Highlights
An absurd reasoning - Absurdity and Suicide
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
“In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. (…) It is merely confessing that that ‘is not worth the trouble’.”
“Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the useless of suffering.”
“We get in the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”
“The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of thoe who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.”
Absurd Walls
“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are consious of saying.”
“Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or of an attitude of mind.”
“It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if if I say that I know him a little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth.”
“All great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a streetcorner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity.”
“So long the as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart.”
“I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessnes, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.”
“The absurd depends as much on the man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together, It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place.”
Philosophical Suicide
“The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.”
“There can be no absurd outside the human mind. Thus, like everything else, the absurd ends with death. But there can be no absurd outside this world either.
“A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.”
“And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope, a continual rejection, and a conscious dissatisfaction. Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only in so far it is not agreed to.”
“The leap does not represent an extreme danger as Kierkegaard would like it to do. The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest - that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.”
Absurd Freedom
“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”
“He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels - his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accomodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.”
“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.”
“That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. 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. No disparagement is of any use.”
“To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitues man’s majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.”
“Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Everything that is indomitable and passionate in a human heart quickens them, on the contrary with its own life. It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one’s free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself.”
“The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all my chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in man’s availability.”
“Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences - all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it. But at that moment I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which alone cas serve as basis for a truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality. After death the chips are down. I am not even free, either, to perpetuatue myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, without recourse to contempt.”
“I think I can choose to be that rather than something else. I think so so unconsciously, to be sure. But at the same time I strengthen my postulate with the beliefs of those around me, with the presumptions of my human environment. However far one may remain from any presumption, moral or social, one is partly influenced by them and even, for the best among them, one adapts one’s life to them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free.”
“The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom.”
“Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of it - this involves the principle of a liberation.”
“The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life - it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only resonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live.”
“The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”
“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. “
The Absurd Man
“What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”
“But to anyone who seeks quantity in his joys, the only thing that matters is efficacy. What is the use of complicating the passwords that have stood the test?”
The Myth of Sisyphus
“You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. 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 toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.”
“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.”
“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
“The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days.”
“He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”