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Is Philosophical Interest in the Absurd Absurd?

Glenn Mason-Riseborough (12/10/2002)

 

A number of writers make reference to the concept, notion, or feeling of the absurd in their works.  I wish to investigate whether the absurd can do any work in philosophical theories, and if so, what.  I’ll start out with some preliminaries—defining a general sense of absurdity before discarding philosophically uninteresting types of absurdity.  I’ll then move on to the putatively philosophical types of absurdity, with the aim of disambiguating and categorising the varieties.  I’ll look at each variety in turn, discussing if and to what extent specific types of absurdity describe the human condition.  In particular, I will pay close attention to Albert Camus’ essay on the absurd—The Myth of Sisyphus.  This will be the starting point for my investigation, and I will focus exclusively on the Camusian tradition with regards to discussions of the absurd.  That is, I will not consider alternative or technical definitions of the absurd used in other contexts, though this should not be taken as blind dismissiveness.

 

Preliminaries

Let’s start from the most general.  In everyday language, if a situation is absurd then it is incongruous, ridiculous, inappropriate, or out of place.  As Camus correctly points out, absurdity is a two-place relation—it only makes sense to speak of something being out of place if there is some sense of what it would be like to be in place (“the absurdity springs from a comparison … it lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation”[1]).  Moreover, the greater the difference between these two parts of the situation, the more absurd is the situation (again, Camus: “the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison”[2]).  What are these two parts?  One way of expressing it is to say that one part has to do with certain propositional attitudes of intentional agents, and the other part to do with certain parts of the way the world is, independent of intentionality.  Of course, not any old pair of terms will do; they must be related in the correct way—more on this later.  The way that the world is may also include certain features of agents that are not to do with intentionality, for example human nature, and this may, in turn, influence the intentional component.  Both Camus and Thomas Nagel[3] (along with others) accept this general description of the two parts of the absurd.  Camus writes: “what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational [the world] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart [intentionality];”[4] “the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [intentionality] and the unreasonable silence of the world;”[5] “his intention and the reality he will encounter;”[6] “a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it;”[7] “[the absurd] is born precisely at the very meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason [intentionality] with the ever resurgent irrational [the world].”[8]  Camus’ meaning with respect to “bare fact,” “certain reality,” “action” and “the world that transcends it” is far from clear—they all seem ways of describing the world, and not intentionality.  I take Camus to be intending one of each pair to refer to the intentional aspect (for it to be consistent with the rest of his work); I don’t know which, and Camus doesn’t explain himself sufficiently.  Similarly, when defining the absurd Nagel writes: “a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration [intentionality] and reality.”[9]  To summarise this, there are two separate claims in the assertion of the absurdity of a situation: (1) some kind of deep desire (Camus: wild longing or need), intention, aspiration, pretension, belief, or expectation (often based on reasoning) on the part of the agent, and with respect to a certain feature or features of the world, and (2) the way the world is, with respect to the same feature or features, independent of the agent’s intentional attitude to said feature or features.  The greater the discrepancy between these two aspects, the greater is the absurdity.  Clearly then, talk of absurdity assumes the existence of both intentional agents and mind-independent reality.  Further, in the case of mistaken perceptions about the world, I take it that we would either say that we were mistaken about there being absurdity, or we were mistaken about the nature of that absurdity.

Let’s look at some examples of absurdity.  First, Nagel’s general cases of absurdity:

 

Someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a philanthropic foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded announcement; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.[10]

 

Also, Camus gives an example of “a man armed only with a sword attack[ing] a group of machine-guns.”[11]  I would like to add one further example (which is thanks to Douglas Adams[12]): due to quantum indeterminacy, a chesterfield sofa spontaneously appears in the middle of Lord’s Cricket Ground.  We might say that this final example situation is absurd because (1) we have a deep need for events to be non-random, or a belief or expectation that they are non-random, but (2) in fact randomness exists in the world.[13]  I include this last example to bring out two points: (i) in all the examples that both Camus and Nagel give, there is an active human presence; absurdity need not involve human actions (as long as it includes human perceptions and intentions), and (ii) the presence and magnitude of absurdity may vary depending on the individual whose intentional attitudes are considered – a quantum physicist may find the appearance of the chesterfield sofa only minimally absurd (or not absurd at all), since (for example) s/he has acclimatised to randomness,[14] whereas someone not well versed in modern physics may find the situation very absurd.

At this stage, I have not suggested anything particularly philosophically significant about absurdity in general.  The absurdity arose simply from the specific situation and a possible human reaction to it, not from some general truth about the nature of the world and necessary attitudinal responses by us.  On this basis, Nagel points out two types of absurdity that we can we discard as philosophically uninteresting—instances of absurdity that are situation-specific or peculiar to only some people.  Firstly, in many absurd situations we are able to either change our attitude to the situation (change our desires, beliefs, etc) or change the situation to suit our attitudes (remove ourselves, alter specifics, etc).  When we do one or both of these things, the situation stops being absurd.  For example, for Nagel’s final example quoted above, we might either change our intentions—such as not hold knighthood so seriously, or change the situation—for example tie our pants tightly so they don’t fall down.  Secondly, even if we are unable to change our attitude or situation, the absurdity may be contingent on the type of person we are (our individual psychological or physical makeup), or the environment that we happened to grow up in (culture, geography, etc.).  Since this type of absurdity does not arise for all of us, it is not a fundamental question about the world as a whole in which we live.  And while it might be psychologically, sociologically, historically, or even theologically interesting, it is not philosophically interesting.  Generalising, Nagel says:

 

If there is a philosophical sense of absurdity … it must arise from the perception of something universal – some respect in which pretension and reality inevitably clash for all of us [humans].[15]

 

That is, for Nagel a philosophical sense of absurdity arises in situations where there is something about the human condition that requires that we, as humans, have certain propositional attitudes, but these attitudes can never be satisfied in the world in which we actually live.  A consequence of this is that for a philosophical sense of absurdity to exist, there must be a human nature that necessitates certain propositional attitudes.[16]  And conversely, if there isn’t a human nature, then there won’t be any philosophical sense of absurdity.  Is Nagel correct to require that if a sense of absurdity is to be a philosophical sense of absurdity then it must be universal to humanity as a whole?

