"Camus, Albert - An Absurd Reasoning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Camus Albert)AN
ABSURD REASONING by Albert
Camus
Contents Preface to 1955 American Edition
for me "The
Myth of Sisyphus" marks the beginning of
an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the
problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder, in both
cases without the aid of eternal values
which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary
Europe. The fundamental subject of "The
Myth of Sisyphus" is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder
whether life has a meaning; therefore it is
legitimate to meet the problem of
suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is
this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the
French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible
to find the means to proceed beyond
nihilism. In all the books I have
written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although "The Myth of Sisyphus" poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid
invitation to live and to create, in
the very midst of the desert. It has hence been thought possible to append to this philosophical argument a series of essays, of a
kind 1 have never ceased writing,
which are somewhat marginal to my other books. In a more lyrical form,
they all illustrate that essential
fluctuation from assent to refusal which,
in my view, defines the artist and his difficult calling. The unity of
this hook, that I should like to he apparent
to American readers as it is to me, resides in the reflection, alternately cold and impassioned, in which an
artist may indulge as to his reasons for living and for creating. After fifteen years I have progressed beyond several of the
positions which are set down here; hut
I have remained faithful, it seems to me, to the exigency
which prompted them. That is why this hook is
in a certain sense the most personal of those I have
published in America. More than the others, therefore, it
has need of the indulgence and understanding of its
readers. albert camus PARIS MARCH 1955
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal
life, lout exhaust the limits of the possible. —Pindar, Pythian iii the pages that
follow deal with an absurd sensitivity that can be found
widespread in the age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time,
properly speaking, has not known. It is therefore
simply fair to point out, at the outset, what these pages owe to certain contemporary
thinkers. It is so far from my intention to hide this that they Will be found cited and commented upon
throughout this work. But it is useful to note at the same
time that the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in
this essay as a starting-point. In this sense it may be said that
there is something provisional in my commentary: one cannot prejudge the position it
entails. There will be found here merely
the description, in the pure state, of
an intellectual malady. No metaphysic, no belief is involved in it for the moment. These are the
limits and the only bias of this
book. Certain personal experiences urge
me to make this clear.
AN ABSURD REASONING There is
but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world
has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes
afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it
is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must
preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that
reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel;
yet they call for careful study before they become clear
to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge
that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by
the actions it entails. I have never seen
anyone die for the ontological
argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance,
abjured it with the greatest ease as soon
as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.1 That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the
earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter
ofprofound
indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I
see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give
them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most
urgent of questions. How to answer it?
On all essential problems (I mean
thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method
of La Palisse
and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the
balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In
a subject at once so humble and so
heavy with emotion, the learned and
classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the
same time from common sense and understanding. Suicide
has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon.
On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and
suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls
the trigger or jumps. Of an
apartment-building manager who had
killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that
he had changed greatly since, and
that that experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to
think is beginning to be undermined.
Society has but little connection with
such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought.
One must follow and understand this
fatal game that leads from lucidity
in the face of existence to flight from light. There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful.
Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through
reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers
often speak of "personal sorrows"
or of "incurable illness." These explanations are plausible. But one
would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day
addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.2 But if it is hard to fix the
precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to
deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and
as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is
confessing that life is too much for you or
that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies,
however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that
"is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue
making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of
which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies
that you have recognized, even instinctively,
the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane
character of that daily agitation,
and the uselessness of suffering. What, then, is that incalculable
feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep
necessary to life? A world that can be
explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in
a universe suddenly divested of
illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without
remedy since he is deprived of the memory
of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his
life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
All healthy men having thought of their own
suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a
direct connection between this feeling and
the longing for death. The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between
the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which
suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not
cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then
dictate his conduct. It is
legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of
this importance requires forsaking as
rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of
men inclined to be in harmony with themselves. Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and
insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve
answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies
evidence. A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one
does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical
solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made
for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly
indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer
"no" act as if they thought "yes." As a
matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion,
they think "yes" in one way or another. On the
other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the
meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even
be said that they have never been so keen as on
this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a
commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behavior of those who
profess them. But it must be said that of the thinkers who refused a meaning to life
none except Kirilov who belongs to literature, Peregrinos who is torn
of legend, 3 and Jules Lequier
who belongs to hypothesis, admitted his logic to the point of refusing that life. Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit
subject for laughter, because he
praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for
joking. That way of not taking the tragic
seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man. In the face of such contradictions and
obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between
the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to
leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's
attachment to life there is something stronger than all
the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as
the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We
get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit
of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the
body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of
that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is
both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian
sense. Eluding is the
invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal
evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for
some great idea that will transcend
it, refine it, give it a meaning, and
betray it. Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion. Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort,
people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to
grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common
measure between these two judgments. One merely has to refuse to be
misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously pointed out.
One must brush everything aside and go
straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not
worth living, that is
certainly a truth—yet an
unfruitful one because it is a
truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity
require one to escape it through hope or suicide—this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest.
Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over
others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an "objective" mind can always
introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion.
It calls simply for an unjust—in other words, logical—thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to
the bitter end. Men who die by their
own hand consequently follow to its conclusion their emotional inclination. Reflection
on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem to interest
me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without
reckless passion, in the sole light
of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source.
This is what I call an absurd reasoning. Many
have begun it. I do not yet know
whether or not they kept to it. When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims:
"This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw
behind an objective point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others
can any longer become an object for me," he is evoking after many others
those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others,
yes indeed, but how eager they were to get
out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men
have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise,
but they initiated the suicide of
their thought in its purest revolt.
The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd
vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which
absurdity, hope, and death carry on
their dialogue. The mind can then
analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are
conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse
or a repulsion in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing.
Great feelings take with them their
own universe, splendid or abject. They
light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize
their climate. There is a universe of
jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A
universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an
attitude of mind. What
is true of already specialized
feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate,
simultaneously as vague and as "definite,"
as remote and as "present" as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity. At any streetcorner
the feeling of absurdity can strike any man
in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive. But
that very difficulty deserves reflection. It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there
is in him something irreducible that
escapes us. But practically
I know men and recognize them by
their behavior, by the totality of
their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those
irrational feelings which offer no purchase
to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate them practically,
by gathering together the sum of
their consequences in the domain of
the intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor
a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he
has personified and if I say that I know him a
little better at the hundredth character
counted off, this will be felt to contain
an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-believe as
well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings,
inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume. It is
clear that in this way I am defining a method. But it is also evident
that that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. For methods imply
metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet. Similarly, the last pages
of a book are already contained in the
first pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely
appearances can be enumerated and the climate
make itself felt. Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely
related worlds of intelligence, of
the art of living, or of art itself. The
climate of absurdity is in the beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind
which lights the world with its true
colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude
has discerned in it.
All great deeds and all great
thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a
street-corner or in a restaurant's revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others
derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying "nothing" when asked what one
is thinking about may be pretense in
a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is
sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily
gestures is broken, in which the
heart vainly seeks the link that will connect
it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four
hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal,
sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
Friday and Saturday according to the
same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything
begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. "Begins"—this is
important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at
the same time it inaugurates the
impulse of consciousness. It awakens
consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or
recovery. In itself weariness has
something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with
consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. There is nothing original about these remarks. But they are obvious; that is enough for
a while, during a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere "anxiety," as Heidegger
says, is at the source of everything. Likewise and during every day
of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But
a moment always comes when we have to carry
it. We live on the future: "tomorrow," "later on," "when you have made your way," "you
will understand when you are old
enough." Such irrelevan-cies are
wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet
a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his
place in it. He admits that he stands
at a certain point on a curve that he
acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes
his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything
in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.4 A step lower and strangeness
creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense," sensing to
what a degree a stone is foreign and
irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At
the heart of all beauty lies something
inhuman, and these hills, the
softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we
had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive
hostility of the world rises up to
face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have
understood in it solely the images
and designs that we had attributed to
it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage
scenery masked by habit becomes again
what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when
under the familiar face of a woman,
we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we
shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that
denseness and that strangeness of the
world is the absurd. Men, too, secrete the inhuman.
At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures,
their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone
behind a glass partition; you cannot
hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the
face of man's own inhumanity, this
incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this
"nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming
brother we encounter in our own photographs
is also the absurd. I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On
this point everything has been said and it is only
proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there
is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced
but what has been lived and made conscious. Here,
it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It
is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy
convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time
frightens us, this is because it
works out the problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty
speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least
for a time. From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has
disappeared. This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting
of that destiny, its
uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics
and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command
our condition. Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over. I am limiting myself here to making a rapid
classification and to pointing out these
obvious themes. They run through all literatures and all philosophies.
Everyday conversation feeds on them. There is no question of reinventing them. But it is essential to be sure of
these facts in order to be able to
question oneself subsequently on the
primordial question. I am interested—let me repeat again—not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences. If one is assured of these facts,
what is one to conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die
voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything? Beforehand, it is necessary to take the same rapid inventory on the plane of the intelligence.
The mind's first step is to
distinguish what is true from .what is false. However, as soon as
thought reflects on itself, what it first
discovers is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in this case. Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and more elegant demonstration
of the business than Aristotle: "The often ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy themselves.
For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion
and consequently the falsity of our own thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true). And if one
says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we declare
that solely the assertion opposed to ours is
false or else that solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced
to admit an infinite number of true or false
judgments. For the one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad
infinitum," This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind
that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity of these
paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics
of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind's deepest desire,
even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in
the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a
man is reducing it to the human,
stamping it with his seal. The cat's universe is not the universe of the
anthill. The truism "All thought is
anthropomorphic" has no other meaning.
Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms
of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought
discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena
eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an
intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous
imitation. That nostalgia for unity,
that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the
human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia's existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied. For if,
bridging the gulf that separates
desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One
(whatever it may be), we fall into the
ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to
resolve. This other vicious circle is
enough to stifle our hopes. These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal. One
can nevertheless count the minds
that have deduced the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to
consider as a constant point of reference in
this essay the regular hiatus between
what we fancy we know and what we really
know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live
with ideas which, if we truly put them to
the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced with this inextricable
contradiction of the mind, we shall fully
grasp the divorce separating us from our own creations. So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and
arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this
world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever
reconstructing the familiar, calm surface
which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of
inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers,
we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people
despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human
thought were to be written, it would have
to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. Of whom and of what indeed can I
say: "I know that!" This heart within
me I can feel, and I judge that it exists.
This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and
the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize
it, it is nothing but water slipping
through my fingers. I can sketch one
by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these
silences, this nobility or this
vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain in definable to me. Between the certainty I have of
my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will
never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be
virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are
legitimate only in precisely so far
as they are approximate. And here are trees and I know
their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass
and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes — how shall I
negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on
earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe
it to me and you teach me to classify it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are
true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and
multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom
and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I
wait for you to continue. But you
tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain
this world to me with an image. I
realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
Have I the time to become indignant? You
have already changed theories. So
that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of
art. What need had I of so many
efforts? The soft lines of these hills
and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize
that if through science I can seize phenomena and
enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with
my finger, I should not know any
more. And you give me the choice
between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and
hypotheses that claim to teach me but that
are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in
which I can have peace only by
refusing to know and to live, in which
the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into
being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations. Hence the intelligence, too,
tells me in its way that this world is absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear; I was waiting for
proof and longing for it to be right. But
despite so many pretentious centuries
and over the heads of so many eloquent and persuasive men, I know that is false. On this plane, at least, there is
no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason, practical or
ethical, that determinism, those categories
that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth,
which is to be enchained. In this unintelligible
and limited universe, man's fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds
him until his ultimate end. In his
recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear and
definite. I said that the world is
absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is
all that can be said. But what is absurd is the
confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends
as much on man as on the world. For
the moment it is all that links them
together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures
together. This is all I can discern
clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place. Let
us pause here. If I hold to be true that
absurdity that determines my relationship
with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in face of the world's scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the
pursuit of a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties
and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue
them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I want to know
beforehand if thought can live in those deserts.
I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts.
There it found its bread. There it realized that it had previously been feeding
on phantoms. It justified some of the most
urgent themes of human reflection. From the moment absurdity is
recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether
or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their
law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously
exalt—that is the whole question. It is not, however, the one we shall ask just yet. It stands at the center of this experience. There will be time to
come back to it. Let us recognize
rather those themes and those
impulses born of the desert. It will suffice to enumerate them. They, too, are known to all today.
There have always been men to defend the rights of the irrational. The
tradition of what may be called humiliated thought has never ceased to exist.
The criticism of rationalism has been made so often that it seems unnecessary to begin again. Yet our epoch is marked by
the rebirth of those paradoxical systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly it had always forged ahead.
