When Camus wrote ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ his aim was to address the meaningless nature of modern existence and to explain why, when faced with this harsh reality, we choose to go on living. The word he uses to describe our meaningless world is ‘absurd’: meaning dissonance or being ‘out of tune’, which suggests Camus recognised a dislocation between us and the world. Indeed, he goes on to explain our plight using words like ‘exile’ and ‘divorce’, as he describes a universe in which we now feel ourselves to be aliens. Camus locates our realisation of life’s absurdity in that moment when we are going about our everyday business and have the sudden thought ‘what’s the point?’ It is in that instant “where the void becomes eloquent – and the chain of daily gestures is broken,” that the absurd is revealed. And what Camus spends the book trying to work out is what logically follows from having such a profound realisation.
“Man is always prey to his truths,” Camus tells us. Once we admit them we cannot free ourselves, “Something has to be paid,” because, “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.” Describing us as being constrained by the absurd is interesting, because elsewhere in the book Camus tells us that we are free “Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.” According to Camus, our freedom derives from the fact that we are now the sole master of our world. What previously bound us was the illusion of another world but that illusion has now been dispersed, hence our emancipation. But if we are free, as Camus assures us we are, how can we be bound by anything? Why does our realisation of the absurd have such a hold on us? Why can’t we just shake it off? To be bound to something means that we are dependent on it in some way. Hence we are not free.
I don’t see this lack of congruity as a flaw, however. I think it reveals Camus’ commitment to truth and evidences the living power of the symbolic that we cannot escape. And we cannot escape it because we belong to the reality it points us to. It’s not so much a burden as an opportunity; the symbol provides us with the access point – Camus’ ‘eloquent void’ – through which we may reach an understanding of our life. As theologian Paul Tillich explains, we participate in symbols whether we like it or not. Symbols cannot be avoided and they can’t be removed or canceled by scientific or practical thought. They come into existence when the time is ripe and die away when they are no longer needed. So, even if we covered our eyes and blocked our ears, reality would still find us. To entirely escape the symbolic order we would probably have to render ourselves insensate, but that would be to exist in a kind of dead life.
In considering the sort of payment that should be made following our realisation of life’s absurdity, Camus works through three possible responses. The most obvious one is ‘plain suicide’ which Camus rejects as defeat and “acceptance at its extreme.” There is another form of suicide, however. Camus calls it ‘philosophical suicide’ which he also rejects. And he does so because he doesn’t accept that it’s a legitimate response. ‘Philosophical suicide’ is characterised by the blind attempt to draw a direct correspondence between the absurd and transcendence, which Camus will not countenance because he regards it as disingenuous. Here he quotes Karl Jaspers articulating what Camus regards as a ‘leap’ or an escape from the problem, “Does not the failure [of meaning] reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?” To which Camus responds with an emphatic ‘No’. He will not accept this ‘leap’.
Whilst acknowledging that we stand on the rubble of reason in a soundless universe devoid of meaning, Camus refuses to accept that the absurd equates to God. He will not accept a God antithetical to human reason because he believes that such an acceptance would denigrate man. “If there is an absurd, it is in man’s universe. The moment the notion transforms itself into eternity’s springboard, it ceases to be linked to human lucidity. The struggle is eluded…. This leap is an escape.” And it is in his refusal to take the easy escape route that Camus acknowledges that we are caught up in the living symbolism of the absurd.
The third response, of which Camus does approve, is to acknowledge life’s absurdity but consciously accept one’s fate. Because, according to Camus, “the absurd man when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.” And a model for this exemplary behaviour is, Sisyphus, the eponymous hero, who has been punished by the Gods for attempting to dodge death. His punishment is to spend eternity lugging a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down again, forcing him to start all over again. Having conned Pluto into letting him go upside once more in order to sort out some marital affair, Sisyphus reneges on his promise to return, hence the punishment. He is awarded heroic status by Camus because by doing the task consciously he is seen to triumph over his fate. That and the fact that he was a bit of a party-goer and tried to cram in more life experience also elevates him in Camus’ eyes.
However, Sisyphus doesn’t really work as a role model for our absurd lives because he was actually acquainted with the eternal but chose to avoid it, or at least delay it, which is not our situation. He is also dead. This is probably the reason he doesn’t make an appearance in the book until the appendix. Instead, Camus offers us a mortal hero of quantity in Don Juan. Although fictional, Don Juan is presented as a person dealing well with absurdity. Because, according to Camus, “Becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorises [us] to plunge into every excess,” which, by making love to numerous women, is exactly what Don Juan is doing.
Camus cautions us to forget any moral scruples concerning Don Juan’s excessive behaviour, explaining that he simply has an insatiable appetite. The only question we have to answer is a metaphysical one. And that is to determine whether super-human pleasure-seeking is the best mode of life for coping with the absurd. And in this regard, the insatiability of Don Juan’s sexual appetite is the most important aspect. The form of pleasure we seek does not matter, what is important is that the drive for it is strong enough to outlive us. As Camus tells us, “Longing for desire killed by satisfaction, that commonplace of the impotent man, does not belong to [Don Juan].” So, whereas the ordinary man, with an appetite he is able to satisfy, is plagued by meaninglessness, the extraordinary man with a superhuman appetite is able to escape the same fate. By being able to avoid satiation this superhero evades having to confront life’s absurdity. In effect, they are able to outrun it. And yet, I would suggest that Don Juan’s life doesn’t feel the least bit inspirational; quite the opposite. By keeping busy he seems to have missed out on something important. It’s not that we want life to be absurd, but if it is, we want to know about it. Anything else seems like evasion – just another form of escape; and that leaves us with the feeling that life has been wasted.
