Sisyphus and the Rolling Stone (3)

My objective in producing a new translation of this philosophical essay has been to write as Albert Camus might have done, if English were his native language and he had used it as the medium for dashing off his fevered ideas. This translation work has come to a halt, perhaps permanently. But if I do any more, I promise to publish it here.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe: essai sur l’absurde
Albert Camus © 1942 Éditions Gallimard
Translation © 2010 Ian Vincent Mulder
Continued from extract (2):

The Walls of the Absurd    
Like great works of art, deep feelings carry more meaning than they know. The constancy of any movement towards change, or resistance against change, lies in habits of doing and thinking; then unfolds into consequences unknown to the soul. Strong feelings parade within their own universe, whether it be grand or grotesque. Their passion lights up a private world, in which they meet their own kind. Thus we may encounter a universe of jealousy, ambition, egoism or generosity. By world I mean a metaphysic, an attitude of mind. What’s true of particular thoughts is more so for indeterminate emotions, where confused mingles with definite, distant mingles with present: as happens with thoughts inspired by beauty or the absurd.

The sense of absurdity can hit any man in the face, on any street corner. In its desolate nakedness, its light that fails to shine, it can’t be grasped. But even this difficulty is worth a moment’s reflection. It’s probably true that another man remains forever unknown to us: in him is some irreducible essence that will forever escape our grasp. But in practice I know individuals; and I recognise them by their behaviour, the sum of their actions, the consequences they set in motion as they pass through life. In like manner, all the irrational feelings beyond the grasp of analysis are such that I can define them in practice, appreciate them in practice, assemble the sum of their consequences into some kind of intelligent structure; grasp and comprehend their faces and thus retrace their universe. It certainly seems that having seen the same actor a hundred times, I won’t get to know him any better personally. But if I add up all the heroes he has brought to life, and claim to know him better after seeing him in a hundred roles—you’d grant me some truth in that. It seems like a paradox, but it’s an apologue too(1), for it carries a moral. It teaches that a man defines himself as much by his fooling as by his sincerity. Thus, going a touch deeper, you find feelings inaccessible to your own heart but partially betrayed in the acts they inspire and the attitudes of mind they inform. You can see that I’m beginning to define a method here. But you also see that this method is one of analysis rather than knowledge. Methods imply their own metaphysic; unknowingly they reveal conclusions they claim not to know yet. Thus, the last pages of a book are implied already in the first pages. The knot can’t be avoided. Such a method acknowledges the impossibility of true knowledge. We can only take into account appearances, feel the temperature, as it were.

The feeling of absurdity is beyond our grasp, but perhaps we can reach an understanding of it in different, yet closely related worlds: intellect; the art of living; or more simply art itself. At the beginning, absurdity makes itself felt like an ambience—like the weather. In the end, we find everything absurd: our attitude of mind illuminates the whole world in a clarity which arrives when it’s ready to, lighting up the unrelenting countenance of that special person who can recognise it for what it is.

***

Any great thought or deed starts with something trivial. They might be conceived on a street corner, or in a restaurant foyer. It’s like that with absurdity, too. For all its nobility, the absurd generally springs from humble birth. When asked “What are you thinking about?” a man might answer “nothing”. His beloved knows he may be bluffing; but a sincere “nothing” stands for an odd state of soul, where “nothing” speaks volumes, where the chain of daily routines is broken, where no link can be found to connect it back again. It is the first manifestation of absurdity.That’s when the stage-sets collapse. Get up, ride the tram, four hours in office or factory, eat, ride the tram, four more hours at work, eat, sleep—Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday, all in the same rhythm. Most of our time passes easily this way. One day, the “why” pops up. Then it all starts, the sense of weariness tinged with a certain astonishment. “Starts”—this is an important word. Weariness comes at the end of a mechanical existence, but at the same time triggers a stirring of consciousness, wakes it up and sets in motion what follows. What follows is either that you sink back unconsciously into the chain, or that you wake up for good. Waking up leads in time to its own consequence: suicide or revival. In itself, weariness is disheartening. But in this instance I come to the conclusion that it’s good. For everything starts with being conscious: without this, nothing has any value. There is nothing original in these remarks, of course. But they make sense, and that’s enough for now, as a brief recognition of how the absurd arises. At the origin of everything is a simple sense of concern.