But that is not so much a proof of
the efficacy of the reason as of the
intensity of its hopes. On the plane of history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity
and the clear vision he may have of
the walls enclosing him. But never perhaps at any time has the attack on reason been
more violent than in ours. Since Zarathustra's great
outburst: "By chance it is the oldest nobility in the world.
I conferred it upon all things when I proclaimed that above them no eternal will
was exercised," since Kierkegaard's fatal illness, "that malady that
leads to death with nothing else following it," the significant and
tormenting themes of absurd thought have followed one
another. Or at least, and this proviso is of capital importance,
the themes of irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from
Kierkegaard to Che-stov, from the
phenomenologists to Scheler,
on the logical
plane and on the moral plane, a whole family of minds related by their nostalgia but opposed by their methods or their aims, have persisted in blocking
the royal road of reason and in recovering the direct paths of truth. Here I assume these thoughts to be
known and lived. Whatever may be or
have been their ambitions, all
started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy,
anguish, or impotence reigns. And what they have in common is precisely the
themes so far disclosed. For them,
too, it must be said that what matters
above all is the conclusions they have managed to draw from those discoveries. That matters so much that they must be examined separately. But for
the moment we are concerned solely
with their discoveries and their
initial experiments. We are concerned solely with noting their agreement. If it would be
presumptuous to try to deal with
their philosophies, it is possible and sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is common to them. Heidegger considers the human
condition coldly and announces that that existence is humiliated. The
only reality is "anxiety" in the
whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this
anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of
itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual
climate of the lucid man "in
whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that
"the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in
Kant extends only to recognizing the
restricted character of his "pure Reason."
This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to
him so much more important than all
the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He
enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind
contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of
anxiety and "existence then
delivers itself its own summons through
the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence
"to return from its loss in the anonymous They."
For him, too, one must not sleep, but
must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world
and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins. Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we have lost "naпvetй." He knows
that we can achieve nothing that will
transcend the fatal game of appearances.
He knows that the end of the mind is failure.
He tarries over the spiritual adventures revealed by history and
pitilessly discloses the flaw in each system,
the illusion that saved everything, the preaching that hid nothing. In this ravaged world in which
the impossibility of knowledge is
established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only reality and
irremediable despair seems the only
attitude, he tries to recover the Ariadne's thread
that leads to divine secrets. Chestov, for his part, throughout a
wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same truths,
tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of
the ironic facts or ridiculous
contradictions that depreciate the
reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is the
exception, whether in the domain of the heart
or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences
of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures
of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet's imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he tracks
down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses the reason its reasons
and begins to advance with some
decision only in the middle of that
colorless desert where all certainties have become stones. Of all perhaps the most
engaging, Kierkegaard, for a part of his existence at least, does more
than discover the absurd, he lives it. The
man who writes: "The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold
one's tongue but to talk" makes sure in
the beginning that no truth is absolute or can render satisfactory an
existence that is impossible in itself. Don
Juan of the understanding, he multiplies pseudonyms and contradictions, writes his Discourses of
Edification at the same time as that manual of cynical spiritualism, The Diary of the Seducer. He
refuses consolations, ethics, reliable
principles. As for that thorn he feels in his
heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and happy to be so, he builds up
piece by piece—lucidity, refusal,
make-believe—a category of the man
possessed. That face both tender and sneering, those pirouettes followed
by a cry from the heart are the absurd spirit itself grappling with a reality
beyond its comprehension. And the spiritual
adventure that leads Kierkegaard to
his beloved scandals begins likewise in the chaos of an experience
divested of its setting and relegated to its original incoherence. On quite a different plane, that
of method, Husserl and the phenomenologists,
by their very extravagances, reinstate the
world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason.
The spiritual universe becomes incalculably
enriched through them. The rose petal,
the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity.
Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is
learning all over again to see, to
be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the
manner of Proust,
into a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more positive than Kierkegaard's or Chestov's,
Husserl's manner of proceeding, in the beginning, nevertheless negates the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope,
opens to intuition and to the heart a
whole proliferation of phenomena, the
wealth of which has about it something inhuman.
These paths lead to all sciences or to none. This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important than the end. All that is involved
is "an attitude for
understanding" and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the beginning, at very least. How can one fail to feel the
basic relationship of these minds! How can one fail to see that they
take their stand around a privileged and
bitter moment in which hope has no further place? I want everything to be explained
to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this
insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is
peopled with such irrationals. The world
itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast
irrational. If one could only say just once: "This
is clear," all would be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is
clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him. All these experiences agree and confirm one another. The mind,
when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions.
This is where suicide and the reply stand.
But I wish to reverse the order of the
inquiry and start out from the intelligent adventure and come back to
daily acts. The experiences called to mind
here were born in the desert that we must not leave behind. At least it is essential to know how far
they went. At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his
longing for happiness and for reason.
The absurd is born of this confrontation
between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This
must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational,
the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the
drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence
is capable. Philosophical Suicide
The feeling of the absurd is
not, for all that, the notion of the absurd. It lays the foundations for
it, and that is all. It is not limited to
that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes judgment on the
universe. Subsequently it has a chance of
going further. It is alive; in other words, it must die or else reverberate.
So it is with the themes we have gathered
together. But there again what
interests me is not works or minds, criticism of which would call for another form and another place, but the discovery of what their conclusions have
in common. Never, perhaps, have minds been so different. And yet we
recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such dissimilar zones
of knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same
way. It is evident that the thinkers we have
just recalled have a common climate. To say that that climate is deadly
scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that
stifling sky forces one to get away or to
stay. The important thing is
to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in
the second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible
interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy. But first I want to detour from the direct path. Up to now we have
managed to circumscribe the absurd from the
outside. One can, however, wonder how much is clear in that notion and by direct analysis try to discover its meaning on the one hand and, on the other, the
consequences it involves. If I accuse an innocent man of
a monstrous crime, if I tell a virtuous man that he has coveted his own
sister, he will reply that this is absurd.
His indignation has its comical aspect. But it also has its fundamental
reason. The virtuous man illustrates by that
reply the definitive antinomy existing between the deed I am attributing to him
and his lifelong principles. "It's absurd" means "It's impossible" but also
"It's contradictory." If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider
his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion
between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim
he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts
apparently dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of
such a reasoning
with the logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from
the simplest to the most complex, the
magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance
between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges,
rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For
each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus
justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere
scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison
between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that
transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the
elements compared; it is born of their
confrontation. In this particular case and on
the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in
man (if such a metaphor could have a
meaning) nor in the world, but in
their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them. If I wish to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know
what links them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has
to derive all the consequences from
it. The immediate consequence is also a rule of method. The odd
trinity brought to light in this way is certainly not a startling discovery. But it resembles the data of experience in that it is both infinitely simple and
infinitely complicated. Its first distinguishing feature in this regard is that it cannot be divided. To
destroy one of its terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd
outside the human mind. Thus, like everything else, the
absurd ends with death. But there can be no absurd outside this
world either. And it is by this elementary criterion
that I judge the notion of the absurd to be essential
and consider that it can stand as the first of my truths. The
rule of method alluded to above appears here. If I
judge that a thing is true, I must preserve it. If I
attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure
away one of the terms of the problem. For me the sole datum is
the absurd. The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I consider essential in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and an unceasing struggle. And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must
admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope
(which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection
(which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious
dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature
unrest). Everything
that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements
(and, to begin with, consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the
absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has
meaning only
in so far as it is not agreed to.
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely,
that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to
it. A man devoid of hope and conscious
of being so has ceased to belong to
the future. That is natural. But it is
just as natural that he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator. All the
foregoing has significance only on
account of this paradox. Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism,
have admitted the absurd climate.
Nothing is more instructive in this regard
than to scrutinize the way in which they have elaborated their consequences. Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the
absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and
find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in
all of them. It deserves attention. I shall merely analyze here as
examples a few themes dear to Chestov and
Kierkegaard. But Jaspers will provide us, in caricatural
form, a typical example of this attitude. As
a result the rest will be clearer. He is left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the depth of experience, and conscious of that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or
at least draw the conclusions from
that failure? He contributes nothing
new. He has found nothing in experience
but the confession of his own impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory
principle. Yet without justification, as he
says to himself, he suddenly asserts all
at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when he writes: "Does not the failure reveal, beyond
any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?" That
existence which, suddenly and 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 (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing
logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap. And paradoxically can be understood Jaspers's
insistence, his infinite patience
devoted to making the experience of the
transcendent impossible to realize. For the more fleeting that approximation
is, the more empty that definition
proves to be, and the more real that transcendent is to him; for the
passion he devotes to asserting it is in
direct proportion to the gap between his powers of explanation and the irrationality of the world and
of experience. It thus appears that the more bitterly Jaspers destroys
the reason's preconceptions, the more radically he will explain the world. That apostle of humiliated thought will find at the very end of humiliation
the means of regenerating being to
its very depth. Mystical thought has familiarized us
with such devices. They are just as legitimate as any attitude of mind. But for the moment
I am acting as if I took a certain problem
seriously. Without judging beforehand the
general value of this attitude or its educative power, I mean simply to
consider whether it answers the conditions I set myself, whether it is
worthy of the conflict that concerns me.
Thus I return to Chestov. A commentator relates a
remark of his that deserves interest: "The only true
solution," he said, "is precisely where human
judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God?
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice."
If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I can say that it
is altogether summed up in this way. For when, at the
conclusion of his passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the fundamental
absurdity of all existence, he does not say:
"This is the absurd," but rather: "This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not
correspond to any of our rational
categories." So that confusion may not be possible, the Russian
philosopher even hints that this God
is perhaps full of hatred and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory; but
the more hideous is his face, the
more he asserts his power. His greatness is his incoherence. His proof
is his inhumanity. One must spring into him
and by this leap free oneself from
rational illusions. Thus, for Chestov acceptance of
the absurd is contemporaneous with the absurd itself. Being aware of it amounts to accepting it, and
the whole logical effort of his
thought is to bring it out so that at the
same time the tremendous hope it involves may burst forth. Let me repeat that this attitude is legitimate. But I am persisting here in considering a single
problem and all its consequences. I
do not have to examine the emotion
of a thought or of an act of faith. I have a whole lifetime to do that. I know that the rationalist
finds Chestov's attitude annoying. But I also feel that Chestov is right rather than the rationalist,
and I merely want to know if he
remains faithful to the commandments of the absurd. Now, if it is admitted that
the absurd is the contrary of hope, it is seen that existential thought
for Chestov presupposes the absurd but proves it only
to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a
conjuror's emotional trick. When Chestov
elsewhere sets his absurd in opposition to
current morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. Hence,
there is basically in that definition of the
absurd an approbation that Chestov
grants it. If it is admitted that all
the power of that notion lies in the way it runs counter to our
elementary hopes, if it is felt that to
remain, the absurd requires not to be consented to, then it can be clearly seen that it has lost its true aspect, its human and relative character in
order to enter an eternity that is
both incomprehensible and satisfying. 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 absurd is no longer that evidence that man ascertains without
consenting to it. The struggle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd and in that communion causes to disappear its essential character,
which is opposition, laceration, and
divorce. This leap is an escape. Chestov, who
is so fond of quoting Hamlet's remark: "The
time is out of joint," writes it down with a sort of savage hope that seems to belong to him in
particular. For it
is not in this sense that Hamlet says it or Shakespeare writes it.
The intoxication of the irrational and the
vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away from the absurd. To Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind reason
is useless and there is nothing
beyond reason. This leap can at least enlighten us a little more as to the true
nature of the absurd. We know that it is worthless
except in an equilibrium, that it is, above all, in
the comparison and not in the terms
of that comparison. But it so happens that Chestov puts all the
emphasis on one of the terms and destroys the equilibrium. Our appetite for understanding, our
nostalgia for the absolute are explicable only in so far,
precisely, as we can understand and explain
many things. It is useless to negate the
reason absolutely. It has its order in which it is efficacious. It is properly that of human experience. Whence we wanted to make
everything clear. If we cannot
do so, if the absurd is born on that occasion, it is born precisely at the very
meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent
irrational. Now, when Chestov rises up against a
Hegelian proposition such as "the
motion of the solar system takes place
in conformity with immutable laws and those laws are its reason," when he devotes all his passion to upsetting
Spinoza's rationalism, he concludes, in effect, in favor of the vanity of all reason. Whence, by a natural and illegitimate reversal, to the
pre-eminence of the irrational.5 But the
transition is not evident. For here may intervene the
notion of limit and the notion of level.
