Chapter 15
Albert Camus:
Rebelling Against the
Absurd
If human life is
absurd, empty, meaningless, leading only to death,
can anything of value be rescued from it?
If we are thrown into a completely desolate
and forlorn existence,
why do anything? Why not kill ourselves
now
instead of waiting for the final absurdity
of death to take us?
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
maintained in his own life
a tension between this awareness of the futility
of human existence
and his own defiant, rebellious self-affirmation.
His writings (philosophy and fiction) reflect
and illustrate this paradox:
Altho ultimate and lasting meaning is impossible,
we can still create our own dignity as persons
by challenging the absurd.
A strange love of life emerges from a devastating
encounter with despair,
as John Cruickshank explains in his book
on Camus:
His inquiry, which set out to discoverCruickshank distinguishes four ways in which we notice the absurd:
how the absurd paradox might either be solved or destroyed
ends by making this paradox itself the basis for positive action....
Camus derives meaning for his existence
from an original denial of the possibility of meaning....
Camus takes as his key to existence
the very fact of not having a key.[John Cruickshank Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt
(New York: Oxford UP, 1960) p. 62-63]
1. We come feel the
absurd when something interrupts our daily routine,
when our comfortable, automatic, habitual
ways of life suddenly fall apart
and we are forced to ask the deepest possible
why?
2. The absurd may
intrude into our smooth-flowing consciousness
when we become acutely aware of the passage
of time:
Life becomes transparent to its end, and
we see that it adds up to zero.
3. Sometimes familiar
objects become radically alien and strange.
We discover ourselves exiled in an accidental
world that makes no sense.
4. Our separation
from other people, our estrangement from ordinary life,
may open us to the deep clash and disharmony
of existence.
We see normal human behavior as shallow,
empty, mechanical, senseless.
60 BECOMING MORE AUTHENTIC: THE POSITIVE SIDE OF EXISTENTIALISM by JAMES PARK
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