Albert Camus often gets lumped in with twentieth-century French existentialists, a crew known for its hardline atheistic membership. But Camus was something different, something much more blasphemous: an agnostic who wouldn’t revere God even if He did exist.
Camus’s primary concern with God centered on the notion of divine justice. Could an otherworldly justice redeem this world, justifying its suffering? Many answer in the affirmative, with the caveat that this higher justice does its redeeming in a way that lies beyond our comprehension. God’s ways are “mysterious.” The notion that a higher being enforces our values, albeit in a way we can’t understand, is profoundly comforting. And it makes it easier to see why we should be good, as it provides external validation for our values.
But this “mystery” business didn’t jive with Camus. A form of justice that he couldn’t understand didn’t have any meaning to him. If what we mean by human justice differs from divine justice, then divine justice isn’t justice, in our terms; it’s meaningless. Camus’s ability to understand something and the meaningfulness of that thing were inseparable. The suffering of the world, then, can’t be redeemed. Human values are not reflected either by the world or by the divine, and without something beyond-the-human reinforcing their validity, things get shaky: questions of whether we should care about anything or see any meaning in our own seemingly random values have a way of popping up, or, for some of us, forcing themselves down our throats.
Miserable, right? According to a Pew Research poll released last year, a slight majority of Americans think that belief in God is necessary for morality to exist; in 21 countries of the 39 surveyed, a sweeping majority answered in the affirmative. But Camus didn’t start acting like a dick because of his inability to revere God or believe in divine justice. He found something else to believe in—not in spite of his blasphemous agnosticism, I don’t think; rather, this position shaped his ethics.
Providing a clear picture of Camus’s ethics is difficult, because his style was more lyrical than rigorously systematic (which leads some philosophiles to claim that he wasn’t a philosopher, but those people can go home and make out with a picture of Kant), and he didn’t offer a list of specific rules to follow. I find it helpful to talk about the development of his ethics alongside Aristotle’s virtue ethics for some framing.
For Aristotle, beings are good at being the type of being they are when they live in a way that fulfills the function for which they are specially equipped. For humans, he decided that function is to act on our rational principle (which means doing boring stuff, like being moderate in all things). When we do that well, we achieve eudaimonia: a state of flourishing, being the best human beings we can be. It’s a life well lived, and it’s glorious.
In Camus’s writing—particularly, The Rebel and The Plague—we find a different “function” emerge (to put it in Aristotelian terms, which Camus did not): Human beings possess values—we have ideas of justice, dignity, and good that are profoundly important to us. We’re unnatural in that way, and this, more so than any “rational principle,” distinguishes the human from everything else. And, while being alone with our values can be a huge downer, it also points out what flourishing might look like for human beings: living in a way that upholds those values, not just because we can, but especially because we’re the only ones who can. Basically, if Jesus isn’t taking the wheel, that’s all the more reason for Carrie Underwood to get really good at steering and to do it all the time, especially when shit is hitting the fan. And just as people die when they don’t take the damned wheel, values die when we don’t uphold them.
We can color in with a bit more detail what Camus’s eudaimonic human being—the upholder of values—might look like. In The Rebel, he writes about an inherent sense of dignity human beings have, a line that is not acceptable to cross, a sense that our lives matter and that we have the right not to be oppressed. I think that, for Camus, behaving justly means acknowledging and respecting that line both in ourselves and others. That means not causing suffering, working against suffering, and just not being a dick in general. He calls for solidarity with our fellow men, which I think takes us a step further. For Camus, the value of human dignity outweighs any goals of religion, state, or cause; we’re more strongly bound to one another than we are to country or Good Word or ideal or other transcendent entity. As the beings that value, there is no overarching entity that is more valuable than the human. We end up crossing other people’s dignity lines when we place these other things on a pedestal and value them more than our fellow men.
Camus, the blasphemous agnostic, was a lover of human beings and defender of solidarity founded on inherent dignity. Camus had an ethics.
We don’t need to believe in God to believe in good. I have no doubt that Christian and other religious beliefs can inspire an ethics of love for human beings. But for many of us, those roads are closed. The connection between our ability to understand and our sense of meaningfulness is too strong. Without something to believe in, some of us despair; if the world is unjust and nothing redeems suffering, then our values are unsupported and our good deeds are mere drops in a bucket. Camus showed me, and doubtless many other little heretics out there, that we’re more than doers of small deeds in the face of a cold and heartless world that renders our actions pointless. Every act of upholding value imbues the world with a dimension that it would lack without that human rebellion against indifference. We’re carrying the fire. And, I hope to God, taking the wheel.
