O my soul, do not aspire to
immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.
– Pindar, Pythian iii
An Absurd Reasoning
Absurdity and Suicide
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. . . . That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.
Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had greatly changed since, and that the experience had “undermined” him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, the uselessness of suffering.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, 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. All healthy men having thought of their own death, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death. . . .
. . . . Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments. One merely has to refuse to be misled by the confusions, divorces and inconsistencies previously pointed out. One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth — yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide — that is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an unjust — in other words, logical — thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Men who die by their own hand consequently follow to its conclusion their emotional inclination. Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only problem to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without reckless passion, in the sole light of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source. This is what I call an absurd reasoning. Many have begun it. I do not yet know whether or not they kept to it.
When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims: “This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can any longer become an object for me,” he is evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. 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. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself.
Absurd Walls
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse or a repulsion in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe — in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as “definite,” as remote and as “present” as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity.
At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection. It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate them practically, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if I say that I know him a little better at the hundredth counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as well as by his sincere feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume. It is clear that in this way I am defining a method. But it is also evident that that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. For methods imply metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet. Similarly, the last pages of a book are already contained in the first pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated and the climate make itself felt.
Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.
* * *
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is thinking about my be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins” — this is important. 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. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. There is nothing original about these remarks. But they are obvious; that is enough for a while, during a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere “anxiety,” as Heidegger says, is at the source of everything.
[From Albert Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus]
Each time it tries to say more than this
The tip of the tongue must wrestle a leech.
– Bill Knott, Lines from Future Poems
So what’s your take on this? Is Camus saying anything interesting here about suicide? IMO he is not. He is trying to make suicide into a philosophical issue, but surely it is almost never a philosophical issue for people who are serious about suicide, and not just idly toying with the idea, as Camus is. If I decide to shoot myself in the head, it will most likely be because MY life is unbearable, not because I have been musing upon life in general or loitering outside phone booths, being struck by the apparent emptiness of the gestures of the strangers making the calls.
Thanks for the darkly amusing comment. I thought I should but was unwilling to reread this Camus passage, the details of which I don’t remember at all, before responding to you. I think you’re right that contemplating/committing suicide has very little to do with philosophy in the intellectually-rigorous-discipline sense in which we are accustomed to think of it.
But if we take the fundamental question of philosophy to be How To Live, and then take the issue of suicide as a metaphor, or synecdoche, for that question (for is not suicide a solution to the problem of existence, albeit at an ugly polar extreme of possible solutions?) . . . I think Camus chose to write about the issue of whether or not to commit suicide at least in part because it is dark, dramatic, controversial, eye-catching — while a more down-to-earth version of his fundamental question of philosophy might be rather, as we said, “How should I live my life?”
But I’ll grant you this: loitering outside of phone booths is VERY existential.
I agree with the way you rewrite the question which is fundamental for Camus (and for many others). However, it is wrong (I hesitate to add) that the answer to the question of How To Live is to be found in philosophy. I write as someone who has spent a couple of decades wandering around the dusty aisles of philosophy looking for an answer to just that question (the best years of my life – gone!). I found nothing substantive. However, I admit that I didn’t get round to reading any Kierkegaard. Maybe the answer was there.
This summer I read (almost by accident) “Wind, Sand and Stars” by Saint-Exupery – a work of literature, definitely not philosophy – and it was practically an epiphany. There were no answers to questions, but there was a resounding affirmation of life that moved me practically to tears – an affirmation of what I already knew – of course – but which could never be framed as the conclusion of a philosophical argument.
The fundamental question of philosophy since Descartes is Truth (not the meaning of life). Philosophy becomes the critique of metaphysics. Philosophy has not been able to spin out any substantive truths (of the sort that we might be able to live by) from some synthetic a priori, as Kant hoped, but it has been able to launch interesting criticisms of other people’s everyday ideas about where the Truth lies (in the heavens, in the sciences, in your gut feelings, etc).
For philosophy to guide life it would have to legislate, but when people grant a right to philosophers to legislate the chances are that it won’t be long before they roll out the guillotine. This (I think) is the basic idea Camus was trying to defend in The Rebel – a much better book that the Myth of Sisyphus.
Philosophy of the useful sort knows that it is useless. Its utility lies in clearing the way for an affirmation of life which is free of illusions. That affirmation, though, can only occur on the terrain of life – pre-philosophical life – life in the phone booth, if you like. It cannot occur on the dusty etherial plane of philosophy.
I will definitely check out “Wind, Sand and Stars” — sounds excellent! (Funny, I never read “The Little Prince”… I haven’t read “The Rebel” yet either.)
I too got burned out on philosophy, but still find some of the literary/poetic/mystical/continental/existential-leaning philosophy interesting at times. I guess I now prefer pretty language to big ideas — the latter cased in the former being the only philosophy I’ll take the time to read.
Your last paragraph sounds awfully Nietzschean, does it not?
Perhaps the fundamental questions of philosophy are better engaged in works of literature?
Camus says himself: “Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.”
I think he understands that suicide is not a result of any philosophical musing or discovery. I don’t think he’s trying to answer the question of “what drives one to suicide”.
