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Camus' Feeling of the Absurd

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Camus' Feeling of the Absurd J Value Inquiry https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9633-1 Camus’ Feeling of the Absurd Thomas Po¨lzler1 Ó The Author(s) 2018 In recent years an increasing number of analytic philosophers have become interested in the issue of the meaning of life (e.g., Cottingham 2003; Metz 2014; Wolf 2010; for an overview see Metz 2013). The majority of these philosophers have assumed that some lives are in fact meaningful. One among many conditions that have been claimed to be necessary and sometimes even sufficient for achieving meaning are certain affective mental states, such as emotions or feelings. Harry Frankfurt, for example, has argued that our lives are meaningful to the extent to which we care for or love things (1982a, b, 2004). And according to Susan Wolf, meaning requires both that we pursue objectively worthwhile projects and that we emotionally identify with or take pride in these projects (2010). In contrast to such non-nihilistic approaches, a number of contemporary analytic philosophers have also denied that meaning can be or at least actually is ever achieved at all (e.g., Martin 1993; Murphy 1982; Nagel 1986; Smith 2003). In the context of these views affective mental states have received far less attention. For example, nihilists have failed to investigate in detail which of these states (if any) promote recognizing the fact of life’s meaninglessness or which of these states result from this recognition. In advancing our understanding of these issues it therefore seems helpful to consider corresponding (typically more detailed and elaborated) debates in continental philosophy (e.g., Heidegger 1962; Sartre 1969, 2000). A particularly promising conception of nihilism’s affective dimension, and one that is particularly compatible with analytic approaches, has been provided by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus.1 1 Camus himself explicitly denied that he was a philosopher, and an existentialist in particular; see 1965: 1427, 1995: 113, 2005: 30. On an ordinary understanding of these terms, however, the above classification is surely appropriate. & Thomas Po¨lzler [email protected] 1 Department of Philosophy, University of Graz, Attemsgasse 25/II, 8010 Graz, Austria 123 T. Po¨lzler For Camus the fact that we cannot achieve meaning is part of what constitutes the so called absurd. He hence mainly discusses meaninglessness-related affective states under the heading of the ‘‘feeling of the absurd’’. Most clearly and thoroughly, this feeling is addressed in his earlier works, in particular in the Myth of Sisyphus (2005).2 Here Camus introduces an important distinction. He distinguishes between (1) the feeling of the absurd in a narrow sense and (2) the ‘‘appearances’’ of this feeling (also called ‘‘feelings of the absurd’’), by which he means the ways in which the feeling of the absurd manifests itself (2005: 9–10). Moreover, he discusses weariness, anxiety, strangeness, nausea, and horror in the face of one’s mortality as forms of such appearances (2005: 11–14). Camus-scholars have so far paid little attention to his thoughts about the feeling of the absurd (for notable exceptions see Bowker 2013; Carroll 2007; Reiff 1999). This non-consideration presumably traces back to two facts. First, the above mentioned remarks in the Myth of Sisyphus are rather brief. It therefore seems as if Camus did not ascribe much significance to the feeling of the absurd. And second, in examining this feeling Camus also repeatedly stressed that it is too ‘‘indeterminate’’, ‘‘vague’’, and ‘‘elusive’’ to allow of characterizations (2005: 9–10), and that it therefore cannot be appropriately analyzed at all (2005: 10). On closer consideration, however, the above facts do not warrant the feeling of the absurd’s non-consideration. Camus only said so little about this feeling because in his view it had already been helpfully examined by other philosophers and is well-known to ordinary people (2005: 14). He left no doubt that he actually regarded the feeling as highly significant (2005: 10–11, 27). Moreover, Camus’ claim that the feeling of the absurd cannot be characterized must be qualified as well. For one thing he only intended this claim to apply to the feeling of the absurd in the narrow sense, and not to the appearances of this feeling (which, as mentioned above, he actually characterized himself). For another thing, Camus also granted that even the feeling of the absurd in its narrow sense can at least be defined in terms of its function (as will be shown in this paper). If the above considerations are correct then a detailed philosophical analysis of the feeling of the absurd is both valuable as a piece of Camus scholarship and may also helpfully inform and complement nihilistic accounts of the meaning of life in analytic philosophy. This paper aims at providing such an analysis. It will investigate Camus’ conception of the feeling of the absurd in three steps. First, I will examine what Camus meant by the term ‘‘feeling’’ (Sec. 1). Second, I will investigate his notion of the ‘‘absurd’’ (Sec. 2). And third, based on the results of these considerations, I will determine the particular relation in which a feeling must stand to the absurd in order to qualify as a ‘‘feeling of the absurd’’ (Sec. 3). 