The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or else, they
may justify themselves on the level of description without for that reason being true on the level of
explanation. Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand for clarity being conjured away, the absurd disappears with
one of the terms of its comparison. The absurd
man, on the other hand, does not undertake such a leveling process. He
recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the
irrational. Thus he again embraces in a
single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to
leap before knowing. He knows simply that in
that alert awareness there is no further place for hope. What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will
be perhaps even more so in Kierkegaard. To
be sure, it is hard to outline clear propositions in so elusive a
writer. But, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be felt
throughout that work, as it were, the presentiment (at the same time as
the apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts
forth in the last works: Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to its
harshest aspect. For him, too,
antinomy and paradox become criteria
of the religious. Thus, the very thing that led to despair of the
meaning and depth of this life now gives it
its truth and its clarity. Christianity is the scandal, and what
Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: "The sacrifice of the
intellect."6 This effect
of the "leap" is odd, but must not surprise us any longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world, whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. "In his failure," says Kierkegaard, "the believer finds his triumph." It is not for me to wonder to
what stirring preaching this attitude is linked. I merely have to wonder
if the spectacle of the absurd and its own
character justifies it. On this point, I know that it is not so. Upon
considering again the content of the absurd,
one understands better the method that inspired Kierkegaard. Between the irrational
of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, he does not maintain the equilibrium. He does not respect
the relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the
feeling of absurdity. Sure of being unable to escape the irrational, he wants
at least to save himself from that desperate
nostalgia that seems to him sterile and
devoid of implication. But if he may be right on this point in his judgment, he could not be in his
negation. If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at
once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him
and to deify the only certainty he henceforth
possesses, the irrational. The important thing, as Abbe
Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay,
is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied
wish, and it runs throughout his
whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to
escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more desperate effort since he
intermittently perceives its vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither
fear of God nor piety were capable of
bringing him to peace. Thus it is that, through a strained subterfuge, he gives the irrational the
appearance and God the attributes of
the absurd: unjust, incoherent, and
incomprehensible. Intelligence alone in him strives to stifle the underlying demands of the human heart. Since nothing is proved, everything
can be proved. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken. I do not want to suggest anything here, but how can
one fail to read in his works the
signs of an almost intentional
mutilation of the soul to balance the mutilation accepted in regard to the
absurd? It is the leitmotiv of the Journal.
"What I lacked was the animal which also belongs to human
destiny. . . . But give me a body
then." And further on: "Oh! especially in my
early youth what should I not have
given to be a man, even for six months
. . . what I lack, basically, is a body
and the physical conditions of existence." Elsewhere, the same man nevertheless adopts the great
cry of hope that has come down through so many centuries and quickened so many hearts, except that of the
absurd man. "But for the
Christian death is certainly not the end
of everything and it implies infinitely more hope than life implies for us,
even when that life is overflowing
with health and vigor." Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. It allows one
perhaps, as can be seen, to derive hope of its contrary, which is
death. But even if fellow-feeling inclines one toward that attitude, still it must be said that excess justifies nothing. That
transcends, as the saying goes, the human scale; therefore it
must be superhuman. But this "therefore" is
superfluous. There is no logical certainty here. There is no
experimental probability either. All I can say is that, in
fact, that transcends my scale. If I do not draw a negation
from it, at least I do not want to found anything on the
incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live
with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the
intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not
therefore negate it, recognizing its
relative powers. I merely want to
remain in this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear. If
that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason
for giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than Kierkegaard's view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the very state
of sin. For sin is what alienates
from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious
man, does not lead to God.7
Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the
absurd is sin without God. It is a matter of living in
that state of the absurd. I know on what it is founded, this mind and
this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule of life of
that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me
a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as
mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this
ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light. But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring
lyricism cannot hide the paradox from me. One must therefore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning:
"If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force
producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing
can fill underlay all things, what would life
be but despair?" This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking
what is true is not seeking what is desirable. 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.
I am taking the liberty at this
point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But
this does not imply a judgment. It is a convenient way of indicating the
movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its
very negation. For the existentials negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of
human reason.8
But, like suicides, gods change with men. There are many ways of
leaping, the essential being to leap. Those redeeming negations, those ultimate
contradictions which negate the obstacle that has not yet been
leaped over, may spring just as well (this is the paradox
at which this reasoning aims) from a certain religious inspiration
as from the rational order. They always lay claim to the
eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap. It must be repeated that the
reasoning developed in this essay leaves out altogether the most
widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened age: the one, based on the
principle that all is reason, which aims to explain the world. It is natural to
give a clear view of the world after
accepting the idea that it must be clear. That is even legitimate, but
does not concern the reasoning we are
following out here. In fact, our aim is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from
a philosophy of the world's lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it. The most
touching of those steps is religious
in essence; it becomes obvious in the theme of the irrational. But the most paradoxical
and most significant is certainly the one that attributes rational reasons to a world it originally imagined as devoid of any guiding principle. It
is impossible in any case to reach the consequences that concern us without having given an idea of this new
attainment of the spirit of
nostalgia. I shall examine merely the theme
of "the Intention" made fashionable by Husserl
and the phenomenologists. I have already alluded to
it. Originally Husserl's method negates the classic procedure of the reason. Let
me repeat. Thinking is not unifying
or making the appearance familiar
under the guise of a great principle. Thinking is learning
all over again how to see, directing one's
consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to
explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its
initial assertion that there is no
truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything
has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it
is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian
image, it resembles the projector that
suddenly focuses on an image. The
difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive and incoherent
illustration. In that magic lantern
all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth
they are beyond all judgments. This is
the "intention" that characterizes consciousness. But the word
does not imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of "direction": its only value is topographical. At first sight, it certainly seems that in this way nothing
contradicts the absurd spirit. That apparent modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain, that intentional discipline whenceresult paradoxically a profound enrichment of experience
and the rebirth of the world in its prolixity are absurd procedures. At least at first sight.
For methods of thought, in this case as elsewhere, always assume two aspects, one psychological and the other
metaphysical.9 Thereby they harbor two truths. If the theme of the intentional
claims to illustrate merely a psychological attitude,
by which reality is drained instead of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from the absurd spirit. It aims
to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take delight in describing and
understanding every aspect of experience. The truth involved then for each of those aspects is psychological
in nature. It simply testifies to the "interest" that reality
can offer. It is a way of awaking a sleeping
world and of making it vivid to the
mind. But if one attempts to extend and give a rational basis to that
notion of truth, if one claims to discover
in this way the "essence" of each object of knowledge, one
restores its depth to experience. For an absurd
mind that is incomprehensible. Now, it is this wavering between modesty
and assurance that is noticeable in the
intentional attitude, and this shimmering of phenomenological thought
will illustrate the absurd reasoning better
than anything else. For Husserl speaks likewise of
"extra-temporal essences" brought
to light by the intention, and he sounds like Plato. All things are not explained by one thing but by all things. I see no difference. To be sure,
those ideas or those essences that consciousness "effectuates"
at the end of every description are not yet
to be considered perfect models. But
it is asserted that they are directly
present in each datum of perception. There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a
stop, but also lights up. Platonic
realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard was
swallowed up in his God; Parmenides plunged
thought into the One. But here
thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is not all:
hallucinations and fictions likewise belong
to "extra-temporal essences." In the new world of ideas, the species of centaurs
collaborates with the more modest
species of metropolitan man. For the absurd man, there was a truth as well as a bitterness in that purely psychological opinion that all aspects
of the world are privileged. To say that everything
is privileged is tantamount to saying that everything is equivalent. But the
metaphysical aspect of that truth is
so far-reaching that through an elementary reaction he feels closer perhaps to Plato. He is taught, in fact,
that every image presupposes an equally privileged essence. In this ideal world without hierarchy, the formal army
is composed solely of generals. To be sure, transcendency had been eliminated. But a sudden shift in thought brings back into the
world a sort of fragmentary immanence which restores to the universe its
depth. Am I to fear having carried too far
a theme handled with greater
circumspection by its creators? I read merely
these assertions of Husserl, apparently paradoxical
yet rigorously logical if what precedes is accepted: "That which is true is true absolutely, in
itself; truth is one, identical with
itself, however different the creatures who perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods." Reason triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice, I cannot
deny. What can its assertions mean in
the absurd world? The perception of an
angel or a god has no meaning for
me. That geometrical spot where divine reason ratifies mine will always be incomprehensible to me.
There, too, I discern a leap, and
though performed in the abstract, it
nonetheless means for me forgetting just what I do not want to forget. When
farther on Husserl exclaims: "If all masses subject to attraction were to disappear, the
law of attraction would not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible application," I know that I am faced with a metaphysic of
consolation. And if I want to
discover the point where thought leaves the path of evidence, I have only to
reread the parallel reasoning that Husserl
voices regarding the mind: "If we
could contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic processes, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, like the basic laws of
theoretical natural science. Hence
they would be valid even if there were no psychic process." Even if
the mind were not, its laws would be! I see
then that of a psychological truth Husserl aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he
leaps by this expedient to eternal
Reason. Husserl's theme of the "concrete universe" cannot then
surprise me. If I am told that all essences are not formal but that some are material, that the first are the object of
logic and the second of science, this is merely a question of definition. The
abstract, I am told, indicates but a
part, without consistency in itself, of a concrete universal. But the
wavering already noted allows me to throw light on the confusion of these
terms. For that may mean that the concrete object of my attention, this sky, the reflection of that water on this
coat, alone preserve the prestige of the real that my interest isolates in the
world. And I shall not deny it. But that may mean also that this coat
itself is universal, has its particular and
sufficient essence, belongs to the world of forms. I then realize that merely the order of the
procession has been changed. This world has ceased to have its reflection in a higher universe, but the heaven of
forms is figured in the host of
images of this earth. This changes nothing for me. Rather than
encountering here a taste for the concrete, the meaning of the human condition,
I find an intellectualism sufficiently
unbridled to generalize the concrete
itself.
It is futile to be amazed by the apparent paradox that leads thought to its own negation by the opposite
paths of humiliated reason and triumphal reason. From the abstract god
of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the
distance is not so great. Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the way matters but little; the
will to arrive suffices. The abstract philosopher
and the religious philosopher start Out from the same disorder and support each other in the
same anxiety. But
the essential is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge. It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the most deeply
imbued with a philosophy of the
non-significance of the world and one
of the most divided in its conclusions. It is constantly oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality which tends to break up that thought
into standard reasons and its extreme irrationalization
which tends to deify it. But this divorce is
only apparent. It is a matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases, the
leap suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion of reason is a one-way notion. To tell the truth,
however rigorous it may be in its ambition, this concept is nonetheless just as unstable as others. Reason bears
a quite human aspect, but it also is
able to turn toward the divine. Since
Plotinus, who was the first to reconcile it with the eternal climate, it has learned to turn
away from the most cherished of its principles, which is contradiction, in order to integrate into it the strangest,
the quite magic one of participation.1 It is an instrument of thought and not thought itself.
Above all, a man's thought is his
nostalgia. Just as reason was able to soothe the melancholy of Plotinus, it provides modern anguish the means of calming itself in the familiar setting of the
eternal. The absurd mind has less luck. For it the world is neither so rational nor so irrational. It is unreasonable and
only that. With Husserl the reason eventually has no
limits at all. The absurd, on the contrary, establishes its limits since
it is powerless to calm its anguish. Kierkegaard independently asserts that a single limit is enough to negate that
anguish. But the absurd does not go so far. For it that limit is directed solely at the reason's ambitions. The
theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentials,
is reason becoming confused and escaping by
negating itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. Only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man
recognize his true motives. Upon comparing his inner exigence and what is then offered him,
he suddenly feels he is going to turn
away. In the universe of Husserl the world becomes
clear and that longing for familiarity that man's heart harbors becomes
useless. In Kierkegaard's apocalypse that desire for clarity must be given up
if it wants to be satisfied. Sin is not so much knowing (if it were, everybody
would be innocent) as wanting to know.
Indeed, it is the only sin of which the absurd man can feel that it constitutes both his guilt and his innocence. He is offered a solution in
which all the past contradictions have become merely polemical games. But this is not the way he experienced
them. Their truth must be preserved, which consists in not being satisfied. He does not want preaching. My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It
is that divorce between the mind that
desires and the world that disappoints, my
nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds
them together. Kierkegaard suppresses my
nostalgia and Husserl gathers together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was
a matter of living and thinking with those
dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse. There can be no
question of masking the evidence, of
suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It
is essential to know whether one can live
with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide.
I merely wish to purge it of its
emotional content and know its logic
and its integrity. Any other position implies for the absurd mind deceit and the mind's retreat before
what the mind itself has brought to light. Husserl claims to obey the desire to escape "the
inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well-known and convenient
conditions of existence," but the final leap restores in him the eternal and its comfort. The leap
does not represent an extreme danger
as Kierkegaard would like it to do.
The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and
the rest is subterfuge. I know also
that never has helplessness inspired
such striking harmonies as those of Kierkegaard. But if helplessness has
its place in the indifferent landscapes of history, it has none in a reasoning
whose exigence is now known.