Firstly, and on a preliminary note, John Cruickshank objects to absurdity being called absolute or universal.  Cruickshank seems to think that it is not legitimate to call a relation absolute or universal if its existence relies on an intentional component (“because the absurd is a relationship with an experiencing mind as one of its terms, it follows that the absurd cannot strictly be presented as something absolute and universal”[17]).  But, in response, it seems to me legitimate to call it universal in the sense that it is universal for all possible worlds that contain intentional agents, or universal for all possible worlds that contain humans.  True, it is not universal for all possible worlds, or for all possible worlds that contain that feature but don’t contain intentional agents, but this is not what we were saying.  To reiterate, what we are interested in finding out is whether there is any sense of absurdity that is universal for all of us.

Secondly, Nagel assumes that the human condition is sufficiently general to be called universal.  In response, it might be argued that it is still only contingent to humans, so it ignores any potential or actual non-human intentional agents and, strictly speaking, cannot be said to be universal to all intentional agents.  I think this is a fair objection, but since we currently have no idea if and to what extent there might be differences between humans and other possible intentional agents, I think starting from the human condition is legitimate.  Whatever the case, it is universal for all of us as humans, and as such is good enough to be called universal, and moreover is potentially philosophically fruitful.

Thirdly, we might object to Nagel by going in the opposite direction from the second objection.  Rather than saying that Nagel’s view is not universal enough to be properly philosophical, we might say that it is too universal, and too strict.  It ignores potentially fruitful philosophical concerns to do with propositional attitudes that are contingent with respect to humanity as a whole, but necessary with respect to sub-groups of humanity (due to upbringing, culture, etc.).  This is a direct rejection of Nagel’s discarding of the second type of absurdity.  In other words, it might be objected that there is a whole tradition of (what many would call[18]) philosophy that focuses on the way we are now—the condition of modernity, and at the same time acknowledges that people at other times and in other cultures were (or are) not like this.[19]  But, this third objection might be countered with the claim that this is not philosophy (where, by “philosophy”, we are making no further claim than that we are searching for the most general facts about the world).  Nagel’s strictness is admirable in the sense that we need to demarcate philosophy from other areas of investigation such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, history and theology.  This is not denying that these are worthwhile areas of investigation in their own right.  Nor is it not denying the possibility that philosophers use the facts found by these other disciplines to make philosophical claims, or the possible usefulness of comparing cultures, in a biographical sense, to articulate a philosophical position.  But it is denying that the search for such facts is a philosophical one.  To take an example, it might be argued that the “problem of modernity” is a theological (not philosophical) problem for those who still (sadly) accept many of the presuppositions that theists accept, but don’t accept the central presupposition that holds it all together (that of God’s existence).  It is theological in the sense that theology, in its search for truth, accepts a richer set of presuppositions than does philosophy, without examining the reasons behind these presuppositions.  That is, it accepts the presuppositions that alienation, despair, homelessness, lack of meaning, lack of values, lack of moral certainty, nihilism, and so on follow on from the non-existence of God.  These are presuppositions that are not accepted by those (including myself) who are completely at home in modernity, but don’t believe in the existence of God and do believe that death is the complete cessation of the self.  This might also be a psychological, psychiatric or pastoral problem—helping those with these sorts of beliefs work through their anxieties and negative emotions.  As a second reply to the objection, with respect to the absurd, if we make a claim about a culturally contingent absurdity doing normative work, it seems a legitimate philosophical criticism to say, “well, perhaps fair enough for other people who happen to hold these beliefs, but that doesn’t concern me because I don’t accept their presuppositions.”  And surely, philosophy is the sort of discipline in which the conclusions do concern everyone.  We take a philosophical theory to be inadequate if the conclusions apply to some people but not to others.  And on this I think all I need to say is that if only some people have certain pretensions about the world, then we cannot use this to give an account of how we all (both with and without the pretensions) ought to act (which is what Camus is usually seen as doing).  Thus, I will accept Nagel’s strict requirement regarding a philosophical sense of absurdity.

I will make two final points in this section, both to do with interpreting Camus.  Firstly, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus often writes as if he is making objective universal claims on the topic of absurdity.  He writes as if absurdity is a necessary condition of us.  Thus, it is easy to read the work as an investigation into necessary features of the human condition (as, for example, do Sartre, Cruickshank, Brian Masters, and Nagel[20]), or even the modern human condition (as, for example, does Julian Young[21]).  But as David Sprintzen writes:

 

While Camus has gone to significant lengths to objectify the content and deemphasize the importance of personal religious struggles, early manuscripts leave clear traces of their imprint.  Rather than speaking impersonally of what is deemed by the absurd, Camus had written, “What I demand of myself is to live solely with what I know … I want to find out if it is possible to live without appeal” (E, 1440).  The personal effort of will is underscored by assertions such as claiming to “hold certain facts from which I do not want to separate myself,” in which passage the want is ultimately replaced by the more impersonal cannot (E, 1439; MS, 51).[22]

 

