Writings

Preamble

This started as an exercise during an introductory course on close reading. The task was to write an introduction, a body paragraph and 3 topic sentences in response to Nietzsche, who wrote:

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

I ended up thinking about it for two weeks because, for the lack of a better description, the text fought back. I spent an ungodly amount of time thinking about Camus’ philosophy. Then I spent another ungodly amount of time trying to write something vaguely literary without veering into a philosophical exposition. This is the result.

The Essay

Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) sets out to elucidate the philosophy of the absurd, as opposed to adjacent philosophies such as existentialism. One simplified encapsulation of existentialism lies in Nietzsche’s assertion: “he who has a why can bear to live with almost any how”. Reformulated another way, Nietzsche proposes a conditional relation between meaning – the why – and endurance. As a philosophical essay striving to distinguish its absurdist idea, The Myth of Sisyphus can be read as a response to Nietzschean existentialism. Specifically, Camus subverts this conditional relation on three levels – experientially, logically and philosophically to pave the way for a solution to the absurd.

In Absurdity and Suicide, Camus switches from third-person narration to second-person narration as an experiential way of understanding how the absurd destabilises Nietzsche’s “why”. Following his assertion that “beginning to think is beginning to be undermined”, Camus transitions from a dispassionate “one would have to know…” to the second-person pronoun “killing yourself amounts to confessing…that life is too much for you” and “dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized…the absence of any profound reason for living”. Both instances discuss hypothetically the reason for suicide – either external or internal. The switch in point of view follows Camus’ turn from external causes to an individual’s interiority. Simultaneously, it creates a distancing effect from external reasons for suicide and an immediating effect with Camus’ belief that having a Nietzschean “why” brings absurdity into sharp relief. In the first instance, using the third-person “one” renders the discussion abstract. The switch to second-person “you” then forces a shift in the reader’s mindset; it compels them to relate to the hypothetical discussion and grasp the tension between thought and absurdity on an intellectual and experiential level. This experience is then finally augmented by parataxis – “the ridiculous character…the absence… the insane character… the uselessness of suffering.” The paratactical construction mirrors the force of absurdity in its choice of extreme adjectives (“ridicuous”, “insane”) and its structure – a relentless series of revelations regarding the absurd. In so doing, Camus questions the Nietzschean idea of “why” by showing that thinking about one’s existence gives rise to the absurd. Simultaneously, he also attacks the “how” by showing how the absurd renders suffering futile. 

Moreover, Camus refuses the binary logic of suicide through the use of recursive qualifiers in a series of hypotactical constructions. When questioning the binary yes/no answer to the problem of suicide, Camus engages in a series of hypotaxis with contrasting connectors and conditionals – “But it is wrongly assumed…”, “A priori and reversing the terms…”, “if I accept the Nietzschean criterion…”, “on the other hand…” and “on the contrary…”. This meandering hypotaxis mirrors not only an introspective way of reasoning but also Camus’ sustained delay in resolving the problem of suicide. By using contrasting connectors repeatedly, Camus constantly contradicts and refuses the binary solution. The recursive qualifiers reflect a struggle and perform a sense of argumentative delay before finally being explored further through conditionals and hypotheticals. These lead to the overturning of a key assumption – if people deem life not worth living and choose “no”, that choice is predicated on the belief that there must initially have been a value to living, that they “think ‘yes’ in one way or another”. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s aphorism can be formalised as “If P(has a why), then Q(can bear almost any how)”. It also invites the consideration of its inverse: “If not P (lack of a why), then not Q(unable to bear any how)”. Through hypotaxis, Camus destabilises this inverse and shows that rejecting life presupposes prior valuation; this revelation undermines the neat conditional relation of P→Q.

Finally, Camus invokes a series of thinkers to distinguish his response on confronting the absurd from them. Towards the end of Absurd Walls and in Philosophical Suicide, he enumerates philosophers ranging from “Heidegger” who “thinks and talks only of [anxiety]”, “Jaspers” who “tries to recover the Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets”, “Chestov”, who eschews “universal rationalism” and privileges a transcendant “exception”, “Kierkegaard” who “returns to [Christianity’s] harshest aspect and “Husserl”, whose phenomenological methods “enumerate what it cannot transcend” but which simultaneously give rise to an “abstract polytheism”. This enumeration and extended critique simultaneously serves as an appeal to authority and an attempt to transcend said authorities. In the first instance, the listing of several existentialists and a phenomenologist helps locate Camus within a long tradition of thinkers grappling with an irrational, indifferent world. This lends his attempt at doing the same a sense of authority derived from historicity as opposed to a standalone problem conjured on a whim. Second and more importantly, Camus then pushes further than these thinkers by dispassionately critiquing them for “[taking] the leap” by fixating on anxiety (Heidegger), religion (Jaspers, Chestov, Kierkegaard) or consciousness as meaning-making (Husserl). Each thinker is shown to elude the absurd in progressively lesser degrees, ending with Husserl whose refusal to ascribe ontological explanations towards the world came close to Camus’ ideal. This progression positions Camus as the natural next step with his solution: endurance as revolt.

For Nietzsche, enduring suffering is possible given a teleological basis. However, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus undermines that clean relation by showing that the need for teleological justification in fact gives rise to the absurd. Furthermore, the logical connection between endurance and meaning is thrown into question; Camus shows that existence cannot be logically reduced to the binary conditional structure implied by Nietzsche. Finally, where previous thinkers have sought to find an ontological structure within which the collapse of meaning into the absurd makes sense, Camus eschews such foundations. This dismantling of Nietzsche’s aphorism gives rise to the question of how endurance is still possible in the face of such total collapse – which sets the stage nicely for Camus to introduce his answer of revolt vis-a-vis a reimagined allegory of Sisyphus.