Albert Camus · Philosophy
Camus’s starting move: the one truly serious philosophical problem is suicide - whether life is worth living once we admit it has no given meaning. He rejects both literal suicide and the ‘philosophical suicide’ of the religious leap, and finds a third answer in revolt.
Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with one of the most arresting sentences in modern philosophy: there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and it is suicide. The abstractions philosophers usually argue about - whether the world has twelve categories or fourteen, whether the mind is one substance or two - are, he says, games compared with the question of whether a person should go on living at all. And this question becomes unavoidable precisely once we have faced the absurd. If the universe offers no given meaning, then the sceptic has a blunt challenge: why not simply end it? To answer that challenge honestly, without lying and without flinching, is the real work of philosophy, because it is the one question on which everything else - every value, every project, every day - silently depends. Camus refuses to treat it as morbid or embarrassing. He treats it as first.
Camus identifies two temptations that both amount to running away, and he treats them as strangely parallel. The first is literal suicide: ending your life because it seems not worth living. The second he names, provocatively, philosophical suicide: the intellectual leap by which a thinker escapes the absurd not by dying but by suddenly affirming a hidden meaning - a God, an eternal order, an Absolute - that reason could never establish. He accuses the great religious existentialists of his day, Kierkegaard and Chestov chief among them, of exactly this. Having brilliantly diagnosed the absurd, they cannot bear to live inside it, so they ‘leap’ into faith, deifying the very thing that crushes them and finding hope in what impoverishes them. Both suicides, bodily and philosophical, dissolve the absurd by eliminating one of its two terms - the first kills the questioner, the second silences the question by pretending it has been answered. Camus refuses them both.
Camus insists that facing the absurd, far from draining life of value, gives it back. He names three consequences of the lucid, un-escaped life. First, revolt: a constant confrontation between the person and their own obscurity, a refusal to be reconciled that keeps consciousness alert and alive; the absurd is only truly honoured by someone who keeps struggling against it. Second, freedom: once you stop believing your life must serve some fixed, eternal purpose, you are released from the tyranny of that purpose and free to live as your own, without a script written elsewhere. The condemned man, oddly, is the freest, having nothing left to lose and everything left to feel. Third, passion: with no afterlife to defer to and no meaning to redeem the present, the present itself becomes precious, and the absurd person tries not for the best living but for the most living - quantity of experience, intensity, a greedy attention to the only life there is. Revolt, freedom, passion: these are the wages of refusing to escape.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Camus makes suicide the fundamental question (is life worth living without given meaning?), and that he rejects two answers: literal suicide (killing the questioner) and ‘philosophical suicide,’ the leap to God or an Absolute (killing the question). His third answer is revolt. Explain the argument in…
Leads to Blaise Pascal.
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