Amée LaTour has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and works as a freelance writer. She is primarily interested in the concrete application of philosophy to everyday life.
how does the absurd fit into this?
Thanks a lot for asking this question. I didn’t name the absurd or address Camus’ early work intentionally, since that part of his work gets way more attention than his later stuff (which I think is a real shame, because his ethics really develop later on). But I think it’s important to see the connection between his early and later works, as there is a thread that follows through both, so I’m happy it’s coming up here.
Camus explicitly makes the connection between the absurd and rebellion in the introduction to The Rebel, which I recommend reading. You can access the whole of it on Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.
I’ll summarize my take, though: The absurd is the confrontation between the human desire for justification/explanation and a universe that doesn’t fulfill it. The question in The Myth of Sisyphus was whether or not to remain alive in such a state, a question Camus sought to answer because he saw suicide to be the problem of the time. He answered that we should remain alive, but acknowledged that indifference (or “sterility”) was also a consequence of the absurd. In The Rebel, he says the problem of the day is not suicide, but murder. So the issue of how to treat one another needed to be addressed. Rebellion is founded on the absurd; it’s the act of upholding values in a world that doesn’t reflect them (rather than just staying alive). We can’t uphold human values if we don’t act in solidarity with our fellow human beings, as the values are not ours individually, but all of humanity’s.
TL;DR: The Myth of Sisyphus leaves us alive and sterile in the tension of the absurd. The Rebel leaves us amplifying our end of the absurd split in solidarity with others.
yeah that helps, otherwise I think yer original post is just outlining existential-humanism, also might be worth adding echoes of the theater of the absurd and all so it doesn’t get too heroic (as waxing Aristotelian tends to do).
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tam-hussein/instead-of-camus-remember_b_2090074.html
Amee, my read of Camus is that he is consistent throughout from Myth of Sisyphys to the Rebel, from suicide to homicide, all based on the absurdity of the human experience, life with no given meaning. The answer of why not commit suicide is not about sterility, nor about committing suicide, but of bringing ones own self-created meaning (value) to bear in a universe with absolutely no given value, just the immediacy of the moment–living without escape and thus with integrity, in revolt/rebellion and defiance, lucidity and acute consciousness and rebellion against this mortal coil.
Escape is the giving of false meaning to this absurd life: 1) via suicide, which would imply that the world is meaningful enough to kill oneself; 2) via homicide, which would imply that society is meaningful enough to kill someone for; 3) via beliefs such as religion, communism, science, philosophy, reason, etc.
The “ethical” triumph of Sisyphus was “His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.” (MS, p. 120)
Similar to Sisyphus, in The Rebel, revolt creates existential values and social solidarity, not for the sake of transcendent moral or political values, but keeping dignity in the face of absurdity by not yielding to false escapes individually or collectively as noted above (1-3).
While there may be two scholarly readings of Camus, there is only one authentic reading of Camus IMHO. Our solidarity is in the absurd.
Hi, Wayne,
Thanks a lot for your thoughtful response. I agree with much of what you have said.
I agree that there’s consistency throughout Camus’ work. Absurd reasoning forms the foundation for rebellion and solidarity. And refusal of escapism, as you pointed out, is a thread binding The Myth and The Rebel together.
Integrity and lucidity are certainly reasons Camus gives in The Myth for staying alive. I suppose what I don’t see is how Sisyphus, like the rebel, “creates existential values and social solidarity.” Based on his introduction to The Rebel, I don’t think Camus saw that either.
Honestly, I find much of what he has to say about the contradictory conclusions of absurd reasoning concerning murder in this introduction to be difficult to follow. But when he says, “[The absurd] is contradictory in its content because, in wanting to uphold life, it excludes all value judgments, when to live is, in itself, a value judgement,” it reminds me of his repeated emphasis in The Myth on acknowledging the ultimate futility and meaninglessness of human creations, one of which could be value. So the value of life is simultaneously reinforced and denied by absurd reasoning.
In The Myth, absurd reasoning tells us to live, but not how, and I think that’s an important box for ethics to tick, which is why I feel Camus’ ethics really takes shape in The Rebel. That’s where the emphasis on personal integrity founded on defiance against the absurd confrontation transitions to solidarity founded on shared human value in rebellion against the absurd. When value is seen as humanity’s and not just an individual’s creation, we have a “rule of conduct”: murder is unjustified.
That’s my take on it, at least at the moment. I’d be happy to hear more about your ideas.
Well done Amee.