In the same way, for all the days of an unremarkable life, time carries us forward. But a moment always comes when we must carry it. We live for the future: “tomorrow”, “later”, “when you get a job”, “you’ll understand when you’re old enough”. Fine words, in view of the fact that one day we’ll die. Then the day comes when a man discovers that he’s thirty years old. Thus he affirms his youth. But he also places himself at a point in time. He’s at a certain point on a curve, and recognises he must follow its path. He’s in thrall to time. In the horror of this realisation, he sees his worst enemy: tomorrow. There he was, wishing for tomorrow, when his whole being ought to have refused it. This sudden revolt of the flesh is the absurd.(2)

A step lower and here’s the strangeness: to see for yourself that the world is a kind of dense jungle, to glimpse something utterly alien in a stone, to feel how intensely a natural landscape can blank us out. In the depths of beauty lies something inhuman: and these hills, this gentle sky, the shape of trees, are suddenly stripped of their illusion, henceforth more distant than a lost paradise. A primitive hostility, nursed for millennia, rises against us once more. For a moment, our understanding of the world slips. For centuries all we have seen are the patterns we projected on it, and now we don’t have the strength to play that trick any more. The world escapes us because it has reverted to its true nature. These surfaces, these habitual masks, revert to what lies behind them. They retreat from us. It’s just like the moment when, beneath the surface of a woman’s face—a woman one has loved for months or years—one suddenly sees a stranger. What then was desire now feels like being very alone. But the time hasn’t yet come. There’s just one thing: this dense jungle, this strangeness. This is the absurd.

Human beings also give out something inhuman. In certain times of clarity, the mechanical aspect of their movements, their senseless pantomime, makes everything around them stupid. A man speaks on the ’phone behind a glass partition. You can’t hear him, only watch his meaningless mime; and you wonder why he’s alive. This uneasiness in the face of human inhumanity, this sinking feeling, confronted with what we are, this “nausea” as a contemporary author (3) calls it, this too is the absurd.

I come at last to death and the feeling it inspires in us. Everything has been said already, and we’d do best to steer clear of pathos. But one thing never hits us strongly enough: the whole world behaves as if it didn’t know. For in truth, nobody has experienced death. You can’t truly know anything unless you have actually gone through it, “with your eyes open”. It’s hardly possible, even, to speak of experiencing the death of someone else. What we see is a makeshift from our imagination, that we never find convincing. We are not really persuaded by the conventional melancholy. The horror comes from mathematical inevitability. What’s frightening about time is the way it resolves every problem into a single solution. All the fine talk about soul is freshly negated, at least in the short term. Here’s a dead body: a slap won’t bruise it any more, its soul has fled. This primitive and defining aspect of life’s adventure summarises the feeling of the absurd, showing life to be mortal, ultimately useless. Morality and striving have no a priori justification, in face of the bloody mathematics which order our destiny.

But again, all this has been said again and again. I’ll limit myself to a rapid analysis, and to pointing out some obvious themes from literature and philosophy. They are the stuff of everyday conversation, nothing is reinvented. But we need to be clear on the evidence, so that we can ask the question posed at the beginning of this book. What interests me, let me repeat, isn’t so much to discover instances of the absurd. It is their consequences. Once assured of the facts, what should one conclude, how far should one go in order not to evade anything? Should one die by one’s own hand, or keep hoping despite all? We must first make a quick inventory, on the level of intellect.

***

The mind’s first step is to distinguish true from false. But as soon as we reflect on our own thoughts, the first thing we discover is a contradiction. It’s useless to force ourselves to be convincing. Over the centuries no-one has proved this more clearly and elegantly than Aristotle. “The often-ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy themselves. When we say all is true, we declare the truth of the opposite proposition, thus declaring the falsity of our own proposition (because its opposite refuses to allow its own truth). And if one says all is false, then the statement itself must be false too. If I say that the only false statement is the one opposite to my own, or that the only statement not false is my own, I still find myself obliged to admit an infinite number of true or false statements. For in delivering a true statement, I declare at the same time that it is true, and so on to infinity.”

