Meaning, Nihilism, and the Question of Suicide

Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is singularly obsessed with one question: is suicide a valid reaction to realizing that one lives in an absurd world?

The Absurd

It’s important to understand what Camus means when he refers to an absurd world. He doesn’t simply mean that we live in a world where ridiculous or tragic or comic or tragi-comic things may happen. What he means is much more significant.

He takes for granted that there is no God, or rather he takes for granted that he can never know whether there is or isn’t, and so — wishing to deal with only those things of which he is certain — he rules out the possibility of God and anything beyond this life of which he can be assured.

For Camus, the Absurd is the radical disjunction between humanity and the world in which we exist. Our minds yearn for meaning, our lives demand it, but the world remains mute. Existence pledges no allegiances, ratifies no causes, justifies no arguments, never gives you an “ought” from an “is”. Because of this, men and women can find no moral support for their lives in the world. Of course, there is physical support for the continuation of life available, but nothing to tell you why or even if that life SHOULD continue. And so, the question of the continuation of life becomes the focus of Camus for this book-length essay.

Camus is often regarded as a philosopher, but he himself claimed that he was not one — for the reason that he didn’t have sufficient faith in reason to construct a philosophical system. He, instead, thought of himself as an artist.

However, I don’t think Camus was accurately representing himself, here. Or, if he was, I think that he did not find a way to live consistently with that belief — though I’m not sure if that even represents a problem under Camus’ system, which is more like an anti-system, as it was described by Francis Jeanson, “an anti-rational posture.” Camus had a commitment to the Absurd — that was, at all times, to live as if there were meaning to the world, while believing that there is not. Maybe under such conditions there is legitimacy in writing books in which you attempt to rationally defend your anti-rational position. After all, if you were to point out to Camus that he contradicts himself, then he would likely smile and say, “Yes. Didn’t I tell you it was absurd?”

Revolt

In response to this condition, Camus viewed the only meaningful life to be the life lived in revolt against the meaninglessness of the absurd world:

That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, 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. The sight of human pride is unequalled.

But you might turn to him and rebut, “No. It doesn’t. It is a lie you have told yourself to make living possible. Don Quixote is not a hero. He is a broken man, pitied by those around him. It is only the crooked, idiot finger that points beyond his life to the possibility of a God who could redeem it that saves him from being more than a simple wretch.”

I suspect that first-cycle Camus would nod in agreement and say, “It is exactly as you say”…and continue writing his books in opposition.

In researching Camus, I found that MoS represents his first of three “cycles.” According to the scholars, each cycle is delineated by a novel, a work of nonfiction, and a play. All but one are characterized by a primitive myth.

The myth which inspires the first cycle of Camus is, of course, that of Sisyphus — the man who so angered the Greek gods that they punished him with an eternity of futile, senseless labor. The allegorical connection is not a difficult one to make. We are Sisyphus; our labor is living. Our fate is not an eternal one…but, at every given moment of a man’s life, it may FEEL eternal.

The question is, then: How do we live in this predicament?

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says.

Though frequently lumped in with the existentialists, Camus did not believe himself to be one. He has obvious respect for figures like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, but believes that their leap of faith was a form of escape that he does not wish to repeat. Prior to that leap, one is trapped in a moment of extreme tension: he is asked to attend to the painful task of living, despite knowing that task to be meaningless and futile.

The goal for Camus is to remain in this state, to live with perfect consciousness of the futility of it and ask for nothing more. Camus claimed that existentialism is drenched in hope, and that hope must be abandoned in order to live a truly conscious and authentically-absurd life. He idolizes Don Juan and his appetites, his simple delight in diversity and pleasure.

At one point in Don Juan’s journeys, after sex, his lover sighs and says, “At last, I have given you love.”

Don Juan merely laughs at her. “At last?” he says. “No, but once more.”

With this Don Juan collapses the distance between the romantic and hedonically pedestrian. Sex is love; love is sex. He denies that there might be anything higher. The conscious life, supposedly so ennobled by its tragic knowledge, collapses into simple hedonism. This is the most frustrating aspect amongst the beliefs of Camus: they are logically unassailable because they have already failed to test of logic. They deny that logic can offer anything more useful; but they are, themselves, unsatisfying. I suspect that, in the end, they were unsatisfying to Camus too.

Later Life

Camus became successful and famous at a very young age and had a number of affairs, as one would expect of any good acolyte of Don Juan. His poor wife eventually suffered from a nervous breakdown from the affairs (one of which was particularly public and involved a beautiful actress) and had to be hospitalized. This apparently affected Camus — but to what extent is hard to tell.

It would take more effort than I usually devote to these little write-ups to make sure; but I suspect that Camus eventually transcended Sisyphus, or at least wished to. Towards the end of his life, he devoted much of his work to adapting Dostoevsky’s Demons into a play. He also took on the task of posthumously publishing a series of the works of the Christian philosopher, Simone Weil. Camus once called Weil “the only great spirit of our times” and believed her work might contain the cure to nihilism. He named the series Espoir.

In French, it means “hope.”