Now the main thing is done, I
hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is
certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot
reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part of me
that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and
cohesion. I can refute everything in
this world surrounding me that
offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and
this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this
world has a meaning that transcends it. But
I know that I do not know that
meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a
meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what
I understand. And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility
of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle —I also know that
I cannot reconcile them. What other truth
can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which
means nothing within the limits of my
condition? If I were a tree among trees, a
cat among animals, this life would have a meaning,
or rather this problem would not arise, for I
should belong to this world. I should
be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness
and my whole insistence upon familiarity.
This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of
the pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. And what constitutes the basis
of that conflict, of that break between
the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If therefore I want to preserve it, I can through a constant awareness,
ever revived, ever alert. This is what, for the moment, I must remember.
At this moment the absurd, so obvious and yet
so hard to win, returns to a man's life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind can
leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. That path now emerges in
daily life. It encounters the world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun
"one," but henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity.
He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of
the present is his Kingdom at last.
All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract
evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to
the abject and magnificent shelter of man's heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going
to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas
and forms to one's own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of
the absurd? Let's make a final effort in this regard and draw all our
conclusions. The body, affection,
creation, action, human nobility will then resume their
places in this mad world. At last man will again find there the wine of
the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness. Let us insist again on the
method: it is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the
absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking
in either religions or prophets, even
without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't
fully understand, that
it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is
assured that this is the sin of pride,
but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in
store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to
him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the
truth, that is all he feels—his
irreparable innocence. This is what allows
him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not
certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is
concerned: he wants to find out if it
is possible to live without appeal.
Now I can broach the notion of
suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point
the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to
be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary,
that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is
accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd,
unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by
consciousness. Negating one of the terms of
the opposition on which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish
conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The
theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual
experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all,
contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the
absurd dies only when we turn away
from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus
revolt. It is a constant confrontation
between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible
transparency. It challenges the
world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique
opportunity of seizing awareness, so
metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in
his own eyes. It is not aspiration,
for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing
fate, without the resignation that ought to
accompany it. This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is
remote from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly.
For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary
by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future,
his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way,
suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd
in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd
cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the
extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It
is, at the extreme limit of the condemned
man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards
away, on the very brink of his
dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death. 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 blinders, there is no finer sight than
that of the intelligence at grips with a
reality that transcends it. The sight
of human pride is unequaled. No disparagement
is of any use. That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out
of nothing, that face-to-face
struggle have something exceptional about them. To impoverish that
reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's
majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also
debilitate me at the same time. They
relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.
At this juncture, I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation. Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Everything that is
indomitable and passionate in a human
heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is essential
to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will.
Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his
extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness
and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is
defiance. This is a first consequence.
If I remain in that prearranged
position which consists in drawing all the conclusions (and nothing
else) involved in a newly discovered notion, I am faced with a second paradox.
In order to remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the
problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing
whether or not man is free doesn't
interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have
no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of
"freedom as such" has no meaning.
For it is linked in quite a different
way with the problem of God. Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this
problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all
its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the
alternative: either
we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we
are free and responsible but God is
not all-powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything
from the acuteness of this paradox. This is why I cannot get lost in the glorification or the mere
definition of a notion which eludes me and loses
its meaning as soon as it goes beyond the frame of reference of my individual experience. I cannot
understand what kind of freedom would
be given me by a higher being. I have
lost the sense of hierarchy. The only
conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in
the midst of the State. The only one
I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all
my chances of eternal freedom, it restores
and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in
man's availability. Before encountering the absurd,
the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for
justification (with regard to whom or what
is not the question). He weighs his chances, he
counts on "someday," his retirement
or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a
point of contradicting that liberty.
But after the absurd, everything is
upset. That idea that "I am," my way of acting as if everything has a meaning (even if, on
occasion, I said that nothing has)—all
that is given the lie in vertiginous
fashion by the absurdity of a possible death. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief
in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it. But
at that moment I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to
be, which alone can serve as basis for a
truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality. After death
the chips are down. I am not even free,
either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to contempt. And who
without revolution and without contempt can remain a slave? What freedom can
exist in the fullest sense without assurance
of eternity? But at the same
time the absurd man realizes that hitherto
he was bound to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he
imagined a purpose to his life, he
adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave
of his liberty. Thus I could not act
otherwise than as the father (or the
engineer or the leader of a nation, or the post-office sub-clerk) that I am preparing to be. I think I can choose to be
that rather than something else. I think so unconsciously, to be sure. But at the same time I strengthen my postulate with the beliefs of those
around me, with the presumptions of
my human environment (others are so
sure of being free, and that cheerful mood is so contagious!). However far one may remain from any presumption,
moral or social, one is partly influenced
by them and even, for the best among them (there are good and bad
presumptions), one adapts one's life to
them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free. To speak clearly, to the extent to
which I hope, to which I worry about
a truth that might be individual to
me, about a way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself
barriers between which I confine my
life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only fill me with
disgust and whose
only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man's freedom seriously. The absurd enlightens me on
this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my
inner freedom. I shall use two comparisons
here. Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they
become secretly free. In
spontaneously accepted slavery they recover
a deeper independence. But what does that freedom mean? It may be said, above all, that they feel free with regard to themselves, and not so much free
as liberated. Likewise, completely turned toward death (taken here as
the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything
outside that passionate attention
crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom
with regard to common rules. It can be seen at this point that the initial themes of existential
philosophy keep their entire value.
The return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom. But it is
existential preaching that is alluded
to, and with it that spiritual leap which basically escapes consciousness. In the same way (this is
my second comparison) the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which
consists in not feeling responsible.2 Death, too, has
patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate. Losing oneself in that bottomless
certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one's own life to
increase it and take a broad view of
it—this involves the principle of a liberation.
Such new independence has a definite time
limit, like any freedom of action. It does not write a check on eternity. But
it takes the place of the illusions
of freedom, which all stopped with death. The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early
dawn, that
unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life—it is clear
that death and the absurd are here the
principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence.
The absurd man thus catches sight of
a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which
all is collapse and nothingness. He
can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his
refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.
But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing
else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up
everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our
definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining. Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all
that interests me. I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of life
being given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this particular concern,
belief in the absurd is tantamount to substituting the quantity of experiences for the quality. If I convince myself that
this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that
perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its
limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to
me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable. Once
and for all, value judgments are discarded here in favor of factual judgments.
I have merely to draw the conclusions from what I can see and to risk nothing
that is hypothetical. Supposing that living in this way were not honorable, then true propriety would command me
to be dishonorable. The most
living; in the broadest sense, that rule means nothing. It calls
for definition. It seems to begin with the
fact that the notion of quantity has not been sufficiently explored. For it can account for a large share of human experience. A man's rule of conduct and
his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of
experiences he has been in a position to accumulate. Now, the conditions
of modern life impose on the majority of men the same quantity of experiences and consequently the same profound experience.
To be sure, there must also be taken into consideration the individual's
spontaneous contribution, the "given"
element in him. But I cannot judge of that, and let me repeat that my rule here is to get along with the immediate
evidence. I see, then, that the individual character of a common code of ethics lies not
so much in the ideal importance of
its basic principles as in the norm of an experience that it is possible
to measure. To stretch a point somewhat, the
Greeks had the code of their leisure
just as we have the code of our eight-hour day. But already many men among the most tragic cause us to foresee that a longer experience changes
this table of values. They make us
imagine that adventurer of the everyday
who through mere quantity of experiences would break all records (I am purposely using this sports expression)
and would thus win his own code of ethics.3 Yet let's avoid romanticism and just ask
ourselves what such an attitude may
mean to a man with his mind made up
to take up his bet and to observe strictly what he takes to be the rules of the
game. Breaking all the records is first and foremost being faced with
the world as often as possible. How can that be
done without contradictions and without playing on words? For on the one
hand the absurd teaches that all experiences
are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity
of experiences. How, then, can one fail to
do as so many of those men I was speaking
of earlier—choose the form of life that brings us the most possible of that
human matter, thereby introducing a scale of values that on the other
hand one claims to reject? But again it is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches us. For the mistake
is thinking that that quantity of experiences
depends on the circumstances of our
life when it depends solely on us. Here we have to be
over-simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of
them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes
useless. Let's be even more simple. Let us say that the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to be made good, is
constituted by premature death. Thus
it is that no depth, no emotion, no
passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in the eyes of the absurd man
(even if he wished it so) a conscious
life of forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years.4 Madness and death are his irreparables.
Man does not choose. The absurd and
the extra life it involves therefore
do not depend on man's will, but on its contrary, which is death.5 Weighing words carefully, it is altogether a question of luck. One just has to
be able to consent to this. There
will never be any substitute for
twenty years of life and experience. By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the Greeks claimed that those who died young were
beloved of the gods. And that is true only if you are willing to believe that entering the ridiculous world of
the gods is forever losing the purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth. The present and the
succession of presents before a
constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man. But the word "ideal" rings
false in this
connection. It is not even his vocation, but merely the third consequence of
his reasoning. Having started from an anguished awareness of
the inhuman, the meditation on the
absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt.6
Thus I draw from the absurd
three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform
into a rule of life what was an
invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull
resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say: that it is necessary. When Nietzsche writes:
"It clearly seems that the chief
thing in heaven and on earth is to obey
at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the
trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance,
reason, the mind—something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine," he elucidates the rule of a really
distinguished code of ethics. But he
also points the way of the absurd man.
Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself
occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so. "Prayer," says Alain, "is when night descends over thought." "But the mind must meet the
night," reply the mystics and the
existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and
through the mere will of man—dark,
impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it
must encounter a night, let it be
rather that of despair, which remains
lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the
intelligence. At that degree, equivalence
encounters passionate understanding.
Then it is no longer even a question
of judging the existential leap. It resumes its place amid the age-old fresco of human attitudes. For the
spectator, if he is conscious, that leap is still absurd. In so far as it thinks it solves the paradox, it
reinstates it intact. On this score,
it is stirring. On this score, everything
resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn in all its splendor and
diversity. But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of
seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual
forces. The preceding merely defines a way of
thinking. But the point is to live.
1
From the point of view of the relative value of truth. On the other
hand, from the point of view of virile behavior, this scholar's
fragility may well make us smile. 2 Let us not miss this opportunity to
point out the relative character of this essay. Suicide may indeed be related to much
more honorable considerations—for example, the political suicides of protest, as they were called, during the Chinese
revolution. 31 have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who,
after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract
attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but
the book was judged no good. 4 But not in the proper sense. This is
not a definition, but rather an enumeration of the feelings
that may admit of the absurd. Still, the enumeration finished, the
absurd has nevertheless not been exhausted. 5 Apropos of the notion of exception
particularly and against Aristotle. 6 It
may be thought that I am neglecting here the essential problem,
that of faith. But I am not examining the philosophy of Kierkegaard
or of Chestov or, later on, of Husserl
(this would call for a different place and a different attitude of mind); I am simply
borrowing a theme from them and examining whether its
consequences can fit the already established rules. It is merely
a matter of persistence 71 did not say "excludes God,"
which would still amount to asserting. 8 Let me assert again: it is not the
affirmation of God that is questioned here, but rather the logic
leading to that affirmation. 9 Even the most rigorous epistemologies
imply metaphysics. And to such a degree that the metaphysic
of many contemporary thinkers consists in
having nothing but an epistemology. 1 A.—At that time reason had
to adapt itself or die. It adapts itself. With Plotinus, after being logical it becomes aesthetic. Metaphor takes the place of the syllogism. B.—Moreover,
this is not Plotinus' only contribution to phenomenology.
This whole attitude is already contained in the concept so dear to
the Alexandrian thinker that there is not only an idea of man but
also an idea of Socrates. 2 I am concerned here with a
factual comparison, not with an apology of humility. The
absurd man is the contrary of the reconciled man. 3 Quantity sometimes constitutes quality.
If I can believe the latest restatements of scientific theory, all matter is
constituted by centers of energy. Their greater or lesser quantity
makes its specificity more or less remarkable. A billion ions and one ion differ
not only in quantity but also in quality. It is easy to find an
analogy in human experience. 4
Same reflection on a notion as different as the idea of
eternal nothingness. It neither adds anything to nor subtracts anything from reality. In
psychological experience of nothingness, it is by the consideration of what will happen in two thousand years that our own nothingness truly takes on meaning.
In one of its aspects, eternal
nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours. 5
The will is only the agent here: it tends to maintain consciousness.
It provides a discipline of life, and that is appreciable. 6 What matters is coherence. We start
out here from acceptance of the world. But Oriental thought teaches that one can
indulge in the same effort of logic by choosing against
the world. That is just as legitimate and gives this essay its
perspectives and its limits. But when the negation of the
world is pursued just as rigorously, one
often achieves (in certain Vedantic schools) similar results regarding, for instance,
the indifference of works. In
a book of great importance, Le Choix, Jean Grenier establishes in this way a veritable
"philosophy of indifference."
