that one

thinks it is disgrace to life to continue living at such a low pitch. If one can’t worship –

understood in the sense of gratitude, trust and love towards the ground of being and thus of

“the given,” of and thank life one lives vegetatively and is dead. There is no escape from
 Shah 266

God. Every attempt to escape necessarily fails because God is All, Life, What Is, the Only

Reality that there is.

In mystical traditions truth and freedom have been intimately linked. The Supreme

gift is the gift of Truth as Budhha famously put it. Nirvana or freedom follows from this

respect for this gift. To live in truth is only an invitation to freedom and none questions the

value of freedom. Truth is valued as a means to freedom. Only truth makes us free and

Freedom is God. Freedom is our birthright. The question is the art of being happy in a

universe which seems ordinarily meaningless and not cut to our heart’s desire.

Ultimately for the sage there is no question, no need of any answer and no problem

whatsoever. I quote a few sayings from the Gita of Ashtavakra which present the distilled

essence of nondualism besides which all the ramblings, self-searchings and debates of

modern Western philosophy and modern literature seem childish:

For me remaining in myself, there is no need for talk of the three goals
of life, of yoga or of knowledge. (19:1)

For me, established in my own glory, there is no religion,

sensuality, possessions, philosophy, duality or even non-duality. (19: 2)

For me established in my own glory, there is no self or non-self, no

good or evil, no thought or even absence of thought. (19: 4)

For me established in my own glory, there is no dreaming or deep

sleep, no waking nor fourth state beyond them, and certainly no fear. (19:
5)

Neither happy nor unhappy, neither detached nor attached, neither

seeking liberation nor liberated, he is neither something nor nothing. (18:
96)
 Shah 267

The wise man does not dislike samsara or seek to know himself.
Free from pleasure and impatience, he is not dead and he is not alive. (18:
83)

There is no knowledge or ignorance…, no bondage, no liberation,

and no property of self-nature. (20: 3)

For me who am forever pure there is no illusion, no samsara, no

attachment or detachment, no living being and no God. (20: 11)

Faith in life is what a consistent absurdist doubts. Thus seen Camus willn’t qualify,

nor will Beckett. Life without transcendence is like atheist’ version of tawhid – truncated

view of the grandeur and joys of life as God is Life, Larger Life, Richer Life, Life sublime

and grand, Life of perpetual wonder, creativity and joy.

Life resists all attempts at its devaluation and negation by those who deem it to be

futile and without any significance or meaning. Man never really doubts the value and

significance of life. He demonstrates his faith in the meaning of life by his very act of living,

by choosing life instead of death as Tagore in Sadhna also argues. Did the Christ ask for

anything more than choosing life and are religions commandments amounting to anything

more than not harming life? Esoteric commentaries of scriptural commandments show that

in the last analysis all these boil down to affirming and celebrating life. Man is condemned

to choose life. Choosing death is relinquishing human status. And man is not prepared to be

a stone as otherwise he would not proceed to scan God and judge his creation as absurd.

How does religious faith in life work in practice? By making it possible to affirm the

world, enjoy it, love it and feel rooted, grounded, significant, loved. If Beckett’s characters

had it they would not be weary, cursing, boring, alienated, waiting needlessly, mutilating

themselves, unreconciled to life and unprepared to encounter it squarely.

 Shah 268

Fuller life, intense life, larger life, life dancing, life smiling, life proclaiming itself

even in death is the meaning of life. There can be only one meaning. That is the glory of

life. That is the meaning that man has always upheld and that scriptures give to it. Sat, Chit,

Ananda – these express all that could ever be expressed. Life can’t be judged from any

abstract standards that reason constructs. God who stands for Life, the Ever-living is prior to

everything, the ground of our being, our very breath, our ultimate concern and our essence is

the Hidden and the Manifest meaning and purpose of everything including man.

What does the modern man need? Nothing except the bread and comforts because he

thinks he needs no saviour and he need not be saved according to more ardent devotees of

secular modernity. But modern literature gives a lie to this thesis. Its darkness laments the

lost light, the light that is perhaps there though so elusive that modern man fears it not there.