“Want” turns the writing into a more personal, self-investigation of the psychology of Albert Camus; “cannot,” taken as a logical claim, gives a more universal, philosophical feel to the writing.  Later, Sprintzen writes:

 

If there is a logic that Camus is pursuing here, it does not follow that he is arguing for a philosophy.  He is seeking to diagnose a malady, albeit an intellectual one, from which he and many of his contemporaries suffer in order to point the way to a cure.  He is not claiming that those who do not suffer from that malady are wrong, any more than he suggests that his cure is proof of the illegitimacy of other remedies.[23]

 

And even more succinctly:

 

The experience of the absurd, however, is not universal, not inevitable, not necessary, not even necessarily true.  But it is rooted in historical reality …[24]

 

If all Camus is doing is working through his own psychology, or the psychology of many in a particular cultural group to which he belongs (which may be very different from the psychology of many of the rest of us), then we should not expect, or demand, of Camus solid arguments defending universalist claims, either about the nature of reality or how we, as humans, ought to live.  Sprintzen does not even go so far as to suggest that Camus is describing a condition that afflicts all of us in modernity.  It may be that, as Sprintzen claims, Camus is simply discussing one (or more than one) of the philosophically uninteresting (but perhaps psychologically interesting) forms of absurdity.  To demand a philosophical work when there is no philosophical intent on the part of the author is itself absurd.

What follows from this observation regarding Camus’ possible intentions?  (1) We cannot be sure about Camus’ real position—is he really making universal claims about human nature, or are his claims rhetorical exaggeration?  (2) I don’t care!  This is a problem for historians, not philosophers.  What I am interested in is whether absurdity is true for all of us in the actual world.  All we can do is take Camus’ written claims at face value, and see if they hold up to investigation.  My initial question still stands: are there any philosophically interesting forms of the absurd (that is, is absurdity, in any of its forms, necessary, inevitable, fundamental or universal[25] to us as humans), and can the absurd do any philosophical work in terms of explaining the world?  Even more succinctly, ought philosophers care about Camus’ discussion on the absurd?

Secondly, there is some questioning regarding whether Camus has more than one distinctly different meaning of the absurd, one of which is not the two-piece relation as described above (this is a separate point from what I shall argue in the section below, namely that it is possible to see in Camus more than one meaning of the absurd, but they all conform to the general two-piece form expressed above).  I will consider two claims of this form:

(1) Young states that Camus’ notion of the absurd is ambiguous because, along with the official two-piece articulation of the absurd (“both the nothing and human need for the ‘something’ are its necessary ingredients”[26]), Camus also has an “unofficial” sense.  Young writes:

 

Much of the time, however, he [Camus] slips into using “absurd” simply to refer to the fact of the nothing.  Speaking of Sisyphus’ “secret joy”, for example, he observes that “happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth” (MS p. 110).  This is a repetition of the point that “there is no sunlight without shadow” [Camus, half a page later] and treats “the absurd” simply as a name for the nothing.[27]

 

Young, following Heidegger, has two main senses of “the nothing.”  The first is ontological—the absence of everything, the “empty” or the void.  The second is epistemological—the “positive” or the unintelligible-to-us.  The second sense of the nothing seems to be very much something, but something unknowable.  While Young is a little unclear and appears to switch between these two meanings, a big emphasis, for both senses of the nothing, is the absence of life (“the nothing which lies on – which is – the other side of this world and life”[28]).  Thus, on the surface, the nothing (or the “unofficial” absurd) has just one part—the fact that we all cease to live (whether we take ceasing to live as emptiness or something that is unintelligible to us).  But Young also sometimes adds an attitude to the nothing, that of “bitterness,” “hideousness” and “horror,” which he takes from Camus (Young: “the bleakness of the post-death-of-God world is “the nothing””[29]).  Thus Young is doubly unclear.  If we take the nothing to be both absence of life and also an attitude to that absence (horror, etc.), then the nothing is very similar to the two-piece absurd (it has both an intentional and non-intentional component).  Moreover, the nothing comes out as a form of the absurd if we take the attitude to be of the right type (for example fleshing out bitterness and horror as a deep need to not lose one’s life).  We have got right back to where we started, and there is no difference in meaning.  But let’s now assume that Young’s meaning of the nothing is just the one-piece version (absence of life).  Do we need to interpret Camus as saying “happiness and the absence of life are two sons of the same earth”?  Interpreting poetry is notoriously difficult, and I accept that Young’s interpretation is possible.  But I don’t think it is necessary.  I think it is possible to interpret Camus as saying that the world we live in contains some facts that make us happy and other facts that generate the feeling of the absurd (a deep need for order that the world doesn’t provide).  More succinctly, the world contains both good parts (that generate positive emotions like happiness) and bad parts (that generate negative emotions like the feeling of the absurd).  I also need to interpret Camus’ “there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night,”[30] which Young thinks parallels the happiness/absurd passage.  Firstly, taken literally it is simply false.  Of course we can have sun without shadow; it is shadow without sun that we cannot have.  Poetically, it is a different matter.  I tentatively suggest that in this passage Camus is paralleling a theistic reply to the argument from evil.  We cannot, logically, have good things in this world without also having bad things; we have to be aware of and accept the bad things, but they don’t need to take over our lives.  This also fits in with Camus, earlier in the paragraph, writing that Sisyphus “silences all the idols.”  How ought we decide between interpretations?  On the whole conservative interpretations are better than radical interpretations, and I think it is preferable to take an interpretation that claims consistency of word meanings over an interpretation that forces one to accept multiple meanings of words.  That is, my interpretation, which is more conservative, is preferable.  Also, Young’s interpretation requires that Camus has a category change, between emotions (happiness) and facts (absence of life).  But, if Young is correct regarding a different meaning of the absurd, I will qualify my question to focus exclusively on the two-piece type of absurdity.  I will not discuss absurdity as the nothing, or any other one-piece form, and I will consider such issues outside the scope of my present inquiry.

