Category: reading

Find the first two parts here and here.

I left you last at the beginning of Camus’ critique of other philosopher’s thoughts and rationalizations for suicide.  Camus doesn’t deal with every philosophy, ever -ism, he takes up the only existential philosopher’s and only those who have directly dealt with the issue of suicide.  This list includes: Chestov ( I haven’t read), Kierkegaard (I have), Jaspers (haven’t), and Husserl (have).  Camus states in the very beginning that each and every one of them fails, they abandon reason and escape the problem of suicide by a leap of faith, “a forced hope.” Jaspers’ is the most forthright of the philosophers in this regard.  After enumerating in how many ways Man fails to connect to the world around him, turns that failure is transcendence?!  Unable to find purpose or meaning Jasper inverts it all and says that this is meaning, “That existence which, through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god, and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”  How convenient for Jasper that when his reasoning got him in a tough spot, when it appeared he  might have to say that the only logical thing to do in an absurd world is to kill yourself, he declares that the complete absence from reality of meaning or purpose is a direct sign that there is!

Chestov simply states that when we reach the absurd we have found God, that “we must rely upon him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”  Faced with the absurd we must take the leap of faith and trust to God.  Chestov rejects reason and hopes that there is something beyond it.   Camus is quick to point out that reason and this world are all Humanity has to work with and that by making the absurd God and removing them from this world into a world beyond, they’ve both lost all meaning to mankind.  Logic and reason, which if you remember were all Camus was going to use when he began his inquiry into suicide, is not these philosopher’s strong point as Camus repeatedly points out.  They’ve abandoned it when they make the hopeful leap of faith, Kierkegaard does the same as Chestov if not more so turning the Christian God of his youth into a monster of a deity that requires a sacrifice of the intellect to satisfy it.

Camus rejects all of this, he wants to know if he can live with what he knows and with that alone.  Camus dismisses the failed attempts of his predecessors with these words:

If in order to elude the anxious question: “what would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”  everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

So what do I think about all this?  I find that without me knowing it that my thoughts on life have been heavily influenced by Camus.  The first time I read this I know there were parts that I didn’t understand and simply continued reading in the hopes of finding some clarity…  I do not recall finding it, but rereading the essay it is clear I did.  I haven’t sat down and mapped out my logic or reasoning, but I don’t need any other reason to live than that I have a life.  In a conversation with a Mormon Bishop I was asked, “Without God why do you even bother getting up in the morning?”  I honestly do not understand this question.  I suspect that those who ask it don’t either.  No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution.  They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing.  They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.  I told him this and he seemed taken aback, and then asked “What about when you die?”  I laughed out loud at that point, though I quickly apologized.  I don’t remember my life before I came in to it and I don’t think I’ll remember it afterwards.  Is your life, right now, only worth continuing if a eternity of existence is promised after you die?  I doubt it.  Living is its own reward… Camus’ thoughts are quite a bit more stylized than that, demanding that Man live life constantly rebellion against the fact that the world is absurd and that life must end…

I’ll be discussing and commenting on that in the next edition, which covers Camus’ “absurd freedom” and then moving on to the “absurd man”