In the preceding pages we have argued the case for an alternative worldview that

bypasses or appropriates the malaise of contemporary literature. This alternative view

challenges the whole underlying basis that has culminated in modernity, in the death of God

and thus the loss of transcendent ground of meaning. (Post)Modern literature wallowing in

the murky waters of absurdism and nihilism is only a development of implications of the

thesis of absence of transcendence in contemporary thought. We may summarize the various

points argued in this work briefly by way of conclusion in the following words:

• Absurdism based on rejection of religious or theological narrative is a reaction to

badly or crudely put metaphysical thesis of which religions are an expression that

exotericism advocates and this compromises its credentials as a sound

philosophy.
 Shah 269

• The problem of nihilism could be tackled with the help of insights from the

traditionalist metaphysical school and postmetaphysical appropriation of

mysticism.

• The mystical core of world traditions including Christianity resists the array of

critiques that modernity and postmodernity marshal against the theistic religious

worldview of Christianity which had made the world an enchanted garden and

life full of significance.

• Our absurdist writers, despite their conscious attempt to distance themselves

from the traditional religious/mystical worldview, are really borrowing from it

and rereading it along the lines that converges in many respects with mystical

writers and could well be characterized as quasimystical. Great modern

philosophers and writers in their attempts to grapple with the problem of

suffering, finitude and nihilism have appropriated insights from mysticism.

• The various corollaries of the thesis of nihilism such as futility and vanity of all

human endeavors, fragility of individuality, absence of God in the world of

necessity and nothingness at the heart of being are part and parcel of

religious/mystical worldviews but don’t warrant the despairing conclusions that

absurdist writers draw.

• The doctrines of traditional religions which include immortality of the spirit, the

possibility of knowledge of essences/God provable or discoverable by

meditation/prayer/contemplation and transcendence of suffering or dukkha are

not, contrary to what absurdists believe, refutable by any empirical investigation

or rationalistic philosophy or logical argument. Ideally mysticism advocates no

 Shah 270

doctrines and is only an art of living that appeal to no outside authority or

philosophical arguments. It is just an art of awareness individually practizable or

verifiable by anybody.

• There is no possibility of overcoming nihilism through any route that denies

transcendence.

• The great literature/art as traditionally understood by different traditions

including the Western Christian tradition is essentially mystical in the sense we

have used the term mystical in this thesis. It is possible to escape contemporary

malaise of absurdism and nihilism – that Beckett and Camus fail to extricate – by

deeper appreciation and understanding of essentially mystical orientation of

traditional literature/art.

• Modern man’s boost to have no need of salvation or God is simply false. Modern

man continues to be a man, a man in the divine image, and can’t escape the

demands of his theomorphic nature. The painful tone of modern literature – most

movingly seen in absurdist writings – shows that modern man is desperate

without transcendence and seeks to find it though he locates it in places where

only a faint image of it is gettable.

• All Eastern traditions based on a metaphysical worldview are fully equipped to

guide modern man in finding answer to the problem of justifying life or

existence and finding significance and meaning of life.

• Absurdist writers choose to be ignorant of traditional wisdom and come up with

a distorted understanding of mysticism and traditional wisdom as solutions to the

perennial problems that modern man faces. Nietzsche and a host of thinkers
 Shah 271

following him have misunderstood or not fully understood traditional wisdom

which solves the problems that modernity poses. What is needed is a more

dispassionate and objective understanding of traditional wisdom. The East has

avoided the problems that modern nihilism poses with complete fidelity to the

evidence of senses and demands of reason. There is no fideism or recourse to any

irrational and dogmatic attitude in tackling the problem of meaning of life.

Modern Western thought is very impoverished and the problems it faces such as

nihilism and absurdism are self created by it and these can be solved by seriously

interrogating its philosophical assumptions. Perennialists interrogate the

conceptual basis of modernity along the needed lines and their insights may be

appropriated for dissolving these self created problems.

• The traditionalist position is that the individual doesn’t count, the soul (as

distinguished from the supraindividual faculty of Intellect/ Spirit) is mortal, the

heaven is to be experienced here and now, seeking consolations is a weakness,

there is no person in the heavens who looks after our individual welfare or

concerned with fulfilling our wishes, aims and aspirations that have a reference

to the self, there is the objective impersonal order of things (called necessity by

Simone Weil) against which nothing could be done, autonomous individuality is

delusion, all is vanity and the world with all its beauties and dreams is going to

be annihilated as nothing temporal or compounded has substance or is

permanent. All these points are made by Simone Weil and Eckhart and help to

dissolve absurdist thesis.

 Shah 272

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