Philosophical Absurdism as described by Albert Camus, an overview

There's been a few threads and Discord conversations asking about what Absurdism is, and how it relates to Nihilism or Existentialism. I thought it might be helpful to try and write a comprehensive overview/introduction that can be stickied or linked to if people find it valuable. I'm not a historian and I don't have a philosophy degree, so I may get it a bit wrong, I welcome any corrections, clarifications, feedback, or alternative interpretations.

Since "Absurd" is a common English word, it's easy for people to interpret the term in different ways, it certainly happens quite a bit within this subreddit! "Absurdist Comedy" for instance (which makes up maybe a third of all posts here), refers to surreal/random comedy. It's named after the same English word, but isn't really related to the philosophy (capital-A Absurdism) at all. (Think "Impressionist Painting" vs an "Impressionist Comedian"). Before I go any further I want to be clear that _there's nothing wrong with this_. If you're inspired by absurdist comedy, or if you've developed your own philosophy of life about how absurd you feel the universe is, that's _great_ and it's clear that people here want to talk about that. Things don't need to strictly fit into the Philosophical Absurdism bucket to be worth sharing. After all, this is "/r/Absurdism", not "r/ThePhilosophyOfAbsurdismAsDescribedByAlbertCamus". This post is about clarification and history, not about saying anyone is "doing Absurdism wrong".

That said, the concept which you might call "Classical Absurdism" is absolutely worth learning about, it's fascinating and on a personal level I've found it helpful in difficult times. At the very least, after reading you should understand why there's so many pictures here of a dude pushing a rock.

Classical Absurdism is the belief of Albert Camus, a French-Algerian writer and philosopher who published his most notable works in the the 1940s. The essay where he most clearly lays out his beliefs is titled "The Myth of Sisyphus", which is where all the rock-pushing imagery comes from. While Absurdism, Existentialism, and Nihilism all have similar roots and overlapping concept, Camus himself firmly denied being either an Existentialist or a Nihilist, and felt both philosophies to be incomplete and inauthentic.

Existentialism and the history of Absurdism

Some historical context can be helpful for understanding the ideas.

For most of human history, "ethics" and "religion" were basically interchangeable. Philosophers interested in the question "how should a human act?" would ask in terms of "how do the God(s) want us to act?" In the modern era even the very religious understand the motivation to separate ethics from religion, but that idea is fairly recent.

In the 1800s Søren Kierkegaard began writing heavily on the subject, criticizing the church and society and exploring the despair trying to find meaning without them. He wasn't the first to flirt with Nihilism (he's behind the Buddha by about 1300 years) but he's critical to the Western Philosophical tradition that led to Absurdism. Kierkegaard wrote opposing viewpoints under different pseudonyms, making it difficult to nail down exactly how he felt on any given subject, but it's widely accepted that he ultimately decided that human rationality wasn't up to the task of finding meaning. He concluded that the only solution was to take a leap of faith and find meaning in God.

If we jump ahead to the 1940s, several brilliant minds are scattered throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, as soldiers, resistance fighters, and prisoners in concentration camps. Staring into the face of the horrors of World War 2, they sought to answer the question: "If belief in God didn't stop this from happening, what could have?". Taking inspiration from earlier thinkers like Kierkegaard, we get the Existentialists: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many others.

An Existentialist would start with the premise that man isn't born with any particular nature or value or essence that exists outside of themselves. First a human exists, and only then do they create values and meaning through their consciousness. Existence precedes essence. From that starting point the Existentialists had to rethink everything. How do we come to have values if they don't exist outside ourselves? How do we think about meaning at all? How can we talk about morality if we can't rely on a God to inform us? And of course, the fundamental question of ethics: How should a human act?

Different Existentialist thinkers came to different conclusions. They developed theories of ethics and metaphysics, they wrote plays and novels that inspired new kinds of art, and they laid the groundwork for modern feminism.

Albert Camus, the proto-Absurdist, came out of this same world. He was a writer and a member of the French resistance during World War 2, and was part of the same social circle as Sartre and De Beauvoir. Camus shared many ideas with Existentialist thinkers and asked the same questions about meaning, but didn't accept the "Existence Precedes Essence" premise.

The Absurd and other concepts

In Classical Absurdism, "The Absurd" isn't a quality of the world we live in, but the relationship between us and it. In a beautifully illustrated example from "The Myth of Sisyphus": A man with a sword is not absurd. A man with a machine gun is not absurd. But a man with a sword charging at a man with a machine gun is absurd. The absurdity comes from the mismatch, the components aren't themselves comedic, but the impossible relationship between them is.

For Camus:

- Humans strive to find meaning in life, we're born to crave it

- The world we live in can't speak to us, it can't reveal to us any meaning

(note that it's not that the world _has_ no meaning, it's that we're incapable of learning whether or not it does)

The world itself is not Absurd, and our desire for meaning isn't Absurd, but our search for meaning in a world that can't offer it, this _relationship_ is "The Absurd". For Camus this is neither good nor bad but an inevitable consequence of being human in our world.

The Absurd exists whether we notice it or not. Noticing it tends to make people deeply uncomfortable, and Camus believes that most people who grasp The Absurd will quickly jump through whatever mental hoops they need to ignore it, to hide their head in the sand and pretend they never saw it. Camus calls this "Philosophical Suicide", the idea that you've seen the Absurdity of your search for meaning and decided it was better to stop looking. For Camus this might include someone who finds their meaning from religion or a cause, like Kierkegard and his leap of faith.

This is where Camus feels he differs from an Existentialist or Nihilist. An Existentialist grasps The Absurd and then decides to create their own meaning, a Nihilist grasps The Absurd and then decides there is no meaning. In both cases, Camus thinks they're just dodging the question.

The Absurd Man

For Camus, ignoring The Absurd is living inauthentically - to live authentically you need to see The Absurd, feel that uncomfortable feeling, and stay there. He wants us to rebel against the lack of meaning by grasping the futility and acting anyway. In The Myth of Sisyphus he illustrates this with three examples of living an Absurdist life:

- Don Juan, who drinks and seduces and readily falls in love, living each moment as passionately as possible. Don Juan treats each party and each romance as if they are the most important thing in the world, fully aware that he'll soon abandon that romance for another.

- The Actor, who seeks fleeting fame and inhabits the his characters, trying on new personalities and histories. The Actor gives themselves entirely their identity's long-term hopes and dreams, fully aware that he'll be someone entirely different tomorrow/

- The Conqueror, who tries to make an impact on the world and engage in history. I interpret this as both a literal warrior on the world stage, but also someone seeking to conquer their field and make history in their own corner of the world, be it art, sports, local politics. The Conqueror seeks to leave their mark on the world, fully aware that they won't live to see if they succeeded, and that all kingdoms crumble to dust.

Perhaps today Camus would write of the Reddit user who posts a long essay, fully aware that almost no one will read it in its entirety!

While these archetypes share a lot with a "do what you feel" or "live for the now" existentialist/nihilist viewpoint, I think for Camus the attitude and approach one has is very important. An authentic life is an act of rebellion against a world that offers us no meaning, in defiance of our short time here.

When Camus closes his essay with the famous line "We must imagine Sisyphus Happy", he's giving us a way out. Sisyphus is cursed to push his boulder up a hill, just like we're cursed to search for meaning. Sisyphus can't stop pushing, and he can't get get the boulder over the hill, these are simple and inevitable facts of his world. The one thing Sisyphus _can_ do is rebel against his world and choose to enjoy the act of pushing.

Vive L'Absurd!

Submitted December 12, 2019 at 09:48PM by tmdBrassMan https://ift.tt/2YJUR2V