(2) Sartre likewise points out ambiguity in Camus with respect to the absurd.  He states that “the absurd is both a state of fact and the lucid awareness which certain people acquire of this state of fact.”[31]  The “state of fact” form is what I have been calling the two-piece type of absurdity (Sartre seems to give three states of fact: “primary absurdity manifests a cleavage, the cleavage between man’s aspirations to unity and the insurmountable dualism of mind and nature, between man’s drive towards the eternal and the finite character of his existence, between the “concern” which constitutes his very essence and the vanity of his efforts”[32]).  The “lucid awareness” form of absurdity is expressed when Camus writes of the absurd man—the person who is aware of, and draws and acts on inevitable conclusions from, the supposed fact of a fundamental absurdity.  To be fair to Camus, I think “absurd” and “absurd man” are two separate technical terms.  There is no ambiguity here, since each can be thought of as a distinct term.  We can no more think of “absurd man” being a change in meaning of “absurd” than we can think of “fake diamond” being a change in meaning of “diamond”—a fake diamond is not a diamond, and an absurd man is not the absurd.  However, for an absurd man to possibly exist, it has to be true that fundamental absurdity exists, and this is what I will investigate in the next section.

 

Philosophically interesting absurdity

To reiterate, if the absurd is to be philosophically interesting, then there has to be a sense in which all of us, because of our nature as humans, have some specific deep desires, aspirations, pretensions, intentions, beliefs, expectations, etc., and these attitudes cannot be lived up to by reality (correctly understood—it is possible that some people thought that they were lived up to by reality).  It seems to me that it is not sufficient just to claim, in some vague way, that such absurdity exists, without expanding on specifically what the components are.  Two follow-up questions: firstly, is it possible to have more than one type of philosophically interesting absurdity?  That is, might there be more than one way in which the world does not meet our universal human needs?  Answer: I don’t see why not, but if there is, I have not seen any writers explicitly draw attention to this.  Secondly, what form might such absurdity (or absurdities) take?  It is my task in this section to flesh out and analyse a number of putative philosophically interesting (two-piece) absurdities.

Once again, I will take Camus as a starting point for this inquiry.  The difficulty with this is that not only does Camus mostly take it as a given that absurdity exists (“I am interested – let me repeat – not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences”[33]), but he rarely gives direct definitions or cites his sources.  Furthermore, his commentators are often equally unforthcoming with their descriptions, and many just flatly contradict each other with respect to interpretation (this will become clearer in my discussion below).  Given this, my aim will be partly to understand Camus’ position, and partly to give an exposition of types of absurdity and evaluate whether such absurdity exists.

On reading The Myth of Sisyphus, one is struck time and again with Camus’ insistence that the world is irrational, yet humans feel a deep desire for clarity of reasoning, and that this relation is the absurd.  Many of the quotes from Camus in the section above showed this.  Robert Wilkinson sums this up:

 

Absurdity is a feeling which arises from the confrontation of the world, which is irrational, with the hopeless but profound human desire to make sense of our condition.[34]

 

This is all very well and good, but what does it mean to say that the world is irrational?  This can be interpreted in a number of ways:

Option 1: The world is a person who is bad at reasoning.  In everyday usage, if we say that someone is irrational (as opposed to rational) we are saying that such a person’s mind is faulty—s/he is believing contradictory claims, or is engaging in bad reasoning.  Of course, it cannot be that Camus means that the world is irrational in this sense—Camus never claims that the world, as a whole, is an intentional agent with a mind that might believe or reason, and there is little or no evidence to suggest that this is the case.  Furthermore, this doesn’t generate the absurdity, since there is no reason to assume, for this reason alone, that we couldn’t make sense of our world, in such a world.  After all, psychiatrists often do a good job of correctly analysing irrational people.  So, this can’t be right.

Option 2: The world is chaotic.  We also sometimes use “irrational” to mean that something is not based on logical reasoning.  On this basis saying that the world is irrational might amount to saying that the world is fundamentally chaotic.  The absurdity arises because (1) we, as humans, have a deep need to see the world as an ordered place obeying natural laws, and our nature dictates that we must strive to discover and articulate as precisely as possible these natural laws, with an aim to predict future events, and understand how to act on that basis, but (2) there are no laws, and the world is unpredictable (though presumably we could never know that the world was like this; at best we would only know that we could find any such laws).  Cruickshank articulates this form of the absurd, when he writes:

 

Intellectual awareness of the absurd is the experience of a person who has expected—no doubt on the basis of Hegel’s assurances—a rationally ordered cosmos, but who finds instead—on the basis of his own experience—a chaos impervious to reason.[35]

 

Part (1) is arguably plausible, especially given current evolutionary theory, which suggests that making sense of our world is an important survival feature, and those early humans who did not have it died out and did not pass on their genes.  But more work would need to be done to show that it is common to all humans.  Camus certainly thinks it is true of himself (“I can negate everything … except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion”[36]), and he possibly thought it true of all humans.  He writes:

 

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.  But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.  His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or hope of a promised land.[37]

 