But there is a darker, more menacing image of the meaninglessness of modern existence that reveals a world without any of the liberating opportunities that seem to excite Camus. In this cursed world the individual appears but a pawn in the hands of faceless higher powers that block his every attempt to comprehend his life and his fate. In ‘The Castle’, published posthumously in 1926, K, the compliant hero –a land surveyor – arrives in a town with a castle. The horror of the story is that there is no discernible meaning to anything that unfolds. There appears to be some logical system playing out, drawing K towards his fate but it is incomprehensible to K or to us. There are no discernible connections we can make and there is no explanation for anything that happens. Nothing makes sense. But what makes ‘The Castle’, and indeed all of Kafka’s work, so harrowing is the lack of psychological interpretation within it. I didn’t notice this until Erich Heller, the brilliant literary critic, pointed it out. And that is probably because so much of our modern literature and art is saturated with psychological interpretation, which blocks anything from speaking for itself. But Kafka’s work isn’t like that. He offers us no reflective insight. There are no monologues or conversational asides to guide us. We don’t know what the characters think or plan or hope for. We just see the world in its undiluted oppressiveness. There seems to be something systematic at work determining K.’s fate, but we don’t understand its working and soon the horror dawns on us that the ‘system’, if that be what it is, is beyond human comprehension. It is not a world for humans.
In his analysis of ‘The Castle’, Heller makes the point that we no longer have symbols of a transcendent order through which to understand reality, as Kafka was well aware. Instead “what the modern mind perceives as order is established through the tidy relationship of things themselves.” These petty orderings, which are constructs of the positivistic-scientific mind, are trivial and say nothing to the human condition. And it is the nonsensical logic of such orderings that Kafka assembles into something nightmarish. The result is what Heller describes as ‘a work from the darkness’. Whilst Camus’ disappointment stems from his looking to an empty heaven for a sign to explicate the meaninglessness of our modern lives, Kafka has already realised that what comes next bubbles up from below. As Heller explains, “reality has been all but completely sealed off against any transcendental intrusion. But in Kafka’s work the symbolic substance, forced back in every attempt to attack from above, invades reality from down below carrying with it the stuff from Hell.” Heller, goes on to correct his use of the word ‘invade’, grimly realising that things have gone still further, and that an invasion is not needed because the weight of the world is enough to sink us, “Kafka writes at the point where the world, having become too heavy with spiritual emptiness, begins to sink into the unsuspected demon-ridden depths of unbelief.” This is the world of negative transcendence.
The most recent emanation from the world of negative transcendence, and a symbol familiar to all of us, is the Zombie. In ‘Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century Crisis’, John Vervaeke looks at the symbolic significance of this expression of dead life, which in so many ways resembles our own. The Zombie is an uncomprehending being, it cannot speak or think. With its insatiable appetite for living flesh – they don’t eat each other - and its inability to thrive, it’s the ultimate consumptive. It has no sense of purpose or direction. It is everywhere, yet at the same time it is homeless with no relationships or community. It is incapable of learning or communicating or of controlling its appetite which is the only drive that seems to motivate it. The Zombie is incapable of being either sad or happy, and it isn’t even bad. It’s just a victim of the most terrible of fates. Is it the living dead or the dead living? Sometimes people ‘turn’ after getting bitten; in other scenarios they have to die before they are resurrected as the living dead.
Is this symbol of dead life pointing us to an irreparable break with the transcendent? That’s unimaginable. But, once turned, does a Zombie ever revert back? It is a mindless creature without resources or desires. All it has is appetite and the only thing it can accomplish is the infection of others. It can’t replicate itself other than by dragging others down with it. And, ultimately, it is barren. Is this the fate of Western Christendom? Has our civilisation really culminated in the Zombie? How can such a thought be entertained regarding a culture as advanced as ours? And yet, the sophisticated technology and scientism of today disguise the profound rupture with reason that lies at its foundation. And it is the diminution of our understanding of what reason is, rather than any failure of belief that has cut us off from participating in life’s mystery.
People often think of the modern world as one in which man has been freed from superstition and thereby enabled to properly reason and pursue science. And this certainly fits the progressive narrative that was tagged on to modernity after the event. But what brought the modern era into being was not the light of reason chasing away the shadows of a delusional scholasticism. Rather, it was reason that first collapsed as the scholastics gave up on their struggle to marry Greek philosophy with Christian revelation, and that created space for a new way of thinking about the world.
And it was the arrival of Nominalism, which is an interpretation of reality that sees everything as singular, separate and disconnected that finally brought scholasticism to an end and ushered in modernity. The reason Nominalism became prominent is because in the tussle between revelation and reason, which had been going on between different theological schools for much of the Middle Ages, revelation finally won. The advocates of Nominalism argued for the superiority of revelation, asserting that scripture was the only route to God. Accordingly, Nominalism disparaged the power of human reason and declared the world unknowable in the absence of God’s revelation. Thus, what Nominalism opened up was an entirely new way of interpreting the world. This is the scientific mode of investigation that proceeds by breaking single entities down into smaller and smaller parts. This piecemeal way of gaining knowledge was the antithesis of the philosophical knowing favoured by the Greeks, who perceived the universe in a deeply relational and participatory way. Nominalism took the view that every single thing is a separate individual creation. As a result, beings have no connection with each other and are intrinsically unknowable. Essentially, the universe is nothing but a created collection of disparate objects that an indifferent God willed into existence. And, in fact, tomorrow God could will everything to be completely different. Nominalism turned the world upside down, rendering nature mute, man deaf and God absent. This is the meaningless world Camus and the rest of us are struggling to make sense of.