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From One to All the Evolution of Camus's Absurdism JARED L. SMITH, M.A. MAY 2020 PHILOSOPHY FROM ONE TO ALL: THE EVOLUTION OF CAMUS’S ABSURDISM (83 pp.) Thesis Advisor: Benjamin Berger In this thesis, I argue that there is a metaphysical shift in Albert Camus’s philosophy which allows him to build an ethics of revolt in his later work out of his earlier, individual-focused account of absurdism. Against Herbert Hochberg and other scholars who argue that Camus’s later work is inconsistent with his earlier work, this thesis tracks the progression of Camus’s thought in order to demonstrate that his ethics does not constitute a rupture with his past work but a consistent evolution of it. First dealing with the problem of suicide covered in the Sisyphean cycle, the thesis goes on to examine the ethics of rebellion in the Promethean cycle and concludes with a speculative consideration of the third, incomplete cycle on love. Taken together, these chapters show that the consistent evolution of Camus’s absurdism argues the reaction to the absurd that one ought to have is that of agape: the recognition of humanity’s innate power to create value as a transcendental structure of consciousness. FROM ONE TO ALL: THE EVOLUTION OF CAMUS’ ABSURDISM A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Jared L. Smith May 2020 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Jared L. Smith B.A., Marian University, 2018 M.A., Kent State University, 2020 Approved by Benjamin Berger ____________________________, Advisor Michael Byron ______________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy James Blank ________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------vi CHAPTERS I. INTRODUCTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 II. THE SISYPHEAN CYCLE ------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 1. INTRODUCTION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 2. WHAT IS THE ABSURD? ------------------------------------------------------------ 7 3. PHILOSOPHICAL SUICIDE ------------------------------------------------------- 14 4. MEURSAULT AS THE UNIVERSE: REIMAGINING THE STRANGER --- 19 5. A PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH ------------------------------------------------------- 31 III. THE PROMETHEAN CYCLE ------------------------------------------------------------- 38 1. INTRODUCTION -------------------------------------------------------------------- 38 2. AGAINST NIHILISM: THE QUESTION OF MURDER ----------------------- 40 3. SLAVE AGAINST MASTER: “ALL OR NOTHING” -------------------------- 48 4. FROM ONE TO ALL: THE PLAGUE AGAINST THE STRANGER ---------- 54 5. I AS AN OTHER ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 58 6. THE JUST ASSASSIN: THE ETHICS OF ABSURDITY IN ACTION -------- 62 IV. A PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE? --------------------------------------------------------------- 66 1. INTRODUCTION -------------------------------------------------------------------- 66 2. GRECIAN LOVE --------------------------------------------------------------------- 67 3. AGAPE IS THE RECOGNITION OF A STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 73 iv 4. CAMUS’S TURN TO AGAPE ------------------------------------------------------ 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 81 v Acknowledgements I would like to express my special gratitude to a number of different individuals and institutions. The first of these is my amazing wife Sam as without her continuous love and support this project (as well as my Masters as a whole) would have never been possible. I would next like to thank my thesis committee of Dr. Berger, Dr. Barnbaum, and Dr. Garchar. In addition to this I would like to specially thank Dr. Aldea who helped me with the project that turned into the beginning of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Zavota, Dr. Kim, Dr. Deb, and Dr. Ryan. In addition to those professors, I would also like to take the time to thank Nicholas Charles and Griffin Werner who have, after listening to me pitch a number of different variations of this thesis over the course of two years still call me a colleague and friend. I also wish to thank Tirza, Hyo Won, Colin, Hyeon, Joe, Cara, Matt, Will and Brant. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Reuter, Dr. Malone, and Dr. Nichols along with the rest of the philosophy and religion faculty at Saint Joseph’s College that helped to instill the love of philosophy in me. vi Chapter One: Introduction “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” (Myth, 3). This is how Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus. By the end of the work, he has ruled that suicide, both physical and “philosophical”, is something from which one should always turn away. And yet, less than a decade later, in the play “The Just Assassins” and the philosophical essay, The Rebel, Camus seems to take a very different position. He concludes in the former that the assassin not only should but must kill himself. When stated like this, it would appear that Camus has contradicted himself, turned his back on his earlier work, and this leads to a disjointed picture of the philosopher. Herbert Hochberg has gone so far to say that, given this apparent inconsistency, Camus’s work is “incoherent” (Hochberg, 100). However, this could not be further from the truth. In this thesis, I argue that Camus’s thought is coherent, but this can only be seen if we understand it as an evolution of thought, a development that begins with the Sisyphean cycle and builds into the more complicated ethics of the Promethean cycle. I also argue that this consistent evolution continues into the unwritten Nemesis cycle, in which Camus was on his way to concluding that the reaction to the absurd that one ought to have is that of agape: the recognition of humanity’s innate power to create value as a transcendental structure of consciousness. James Feibleman writes of Camus that, 1 He was neither a great novelist nor a great dramatist; his work is too non- specific and undramatic. For the most part, he was rational but at the same time superficial, often reasoning closely about what hardly matters, pages which sometimes give off the appearance of philosophy but deal with trivial generalities, the finished work amounting only to weak philosophical essays and glimpses of plans for fiction. It is difficult to see anything of permanent worth in all of this if we confine our judgment strictly to his writings in their proper categories. Camus did not advance the cause of either the novel or philosophy, and these are the two fields to which he devoted most of his attention. And yet there is a tremendous value in Camus which is worth recognizing and saving (Feibleman, 281-2). While I disagree with Feibleman’s claims about Camus’s philosophy and novels, I do agree with his conclusion of a hidden value that we must recognize and save. It is the work of this thesis to recognize this hidden value, which I argue is the development of love into agape. Thus, in the final chapter of this thesis, I will argue that the development of Camus’s metaphysics corresponds to a development in his understanding of love, from eros to philia and finally to agape. This interpretation is accomplished, in part, by combining the literature and philosophical treatise of the cycles focusing on both, not only focusing on the main themes of each cycle but also highlighting the evolution of the concept of love for Camus. It is important to note that this thesis will grant equal weight to both the treatises and the literature that Camus has written to fully flesh out Camus’s philosophy, as to leave out either would not paint a complete picture. That is to say, in the body of this thesis I will directly disagree with Feibleman’s understanding of Camus both as a philosopher and as a writer, demonstrating the value that comes from combining them both to highlight the important, dramatic underpinnings of both. The second chapter of this work will deal with the above problem of suicide, briefly explicating the absurd and highlighting the fact that for Camus it is a relational phenomenon; the world is not absurd for Camus, but the relationship between the human and the world yields 2 absurdity. I will then consider Camus’s taxonomy of classical responses to the absurd—all of which are forms of escapism—in a discussion of philosophical and physical suicide. The former will consider religion and other philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Husserl, while the latter will be expanded into a broader “philosophy of death”; however, both will in turn be criticized by Camus. I will then offer an in-depth and novel analysis of Camus’s The Stranger, in which I argue that Meursault should not be read, as he ordinarily is, as the questioning human grappling with the absurdity of existence, but rather the silent universe against which the other characters rebel. The chapter will then conclude with a discussion of The Myth of Sisyphus, in which we find that solipsistic rebellion against our deaths in order to create
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