AN
ABSURD REASONING by Albert
Camus
Contents Preface to 1955 American Edition
for me "The
Myth of Sisyphus" marks the beginning of
an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the
problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder, in both
cases without the aid of eternal values
which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary
Europe. The fundamental subject of "The
Myth of Sisyphus" is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder
whether life has a meaning; therefore it is
legitimate to meet the problem of
suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is
this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the
French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible
to find the means to proceed beyond
nihilism. In all the books I have
written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although "The Myth of Sisyphus" poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid
invitation to live and to create, in
the very midst of the desert. It has hence been thought possible to append to this philosophical argument a series of essays, of a
kind 1 have never ceased writing,
which are somewhat marginal to my other books. In a more lyrical form,
they all illustrate that essential
fluctuation from assent to refusal which,
in my view, defines the artist and his difficult calling. The unity of
this hook, that I should like to he apparent
to American readers as it is to me, resides in the reflection, alternately cold and impassioned, in which an
artist may indulge as to his reasons for living and for creating. After fifteen years I have progressed beyond several of the
positions which are set down here; hut
I have remained faithful, it seems to me, to the exigency
which prompted them. That is why this hook is
in a certain sense the most personal of those I have
published in America. More than the others, therefore, it
has need of the indulgence and understanding of its
readers. albert camus PARIS MARCH 1955
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal
life, lout exhaust the limits of the possible. —Pindar, Pythian iii the pages that
follow deal with an absurd sensitivity that can be found
widespread in the age—and not with an absurd philosophy which our time,
properly speaking, has not known. It is therefore
simply fair to point out, at the outset, what these pages owe to certain contemporary
thinkers. It is so far from my intention to hide this that they Will be found cited and commented upon
throughout this work. But it is useful to note at the same
time that the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in
this essay as a starting-point. In this sense it may be said that
there is something provisional in my commentary: one cannot prejudge the position it
entails. There will be found here merely
the description, in the pure state, of
an intellectual malady. No metaphysic, no belief is involved in it for the moment. These are the
limits and the only bias of this
book. Certain personal experiences urge
me to make this clear.
AN ABSURD REASONING There is
but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world
has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes
afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it
is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must
preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that
reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel;
yet they call for careful study before they become clear
to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge
that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by
the actions it entails. I have never seen
anyone die for the ontological
argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance,
abjured it with the greatest ease as soon
as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.1 That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the
earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter
ofprofound
indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I
see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give
them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most
urgent of questions. How to answer it?
On all essential problems (I mean
thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method
of La Palisse
and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the
balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In
a subject at once so humble and so
heavy with emotion, the learned and
classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the
same time from common sense and understanding. Suicide
has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon.
On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and
suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls
the trigger or jumps. Of an
apartment-building manager who had
killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that
he had changed greatly since, and
that that experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to
think is beginning to be undermined.
Society has but little connection with
such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought.
One must follow and understand this
fatal game that leads from lucidity
in the face of existence to flight from light. There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful.
Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through
reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers
often speak of "personal sorrows"
or of "incurable illness." These explanations are plausible. But one
would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day
addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.2 But if it is hard to fix the
precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to
deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and
as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is
confessing that life is too much for you or
that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies,
however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that
"is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue
making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of
which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies
that you have recognized, even instinctively,
the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane
character of that daily agitation,
and the uselessness of suffering. What, then, is that incalculable
feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep
necessary to life? A world that can be
explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in
a universe suddenly divested of
illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without
remedy since he is deprived of the memory
of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his
life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
All healthy men having thought of their own
suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a
direct connection between this feeling and
the longing for death. The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between
the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which
suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not
cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then
dictate his conduct. It is
legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of
this importance requires forsaking as
rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of
men inclined to be in harmony with themselves. Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and
insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve
answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies
evidence. A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one
does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical
solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made
for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly
indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer
"no" act as if they thought "yes." As a
matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion,
they think "yes" in one way or another. On the
other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the
meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even
be said that they have never been so keen as on
this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a
commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behavior of those who
profess them. But it must be said that of the thinkers who refused a meaning to life
none except Kirilov who belongs to literature, Peregrinos who is torn
of legend, 3 and Jules Lequier
who belongs to hypothesis, admitted his logic to the point of refusing that life. Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit
subject for laughter, because he
praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for
joking. That way of not taking the tragic
seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man. In the face of such contradictions and
obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between
the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to
leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's
attachment to life there is something stronger than all
the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as
the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We
get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit
of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the
body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of
that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is
both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian
sense. Eluding is the
invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal
evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for
some great idea that will transcend
it, refine it, give it a meaning, and
betray it. Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion. Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort,
people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to
grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common
measure between these two judgments. One merely has to refuse to be
misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously pointed out.
One must brush everything aside and go
straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not
worth living, that is
certainly a truth—yet an
unfruitful one because it is a
truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity
require one to escape it through hope or suicide—this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest.
Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over
others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an "objective" mind can always
introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion.
It calls simply for an unjust—in other words, logical—thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to
the bitter end. Men who die by their
own hand consequently follow to its conclusion their emotional inclination. Reflection
on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem to interest
me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without
reckless passion, in the sole light
of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source.
This is what I call an absurd reasoning. Many
have begun it. I do not yet know
whether or not they kept to it. When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims:
"This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw
behind an objective point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others
can any longer become an object for me," he is evoking after many others
those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others,
yes indeed, but how eager they were to get
out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men
have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise,
but they initiated the suicide of
their thought in its purest revolt.
The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd
vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which
absurdity, hope, and death carry on
their dialogue. The mind can then
analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are
conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse
or a repulsion in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing.
Great feelings take with them their
own universe, splendid or abject. They
light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize
their climate. There is a universe of
jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A
universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an
attitude of mind. What
is true of already specialized
feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate,
simultaneously as vague and as "definite,"
as remote and as "present" as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity. At any streetcorner
the feeling of absurdity can strike any man
in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive. But
that very difficulty deserves reflection. It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there
is in him something irreducible that
escapes us. But practically
I know men and recognize them by
their behavior, by the totality of
their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those
irrational feelings which offer no purchase
to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate them practically,
by gathering together the sum of
their consequences in the domain of
the intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor
a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he
has personified and if I say that I know him a
little better at the hundredth character
counted off, this will be felt to contain
an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-believe as
well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings,
inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume. It is
clear that in this way I am defining a method. But it is also evident
that that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. For methods imply
metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet. Similarly, the last pages
of a book are already contained in the
first pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely
appearances can be enumerated and the climate
make itself felt. Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely
related worlds of intelligence, of
the art of living, or of art itself. The
climate of absurdity is in the beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind
which lights the world with its true
colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude
has discerned in it.
All great deeds and all great
thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a
street-corner or in a restaurant's revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others
derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying "nothing" when asked what one
is thinking about may be pretense in
a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is
sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily
gestures is broken, in which the
heart vainly seeks the link that will connect
it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four
hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal,
sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
Friday and Saturday according to the
same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything
begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. "Begins"—this is
important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at
the same time it inaugurates the
impulse of consciousness. It awakens
consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or
recovery. In itself weariness has
something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with
consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. There is nothing original about these remarks. But they are obvious; that is enough for
a while, during a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere "anxiety," as Heidegger
says, is at the source of everything. Likewise and during every day
of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But
a moment always comes when we have to carry
it. We live on the future: "tomorrow," "later on," "when you have made your way," "you
will understand when you are old
enough." Such irrelevan-cies are
wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet
a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his
place in it. He admits that he stands
at a certain point on a curve that he
acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes
his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything
in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.4 A step lower and strangeness
creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense," sensing to
what a degree a stone is foreign and
irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At
the heart of all beauty lies something
inhuman, and these hills, the
softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we
had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive
hostility of the world rises up to
face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have
understood in it solely the images
and designs that we had attributed to
it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage
scenery masked by habit becomes again
what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when
under the familiar face of a woman,
we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we
shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that
denseness and that strangeness of the
world is the absurd. Men, too, secrete the inhuman.
At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures,
their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone
behind a glass partition; you cannot
hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the
face of man's own inhumanity, this
incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this
"nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming
brother we encounter in our own photographs
is also the absurd. I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On
this point everything has been said and it is only
proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there
is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced
but what has been lived and made conscious. Here,
it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It
is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy
convention cannot be persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time
frightens us, this is because it
works out the problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty
speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least
for a time. From this inert body on which a slap makes no mark the soul has
disappeared. This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting
of that destiny, its
uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics
and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command
our condition. Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over. I am limiting myself here to making a rapid
classification and to pointing out these
obvious themes. They run through all literatures and all philosophies.
Everyday conversation feeds on them. There is no question of reinventing them. But it is essential to be sure of
these facts in order to be able to
question oneself subsequently on the
primordial question. I am interested—let me repeat again—not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences. If one is assured of these facts,
what is one to conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die
voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything? Beforehand, it is necessary to take the same rapid inventory on the plane of the intelligence.
The mind's first step is to
distinguish what is true from .what is false. However, as soon as
thought reflects on itself, what it first
discovers is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in this case. Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and more elegant demonstration
of the business than Aristotle: "The often ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy themselves.
For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion
and consequently the falsity of our own thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true). And if one
says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we declare
that solely the assertion opposed to ours is
false or else that solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced
to admit an infinite number of true or false
judgments. For the one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad
infinitum," This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind
that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity of these
paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics
of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind's deepest desire,
even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in
the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a
man is reducing it to the human,
stamping it with his seal. The cat's universe is not the universe of the
anthill. The truism "All thought is
anthropomorphic" has no other meaning.
Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms
of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought
discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena
eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an
intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous
imitation. That nostalgia for unity,
that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the
human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia's existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied. For if,
bridging the gulf that separates
desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One
(whatever it may be), we fall into the
ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to
resolve. This other vicious circle is
enough to stifle our hopes. These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal. One
can nevertheless count the minds
that have deduced the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to
consider as a constant point of reference in
this essay the regular hiatus between
what we fancy we know and what we really
know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live
with ideas which, if we truly put them to
the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced with this inextricable
contradiction of the mind, we shall fully
grasp the divorce separating us from our own creations. So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and
arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this
world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever
reconstructing the familiar, calm surface
which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of
inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers,
we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people
despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human
thought were to be written, it would have
to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. Of whom and of what indeed can I
say: "I know that!" This heart within
me I can feel, and I judge that it exists.
This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and
the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize
it, it is nothing but water slipping
through my fingers. I can sketch one
by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these
silences, this nobility or this
vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain in definable to me. Between the certainty I have of
my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will
never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be
virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are
legitimate only in precisely so far
as they are approximate. And here are trees and I know
their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass
and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes — how shall I
negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on
earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe
it to me and you teach me to classify it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are
true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and
multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom
and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I
wait for you to continue. But you
tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain
this world to me with an image. I
realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
Have I the time to become indignant? You
have already changed theories. So
that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of
art. What need had I of so many
efforts? The soft lines of these hills
and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize
that if through science I can seize phenomena and
enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with
my finger, I should not know any
more. And you give me the choice
between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and
hypotheses that claim to teach me but that
are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in
which I can have peace only by
refusing to know and to live, in which
the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into
being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations. Hence the intelligence, too,
tells me in its way that this world is absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear; I was waiting for
proof and longing for it to be right. But
despite so many pretentious centuries
and over the heads of so many eloquent and persuasive men, I know that is false. On this plane, at least, there is
no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason, practical or
ethical, that determinism, those categories
that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth,
which is to be enchained. In this unintelligible
and limited universe, man's fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds
him until his ultimate end. In his
recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear and
definite. I said that the world is
absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is
all that can be said. But what is absurd is the
confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends
as much on man as on the world. For
the moment it is all that links them
together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures
together. This is all I can discern
clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place. Let
us pause here. If I hold to be true that
absurdity that determines my relationship
with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in face of the world's scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the
pursuit of a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties
and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue
them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I want to know
beforehand if thought can live in those deserts.
I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts.
There it found its bread. There it realized that it had previously been feeding
on phantoms. It justified some of the most
urgent themes of human reflection. From the moment absurdity is
recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether
or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their
law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously
exalt—that is the whole question. It is not, however, the one we shall ask just yet. It stands at the center of this experience. There will be time to
come back to it. Let us recognize
rather those themes and those
impulses born of the desert. It will suffice to enumerate them. They, too, are known to all today.
There have always been men to defend the rights of the irrational. The
tradition of what may be called humiliated thought has never ceased to exist.
The criticism of rationalism has been made so often that it seems unnecessary to begin again. Yet our epoch is marked by
the rebirth of those paradoxical systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly it had always forged ahead.