2 The relation between Camus’ early and late philosophy is controversial. Some commentators have argued that his early and late philosophy form a ‘‘unity’’ (Schlette 1975: 181), or that they are at least linked by an ‘‘intellectual continuum’’ (Foley 2008: 4; see also Hochberg 1965: 96; Pieper 1984: 9). But this is most likely wrong (see, e.g., Mairhofer 1989: 89–98, 1999:7;Po¨lzler 2014: 99; Sagi 2002: 46, 113; van der Poel 2007: 19). There is a significant gap between Camus’ views about the nature and normative consequences of the absurd before the last years of World War II (e.g., 1946, 2005, 2008) and his views after this time (e.g. 1989, 1991). One reason why Camus mainly addressed the feeling of the absurd in his early work is that this work focuses more on the individual rather than on society. 123 Camus’ Feeling of the Absurd There are different legitimate approaches to interpreting Camus. Here I will take a rather conservative approach. This means that I will try to reconstruct Camus’ conception of the feeling of the absurd in a way that is as faithful to his own statements as possible. Only where taking these statements at face value would introduce severe implausibility or incoherence will I resort more strongly to what he should have (rather than to what he actually) said. Note that more liberal approaches (see, e.g., Bowker 2013, 2014; Sagi 2002) may yield valid and interesting conceptions of the feeling of the absurd as well, and are hence no less worthy of being pursued. They just do not yield the kind of conception that I am interested in here. Assuming my conservative approach, it will turn out that the feeling of the absurd is not, strictly speaking, a feeling. It is rather a conjunction of a mood (feeling of the absurd in the narrow sense) and of emotions that this mood tends to give rise to (appearances of the feeling of the absurd). Moreover, both moods and emotions qualify as absurd in virtue of their promoting the discovery of the absurd, i.e., the discovery that humans search for meaning, but the world does not answer this search. 1 Feelings Let us begin by asking what Camus meant when he talked about the feeling of the absurd as a particular kind of feeling. English-speaking psychologists and philosophers typically distinguish between different kinds of affective mental states, such as feelings, emotions and moods (e.g., de Sousa 2013; Johnson 2009). In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus used the term ‘‘feeling’’ in a sense that appears to be ambiguous with regard to this differentiation (as a result of his general lack of conceptual rigor, and maybe also as a result of the fact that the differentiation does not straightforwardly translate into French terms; see 1942). To my mind, an important step in illuminating Camus’ conception of the feeling of the absurd is to reconstruct it in the more fine-grained affective vocabulary just mentioned. So which particular kind of affective mental state had Camus in mind when he characterized the feeling of the absurd? Did he mean a feeling, an emotion or a mood? The first hypothesis to consider is of course that Camus meant just what he said, namely that the feeling of the absurd is a feeling (a ‘‘sentiment’’, as he put it in the French original). This interpretation can be ruled out rather quickly. Psychologists and philosophers typically use the term ‘‘feeling’’ to refer to conscious experiences of our own bodily or mental states, for example, to pleasure or pain, or to what it is like to love or to hate someone.3 But neither the feeling of the absurd in the narrow sense nor its appearances can be coherently understood as feelings in this sense. Take, first, the feeling of the absurd in the narrow sense. Camus describes this feeling as ‘‘indeterminate’’, ‘‘vague’’ and ‘‘elusive’’. Feelings qua conscious 3 William James (1884) and Carl Lange (1885) argued that particular kinds of feelings are not only aspects of emotions, but are identical to them. Contemporary emotion researchers mostly reject this view. 123 T. Po¨lzler experiences of bodily or mental states, however, tend to be rather determinate, clear and definable (at least more determinate, clear and definable than other kinds of affective mental states). We can easily tell how pleasure differs from pain, how experiences of love differ from experiences of hate, and so on.
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