I think that for Camus, all we need to know is revealed in the Myth of Sisyphus, in our encounter with life and possible meaning: 1) suffering, 2)no given meaning, 3) why not commit suicide (i.e., either give it up or find a way forward without a given): the why not is your reason for living. Then along came Sartre and all his preaching on individual responsibility, rather than struggling with common man, and his turn to communism as a retreat from the existential condition. So Camus had to respond to this new abnegation of not just the absurdity of life, (which we have now become enurred to), but of a new beast slouching toward Bethelehem: communism, kill in the name of communism. So he wrote the Rebel as a follow up and consolidated his no given meaning in life as human solidarity which he knew from the beginning. I mean, how does one not either get this position or not?
I think ethics is an Aristotelian category like phronos that is not admitted to by Camus.
Do you mean “phronesis”? “Phronimos”? I can’t find “phronos” in the lexicon.
And what do you mean by saying that “ethics is an Aristotelian category”? It’s certainly not one of his categories in the technical sense. “Ethos” means character or way of life, “ethika” is the adjectival form, and “ta ethika” is a nominalization meaning “the things pertaining to ways of ways of life.”
Thanks for the correction to phronesis Alan. According to Aristotle’s theory on rhetoric, ‘phronesis’ is one of the three types (rather than categories–sorry for the confusion) of appeal to character (ethos). The other two are respectively appeals to ‘arete’ (virtue) and ‘eunoia’ (goodwill). Aristotle holds that having phronesis is both necessary and sufficient for being virtuous.
The actual category which would not be consistent with Camus would be ‘essence,’ by which Aristotle seeks to define, for example a tiger, the essence of ‘what it is to be’ a tiger, what is predicated of the tiger per se. Existentialism per Camus holds that existence precedes essence, and that it is holding onto essences that leads to illusion and false escapes from raw existence. Virtue and character are thus Aristotelian constructs of essence not congruent with an existential metaphysics.
Hi Wayne,
For one, I was not trying to parallel Camus’ ethics with all aspects of Aristotelian virtue ethics. I know I opened myself up to that danger by using the latter as a framework. But I do think the idea of flourishing/eudaimonia is helpful for understanding why one ought to uphold human values in a world that doesn’t reflect them.
I also question the attribution of “existence precedes essence” to Camus’ thought. In my understanding, Camus did believe in a human nature, and this was one thing that set him apart from existentialism (he never considered himself an existentialist). There’s a brief discussion of the point here, in section ii. on Revolt: http://www.iep.utm.edu/camus/. Human nature is founded on shared values, the story goes.
Hi Amee–
As you quoted in the above reference, Camus“seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).
I agree there is this scholarly interpretation of Camus, but it is against how I interpret his philosophy of the absurd (his rift with Sartre contaminated the definition of existentialism). Camus distanced himself from philosophy per se in the same manner Nietzsche did, preferring to show, demonstrate, express in the experiential mode of literature rather than in the philosophically logical, essential and distant approach of the human condition—thus denying participation in Sartrean philosophical existentialism, but not in the absurd. Reading Kant into Camus requires aligning Camus with philosophy rather than his concept of the absurd. Revolt and the Rebel certainly launched solitary man into human solidarity, but of what? Transcendental values of philosophy, or immanent values only based on a common absurd existence. That has always been my reading of Camus, as in the spirit of Nietzsche, but I realize the other rendition.
“But I do think the idea of flourishing/eudaimonia is helpful for understanding why one ought to uphold human values in a world that doesn’t reflect them”
that’s very puzzling since Aristotle introduces eudaimonia as in fact being part of our deep ethical/developmental (telos if you will) relations with world/existence, this is why the broader context of the absurd (and related modern phenomena like ugliness in art via Picasso and all) seems to make folks like Camus worth noting. To be humane in an inhumane world is a leap (like Kierkegaard but without the saving grace) in the face of reason not a product of it.
Hi dmf,
Yes, I can see how it’s strange to talk about an Aristotelian concept in Camus’ terms. It certainly wouldn’t make sense to speak of a telos where Camus is concerned. For Aristotle, humans were very much part of nature (Camus has a cool section in The Rebel about how the Greeks were at peace with nature). But for Camus, nature and human nature are in tension.
I think eudaimonia can be divorced from teleology. If we ask, “How should human beings live?” my mind immediately goes to the question, “Well, what does it mean to be human?” If we answer that it means to have human values, then we could say that, to live most fully as human beings, we ought to uphold those values. That to me is a very similar idea to flourishing — without the bliss associated with Aristotle’s, since the tension remains between nature and human nature.