This vicious circle is merely the first of a series, where the mind, turning in on itself, gets sucked into a vertiginous spiral. These paradoxes are irreducibly simple. Whatever the word-games and logical acrobatics, understanding is primarily a matter of bringing things together into unity. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate processes, is to connect with the deepest feeling of the whole man as he faces his own universe. It demands intimate contact, and thirsts for clarity. For man, the only way to understand the world is to render it in human terms, put his own stamp upon it. The cat’s world isn’t the same as the anteater’s. Every human thought is anthropomorphic–it could not be otherwise. The mind striving to understand reality can’t be satisfied without translating it into thought. If man could recognise that the universe could also love and suffer, he’d reach an understanding with it. If thought could find eternal relations embodied in the changing mirror of earthly phenomena, which could be summarised into a unique principle: that would be an intellectual joy to make the abode of the blessed appear like a tawdry fake. This longing for unity, this appetite for the absolute conveys the essence of the human drama. It doesn’t mean that the longing can get easily satisfied. For if, crossing the gulf between desire and fulfilment, we agree with Parmenides in asserting the One (whatever that may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind asserting total unity, whilst demonstrating its own separateness, and the very diversity which it claims to resolve. This further vicious circle completes the stifling of our hopes.

So much for the obvious. Once again, I note these things not as interesting in themselves, but for where they lead us. Another obvious fact—man’s mortality—has led some to extremes. In this essay it’s worth keeping constantly in mind the gap between what we think we know and what we really know. In the guise of ignorance, we go along with ideas which would turn our lives upside down if they were deep-felt experience. Such a tangle of contradiction demonstrates how separate we are from our own creations. So long as the mind stays silent and makes no move towards realizing its hopes, it sees its own reflection in the well-ordered unity of its longing. But the moment it makes a move, everything cracks and shatters, splitting the realm of the known into a myriad shimmering shards. After this, there’s no going back to reconstruct the familiar surface of things and the peace of mind which they once offered. After centuries of investigations, so often abandoned, the thinkers among us have no doubt this is true for all knowledge. Setting aside professional rationalists, the rest of us are left to despair of truly knowing anything. A really meaningful history of human thought would be about its successive recantations and inadequacies.

Can there be anyone or anything that I can really claim to know? There is the heart within me: I can feel it, and confirm its existence. I can touch this world, and again, I confirm that it exists. There my science ends, the rest is all a construction. For if I try to grasp this “me” about which I’m so sure, if I try to define and summarise it, it’s like water running through my fingers. One by one, I could depict all the aspects it assumes, and that others see in it: this upbringing, that birth, this enthusiasm, that silence, this nobility, that baseness. But these things can’t be added together. This heart of mine can never be defined. Between the certainty that I exist, and being certain what my existence comprises, there lies an unfathomable gulf. I’ll be a stranger to myself forever. In psychology as in logic, there are truths, but no single truth. “Know thyself”, says Socrates, but it means no more than the prescription of the confessional: “be virtuous”. Longing is there, but ignorance too. The topics are great but the games are sterile. They are only legitimate to the extent that we’re content with something rough-and-ready.

Here are trees, I feel how their bark is gnarled. Here’s water, I taste it. Scents of grass and stars; nights; evenings where the soul unwinds; how can I deny the power and strength of this world? Yet all the science on earth can’t convince me that the world is mine. You describe it, you teach me to analyse and classify. You enumerate the laws of nature, and in my thirst to know I accept them as true. You disassemble its parts: I get increasingly hopeful. Finally you tell me that this glorious universe is reducible to atoms, and atoms are reducible to electrons. All this is good and I wait for you to go on. But then you speak of an invisible planetary system where electrons revolve round a nucleus. You explain the world in an image. So I see that you’ve reached the level of poetry. Now I’ll never know anything. Before I have time to get annoyed, you’ve already changed your theory. So this science which was supposed to teach me everything ends in conjecture; its lucidity darkens into metaphor; its uncertainty resolves itself into art. I didn’t need all that effort. The soft lines of these hills, the evening’s hand falling on my troubled heart—these teach me much more. I’m brought back to my starting-point. I understand that if science can help me grasp phenomena, and make an inventory of them, it still doesn’t explain the world. Even if I could run my finger over every surface, I still wouldn’t know any more than I do. You offer me the choice between a description which is certain yet teaches me nothing, and conjectures which claim to teach me, but lack any certainty. As a stranger to myself and the world, with no weapons other than thoughts which contradict themselves the moment they affirm something, how come I can only attain peace by rejecting knowledge and experience? How come my urge to conquer comes up against a brick wall impervious to all my efforts? Exerting my will merely stirs up paradoxes. Everything’s arranged to give birth to a tainted repose: produced out of indifference, a somnolent heart, or renunciation of this world.