This seems to suggest that humans, by their very nature, need reasons to explain the world, and even bad reasons are better (more satisfying) than no reasons at all.  If humans cannot find reasons, then they develop psychological problems, such as the feeling of alienation and exile.  Historically, this need has been satisfied by religious reasons (in the Judeo-Christian worldview the lost home is Eden and the promised land is heaven), but I don’t think the thought necessarily excludes non-religious reasons, provided that such reasons satisfy the same needs (it seems to me that religious and, for example, scientific reasons are arrived at in entirely different ways, but they both attempt to satisfy the exact same human needs).  Part (2) is less plausible.  Camus explicitly states that reason has its place when he rejects both extremes of thinking about reason.  That is, he rejects that (a) reason explains everything (such as Camus depiction of Hegel’s view) and (b) reason is useless to explain anything (such as Camus depiction of Chestov’s view).  Camus writes: “it is useless to negate the reason absolutely.  It has its order in which it is efficacious. … The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit.”[38]  Moreover, presumably reason would only have its place if the world is not chaotic.  So Camus must not think that the world is chaotic.  Camus’ position seems plausible, in the sense that reasoning and the sciences have done a good job of explaining the world, and surely if the world were indeed chaotic our technologies would fail to operate as reliably as they do.  So, while other possible worlds could be absurd in this sense, it is implausible that the actual world is absurd in this sense.

Option 3: The world is not chaotic, but we cannot fully explain it.  This is a more moderate position than option 2, but, while distinct, is sometimes equated.  This is because, as Cruickshank points out, historical discussion of the absurd more than likely arose out of a rejection of rationalism (such as Cartesian and Hegelian rationalism).  Anti-rationalists were in agreement that rationality could not explain everything, but they disagreed about the reasons for this failure and the extent to which rationality failed.  One position of anti-rationalists was option 2, which focused on the supposed lawlessness of the world, but other positions took the irrationality to be epistemic rather than ontological (in other words, based on a flaw in our ability to comprehend the world, rather than a fact about order in the world, or lack thereof).  The intentional part of absurdity for these views is likewise modified.  Rather than the deep desire that the world is ordered, the deep desire is that we can discover the true nature of the world, in its comprehensibility.  In other words it is the second part (but not the first part) of part (1) of option 2.  Option 3 can be divided into a number of separate positions, depending on how the human failure is fleshed out:

Option 3a: Necessary linguistic limitations.  This is a central part of Young’s fleshed out version of the nothing.  Taking the word “language” in the widest possible sense, and following on from thinkers such as Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, we may claim that our inability to completely explain the world is based on the fact that we can only ever represent the world in a limited number of infinitely many ways.  Things that cannot be articulated in language are unintelligible, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.  The claim is that facts about the world depend upon which “horizon of disclosure” (Heidegger’s phrase) we are coming from—our way of seeing/interpreting/understanding the world (or Being, if one prefers to use the jargon of those articulating the view).  A proposition may be true or false depending on our particular horizon of disclosure.  Examples that are given to provide a sense of what this means (we can only ever have a sense of it, since, by hypothesis, we cannot stand outside our linguistic limitations) include:

 

·                    Drawings that have multiple ways of seeing them that we can “pop” back and forth, such as the duck/rabbit, faces/vase, old woman/young woman, two-dimensional pictures of three-dimensional objects—the glass cube, Escher’s drawings, and “seeing eye” pictures that contain seemingly random dots until one unfocuses one’s eyes,

·                    The visual system, which is an ill-posed problem, in the sense that the visual system can only provide meaningful information if it assumes certain facts about the world – moreover these assumptions are shown to be unwarranted if one looks at, for example, the Ames’ room,

·                    Ambiguities with words in natural languages, such as “bank” or “pharmakon”,

·                    Ambiguities with temporal phrases in natural languages, such as “the president of the USA had sexual relations with an intern in 1998”—do we mean George W. Bush, the current president, or Bill Clinton, the then president?,

·                    Ambiguities based on uncertain references of indexicals, such as Young’s “you’ll never bathe in that again”[39]—do we take “that” as referring to the river, or the particular body of water that will have moved on down-river by the time one goes bathing again?

·                    Rainer Maria Rilke’s moon analogy,[40] which suggests that we can only ever see the lighted two-dimensional disc of a much bigger three-dimensional spheroid.

 

We might object by saying that we can easily (or not so easily) disambiguate these examples by being clearer with our language.  After all, the point of the examples is that we can see both sides—we wouldn’t understand the point of the examples if we couldn’t.  Further, some logicians might say that this is evidence that natural languages are flawed, and thus we ought to develop unambiguous artificial languages.  But whether or not we can disambiguate specific examples (widen some horizons of disclosure), the point behind the examples remains.  The claim is that we cannot widen the horizon of disclosure to encompass absolutely everything.  There is supposedly some aspect of the world that is outside our understanding, and every time we articulate (or reveal) something in language, we are simultaneously concealing something else (when we see the duck, we cannot see the rabbit; when we say you cannot bathe in that again, we are revealing the mass-horizon—the body of water, and concealing the count-horizon—one river).  Is this a correct view of the world?  Well, by hypothesis we simply cannot know.  As far as I can see, there are no arguments for the position, except for the rhetoric of examples.[41]  If we assume the world is like this and if we accept the defence of the second part of part (1) in option 2, then we may assume that this type of absurdity exists.  But if we assume that the world is not like this then we cannot assume that this type of absurdity exists.  In other words, we just don’t know if this type of absurdity exists in the actual world, though it is certainly possible.[42]  But this brings us to another possible form of absurdity, which I will discuss in option 3b below.  Finally, is this Camus’ view of the absurd?  I don’t think so.  Firstly, this is the view of later Heidegger and some French post-structuralists and post-modernists, which post-dates Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus period.  Secondly, Young brings up this idea as an alternative to Camus, and after rejecting Camus’ position.  Young’s point is that if Camus had have had this position, it would have solved a lot of his problems.  Thirdly, I cannot find any indication in Camus’ work where he considered this idea.

