Camus and the Absurd

The Myth of Sisyphus opens with a sentence that gets quoted so often it has gone slightly numb: there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. What it announces is not a mood but a method. Camus is going to take the question seriously enough to answer it, and the book is the answer. The answer is no.

He starts by locating the problem precisely, and the precision is what separates him from a general sense that life is meaningless. The absurd, he insists, is not a property of the universe. Nor is it a defect in human beings. It is a relation between the two: our demand that things mean something, meeting a world that returns nothing.

That definition does an enormous amount of work, because it means the absurd disappears if either side is removed. A mind without the demand would feel nothing at all. A universe that answered would settle the matter. So the absurd only exists while both terms are held together, which sets up his rejection of the two available exits.

The first exit is physical. Kill yourself and the human half is gone; the confrontation ends because one party has left. Camus regards this as evasion rather than solution. If the absurd is what we have honestly discovered to be true, then abolishing the one who noticed it does not respect the discovery.

The second exit is subtler and he calls it philosophical suicide. This is the leap: adopting a faith, or an ideology, or any framework that supplies the missing answer. His main example is Kierkegaard, who diagnoses the absurd with complete honesty and then jumps to God. But the Marxist appeal to History gets exactly the same treatment, and that is the part that made him enemies. In both cases meaning is restored by removing the silent half of the confrontation. The discomfort goes, and nothing about the situation has changed.

What remains is what he calls revolt: holding the tension permanently, consciously, without appeal. Not resignation, because resignation stops looking. Not hope, because hope is a bet on an answer arriving. Revolt brings a strange freedom (once you stop waiting for external meaning, the future stops being a corridor you are moving down) and a passion for the quantity and intensity of experience rather than its justification.

Which brings him to Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever and watch it roll back. Camus is interested in one specific moment, and it is not the pushing. It is the descent: the hour when Sisyphus walks back down, fully conscious, under no illusion, knowing exactly what the next hour holds. That is when he is superior to his fate, because his fate belongs to him. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The obvious objection is that this is resignation with better prose: keep pushing the boulder, feel good about it, which is what any ideology asks. Camus's answer rests entirely on lucidity: the ideology requires you to believe the boulder means something, and revolt requires you not to. Whether that difference does real work or is only a mood is the honest question to bring to him.

A second thing is worth knowing. Camus rejected the existentialist label repeatedly and in print; he and Sartre are grouped together largely because they were friends in Paris at the same time, and the friendship ended in 1952 over exactly this. Camus would not accept that a future good justifies present killing. That refusal is what The Rebel is about, and it cost him the French left for the rest of his life.