Intuition too tells me, in its own way, that this world is absurd. Blind reason, its opposite, may well claim that all is clear: I’ve been waiting for proof and hoping it’s true. Yet centuries of pretension have passed by; and looking over the heads of so many eloquent and persuasive figures, I know it isn’t true. On this plane at least, there’s no happiness if I can’t know. This universal reason, whether practical or ideal, this determinism, these categories supposed to explain everything—common sense finds them laughable. They have nothing to do with the mind. They belie its true nature, which is to be shackled. It is within this limited and undecipherable universe that man’s destiny must henceforth acquire its sense. A throng of irrationals has arisen, which will surround him till his ultimate end. With his restored and newly-focused clarity, the feeling of the absurd becomes distinct and particular. I said that the world is absurd, but I went too fast. The world just isn’t reasonable, that’s all one can say about it. So this is the absurd: the conflict between the actual unreason and the hopeless desire for clarity which so profoundly resonates in man. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it’s the only thing which links them. It ties them to one another just as hate can tear beings apart. That’s the only thing I can see clearly in this measureless universe of my adventures. Let us stop here. If I take it as true, this absurdity which governs my relation to life, if I permeate myself with this feeling which grips me as I regard the circus of this world, with this clear-sightedness imposed on me by my scientific discipline, then I must sacrifice my all to these certainties; and look them in the eye, to make sure I hold fast to them. Above all I must adapt my conduct to them, and follow them through, regardless of consequence. I’m talking of honesty. But I first want to know if thought can still stay alive in these deserts.

I know already that thought has at least been to these deserts, and found sustenance there. It realised that it had fed hitherto on ghosts. It provided occasion for some of the most urgent themes in human reflection.

From the moment it is recognised, absurdity becomes a passion, the most heart-rending of all. To know if you can live with your passions, to know if you can accept their fundamental law, which is to sear your heart whilst exalting it: there lies the question. But it’s not the question to ask ourselves yet. It’s at the centre of this experience and we’ll come back to it. Let us above all recognise the themes and impulses born of that time wilderness. Everyone these days knows how to list them. There have always been defenders of the irrational. The flame of what we may call “humiliated thought” has never yet been extinguished. The critique of rationalism has been made so many times, you’d think there was nothing more to to be done. Yet our own time witnesses a rebirth of these paradoxical systems which try to trip up reason as if it had always been forging ahead in the forefront of thought. That’s not so much a proof of reason’s efficacy, as of its evergreen hopes. If we look at history, we see two persisting attitudes: man’s essential passion torn between the pull towards unity, and his clear vision of the walls which box him in.

Perhaps never, in any epoch, has the attack on reason been so powerful as today. Since Zarathustra’s great cry: “By chance, it is the world’s most ancient form of nobility. I granted it it to all things when I said no eternal will stands above them”, since Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, “that malady which ends in death with nothing thereafter”, we have been assailed by a succession of weighty and tormenting themes, all absurd; or at any rate—and this distinction is critical—irrational and religious.

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(1) Apologue: an allegorical story intended to convey a useful lesson; a moral fable. (Applied more especially to a story in which the actors or speakers are taken from the brute creation or from inanimate nature.)—Oxford English Dictionary [Translator’s note]

(2) But not in the proper sense. It’s not a matter of definition, but of adding up the various feelings which make up the absurd. Having added them up, we still haven’t attained a full definition of the absurd. [Author’s note]

(3) Jean-Paul Sartre. [Translator’s note]