We left Albert Camus as he was dispensing of all the leap-takers — the philosophers who, instead of bearing the weight of existence on their own, found some shortcut to assist them (I’m referring to the previous post, if you missed it). The most frequent of Camus’s targets here was Kierkegaard, who was reportedly a mysterious character until the last installments in his body of work. According to Camus, his final words reeked of a religious attitude. “Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is…’the sacrifice of the intellect’” (p. 37).

Different authors took the existential line of thought in many directions, but as Camus pointed out, they did tend to justify the absurdity of life with some sort of claim to the eternal. Kierkegaard was probably the only philosopher connected to Existentialism who ever defaulted to a purely religious conclusion. But still, one can’t help but wonder how someone could pick apart all the layers, witness pure existence in its true form, and then justify it by concluding that there’s something that exists above and beyond our immediate life. You’ll recall that even Steppenwolf’s Hermine says all true actions live on in eternity.

This is what bothered Camus, and I think it’s why he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. As I said in the last post, it’s a very subtle change in outlook between the Existentialists and Camus’s Absurdism — but it is a change nonetheless. The Existentialists (as I’ve come to know them) were remarkably skilled at describing the “nausea” brought on by life, but they were terrible at suggesting what to do about it. Those with suicidal tendencies before their existential investigation were often left with even greater death-bound impulses. In short, Existentialists sought a way to live in spite of the absurd, while Camus, on the other hand, chose to live for the absurd.

“Living is keeping the absurd alive. […] One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. […] It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but wrongly. […] Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. […] That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. ” (pp. 54-55).

Those familiar with my rants may be thinking of Henry Miller. Back in March I wrote two posts (on Mar 11 and Mar 21) about Miller and George Orwell, after reading that Orwell had criticized Miller’s style of “protest.” To sum it up, Orwell’s style was to attack the governments that had swung too closely to totalitarianism. Miller’s style was more of a protest against all of existence — hence why I think it fits in with Camus’s suggestions.

I’ve only read three of his books, but it’s clear to me that Miller experienced more happiness in his life than most of my favorite writers. That’s just one of the reasons why he’s an enigma, why I can’t cross his name off and keep moving down the list…so to speak. Camus and Miller both understood that, though the absurd does seem to negate our natural tendencies in life, it in no way prevents us from adapting to its conditions. Human beings are the most adaptable creatures on this planet! And our imagination is more powerful than any other tool we possess!

Those who have come this far in the struggle are often compelled to write about it. I know not what drives a man to write — even looking at myself. I know I was bored, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, etc…and I was deeply inspired by the personal fiction of Jack Kerouac. But at the time, it just seemed like something that would be a worthwhile activity even if nothing came of it. Even if I didn’t get paid for it or become famous because of it, writing seemed like a purposeful way to spend my time. Now three years have gone by and — after an arduous process of self-realization — I still feel essentially the same.

In the concluding section of Sisyphus, Camus suggests that a life of absurd creation is, without a doubt, a life worth living:

“He must give the void its colors. [...] A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. […] A succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. […] But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he posesses” (pp. 114-115).

“The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality” (p. 115).

“In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. […] To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s own fate. […] There is no frontier between being and appearing. […] The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings” (p. 117).

But you see that creation is of utmost importance. To continue to create is a man’s way of revolting against the demanding and often unrewarding nature of creative activity. In other words, hardly anyone will ever become famous for writing. Most who realize this after hoping for fame will stop writing. Those who continue do so in an absurd fashion, because it will appear to bystanders that the writer is wasting his time. The absurd creator disagrees:

“He knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life…in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. […] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (pp. 122-123).

After two posts I still haven’t explained the myth itself. Sisyphus is a character sentenced by the gods to the underworld where he must roll a heavy rock up a mountain, whereupon it just rolls back down. This would drive most to despair (if not insanity), but Sisyphus is clever. His victory lies in his continued activity, which he performs without hoping that it will end. By simply pressing on, he revolts against the gods who devised this terrible state of existence. Camus said he prefers to think about the calm moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of the mountain — when he can take a deep breath, survey the land around him, and then stroll leisurely down the slope again.

But don’t be mistaken. Camus provides no manual, nor could there ever be one. Every man troubled by existence must imagine his own happiness. I haven’t quite accomplished it yet, but I feel a lot better about the process than I did before. And with that said, I may be moving on to the next phase in this process of inner discovery. As always, you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

On a very un-nauseating inauguration day for the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, I turn to a book about a much less appealing human experience than we Americans are currently going through.

The first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre seems to be one of the best templates for the Existentialist fiction and philosophy that arose in the mid 1900s. The book was initially published in 1938, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. The story concerns a man of about 30 years of age named Antoine Roquetin, who is staying in the coastal town of Bouville, France to finish researching and writing a historical nonfiction book. Suddenly he is struck by a lasting sensation which he calls “the Nausea” – in short, a feeling of terror caused by the very concept of existence, and disgust over all things that surround him, living and inanimate.

The novel itself doesn’t present a clear picture of what Sartre’s Extistentialism is really all about. But, conveniently, the introduction by Hayden Carruth does, and so that is the source I use here. Carruth starts by saying that “Existentialism is a philosophy–if a philosophy at all–that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world” (p. vi).

(Somehow the song “This Is Our Emergency” by Pretty Girls Make Graves comes to mind…). Carruth points out that this outlook has appeared throughout history and literature, as far back Biblical mythology and ancient Greek philosophy. But modern Existentialism was cultivated primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, with a bit of help from Dostoevski. However, Carruth claims that Sartre’s Existentialism was unique to the 20th Century, and was in direct opposition to the philosophy of Hegel:

“Hegelianism was the philosophy of history and the mass. By projecting a Final Reality toward which all history flows in a process of ever-refining synthesis, Hegel submerged the individual consciousness in a grand unity of ideal mind. [...] The Existentialist knows that the self is not submerged…and any system of thought that overrides this [individual] suffering is tyrannical [...] From this comes man’s despair, but also, if he has courage, his existential integrity” (p. viii).

Carruth suggests that philosophy is not a progression towards an end point, in the way that human life is a progression towards death. He argues that, if man were to keep on living indefinitely, his philosophy would keep on changing. “Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy” (p. xiii).

Living this deep in philosophical literature, I can’t help but wonder why so many people take an “all or none” approach to philosophy. It seems that if one system doesn’t explain everything, people eventually pass it off as useless. Why not pick and choose from various schools of thought, in order to synthesize a working philosophy to live by? It seems that Carruth would have agreed with that notion, when he said, “Philosophical truth assumes many forms precisely because times change and men’s needs change with them” (p. vi). Although, for the record, Existentialism is the most valid philosophical realm that I have found thus far in my individual studies.

Another passage reminds me of Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown (which I’ve written about here before). “Man the thinker is a by-product, a nonessential component of reality, and he and all his works cling to existence with a hold that is tenuous and feeble” (p. ix).

“The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning–this is its self-defining cause–and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea” (p. xi).

Nausea can be considered incomplete if only because it doesn’t provide an escape for Roquetin. But if taken in conjunction with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” we could perhaps assume that there is no escape from existence, and that Roquetin’s priority is to find some way to cope. As Carruth puts it, “Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out” (p. xiv). Roquetin hints at both music and writing (or art in general) as promising elements to include in his future life. And I guess that makes me feel better for being a music junkie and blogger/journalist/aspiring novelist.