But that is not so much a proof of
the efficacy of the reason as of the
intensity of its hopes. On the plane of history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity
and the clear vision he may have of
the walls enclosing him. But never perhaps at any time has the attack on reason been
more violent than in ours. Since Zarathustra's great
outburst: "By chance it is the oldest nobility in the world.
I conferred it upon all things when I proclaimed that above them no eternal will
was exercised," since Kierkegaard's fatal illness, "that malady that
leads to death with nothing else following it," the significant and
tormenting themes of absurd thought have followed one
another. Or at least, and this proviso is of capital importance,
the themes of irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from
Kierkegaard to Che-stov, from the
phenomenologists to Scheler,
on the logical
plane and on the moral plane, a whole family of minds related by their nostalgia but opposed by their methods or their aims, have persisted in blocking
the royal road of reason and in recovering the direct paths of truth. Here I assume these thoughts to be
known and lived. Whatever may be or
have been their ambitions, all
started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy,
anguish, or impotence reigns. And what they have in common is precisely the
themes so far disclosed. For them,
too, it must be said that what matters
above all is the conclusions they have managed to draw from those discoveries. That matters so much that they must be examined separately. But for
the moment we are concerned solely
with their discoveries and their
initial experiments. We are concerned solely with noting their agreement. If it would be
presumptuous to try to deal with
their philosophies, it is possible and sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is common to them. Heidegger considers the human
condition coldly and announces that that existence is humiliated. The
only reality is "anxiety" in the
whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this
anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of
itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual
climate of the lucid man "in
whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that
"the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in
Kant extends only to recognizing the
restricted character of his "pure Reason."
This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to
him so much more important than all
the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He
enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind
contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of
anxiety and "existence then
delivers itself its own summons through
the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence
"to return from its loss in the anonymous They."
For him, too, one must not sleep, but
must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world
and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins. Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we have lost "naпvetй." He knows
that we can achieve nothing that will
transcend the fatal game of appearances.
He knows that the end of the mind is failure.
He tarries over the spiritual adventures revealed by history and
pitilessly discloses the flaw in each system,
the illusion that saved everything, the preaching that hid nothing. In this ravaged world in which
the impossibility of knowledge is
established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only reality and
irremediable despair seems the only
attitude, he tries to recover the Ariadne's thread
that leads to divine secrets. Chestov, for his part, throughout a
wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same truths,
tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of
the ironic facts or ridiculous
contradictions that depreciate the
reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is the
exception, whether in the domain of the heart
or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences
of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures
of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet's imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he tracks
down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses the reason its reasons
and begins to advance with some
decision only in the middle of that
colorless desert where all certainties have become stones. Of all perhaps the most
engaging, Kierkegaard, for a part of his existence at least, does more
than discover the absurd, he lives it. The
man who writes: "The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold
one's tongue but to talk" makes sure in
the beginning that no truth is absolute or can render satisfactory an
existence that is impossible in itself. Don
Juan of the understanding, he multiplies pseudonyms and contradictions, writes his Discourses of
Edification at the same time as that manual of cynical spiritualism, The Diary of the Seducer. He
refuses consolations, ethics, reliable
principles. As for that thorn he feels in his
heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and happy to be so, he builds up
piece by piece—lucidity, refusal,
make-believe—a category of the man
possessed. That face both tender and sneering, those pirouettes followed
by a cry from the heart are the absurd spirit itself grappling with a reality
beyond its comprehension. And the spiritual
adventure that leads Kierkegaard to
his beloved scandals begins likewise in the chaos of an experience
divested of its setting and relegated to its original incoherence. On quite a different plane, that
of method, Husserl and the phenomenologists,
by their very extravagances, reinstate the
world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason.
The spiritual universe becomes incalculably
enriched through them. The rose petal,
the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity.
Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is
learning all over again to see, to
be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the
manner of Proust,
into a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more positive than Kierkegaard's or Chestov's,
Husserl's manner of proceeding, in the beginning, nevertheless negates the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope,
opens to intuition and to the heart a
whole proliferation of phenomena, the
wealth of which has about it something inhuman.
These paths lead to all sciences or to none. This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important than the end. All that is involved
is "an attitude for
understanding" and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the beginning, at very least. How can one fail to feel the
basic relationship of these minds! How can one fail to see that they
take their stand around a privileged and
bitter moment in which hope has no further place? I want everything to be explained
to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this
insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is
peopled with such irrationals. The world
itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast
irrational. If one could only say just once: "This
is clear," all would be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is
clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him. All these experiences agree and confirm one another. The mind,
when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions.
This is where suicide and the reply stand.
But I wish to reverse the order of the
inquiry and start out from the intelligent adventure and come back to
daily acts. The experiences called to mind
here were born in the desert that we must not leave behind. At least it is essential to know how far
they went. At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his
longing for happiness and for reason.
The absurd is born of this confrontation
between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This
must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational,
the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the
drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence
is capable. Philosophical Suicide
The feeling of the absurd is
not, for all that, the notion of the absurd. It lays the foundations for
it, and that is all. It is not limited to
that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes judgment on the
universe. Subsequently it has a chance of
going further. It is alive; in other words, it must die or else reverberate.
So it is with the themes we have gathered
together. But there again what
interests me is not works or minds, criticism of which would call for another form and another place, but the discovery of what their conclusions have
in common. Never, perhaps, have minds been so different. And yet we
recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such dissimilar zones
of knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same
way. It is evident that the thinkers we have
just recalled have a common climate. To say that that climate is deadly
scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that
stifling sky forces one to get away or to
stay. The important thing is
to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in
the second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible
interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy. But first I want to detour from the direct path. Up to now we have
managed to circumscribe the absurd from the
outside. One can, however, wonder how much is clear in that notion and by direct analysis try to discover its meaning on the one hand and, on the other, the
consequences it involves. If I accuse an innocent man of
a monstrous crime, if I tell a virtuous man that he has coveted his own
sister, he will reply that this is absurd.
His indignation has its comical aspect. But it also has its fundamental
reason. The virtuous man illustrates by that
reply the definitive antinomy existing between the deed I am attributing to him
and his lifelong principles. "It's absurd" means "It's impossible" but also
"It's contradictory." If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider
his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion
between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim
he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts
apparently dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of
such a reasoning
with the logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from
the simplest to the most complex, the
magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance
between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges,
rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For
each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus
justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere
scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison
between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that
transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the
elements compared; it is born of their
confrontation. In this particular case and on
the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in
man (if such a metaphor could have a
meaning) nor in the world, but in
their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them. If I wish to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know
what links them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has
to derive all the consequences from
it. The immediate consequence is also a rule of method. The odd
trinity brought to light in this way is certainly not a startling discovery. But it resembles the data of experience in that it is both infinitely simple and
infinitely complicated. Its first distinguishing feature in this regard is that it cannot be divided. To
destroy one of its terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd
outside the human mind. Thus, like everything else, the
absurd ends with death. But there can be no absurd outside this
world either. And it is by this elementary criterion
that I judge the notion of the absurd to be essential
and consider that it can stand as the first of my truths. The
rule of method alluded to above appears here. If I
judge that a thing is true, I must preserve it. If I
attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very solution conjure
away one of the terms of the problem. For me the sole datum is
the absurd. The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I consider essential in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and an unceasing struggle. And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must
admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope
(which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection
(which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious
dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature
unrest). Everything
that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements
(and, to begin with, consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the
absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has
meaning only
in so far as it is not agreed to.
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely,
that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to
it. A man devoid of hope and conscious
of being so has ceased to belong to
the future. That is natural. But it is
just as natural that he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator. All the
foregoing has significance only on
account of this paradox. Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism,
have admitted the absurd climate.
Nothing is more instructive in this regard
than to scrutinize the way in which they have elaborated their consequences. Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the
absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and
find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in
all of them. It deserves attention. I shall merely analyze here as
examples a few themes dear to Chestov and
Kierkegaard. But Jaspers will provide us, in caricatural
form, a typical example of this attitude. As
a result the rest will be clearer. He is left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the depth of experience, and conscious of that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or
at least draw the conclusions from
that failure? He contributes nothing
new. He has found nothing in experience
but the confession of his own impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory
principle. Yet without justification, as he
says to himself, he suddenly asserts all
at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when he writes: "Does not the failure reveal, beyond
any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?" That
existence which, suddenly and 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 (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing
logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap. And paradoxically can be understood Jaspers's
insistence, his infinite patience
devoted to making the experience of the
transcendent impossible to realize. For the more fleeting that approximation
is, the more empty that definition
proves to be, and the more real that transcendent is to him; for the
passion he devotes to asserting it is in
direct proportion to the gap between his powers of explanation and the irrationality of the world and
of experience. It thus appears that the more bitterly Jaspers destroys
the reason's preconceptions, the more radically he will explain the world. That apostle of humiliated thought will find at the very end of humiliation
the means of regenerating being to
its very depth. Mystical thought has familiarized us
with such devices. They are just as legitimate as any attitude of mind. But for the moment
I am acting as if I took a certain problem
seriously. Without judging beforehand the
general value of this attitude or its educative power, I mean simply to
consider whether it answers the conditions I set myself, whether it is
worthy of the conflict that concerns me.
Thus I return to Chestov. A commentator relates a
remark of his that deserves interest: "The only true
solution," he said, "is precisely where human
judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God?
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice."
If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I can say that it
is altogether summed up in this way. For when, at the
conclusion of his passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the fundamental
absurdity of all existence, he does not say:
"This is the absurd," but rather: "This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not
correspond to any of our rational
categories." So that confusion may not be possible, the Russian
philosopher even hints that this God
is perhaps full of hatred and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory; but
the more hideous is his face, the
more he asserts his power. His greatness is his incoherence. His proof
is his inhumanity. One must spring into him
and by this leap free oneself from
rational illusions. Thus, for Chestov acceptance of
the absurd is contemporaneous with the absurd itself. Being aware of it amounts to accepting it, and
the whole logical effort of his
thought is to bring it out so that at the
same time the tremendous hope it involves may burst forth. Let me repeat that this attitude is legitimate. But I am persisting here in considering a single
problem and all its consequences. I
do not have to examine the emotion
of a thought or of an act of faith. I have a whole lifetime to do that. I know that the rationalist
finds Chestov's attitude annoying. But I also feel that Chestov is right rather than the rationalist,
and I merely want to know if he
remains faithful to the commandments of the absurd. Now, if it is admitted that
the absurd is the contrary of hope, it is seen that existential thought
for Chestov presupposes the absurd but proves it only
to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a
conjuror's emotional trick. When Chestov
elsewhere sets his absurd in opposition to
current morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. Hence,
there is basically in that definition of the
absurd an approbation that Chestov
grants it. If it is admitted that all
the power of that notion lies in the way it runs counter to our
elementary hopes, if it is felt that to
remain, the absurd requires not to be consented to, then it can be clearly seen that it has lost its true aspect, its human and relative character in
order to enter an eternity that is
both incomprehensible and satisfying. 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 absurd is no longer that evidence that man ascertains without
consenting to it. The struggle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd and in that communion causes to disappear its essential character,
which is opposition, laceration, and
divorce. This leap is an escape. Chestov, who
is so fond of quoting Hamlet's remark: "The
time is out of joint," writes it down with a sort of savage hope that seems to belong to him in
particular. For it
is not in this sense that Hamlet says it or Shakespeare writes it.
The intoxication of the irrational and the
vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away from the absurd. To Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind reason
is useless and there is nothing
beyond reason. This leap can at least enlighten us a little more as to the true
nature of the absurd. We know that it is worthless
except in an equilibrium, that it is, above all, in
the comparison and not in the terms
of that comparison. But it so happens that Chestov puts all the
emphasis on one of the terms and destroys the equilibrium. Our appetite for understanding, our
nostalgia for the absolute are explicable only in so far,
precisely, as we can understand and explain
many things. It is useless to negate the
reason absolutely. It has its order in which it is efficacious. It is properly that of human experience. Whence we wanted to make
everything clear. If we cannot
do so, if the absurd is born on that occasion, it is born precisely at the very
meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent
irrational. Now, when Chestov rises up against a
Hegelian proposition such as "the
motion of the solar system takes place
in conformity with immutable laws and those laws are its reason," when he devotes all his passion to upsetting
Spinoza's rationalism, he concludes, in effect, in favor of the vanity of all reason. Whence, by a natural and illegitimate reversal, to the
pre-eminence of the irrational.5 But the
transition is not evident. For here may intervene the
notion of limit and the notion of level.