Option 3b: Intellectually undecidable options.  It might be claimed that we can never fully explain the world because there are situations in which, even if we had all the evidence about the situation available to humans, we could not conclusively decide either way between two intellectually understandable positions (or worldviews) on intellectual grounds.  This is not to say that there is no fact of the matter—there is, but it is to say that evidence is insufficient for making a conclusive non-arbitrary decision.  This position differs from option 3a because in this situation it is not the claim that there is something unintelligible—it is intelligible, but just not intellectually decidable.  To this it might be replied that such situations never arise—if we had all the evidence then of course we would be able to make a conclusive non-arbitrary decision—namely the correct one that represented the fact of the matter.  But no, it is countered, such situations do arise.  I’ll give two examples, though there are countless others.

Example 1: David Hume, near the end of the second part of his discussion on miracles, sets up a scenario in which there is no doubt that on the first of January 1600 the world is covered in darkness for eight days.  Hume seems to think that, instead of receiving such an event as a miracle, one would “search for the causes whence it might be derived.”[43]  But, I say, let’s suppose that we engaged in a prolonged search, and we came up empty-handed—no conclusive evidence as to why the world was covered in darkness.  We might suggest two competing theories: (a) there is a natural reason for the darkness, but we just don’t know what it is (and might never know what it is), or (b) there is a supernatural reason, such as that it is God’s doing.  Both are logical possibilities, and we have no intellectual evidence ruling either out; this question cannot be decided on intellectual grounds.

Example 2: A. J. Burger, in his discussion of William James, puts forward a real-life example of an option “that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.”  Burger cites a newspaper report, in which it was written that police were called to a house because of loud screaming.  Apparently a woman and her boyfriend had put the woman’s four-year-old daughter in the oven and burnt her to death.  The couple believed that the girl was really Lucifer incarnate, that Lucifer is responsible for all the evil in the world, and that Lucifer would get away and commit more evil unless they killed him by burning him.  Burger asks what test could be given to determine if the child is Lucifer, and answers, none.

 

If the child behaves abnormally, it could be Lucifer or it could simply be an abnormal child.  If the child behaves normally, it could be a normal child, or it could be Lucifer pretending to be a child as a disguise.  No matter what the child does, then—or what it looks like—one cannot tell whether it is Lucifer or not.  Thus it is a question that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.[44]

 

It might be noted that both these examples I have given have a distinctive “theistic worldview” versus “naturalistic worldview” flavour to them.  This is not an accident because, if John Bishop is correct,[45] then the theism/naturalism debate as a whole is, by its nature, intellectually undecidable, and we can multiply these sorts of examples ad infinitum.  And as I hinted at near the end of my discussion of option 3a, the debate over whether there are necessary linguistic limitations is a debate of precisely this same kind.  Is this a defendable form of absurdity?  Of the types of philosophical absurdity discussed so far, I find this type the most plausible.  It seems to me that the world is, in fact, like I have been describing above—there are numerous options that are not intellectually decidable (in which many of the more interesting ones, to my mind, are to do with the theism/naturalism and “how did it all begin?” debates[46]).  I am slightly less certain about part (1) of the absurd relationship, but as I said above for option 2, and repeated again for option 3a, it is, at least, plausible.  What does Camus think about this?  Two points to think that Camus would accept this form of absurdity.  (1) It seems to me Camus is agnostic, not atheistic (“let me assert again: it is not the affirmation of God that is questioned here, but rather the logic leading to the affirmation”[47]; Camus’ writes, 13 years later in his preface, that his task was to show that “even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate”—not believing in God is distinct from believing there is no God, and sits more comfortably with agnosticism), and as such seems open to the possibility of intellectually undecidable options with respect to theism/naturalism.[48]  (2) As discussed above, Camus holds that rationality has its place, but it cannot give us all the answers.  I cannot find any specific passages in Camus to reject this interpretation of the absurd, and I conclude, tentatively,[49] that Camus would be happy with this articulation of the absurd.

Option 3c: Scepticism and seriousness.  This is the view that Nagel takes, with respect to the absurd, and he appears to think that Camus holds it as well.  Once again, this is a version of the absurd based on epistemic limitations.  It is most similar to option 3b, but it seems to be more generalised in as much as Nagel thinks that the undecidability infiltrates all aspects of our life; it is not just with respect to deciding between worldviews.  Nagel takes the view that absurdity arises because we, as humans, can take a backwards step from our lives at any time and ask the “why?” and “what for?” questions.  We can even ask these questions with respect to reasoning itself, and we arrive at doubts about what it takes for something to be a reason.   Nagel thinks that the factual component of the absurd has to do with the fact that, ultimately, there are no reasons for our doing anything—whatever we do is arbitrary, and this arbitrariness is inescapable.[50]  This makes gratuitous anything that we take seriously.  Nagel points out that in this sense absurdity resembles epistemological scepticism, which he says he also holds (albeit unpopularly).  More precisely, the factual component is not just that we can do this, but that we do do this.  It is part of our nature, as human beings, that we can take a step back and question everything.  The intentional component comes in, for Nagel, because, in fact, we do take our lives seriously—we have goals, and plans and efforts, and we agonise over the smallest details of our appearance, relationships, careers, and so on.  Moreover, this seriousness is necessary, according to Nagel.  Even when we see our seriousness as arbitrary and gratuitous, we still do not disengage from life, and this makes our lives absurd.  Nagel writes:

 

Camus maintains in The Myth of Sisyphus that the absurd arises because the world fails to meet our demand for meaning.  This suggests that the world might satisfy those demands if it were different.  But now we can see that this is not the case.  There does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) about which unsettlable doubts could not arise.[51]

 

I think Nagel is absolutely correct that such absurdity exists.  However, I am not convinced it is what Camus had in mind when he considers the absurd.  This is because, for Nagel’s absurdity, the questioning is with respect to everything, including rationality itself.  And, as I have already shown above, Camus is not willing to give up on rationality as a whole.