[...] jumped off of his balcony during a fight with his wife. Some suicides, as Camus wrote, are “prepared within the silence of the heart” – but not [...]
Thank you for posting this. That is what I was looking for and wanted so much to hear.
This is a very interesting website that I fell upon happenstance. In my recent exploration on the subject of happiness and the happy life which people like Camus and Sartre have delved into with a serious intent to promote good faith in this day and age of bad faith coupled with neurotic and hysterical living; I noticed that the word happy was derived from something that happened to an individual or something one came upon happenstance which changed your life.So naturally I conclude that the best things in life are come upon by chance or happenstance which should cover everything that will ever happen to us.
I think that in this epoch we are truly seeking meaning in our lives and not necessarily ‘truth’ or ‘the truth’. That may be too big of a project for us right now as human beings. Perhaps if we attain godhood the ‘Truth’ shall shed more light. Man must be a paradox of meaning for he has not, to my knowledge, conquered the dualism of his existence, the life and death, good and evil problems facing us. His attempt to find self-transcendence through religion, psychology, philosophy and even science hasn’t worked for he is still faced with the dilemma of the collective experience of humanity which must be shared collectively; although the input is individualized.
I think Camus and others would agree that we are responsible for everything we think and do through the awareness of our conscience. I paraphrase Camus when he said that nothing is worth anything unless it comes from our conscious state. I suppose our happiness, which must be the end goal, since being miserable and unhappy does not feel so good and suffering may be just the right teacher that humans need to be challenged to usurp our limitations. We are fooling ourselves if we think that the relationship with the absurdity in life and all of the limits expressed through our attempt to grapple with the absurd, the abyss and the filling in of the void in our lives with knowledge and wisdom and not pseudo-fillers like ambition, materialism and sometimes the psychological crutches of our addictions that must be solve our problems right now and/or be brushed over with a panoply of panaceas because humans by definition are problem solvers. The other line I hate is everything happens for a reason. Well what about the things that happen for no reason especially when we first embark in our relationship with the absurd?
I hope I can contribute more to the expanding discussion about the love affair we have with finding meaning in our lives and so enjoy life more fully even if we are just playing out a scene from the dream of a dog.
Sincerely yours; Baret
I need to edit this a bit. How do I do that. Jack
I very much disagree that suicide is not a philosophical matter. My best guess is that while it isn’t *always* a philosophical question, the roots of the ideas that compel people to resort to it can be philosophical in nature, though obviously there’s always the chance that is the one difference between people who either don’t ever follow through on attempting it/don’t succeed and those who succeed, since I have only spoken to the former. I have spent considerable time discussing the experience of finding death preferable to life, and I have struggled with the sickening sense that if the world has no order other than the one we already recognize consisting of natural laws, and our existence is only as meaningful as we recognize it as meaningful (and for some, this is extremely difficult to stomach), then the patterns of pain, loneliness, and despair that characterize the lives of some leads to the feeling/thought “I would have been better off never having been born”, which, while seeming absurd to those whose constitution and experiences (and I think *both* are involved) enable them to enjoy a relatively validating life, can only really be dismissed by believing life to be inherently sacred. I am not sure it is, though having written that, I’m now struggling to even get a sense of the meaning of “sanctity”.
Anyway, once one theorizes that given the knowledge of what their life would hold and the decision whether or not to live it, they would choose a complete lack of experience to what they see as a majority of negative experiences, the question of whether, then, they would be better off terminating all experiences rather than continue risking more and more negative ones can completely consume the mind. Whether there is any actual truth value to their perceptions (or any of our perceptions for that matter) doesn’t strike me as an important factor when the experience is so strongly emotional and personal.
There is a tendency in some people to reject the idea that death could be preferable to life, and they dismiss the possibility that anyone not in agonizing pain from a terminal disease could be justified in believing this. The sentiment is that those desperately hopeless people must be weak, mentally ill, and /or their belief is the result of flawed thinking for which the thinker can be held responsible. All I know is, after attempting to challenge every single thought that occurred to me in the course of contemplating suicide, I found the experience to be a deeply philosophical one that in fact compelled me to explore existentialism and led me to this very book. These thoughts can make someone feel incredibly isolated, and reading this gave me an incredible sense of relief merely by existing as evidence that my fears and anxiety were shared by others- people who *did* manage to lead lives I, as an observer/outsider but someone who values empathy, can only appraise as meaningful. Even if I reduce my evaluation to the undeniable fact that “this helped me”, that gives me hope that I have been unable find in any other discipline. Admittedly, I have a very difficult time separating philosophy and psychology, but I also am not sure they can be evaluated both separately *and* completely. When I referred to our perceptions earlier, I had the nagging thought that this seems to be a question of mental health, because there are people who perceive the world in such a way that the rest of the world collectively agrees they are mistaken (I am painfully aware of the implications of/problems with this statement :)), but when ideas are less obviously logically flawed and instead seem fuzzy and subjective, this is where I can’t yet separate philosophy and psychology.
[...] Camus wrote that suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical question.” Everything else outside of that is secondary. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus [...]