The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or else, they
may justify themselves on the level of description without for that reason being true on the level of
explanation. Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand for clarity being conjured away, the absurd disappears with
one of the terms of its comparison. The absurd
man, on the other hand, does not undertake such a leveling process. He
recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the
irrational. Thus he again embraces in a
single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to
leap before knowing. He knows simply that in
that alert awareness there is no further place for hope. What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will
be perhaps even more so in Kierkegaard. To
be sure, it is hard to outline clear propositions in so elusive a
writer. But, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be felt
throughout that work, as it were, the presentiment (at the same time as
the apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts
forth in the last works: Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to its
harshest aspect. For him, too,
antinomy and paradox become criteria
of the religious. Thus, the very thing that led to despair of the
meaning and depth of this life now gives it
its truth and its clarity. Christianity is the scandal, and what
Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: "The sacrifice of the
intellect."6 This effect
of the "leap" is odd, but must not surprise us any longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world, whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. "In his failure," says Kierkegaard, "the believer finds his triumph." It is not for me to wonder to
what stirring preaching this attitude is linked. I merely have to wonder
if the spectacle of the absurd and its own
character justifies it. On this point, I know that it is not so. Upon
considering again the content of the absurd,
one understands better the method that inspired Kierkegaard. Between the irrational
of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, he does not maintain the equilibrium. He does not respect
the relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the
feeling of absurdity. Sure of being unable to escape the irrational, he wants
at least to save himself from that desperate
nostalgia that seems to him sterile and
devoid of implication. But if he may be right on this point in his judgment, he could not be in his
negation. If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at
once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him
and to deify the only certainty he henceforth
possesses, the irrational. The important thing, as Abbe
Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay,
is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied
wish, and it runs throughout his
whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to
escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more desperate effort since he
intermittently perceives its vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither
fear of God nor piety were capable of
bringing him to peace. Thus it is that, through a strained subterfuge, he gives the irrational the
appearance and God the attributes of
the absurd: unjust, incoherent, and
incomprehensible. Intelligence alone in him strives to stifle the underlying demands of the human heart. Since nothing is proved, everything
can be proved. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken. I do not want to suggest anything here, but how can
one fail to read in his works the
signs of an almost intentional
mutilation of the soul to balance the mutilation accepted in regard to the
absurd? It is the leitmotiv of the Journal.
"What I lacked was the animal which also belongs to human
destiny. . . . But give me a body
then." And further on: "Oh! especially in my
early youth what should I not have
given to be a man, even for six months
. . . what I lack, basically, is a body
and the physical conditions of existence." Elsewhere, the same man nevertheless adopts the great
cry of hope that has come down through so many centuries and quickened so many hearts, except that of the
absurd man. "But for the
Christian death is certainly not the end
of everything and it implies infinitely more hope than life implies for us,
even when that life is overflowing
with health and vigor." Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. It allows one
perhaps, as can be seen, to derive hope of its contrary, which is
death. But even if fellow-feeling inclines one toward that attitude, still it must be said that excess justifies nothing. That
transcends, as the saying goes, the human scale; therefore it
must be superhuman. But this "therefore" is
superfluous. There is no logical certainty here. There is no
experimental probability either. All I can say is that, in
fact, that transcends my scale. If I do not draw a negation
from it, at least I do not want to found anything on the
incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live
with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the
intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not
therefore negate it, recognizing its
relative powers. I merely want to
remain in this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear. If
that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason
for giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than Kierkegaard's view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the very state
of sin. For sin is what alienates
from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious
man, does not lead to God.7
Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the
absurd is sin without God. It is a matter of living in
that state of the absurd. I know on what it is founded, this mind and
this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule of life of
that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me
a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as
mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this
ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light. But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring
lyricism cannot hide the paradox from me. One must therefore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning:
"If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force
producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing
can fill underlay all things, what would life
be but despair?" This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking
what is true is not seeking what is desirable. 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.
I am taking the liberty at this
point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But
this does not imply a judgment. It is a convenient way of indicating the
movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its
very negation. For the existentials negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of
human reason.8
But, like suicides, gods change with men. There are many ways of
leaping, the essential being to leap. Those redeeming negations, those ultimate
contradictions which negate the obstacle that has not yet been
leaped over, may spring just as well (this is the paradox
at which this reasoning aims) from a certain religious inspiration
as from the rational order. They always lay claim to the
eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap. It must be repeated that the
reasoning developed in this essay leaves out altogether the most
widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened age: the one, based on the
principle that all is reason, which aims to explain the world. It is natural to
give a clear view of the world after
accepting the idea that it must be clear. That is even legitimate, but
does not concern the reasoning we are
following out here. In fact, our aim is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from
a philosophy of the world's lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it. The most
touching of those steps is religious
in essence; it becomes obvious in the theme of the irrational. But the most paradoxical
and most significant is certainly the one that attributes rational reasons to a world it originally imagined as devoid of any guiding principle. It
is impossible in any case to reach the consequences that concern us without having given an idea of this new
attainment of the spirit of
nostalgia. I shall examine merely the theme
of "the Intention" made fashionable by Husserl
and the phenomenologists. I have already alluded to
it. Originally Husserl's method negates the classic procedure of the reason. Let
me repeat. Thinking is not unifying
or making the appearance familiar
under the guise of a great principle. Thinking is learning
all over again how to see, directing one's
consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to
explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its
initial assertion that there is no
truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything
has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it
is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian
image, it resembles the projector that
suddenly focuses on an image. The
difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive and incoherent
illustration. In that magic lantern
all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth
they are beyond all judgments. This is
the "intention" that characterizes consciousness. But the word
does not imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of "direction": its only value is topographical. At first sight, it certainly seems that in this way nothing
contradicts the absurd spirit. That apparent modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain, that intentional discipline whenceresult paradoxically a profound enrichment of experience
and the rebirth of the world in its prolixity are absurd procedures. At least at first sight.
For methods of thought, in this case as elsewhere, always assume two aspects, one psychological and the other
metaphysical.9 Thereby they harbor two truths. If the theme of the intentional
claims to illustrate merely a psychological attitude,
by which reality is drained instead of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from the absurd spirit. It aims
to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take delight in describing and
understanding every aspect of experience. The truth involved then for each of those aspects is psychological
in nature. It simply testifies to the "interest" that reality
can offer. It is a way of awaking a sleeping
world and of making it vivid to the
mind. But if one attempts to extend and give a rational basis to that
notion of truth, if one claims to discover
in this way the "essence" of each object of knowledge, one
restores its depth to experience. For an absurd
mind that is incomprehensible. Now, it is this wavering between modesty
and assurance that is noticeable in the
intentional attitude, and this shimmering of phenomenological thought
will illustrate the absurd reasoning better
than anything else. For Husserl speaks likewise of
"extra-temporal essences" brought
to light by the intention, and he sounds like Plato. All things are not explained by one thing but by all things. I see no difference. To be sure,
those ideas or those essences that consciousness "effectuates"
at the end of every description are not yet
to be considered perfect models. But
it is asserted that they are directly
present in each datum of perception. There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a
stop, but also lights up. Platonic
realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard was
swallowed up in his God; Parmenides plunged
thought into the One. But here
thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is not all:
hallucinations and fictions likewise belong
to "extra-temporal essences." In the new world of ideas, the species of centaurs
collaborates with the more modest
species of metropolitan man. For the absurd man, there was a truth as well as a bitterness in that purely psychological opinion that all aspects
of the world are privileged. To say that everything
is privileged is tantamount to saying that everything is equivalent. But the
metaphysical aspect of that truth is
so far-reaching that through an elementary reaction he feels closer perhaps to Plato. He is taught, in fact,
that every image presupposes an equally privileged essence. In this ideal world without hierarchy, the formal army
is composed solely of generals. To be sure, transcendency had been eliminated. But a sudden shift in thought brings back into the
world a sort of fragmentary immanence which restores to the universe its
depth. Am I to fear having carried too far
a theme handled with greater
circumspection by its creators? I read merely
these assertions of Husserl, apparently paradoxical
yet rigorously logical if what precedes is accepted: "That which is true is true absolutely, in
itself; truth is one, identical with
itself, however different the creatures who perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods." Reason triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice, I cannot
deny. What can its assertions mean in
the absurd world? The perception of an
angel or a god has no meaning for
me. That geometrical spot where divine reason ratifies mine will always be incomprehensible to me.
There, too, I discern a leap, and
though performed in the abstract, it
nonetheless means for me forgetting just what I do not want to forget. When
farther on Husserl exclaims: "If all masses subject to attraction were to disappear, the
law of attraction would not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible application," I know that I am faced with a metaphysic of
consolation. And if I want to
discover the point where thought leaves the path of evidence, I have only to
reread the parallel reasoning that Husserl
voices regarding the mind: "If we
could contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic processes, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, like the basic laws of
theoretical natural science. Hence
they would be valid even if there were no psychic process." Even if
the mind were not, its laws would be! I see
then that of a psychological truth Husserl aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he
leaps by this expedient to eternal
Reason. Husserl's theme of the "concrete universe" cannot then
surprise me. If I am told that all essences are not formal but that some are material, that the first are the object of
logic and the second of science, this is merely a question of definition. The
abstract, I am told, indicates but a
part, without consistency in itself, of a concrete universal. But the
wavering already noted allows me to throw light on the confusion of these
terms. For that may mean that the concrete object of my attention, this sky, the reflection of that water on this
coat, alone preserve the prestige of the real that my interest isolates in the
world. And I shall not deny it. But that may mean also that this coat
itself is universal, has its particular and
sufficient essence, belongs to the world of forms. I then realize that merely the order of the
procession has been changed. This world has ceased to have its reflection in a higher universe, but the heaven of
forms is figured in the host of
images of this earth. This changes nothing for me. Rather than
encountering here a taste for the concrete, the meaning of the human condition,
I find an intellectualism sufficiently
unbridled to generalize the concrete
itself.
It is futile to be amazed by the apparent paradox that leads thought to its own negation by the opposite
paths of humiliated reason and triumphal reason. From the abstract god
of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard the
distance is not so great. Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the way matters but little; the
will to arrive suffices. The abstract philosopher
and the religious philosopher start Out from the same disorder and support each other in the
same anxiety. But
the essential is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger here than knowledge. It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the most deeply
imbued with a philosophy of the
non-significance of the world and one
of the most divided in its conclusions. It is constantly oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality which tends to break up that thought
into standard reasons and its extreme irrationalization
which tends to deify it. But this divorce is
only apparent. It is a matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases, the
leap suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion of reason is a one-way notion. To tell the truth,
however rigorous it may be in its ambition, this concept is nonetheless just as unstable as others. Reason bears
a quite human aspect, but it also is
able to turn toward the divine. Since
Plotinus, who was the first to reconcile it with the eternal climate, it has learned to turn
away from the most cherished of its principles, which is contradiction, in order to integrate into it the strangest,
the quite magic one of participation.1 It is an instrument of thought and not thought itself.
Above all, a man's thought is his
nostalgia. Just as reason was able to soothe the melancholy of Plotinus, it provides modern anguish the means of calming itself in the familiar setting of the
eternal. The absurd mind has less luck. For it the world is neither so rational nor so irrational. It is unreasonable and
only that. With Husserl the reason eventually has no
limits at all. The absurd, on the contrary, establishes its limits since
it is powerless to calm its anguish. Kierkegaard independently asserts that a single limit is enough to negate that
anguish. But the absurd does not go so far. For it that limit is directed solely at the reason's ambitions. The
theme of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentials,
is reason becoming confused and escaping by
negating itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. Only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man
recognize his true motives. Upon comparing his inner exigence and what is then offered him,
he suddenly feels he is going to turn
away. In the universe of Husserl the world becomes
clear and that longing for familiarity that man's heart harbors becomes
useless. In Kierkegaard's apocalypse that desire for clarity must be given up
if it wants to be satisfied. Sin is not so much knowing (if it were, everybody
would be innocent) as wanting to know.
Indeed, it is the only sin of which the absurd man can feel that it constitutes both his guilt and his innocence. He is offered a solution in
which all the past contradictions have become merely polemical games. But this is not the way he experienced
them. Their truth must be preserved, which consists in not being satisfied. He does not want preaching. My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It
is that divorce between the mind that
desires and the world that disappoints, my
nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds
them together. Kierkegaard suppresses my
nostalgia and Husserl gathers together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was
a matter of living and thinking with those
dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse. There can be no
question of masking the evidence, of
suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It
is essential to know whether one can live
with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide.
I merely wish to purge it of its
emotional content and know its logic
and its integrity. Any other position implies for the absurd mind deceit and the mind's retreat before
what the mind itself has brought to light. Husserl claims to obey the desire to escape "the
inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well-known and convenient
conditions of existence," but the final leap restores in him the eternal and its comfort. The leap
does not represent an extreme danger
as Kierkegaard would like it to do.
The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and
the rest is subterfuge. I know also
that never has helplessness inspired
such striking harmonies as those of Kierkegaard. But if helplessness has
its place in the indifferent landscapes of history, it has none in a reasoning
whose exigence is now known.