Option 4: The death of God.  Young takes Camus’ meaning with respect to the irrationality of the world to be the loss of eternal values, or, in other words, the “death of God” (to use Nietzsche’s phrase).  This is departing yet further from the usual meaning of ‘irrationality,’ but it is still possible to see the connection if we think about it in terms of meaning or purpose.  Young thinks that Camusian absurdity arises because (1) there is a deep human need for it to be the case that God exists, but (2), in fact, God doesn’t exist.  We are victims of a fundamental nostalgia for some sort of Judeo-Christian (or other) grand-narrative that provides eternal values or meaning for us via (for example) telling us what the world is like and our place in it, telling us how we ought to live, and telling us that everything will turn out well for us and the world as a whole.  But, the world is not, nor ever was, like this (according to this view).  Sprintzen takes essentially the same view as Young in his interpretation of Camus, in the sense that he takes Camus as responding to the deep psychological suffering brought about by the purported realisation of God’s non-existence.  The difference is that while Young thinks that Camus holds that the deep desires are fundamental to the human condition (Young: “the absurd lies in the disjunction between the human being’s fundamental spiritual need and what reality offers”[52]), Sprintzen thinks that Camus holds that absurdity is contingent to societies rooted in a Judeo-Christian outlook on life (and we might also add Islamic).  Sprintzen seems to think that people in other societies don’t have the same intentional attitudes as those in the Judeo-Christian tradition; these people don’t have the deep desire for God’s existence (in whichever way it is fleshed out), and some have not even considered the possibility that God might exist.  Sprintzen writes:

 

Energised by the demand for an ordered, dignified, meaningful existence, suffused with the memory of several thousand years of Judeo-Christian providence, confronting a world eternally indifferent to that need and unresponsive to that memory, such is the source of our experience of the absurd.[53]

 

Thus, for Sprintzen, an analysis of Camusian absurdity is an analysis of the psychology or pathology of those within the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And as I wrote in the previous section, this is not a philosophical sense of absurdity.  So, here I will just focus on the potentially philosophically interesting absurdity that Young discusses (whether or not this is Camus’ actual view).  We might then ask the question of what, precisely, is it about the fact of God’s non-existence that reveals in us such a deep unobtainable desire.  I think, once again, there are a number of possible answers, and option 4 can be subdivided into a number of distinct positions.

Option 4a: Death.  Young, answering via Arthur Schopenhauer, claims that Camus’ view is that the intentional component of the absurd is the desire for personal immortality (Young: “Schopenhauer once observed that the desire for God and the desire for personal immortality are really the same”[54]).  Young writes: “if this is right then the absurd is really the disjunction between our demand for the non-finality of death and the failure of reality to meet this demand.”[55]  On this assumption, Young then proceeds to analyse what follows with respect to how we ought to live given the assumption that absurdity understood in this way exists, and Camus’ discussion of revolt and the absurd hero.  As interesting as this topic is, an as enlightening as Young’s thoughts are on these normative and interpretative issues, I won’t discuss it here; instead I’ll focus on whether such absurdity is plausible.  Firstly, is it true that all humans have a deep desire or a demand to live forever?  I say no.  Take, for example, the huge tradition in Indian philosophy that advocates the goal of nothingness, of ceasing to exist, and of halting the chain of birth and death.  For those in this tradition the problem seems to be to end one’s life, and potential immortality appears to be the horror.  Presumably these people don’t demand the non-finality of death, and many go so far as to demand the exact opposite.  Further, in another strand of thought the self and the Self are distinguished—the self dies, but the Self does not die.  At best this is the desire for the world to continue existing or the parts that made up the individual to constitute something greater, but this is far from saying that they, in any sense, survive.  Certainly, it is not anything to do with personal survival, which was what Schopenhauer claimed.  Moreover, whether or not those in this tradition are right in what they do is not the point, all I am saying is that, since they do, the demand for the non-finality of death cannot be a fundamental characteristic of human beings.  So it seems to me that this is, at best, a contingent desire for some people, or some groups of people.  Young also points out another problem by arguing that one cannot both hold that life is precious and also that a deep desire to live forever implies a horror at death (as he thinks Camus does).  He argues that the horror of death blights any attempt to show the preciousness of life, and thus one is forced to abandon the intentional component of this type of absurdity if one also wants to argue against suicide (thus Young thinks that Camus, on his interpretation, is wrong, because Camus tries to hold two contradictory claims).  Young’s argument is not an argument against the coherence of this type of absurdity in isolation, but against the coherence of accepting this type of absurdity combined with an anti-suicide ethic.  Secondly, is it true that personal immortality is impossible?  Without getting into a huge and complex debate about personal identity (and identity more generally), currently orthodoxy says, at the very least, that the notion is highly problematic.  So, a charitable reading would say that this factual component of this type of the absurd is plausible.  But, on the basis that the intentional component of this type of absurdity is not true for humanity as a whole, I am unconvinced that this type of absurdity exists (that is, as a philosophical form of the absurd; I am not denying that it contingently exists for some people who have a particular psychology).  Moreover, if this really is Camus’ picture of the absurd, I am puzzled why Camus would put up as the ideal absurd hero a person who is immortal (Sisyphus).  This makes me question whether Young’s interpretation of Camus is correct (though I think Young’s rejection of the position is essentially correct).  We may attempt to resurrect option 4a by reinterpreting death to be not the death of the individual body, but the complete obliteration of any evidence that one ever existed.  This seems to be close to Camus’ thought when he discusses the actor as the absurd hero, writing: “From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe’s works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten.”[56]  On this interpretation, the absurd arises because (1) one has a deep desire not to be forgotten, for one’s works and legacy to last forever, or for one to matter in the grand scale of things, but (2) eventually, even the best will be forgotten as one’s culture dies, and one is as nothing at the cosmic level.  This also seems to be consistent with the conqueror, as Camus’ absurd hero, since his life consists of trying to build an empire that will last for eternity, even though he knows that his task is impossible.  But this resurrected interpretation fails for exactly the same reasons as the original version of option 4a.  The second part is plausible—that all one’s works will eventually be forgotten and one is fundamentally insignificant, but the first part seems contingent to one’s psychology—I don’t think it is part of human nature to desire eternal recognition (although I am not denying that many individuals do, in fact, desire fame).

