Philosophy of the absurd

The sense of absurdity, according to Camus, comes either suddenly and immediately, or human life for a long period is a gradual and constant immersion in the depths of the absurd; but, in any case, all further life changes, it is impossible to forget about its absurdity. This is Caligula's instant insight: "I just suddenly felt that I needed the impossible. In my opinion, the existing order of things is no good ". Such is the life of the protagonist of the "Outsider", Morse, immersed in a constant sense of absurdity: "Nothing in life will change, everything is the same". And further: "Everything is all the same, everything does not matter, and I know perfectly well why... Throughout my absurd life, through the years not yet come, from the depths of the future I met a dark whiff and met everything in my way, and from this everything that I was promised and imposed, became as illusory as those years that I lived".

Even more strongly, with frightening simplicity, the scene of "absurd insight" in the "Myth of Sisyphus" is described: "A sense of absurdity can strike any person's face in the turn of any street... Morning rise, tram, four hours in the office or at the factory, food, tram, four hours of work, food, sleep, and so on, in the same rhythm, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. "(In fact, this is the description of the way of life of Marco). "Most often this road is followed without much difficulty. But one day, suddenly, there is an interrogative "why?" And everything begins with fatigue, highlighted by surprise".

This fatigue is the first sign of the impending sense of absurdity. Absurdity has not yet taken hold of the whole person. According to Camus, "fatigue is at the same time the last manifestation of life is automatic, and the first discovery is that consciousness has come into motion. Fatigue awakens consciousness and causes everything that follows. The subsequent may be either a return to unconsciousness or a final awakening". So, the person first meets this awakening consciousness of his fatigue, and now depends on it, whether his mind will speak at the top of his voice, or again shut up. Anyway, this fatigue over Camus is the first bell, the first rebellion of the flesh, and "absurdity is revealed in this rebellion of the flesh". So, thanks to consciousness, the absurd first enters into human life.

However, awareness is not the absurdity itself; it is only a part of what is necessary for a complete sense of the absurdity of being. And Camus points out the next important step that a man makes on the road to absurdity. "Another stage below us is the feeling of our alienity in the world - we will discover... with what force nature, the landscape itself can deny us... Primitive hostility of the world reaches us through the millennia. At some point, we cease to understand this world for the simple reason that for centuries we understood only images and drawings in it, which we had previously invested in it, but for some time now we lack the more spirit to resort to this unnatural trick. The world eludes us because it becomes itself again... One thing is clear: in this density and this foreignness of the world absurdity reveals itself". Camus-writer Caligula speaks the Camus philosopher: "This world, such as it is, can not be taken out".

"Hostility of the world" Camus is a very important stage in understanding his philosophy​ of absurdity. Indeed, scientific schemes and theories, replacing each other and called upon to explain to us the world, are shouting in vain about the solution of world riddles and secrets. But in fact, they remain only hypotheses, at best only newer and closer to reality attempts to describe phenomena, and individual phenomena, which are an insignificant part of the whole diverse picture of the world. As a result, no matter how close we are to the truth, we will never fully comprehend it, and the main questions of existence will remain unanswered. This is what makes a man terrified. He passionately wants to know the universe, but all his attempts, like the attempts of Camus himself, are broken about the irrationality and alienation of the world: "... all earth science does not give anything that can assure me that this world belongs to me... I I understand that with the help of science I can identify and list the phenomena, but I can not master the world in any way. Even if I touch all the twists of its relief with my finger, I will not know more about it".

The next stage on the way to absurdity is the perception by the person of other people in their mechanistic manifestation, in their lack of sense of activity, in their alienation to each other and the conscious individual. And in this question, Camus involuntarily echoes Sartre. "People also exude something inhuman," he writes. "The painful confusion before the inhuman in man, the involuntary confusion at the sight of what we are in fact, in short," nausea ", as one modern writer called it all, also reveals the absurdity". Caligula feels this confusion to the absurdity and nausea of human passions, so suddenly stung by absurdity to the very heart. His words are indicative before and after the collision with the absurd. At first: "only the one who causes suffering to another is mistaken". And then: "If the treasury matters, then the human life does not have it... All... must agree with this reasoning and believe that their life is nothing since money for them is everything. In the meantime, I decided to be logical, and since power belongs to me, you will see what you will do with this logic. I will eradicate contradictions and contradictory". Marco, to another hero Camus, in the friends of his mother, who came to say goodbye to the deceased, see more people automata in their grotesquely mechanical than life manifestation, and he involuntarily feels his loneliness and alienation, opposes himself to them: "... they are inaudible gliding in the blinding light. They sat down, and not a single chair creaked. I have never seen anyone so clearly, to the last wrinkle, to the last fold of my clothes. But they were not heard at all; they simply could not believe that they were living people... Most of all I was struck with their faces, that I could not see the eye, only something twinkled in the network of wrinkles... everyone had toothless, sunken mouths... Then I noticed that they were all shaking their heads, sitting opposite me... I thought a ridiculous thought, as if they were going to judge me".

To top it all off, people seem to remember the imminent death, and this is perhaps the strongest argument of the absurd. Of course, he knew about it before. But in that, the pre-absurd notion of mortality and the realization of death in its absurdity is a huge difference. Before a clash with absurdity, a person lives, as if there is no death at all: "... one will never be sufficiently astonished that everyone lives as if they" did not know about death". However, after the rooting of the absurd in the mind of man, the absurdity and the frightening inevitability of death are everywhere with him, and from them, one can not escape: "In fact, the source of horror is the mathematical immutability of the event of death... Simplicity and irreversibility of what happened and gave the content of sense of absurdity. In the deadly light of this fate, it shows uselessness". Indeed, death only becomes truly terrible when a person meets with absurdity and realizes it. This, incidentally, says Heidegger, quoted by Camus: "The world can not offer anything to a person who is in the grip of fear". "People are dying, and they are unhappy", - exclaims Caligula as if he had just really realized this truism. In a sense, that's the way it is, because, of course, he always knew about it, but now, in the radiance of the absurd, it becomes unbearable to him. To the point that Caligula can no longer forget himself in a dream the way it used to be, in other words, his life, or rather, the sense of life, has radically changed. "In fact, we are all condemned to death," the hero of the "Stranger" echoes him. After such insight, the inevitability of death becomes unbearable. "The thought that" I am, "my way of acting as if everything makes sense..., is dizzily refuted by the absurdity of a possible death".