"An Absurd Reasoning" - First part of Ch. I of "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus

By Stephen Alexander Beach

(2126 Words)

Camus introduces the book by saying that he is exploring the consequences of a philosophy of Nihilism, yet he rejects what seems to be the characterized logical end of Nihilism, that of suicide. Rather, he claims that the true authentic version of Nihilism is to live in the contradiction of having no meaning and yet choosing to live anyways. As he says, “…this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism. … 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.” 1

Many times throughout this section Camus proclaims that reason has been shown to be defunct and that reality has no consistent intelligibility to it that we can know. He does not offer much in the way of backing this up, but continually points out the failure of philosophy to ever complete its original project [begun with Pre-Socratics] which was to complete a unified vision of reality and man's place in it. The hope, Camus says, springs eternal, but reason has never borne this out in his opinion. 

“An Absurd Reasoning”
The book is broken down into three sections and then a reflection on the actual myth of Sisyphus. The three sections, “An Absurd Reasoning,” “The Absurd Man,” and “Absurd Creation,” reflect aspects of Camus’ philosophy of the absurd, i.e. the disconnect between the rational understanding of the universe and man’s lived experience of it. This post will deal with the first section. 

"Absurdity and Suicide" - The Two Traditional Options and Finding a Third Way

Being connected to the Existentialist tradition, Camus starts by claiming that the most fundamental question of philosophy is about how one lives. This, to him, comes before any other objective or technical question, and one must take it seriously by embodying their response in their actions. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and this is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus claims that one does not give one’s life for other types of philosophical questions, and thus they must be deemed less important. “I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument.” 2 Rather, people kill themselves because they have no meaning to their life or they die for an illusory idea which they think gives them meaning. And so the question of meaning and life is of the greatest importance. 3 

To kill oneself is to confess that life makes no sense. 4 It is rather a burden or suffering, absent of meaning, and continued only because of habit. “… 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.” And so for the man who is authentic to himself by having his actions and beliefs align, what is the relationship between the absurdity of existence and the recourse to suicide as his confession of its absurdity? 5 

Yet contradictions arise, according to Camus. There are examples of people who were convinced of life’s meaninglessness and yet did not kill themselves, and those who thought they had every meaning and yet took their own life. 6 One explanation is that our natural instincts of bodily survival override the logical call to end one’s life. Another answer is what Camus calls “eluding.” Here he refers to those people who have hope because of a transcendent idea which gives their life meaning. “Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope for 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.” 

And so Camus takes the opportunity to deny the traditional claim that if life is meaningless that logically it makes sense to commit suicide. Must we take one of the two roads laid out, either suicide or delusion of belief? He thinks that, no, there is another option that does not require submitting to the logic of emotions, in suicide, or the delusion of faith. 7 “In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments. … Does it 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?” 8 

Here he then introduces the idea of his “absurd reasoning”. This is to look at nihilism and death with logic devoid of both emotion and belief and to see what is there. He turns to Karl Jaspers, quoting him in saying that he has explored where reason can take him, and reason cannot create a unity to reality, rather it hits absurdity and brings him back simply to himself. And so Camus suggests that this is the path he is talking about, one where reason hits absurdity, but man doesn’t resort to emotions and suicide, or delusion and faith, but rather sits there in the contradiction, the “waterless deserts,” as he likes to say. 9 “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.” 

"Absurd Walls" That Hem Us In
Here Camus turns to the feeling of absurdity, a feeling so wide it can strike anywhere. 10 And so how is man to be known? He has already said that the logical progression of the emotional responses to absurdity, and hope and belief in meaning, are not the pathways to know. Rather, he appeals not to truth, but to practical action. Look at how a man acts out his life and use these things to create a picture of who he is. "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." 11

The path of encountering life's absurdity begins with a life of routine. 12 All the requirements of work, and daily life take up our waking hours until one day we begin to reflect on them. This conscious reflection leads to a questioning of the "why" of all of it. A sort of depression sets in because of the recognition of the weariness of it all. "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." At the beginning of life we tend to push our desire for meaning to the future, saying that things will be good when I reach a certain goal or stage. But then man hits an age where he is on the descent towards death and he realizes that it was all a mirage. 13 (Camus also connects his concept of the absurd to Heidegger's "anxiety," and Sartre's "nausea." 14) 

"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." 15 He talks about death weighing in on him, and since we do not know what happens at death, the absurd is all we are left with. 16 "No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition." Camus is accepting all of this description of the absurdity of life as fact. This is not what his book is about, proving this to be the case. Rather, the point of his work is about finding a third way in dealing with it, as has already been said, between emotion leading to suicide and hope leading to delusion. 

The "absurd walls" that he is talking about are the aspects of our experience of the absurd which nature and life push on us and we bounce up against. They hem us in in every direction. This is true even considering these problems from an intellectual standpoint. 17 Here Camus admits that human beings are looking for unity of reality, for it to make sense, for it to be intelligible and comprehensible to us. "That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama." But Camus thinks this can never be reached because as soon as we affirm all of being into a unity we must include in that unity propositions of disunity, thus destroying the unity. And so there cannot be a unified understanding of everything. 18 

Likewise, we live these placid lives where we think on the surface that everything makes sense, but if we only pushed a little deeper into phrases like "all men are mortal" we would realize that nothing fits together at all. 19 Beyond the knowledge of the fact of our existence in a world, Camus asks what more we can really know about anything. "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. ... 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." 20 

Camus remains unsatisfied with both scientific and philosophical answers. The one gives precision but no meaning to life, the other offers meaning but with no precision. "And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses which 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?" Camus concludes that all that is left is to simply live in the paradox. 21 

"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 only certainty that I can have then is that I am faced by uncertainties, and so this is the path that must be followed. One must see if they can construct a life in the middle of the desert. 22 Camus recognizes that some philosophers seem to be confident in truth, and yet he thinks they have been refuted in all ways except their perennial hope to find what they want to find. 23 For Camus, reason has been shown to be a dead phantom and absurdity the response to this ... there is the irrational and the religious. 24 

Camus then goes into Heidegger and Jasper's philosophies, saying that both have shown that reason fails and the impending doom of death leads to a dread of existence. And so the only other way forward is to find some new means of dealing with this dread. Kierkegaard chooses to live absurdity. 25 "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." Husserl, on the other hand, cannot save reason either. He does not return to the universal principles of reason in his Phenomenology, but considers everything as equal in the experience of consciousness. 26 

And so Camus, in the face of the unintelligibility of the world, says that the way forward is to reverse the traditional attempts. One must begin at the end where one reaches the nihilism in the desert from a theoretical search, and from there to return back to everyday acts and living. 27 

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1 - Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage Books, 2018. Preface
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