Hi Wayne,
I guess I’m not quite picking up what you’re throwing down. I don’t t see how I tried to read Kant into Camus, if that’s what you’re saying. As to the question: ” Revolt and the Rebel certainly launched solitary man into human solidarity, but of what? Transcendental values of philosophy, or immanent values only based on a common absurd existence,” I would say immanent values, definitely.
human or just humane? may just be me but yer line of thinking is indeed sounding more like Kant than Camus who emphasized relationships in all of their messy/complicated/conflicted and in some broad sense doomed existences.
I think like Santayana Camus thought we might cultivate moments of relief/compassion/etc in the midst of the inevitable horrors, the brutal simplifiers of human life.
if you have library access check out:
Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency
Aimee,
Looking back at your interpretation of Camus, I appreciate the line that if he isn’t systematic enough for you “to home and make out with a picture of Kant.” So the reason I picked his name was to nail down the transcendental-sounding terms which I found in your analysis (not that I was correct): believe in, Aristotle’s virtue ethics, rational principle, human beings possess value, justice, dignity, right not to be oppressed, behaving justly, not causing suffering, etc.
While we may be beings that value, to place the value of beings in a moral position to determine ethical versus unethical is to transcend existence with this “value’” that is not organic and only secondarily derived by each individual as it is discovered. The absurd is not vulnerable to placing religion, state nor cause on a pedestal, and it is not vulnerable to placing human on that pedestal either—how absurd. Only in the individual’s own encounter with the absurd is the possibility of revolt against meaninglessness encountered, and potentially shared as solidarity with others. But at no time is this revolt/meaninglessness/suffering/absurdity a transcendental entity which can become the new categorical imperative: “value your fellow man.”
Hi Wayne,
Many of those “transcendental-sounding terms” that you mentioned are used heavily by Camus. I used “rational principle” in a quick summary of Aristotle’s spiel for readers who may not be familiar with it, but in no way connected with Camus.
I don’t see Camus’ ethics (or my interpretation thereof) as being transcendental. The values he puts forth are purely immanent. We have very different readings of The Rebel — I think he very much does put forward something like “value your fellow man” as a rule of conduct. It’s the only way to revolt while remaining consistent with the premise of rebellion, which he states is solidarity. I wouldn’t call it a categorical imperative, as that term is loaded with lots of stuff it wouldn’t make sense to attribute to Camus like rational nature and logical necessity (and perhaps “virtue ethics” was too loaded a term for me to use above!).
Hi dmf,
I’m not sure how anything I’ve written glosses over the complicated nature of human relationships. Can you elaborate on how you feel I’ve said something more Kantian than Camusian?
And thanks for the resource — I’ve never read Santayana.
by stressing the idea(l) of there being something more that connects/elevates us other than our alltoohuman piecemeal efforts to be of some aid in the face of what comes (think of The Plague), what could flourishing mean in such a tragic world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
Hi dmf,
I’m thinking of lines like the following:
“To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled.…To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man’s majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself” (MS 55).
“If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because….[i]t kills the small part of existence that can be realized on this earth through the mutual understanding of men” (Rebel 283).
I think Camus thought human beings and human values are pretty rad — without ever losing sight of the fact that the world is tragic.
In summary, I think we have Camus’ gentle rendition of existentialism, Nietzsche’s hard interpretation, and Cormack McCarthy’s brutal version–all of which are forms of staring into the Abyss and an assault on human nature for those who look.
re: assault on human nature. Hmm, care to elaborate on this topic some more, if ya got a few minutes to kill? Nietzsche’s hard interpretation, etc. Peaked my interest. It’s been awhile since I took thinkers seriously that reject the notion that there is a human nature. Excuse me if I misunderstand you. I confess to only glancing through some of the posts…. It’s late, I’m tired from working 60 hr weeks pushing a boulder up a hill over and over and over, and I’m sick with hay fever. God damn nature.
Jason:
My reference to “an assault on human nature” is referring to existentialism’s attack on the egocentrism of one’s given, unchallenged meaning as sculpted by self-sense, family, society and the world. Regarding Nietzshce’s will to power and values:
“[T]he passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar….It involves the use of a rare and singular standard cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; a courage without any desire for honors; self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things.” (Gay Science, p. 55)
Regarding re-Value-ation:
“For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual….I never even suspected what was growing in me — and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection. (EH II:9).”
“Nietzsche ultimately advocates valuations that issue from a self-confident, self-reinforcing, self-governing, creative and commanding attitude, as opposed to those that issue from reactive attitudes that determine values more mechanically, subordinatingly, and opposingly to those who are inherently more powerful. For Nietzsche, those who prefer to think in terms of “good vs. bad” exemplify the former, leading and superior mentality, and those who think in terms of “good vs. evil,” exemplify the latter, inferior and subservient mentality.” (SEP)