Option 4 revisited: Desire for God’s existence (without the desire for personal immortality).  I am unconvinced that Schopenhauer is right to equate the desire for God’s existence with the desire for personal immortality.  I think Schopenhauer is simply wrong to say:

 

If, one day, it were to be proved that immorality and the existence of gods are independent, even antithetical ideas, … belief in gods would instantly disappear.[57]

 

I think that there are many other psychological reasons for belief in God, or gods, and I think there are many believers in God who deny personal immortality.  The point of my objection is to deny that option 4a is the only form of option 4.  My claim is that the desire for God’s existence need not amount to the desire for personal immortality, and instead of this desire (for personal immortality) there may be one or more other intentions, which make up the desire for God’s existence.  If this can be coherently argued, then it follows that option 4 can subdivide into other forms of absurdity, depending on how we flesh out the desire for God’s existence.  With this in mind, we might turn to Bishop,[58] who asks the question: what functional role does belief in God play in the psychological economy of the theist?  That is, what is it that the belief in God—itself, and not the content of the belief, do for you that non-belief cannot do?[59]  As such, I take this to be a separate question from the one that asks about the desire for religion in general (which need not require belief in God)—I take it that Schopenhauer is not going so far as to equate the desire for religion as a whole with the desire for personal immortality (but if he is, we could add far more objections, such as that religion provides an overarching expression of the nature of the world, an explanation for the way that the world is, instruction on how one ought to live one’s life, assertion of the supremacy of certain values, the worth of adhering to such values, or a social environment in which to live one’s life).  In brief, Bishop focus on hope, in a number of different forms—belief in the existence of God enables one to have certain hopes that non-belief does not permit one to have.[60]  This is the content of the desire for the existence of God, that it allows one to have a certain type of hope.  But, like option 4a, I don’t think that any form of option 4 is able to articulate such a strong position to assert that desire for the existence of God is a universal human desire.  Whatever way we articulate it, whether it is Schopenhauer’s, Bishop’s, or some other fleshing out of the desire,[61] it seems, at best, merely contingent to some groups of people.  As such, it is not a philosophical type of absurdity.  Moreover, it seems to me that the evidence behind the factual component (that God doesn’t exist) needs more work—it may be true, but we just don’t know.  It also depends on how we flesh out what we mean by “God,” and, if we follow Bishop on this, then, while some concepts of God may not be instantiated in the world, others might be.  Finally, with respect to interpreting Camus, I don’t see any evidence of these sorts of discussions in Camus’ work.  I don’t see Camus as claiming that there is fundamental absurdity because God doesn’t exist, and when he is careful he seems to positively say that we don’t know if God doesn’t exist.

 

Conclusion

In this essay I have argued that “the absurd”, as discussed in the Camusian tradition, is an ambiguous term.  I have acknowledged the possibility of one-piece absurdities (as, for example, Young’s interpretation of Camus), but I have not engaged in discussion about the form that these might take, or whether they depart too significantly from the everyday usage of the word “absurd.”  Instead I have focused on disambiguating the two-piece varieties of the absurd.  Firstly, I have distinguished non-philosophical forms of the absurd from philosophical forms of the absurd.  Secondly, I have distinguished four main forms of putatively philosophical absurdity, which have all, to a greater or lesser extent, been articulated in the literature.  I also subdivided two of these into further forms of absurdity.  I have shown that one of these putative philosophical absurdities (option 1) is really not an instance of the absurd, another (option 4) is not an instance of philosophical absurdity (though it is an instance of general absurdity) because the universality of the intentional component is missing, and another (option 2) is questionable because its picture of the factual component is doubtful.  Option 3 absurdity is the most plausible, in as much as it paints a picture of the nature of the world and human intentionality.  I argue that option 3c exists, option 3b plausibly exists, and option 3a possibly exists.  I have also attempted an educated guess as to which forms of absurdity Camus accepted, or which appear consistent with his writings.  Finally, I see this essay as important prolegomena to deciding if the existence of the absurd exerts any normative force.  That is, we need to work out if and to what extent there is absurdity, before engaging in discussion over how we ought to act given such absurdity.  Hence, a follow-up essay might engage in debate over whether the absurd makes suicide legitimate or even obligatory, or whether Camus is correct to claim that the fact of the absurd requires that one reject suicide, nostalgia and hope in favour of lucidity and revolt, or whether Nagel is correct to say that irony is the correct response to the absurd.[62]  It seems to me that the answer to such questions depends on which form of absurdity we are looking at, and exerting energy looking at forms of absurdity that have no philosophical importance is itself absurd (though not philosophically absurd).

 

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