Camus

Albert Camus

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," Albert Camus wrote, in one of the most arresting opening lines ever set down, "and that is suicide." Everything else, he said, whether the world has three dimensions or nine, whether the mind has nine categories or twelve, comes afterward. The real question, the one that matters before all the others, is whether life is worth living at all. And Camus asked it because he had stared without flinching at a fact most of us spend our lives avoiding: that the universe is silent. We are creatures who crave meaning, who demand that our lives add up to something, who ask the world why, and the world gives no answer. There is no God speaking, no cosmic purpose written in the stars, no reason, anywhere out there, why anything should be as it is. Camus called the collision between our desperate hunger for meaning and the world's blank indifference the absurd, and he was scrupulous about what it meant. The world is not absurd in itself, nor are we; the absurd is born in the confrontation between the two, in the gap between what we long for and what we are given, a gap that nothing can close. To live honestly, Camus thought, you have to face this gap squarely, without the comforting lies we paper over it with. And then the real question arrives: once you have seen that life has no given meaning, why go on living?

The man who would not pretend. Camus gave the absurd a human face in his first and most famous novel, The Stranger, whose narrator, Meursault, is one of the strangest and most unsettling characters in modern literature. Meursault is a man who simply will not pretend. He does not perform the emotions society expects of him, does not mouth the comforting pieties, does not feign feelings he does not have or meanings he does not believe in. He says only what is true for him, with a flat, disconcerting honesty, and the world cannot forgive him for it. When, through a senseless chain of events under the blinding Algerian sun, he commits a killing, his trial fixes less on the act itself than on his refusal to weep and emote on cue, on his failure to play the part of a properly sentimental human being. Society, Camus shows, runs on a vast web of agreed-upon fictions, and it will destroy the one who declines to recite them. Yet at the very end, awaiting his fate, Meursault arrives at a strange peace: stripped of all illusion and all false hope, he opens himself for the first time to what he calls "the gentle indifference of the world," and finds in that lucid acceptance, in the simple fact of a world that asks nothing and promises nothing, an unexpected happiness. He is the absurd made flesh, the man who refuses every consoling lie and finds, on the far side of that refusal, a hard and honest serenity. The novel has its own blind spot, the man Meursault kills is an Arab the book never names or sees, a silence later writers have rightly pressed, and one that exposes the colonial world Camus both belonged to and could not fully escape.

No way out but through. Camus considered the two ways people try to escape the absurd, and rejected them both. The first is literal suicide, ending your life because it seems meaningless. But this, Camus argued, is a surrender, not a solution; it does not answer the absurd, it merely abolishes one of the two terms that create it, the human who demands meaning. To kill yourself is to be defeated by the absurd, to flee the very confrontation that defines an honest life. The second escape is subtler, and Camus called it "philosophical suicide": the leap. This is the move of all those who, unable to bear the silence, smuggle a meaning back in, who take the absurd as a springboard and jump, into religious faith, into some grand philosophical system, into any doctrine that promises the universe makes sense after all. Camus had Kierkegaard's famous "leap of faith" squarely in his sights, and he respected its honesty about the absurd while rejecting its escape from it; to leap is to betray the lucidity you started with, to trade a hard truth for a soft consolation. Both escapes, the physical and the philosophical, are ways of running from the absurd. Camus insisted on a third path, the only one that keeps faith with the truth: revolt. To revolt is to hold the absurd fully in view, to refuse both the bullet and the leap, and to go on living anyway, in permanent, lucid, defiant tension, never resolving the contradiction and never pretending it away, but living all the more intensely because there is no appeal, no second life, no cosmic safety net, nothing but this.

Imagine Sisyphus happy. To make this vivid, Camus reached for a figure from Greek myth: Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to roll a great boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down, and to begin again, forever. The gods had judged, Camus notes, that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor, and Sisyphus is its perfect emblem, the picture of a meaningless, repetitive existence, which is to say, a picture of all of us, with our commutes and our chores and our days that circle back to where they began. And then Camus does something audacious. He fixes his attention not on the climb but on the pause, the moment when Sisyphus walks back down the mountain to retrieve his rock, conscious, lucid, fully aware of his fate. That hour of consciousness, Camus says, is the hour of Sisyphus's freedom. For he knows the whole absurd situation, he harbors no illusion that the rock will ever stay, and yet he descends, and bends, and pushes again, owning his fate completely, scorning the gods who imposed it by refusing to be crushed by it. There is no fate, Camus writes, that cannot be surmounted by scorn. And so he arrives at his startling, luminous conclusion: "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." The struggle itself, undertaken with open eyes and without hope of reward, is enough to fill a human life; happiness and the absurd are not opposites but companions; and the man who accepts his absurd fate, and lives it fully, and makes it his own, has wrested from a meaningless universe the only meaning there is, the meaning he creates by living.

The rebel's limit. Camus carried his idea of revolt out of the lonely confrontation with the cosmos and into the world of politics, and there it grew teeth, and cost him dearly. If the absurd has taught us that no transcendent value is given, he asked, does that mean anything goes, that without God all is permitted? Camus answered with a resounding no, and built one of the few genuinely original ethics of the godless modern age. The very act of rebellion, he argued, the moment a slave says "no" to his master, reveals a value the rebel is willing to die for, a line that must not be crossed, a dignity shared by all human beings. "I rebel," he wrote, recasting Descartes, "therefore we are." Rebellion is not solitary; it discovers a human solidarity, a we, and that discovery sets a limit on what rebellion may do. And here Camus turned, at enormous personal cost, against the revolutionary politics of his time. A rebellion that begins in the name of human life and dignity, he warned, betrays itself the moment it starts murdering in the name of an abstract future, sacrificing real, living people today for a perfect society promised tomorrow. The revolutionary who purges and sends millions to camps, certain that history justifies him, has forgotten the solidarity rebellion was for. This argument, made in The Rebel, shattered Camus's friendship with Sartre, who had thrown in with the revolutionary left, and left Camus isolated, attacked from every side. But he would not yield: better, he thought, to be a rebel who sets limits than a revolutionary who recognizes none, better solidarity than slaughter, better to fight injustice as the doctors in his novel The Plague fight the disease, patiently, decently, without grand ideology, simply because it is the human thing to do.

Choose life anyway. The room reads Camus from the wider record, since his work remains under copyright, and the chat says so; read him, above all, in his luminous, sun-struck prose, for Camus was a great writer as much as a thinker, who won the Nobel Prize for novels and essays that wear their philosophy lightly, and who insisted, against the grey abstraction of so much modern thought, on the sea and the sunlight and the body and the sheer sensuous joy of being alive. He came from poverty in colonial Algeria, the son of an illiterate mother, and he never lost the conviction that philosophy must answer to ordinary life, to the worker and the mother and the person with no time for systems. He rejected the label "existentialist" the world kept pinning on him; he was a philosopher of the absurd, and of measure, of the Greek sense of limits against every modern intoxication with the absolute. His refusal to choose a side in the agony of the Algerian war, his loyalty to both justice and the people he loved, made him for a time a lonely figure, embraced fully by neither left nor right. But his central message has only grown more necessary. In a world that has lost its old certainties and not found new ones, Camus offers neither the false comfort of religion regained nor the despair of nihilism, but a third thing, harder and braver: to look the meaninglessness of existence dead in the eye, to refuse every consoling lie, and then, in full lucidity, to choose life anyway, to love it fiercely, to stand in solidarity with others against the suffering we share, and to find, in the struggle itself, freely undertaken, all the meaning a human being can ever have or need. We must imagine ourselves, like Sisyphus, happy.