Now the main thing is done, I
hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is
certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot
reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part of me
that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and
cohesion. I can refute everything in
this world surrounding me that
offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and
this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this
world has a meaning that transcends it. But
I know that I do not know that
meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a
meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what
I understand. And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility
of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle —I also know that
I cannot reconcile them. What other truth
can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which
means nothing within the limits of my
condition? If I were a tree among trees, a
cat among animals, this life would have a meaning,
or rather this problem would not arise, for I
should belong to this world. I should
be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness
and my whole insistence upon familiarity.
This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of
the pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. And what constitutes the basis
of that conflict, of that break between
the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If therefore I want to preserve it, I can through a constant awareness,
ever revived, ever alert. This is what, for the moment, I must remember.
At this moment the absurd, so obvious and yet
so hard to win, returns to a man's life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind can
leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. That path now emerges in
daily life. It encounters the world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun
"one," but henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity.
He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of
the present is his Kingdom at last.
All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract
evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to
the abject and magnificent shelter of man's heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going
to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas
and forms to one's own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of
the absurd? Let's make a final effort in this regard and draw all our
conclusions. The body, affection,
creation, action, human nobility will then resume their
places in this mad world. At last man will again find there the wine of
the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness. Let us insist again on the
method: it is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the
absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking
in either religions or prophets, even
without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't
fully understand, that
it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is
assured that this is the sin of pride,
but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in
store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to
him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the
truth, that is all he feels—his
irreparable innocence. This is what allows
him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not
certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is
concerned: he wants to find out if it
is possible to live without appeal.
Now I can broach the notion of
suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point
the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to
be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary,
that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is
accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd,
unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by
consciousness. Negating one of the terms of
the opposition on which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish
conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The
theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual
experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all,
contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the
absurd dies only when we turn away
from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus
revolt. It is a constant confrontation
between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible
transparency. It challenges the
world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique
opportunity of seizing awareness, so
metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in
his own eyes. It is not aspiration,
for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing
fate, without the resignation that ought to
accompany it. This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is
remote from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly.
For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary
by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future,
his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way,
suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd
in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd
cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the
extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It
is, at the extreme limit of the condemned
man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards
away, on the very brink of his
dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death. 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 blinders, there is no finer sight than
that of the intelligence at grips with a
reality that transcends it. The sight
of human pride is unequaled. No disparagement
is of any use. That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out
of nothing, that face-to-face
struggle have something exceptional about them. To impoverish that
reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's
majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also
debilitate me at the same time. They
relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.
At this juncture, I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation. Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Everything that is
indomitable and passionate in a human
heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is essential
to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will.
Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his
extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness
and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is
defiance. This is a first consequence.
If I remain in that prearranged
position which consists in drawing all the conclusions (and nothing
else) involved in a newly discovered notion, I am faced with a second paradox.
In order to remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the
problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing
whether or not man is free doesn't
interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have
no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of
"freedom as such" has no meaning.
For it is linked in quite a different
way with the problem of God. Knowing whether or not man is free involves knowing whether he can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this
problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all
its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the
alternative: either
we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we
are free and responsible but God is
not all-powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything
from the acuteness of this paradox. This is why I cannot get lost in the glorification or the mere
definition of a notion which eludes me and loses
its meaning as soon as it goes beyond the frame of reference of my individual experience. I cannot
understand what kind of freedom would
be given me by a higher being. I have
lost the sense of hierarchy. The only
conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in
the midst of the State. The only one
I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all
my chances of eternal freedom, it restores
and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in
man's availability. Before encountering the absurd,
the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for
justification (with regard to whom or what
is not the question). He weighs his chances, he
counts on "someday," his retirement
or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a
point of contradicting that liberty.
But after the absurd, everything is
upset. That idea that "I am," my way of acting as if everything has a meaning (even if, on
occasion, I said that nothing has)—all
that is given the lie in vertiginous
fashion by the absurdity of a possible death. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief
in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it. But
at that moment I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to
be, which alone can serve as basis for a
truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality. After death
the chips are down. I am not even free,
either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to contempt. And who
without revolution and without contempt can remain a slave? What freedom can
exist in the fullest sense without assurance
of eternity? But at the same
time the absurd man realizes that hitherto
he was bound to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he
imagined a purpose to his life, he
adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave
of his liberty. Thus I could not act
otherwise than as the father (or the
engineer or the leader of a nation, or the post-office sub-clerk) that I am preparing to be. I think I can choose to be
that rather than something else. I think so unconsciously, to be sure. But at the same time I strengthen my postulate with the beliefs of those
around me, with the presumptions of
my human environment (others are so
sure of being free, and that cheerful mood is so contagious!). However far one may remain from any presumption,
moral or social, one is partly influenced
by them and even, for the best among them (there are good and bad
presumptions), one adapts one's life to
them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free. To speak clearly, to the extent to
which I hope, to which I worry about
a truth that might be individual to
me, about a way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself
barriers between which I confine my
life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only fill me with
disgust and whose
only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man's freedom seriously. The absurd enlightens me on
this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my
inner freedom. I shall use two comparisons
here. Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they
become secretly free. In
spontaneously accepted slavery they recover
a deeper independence. But what does that freedom mean? It may be said, above all, that they feel free with regard to themselves, and not so much free
as liberated. Likewise, completely turned toward death (taken here as
the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything
outside that passionate attention
crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom
with regard to common rules. It can be seen at this point that the initial themes of existential
philosophy keep their entire value.
The return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom. But it is
existential preaching that is alluded
to, and with it that spiritual leap which basically escapes consciousness. In the same way (this is
my second comparison) the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which
consists in not feeling responsible.2 Death, too, has
patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate. Losing oneself in that bottomless
certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one's own life to
increase it and take a broad view of
it—this involves the principle of a liberation.
Such new independence has a definite time
limit, like any freedom of action. It does not write a check on eternity. But
it takes the place of the illusions
of freedom, which all stopped with death. The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early
dawn, that
unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life—it is clear
that death and the absurd are here the
principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence.
The absurd man thus catches sight of
a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which
all is collapse and nothingness. He
can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his
refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.
But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing
else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up
everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our
definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining. Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all
that interests me. I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of life
being given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this particular concern,
belief in the absurd is tantamount to substituting the quantity of experiences for the quality. If I convince myself that
this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that
perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its
limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to
me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable. Once
and for all, value judgments are discarded here in favor of factual judgments.
I have merely to draw the conclusions from what I can see and to risk nothing
that is hypothetical. Supposing that living in this way were not honorable, then true propriety would command me
to be dishonorable. The most
living; in the broadest sense, that rule means nothing. It calls
for definition. It seems to begin with the
fact that the notion of quantity has not been sufficiently explored. For it can account for a large share of human experience. A man's rule of conduct and
his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of
experiences he has been in a position to accumulate. Now, the conditions
of modern life impose on the majority of men the same quantity of experiences and consequently the same profound experience.
To be sure, there must also be taken into consideration the individual's
spontaneous contribution, the "given"
element in him. But I cannot judge of that, and let me repeat that my rule here is to get along with the immediate
evidence. I see, then, that the individual character of a common code of ethics lies not
so much in the ideal importance of
its basic principles as in the norm of an experience that it is possible
to measure. To stretch a point somewhat, the
Greeks had the code of their leisure
just as we have the code of our eight-hour day. But already many men among the most tragic cause us to foresee that a longer experience changes
this table of values. They make us
imagine that adventurer of the everyday
who through mere quantity of experiences would break all records (I am purposely using this sports expression)
and would thus win his own code of ethics.3 Yet let's avoid romanticism and just ask
ourselves what such an attitude may
mean to a man with his mind made up
to take up his bet and to observe strictly what he takes to be the rules of the
game. Breaking all the records is first and foremost being faced with
the world as often as possible. How can that be
done without contradictions and without playing on words? For on the one
hand the absurd teaches that all experiences
are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity
of experiences. How, then, can one fail to
do as so many of those men I was speaking
of earlier—choose the form of life that brings us the most possible of that
human matter, thereby introducing a scale of values that on the other
hand one claims to reject? But again it is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches us. For the mistake
is thinking that that quantity of experiences
depends on the circumstances of our
life when it depends solely on us. Here we have to be
over-simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of
them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes
useless. Let's be even more simple. Let us say that the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to be made good, is
constituted by premature death. Thus
it is that no depth, no emotion, no
passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in the eyes of the absurd man
(even if he wished it so) a conscious
life of forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years.4 Madness and death are his irreparables.
Man does not choose. The absurd and
the extra life it involves therefore
do not depend on man's will, but on its contrary, which is death.5 Weighing words carefully, it is altogether a question of luck. One just has to
be able to consent to this. There
will never be any substitute for
twenty years of life and experience. By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the Greeks claimed that those who died young were
beloved of the gods. And that is true only if you are willing to believe that entering the ridiculous world of
the gods is forever losing the purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth. The present and the
succession of presents before a
constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man. But the word "ideal" rings
false in this
connection. It is not even his vocation, but merely the third consequence of
his reasoning. Having started from an anguished awareness of
the inhuman, the meditation on the
absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt.6
Thus I draw from the absurd
three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform
into a rule of life what was an
invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull
resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say: that it is necessary. When Nietzsche writes:
"It clearly seems that the chief
thing in heaven and on earth is to obey
at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the
trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance,
reason, the mind—something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine," he elucidates the rule of a really
distinguished code of ethics. But he
also points the way of the absurd man.
Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself
occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so. "Prayer," says Alain, "is when night descends over thought." "But the mind must meet the
night," reply the mystics and the
existentials. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and
through the mere will of man—dark,
impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it
must encounter a night, let it be
rather that of despair, which remains
lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the
intelligence. At that degree, equivalence
encounters passionate understanding.
Then it is no longer even a question
of judging the existential leap. It resumes its place amid the age-old fresco of human attitudes. For the
spectator, if he is conscious, that leap is still absurd. In so far as it thinks it solves the paradox, it
reinstates it intact. On this score,
it is stirring. On this score, everything
resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn in all its splendor and
diversity. But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of
seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual
forces. The preceding merely defines a way of
thinking. But the point is to live.
1
From the point of view of the relative value of truth. On the other
hand, from the point of view of virile behavior, this scholar's
fragility may well make us smile. 2 Let us not miss this opportunity to
point out the relative character of this essay. Suicide may indeed be related to much
more honorable considerations—for example, the political suicides of protest, as they were called, during the Chinese
revolution. 31 have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who,
after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract
attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but
the book was judged no good. 4 But not in the proper sense. This is
not a definition, but rather an enumeration of the feelings
that may admit of the absurd. Still, the enumeration finished, the
absurd has nevertheless not been exhausted. 5 Apropos of the notion of exception
particularly and against Aristotle. 6 It
may be thought that I am neglecting here the essential problem,
that of faith. But I am not examining the philosophy of Kierkegaard
or of Chestov or, later on, of Husserl
(this would call for a different place and a different attitude of mind); I am simply
borrowing a theme from them and examining whether its
consequences can fit the already established rules. It is merely
a matter of persistence 71 did not say "excludes God,"
which would still amount to asserting. 8 Let me assert again: it is not the
affirmation of God that is questioned here, but rather the logic
leading to that affirmation. 9 Even the most rigorous epistemologies
imply metaphysics. And to such a degree that the metaphysic
of many contemporary thinkers consists in
having nothing but an epistemology. 1 A.—At that time reason had
to adapt itself or die. It adapts itself. With Plotinus, after being logical it becomes aesthetic. Metaphor takes the place of the syllogism. B.—Moreover,
this is not Plotinus' only contribution to phenomenology.
This whole attitude is already contained in the concept so dear to
the Alexandrian thinker that there is not only an idea of man but
also an idea of Socrates. 2 I am concerned here with a
factual comparison, not with an apology of humility. The
absurd man is the contrary of the reconciled man. 3 Quantity sometimes constitutes quality.
If I can believe the latest restatements of scientific theory, all matter is
constituted by centers of energy. Their greater or lesser quantity
makes its specificity more or less remarkable. A billion ions and one ion differ
not only in quantity but also in quality. It is easy to find an
analogy in human experience. 4
Same reflection on a notion as different as the idea of
eternal nothingness. It neither adds anything to nor subtracts anything from reality. In
psychological experience of nothingness, it is by the consideration of what will happen in two thousand years that our own nothingness truly takes on meaning.
In one of its aspects, eternal
nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours. 5
The will is only the agent here: it tends to maintain consciousness.
It provides a discipline of life, and that is appreciable. 6 What matters is coherence. We start
out here from acceptance of the world. But Oriental thought teaches that one can
indulge in the same effort of logic by choosing against
the world. That is just as legitimate and gives this essay its
perspectives and its limits. But when the negation of the
world is pursued just as rigorously, one
often achieves (in certain Vedantic schools) similar results regarding, for instance,
the indifference of works. In
a book of great importance, Le Choix, Jean Grenier establishes in this way a veritable
"philosophy of indifference."
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