A world torn by wars that slaughtered at least 30 million people; a country crushed by the oppressive fist of colonial France; a father lost in conflict; the radioactive threat of nuclear proliferation; an asphyxiating illness.
Violence and misery mired Camus’ life. Understandably, the creative outburst that followed revolved around questions of meaning and despair. How could so much death and suffering be the product of an inherently meaningful world? Why do we seek meaning so relentlessly? If the world is meaningless, do our individual lives still hold value? These and similar questions underpin much of Camus’ most acclaimed works: The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the angst-inducing The Stranger.
Other authors had been grappling with similar questions. The famous French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that humans are a tabula rasa, a blank slate with no ascribed life plan. "Existence precedes essence," and we are "condemned to be free" [1], freedom being the courageous choice we each make to develop an essence and to assume responsibility for our existence.
But Camus rejected the blank thrusts of his contemporaries. He didn’t seem to see a tabula rasa. Rather, he suggested that we are all born with a shared human nature, which impels us to strive toward a set of common goals. One such goal is our relentless search for meaning. As he saw it, there’s a fundamental fissure between our yearning for purpose and the cosmos’ silent response to our supplications. If the God hypothesis is refuted and with it any notion of fate or divine plans, we must reevaluate the source of our meanings.
The attempt to reconcile bleakness and purpose took a central place in Camus’ work. In The Stranger, the indifferent Meursault doesn’t attach much meaning to…anything. The famous first few lines—"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know."—immediately make that clear. Meursault doesn’t remember when his mother passed away. He doesn’t cry at her funeral; he nonchalantly helps his neighbor harass a woman; and he shoots a man, not his enemy but his neighbor’s, five times. Even in prison does he keep a frightening cool and calm outlook on his situation, indifferent to his death sentence, for this or that, life or death, are much the same in a game he refuses to play.
From this wrestling with absurdity come what are arguably Camus’ most memorable words: "there is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide" [2]. Or to rephrase: could suicide be the only rational response to a meaningless existence?
As I understand it, Camus didn’t think so. Regardless of the cruelty and misery and pain that we have to endure by virtue of being human, affirming our existence by deciding to live is the most supreme expression of genuine freedom.
Perhaps this affirmation animated much of Camus’ life who, I assume, despite writing extensively about meaninglessness and despair, must have found some meaning in penning down his numerous theater plays, essays, books, and newspaper columns about the topics. Perhaps, this want to ascertain our aliveness by searching for meaning is the meaning, or at least one source of meaning. I remember hearing Noam Chomsky say that the answer to ‘what is the purpose of life’ is quite simple: just look at the million things we do. Among those millions of activities is thinking about how bleak and meaningless our existence might be. In this sense, the process of negating meaning through deep reflection about the paradoxically absurd condition in which we all find ourselves is a source of meaning itself.
Another point worth contemplating is Camus’ separation between the cold, bleak, meaningless, arbitrary, and cruel universe and the relentless search and discovery of individual meaning. Camus and most everyone seem to think that human meaning is something we create independently of the rest of nature. In other words, meaning is a uniquely human feature that resides in humans but not in any other entity or part of the universe. This may be obvious when we look at rocks and plants, which may be assumed to have neither notions of meaning nor impulses to search for it. But if we accept that humans are part of the universe, is not saying that the universe is meaningless and that humans may have individual meanings a contradiction?
Let’s say that K’s purpose is to help others share their successful business journeys through blogging and video interviews. K has a clear life purpose. K is also an irreplaceable part of the universe, a part which exists within a vast and seemingly detached cosmic web, but one which is also a part of it. The moment K discovers his sense of purpose, does the universe become purposeful? Or to flip Camus’ guiding question, if one individual life become meaningful, does the world become meaningful?
If the answer is no, it seems that we also have to deny that K has a real purpose. If there is no purpose inherent to the universe, then K, as an inextricable part of the universe, also doesn’t have any purpose, despite his passionate affirming that he does. If we say yes and accept that K is an inextricable part of the universe, then we might say that indeed, the universe is purposeful. Purpose manifests through K, and countless others like him.
Then arises the question: if the universe really is a bleak mechanism with no inherent purpose, whence do our individual purposes come?
Notes
[1] "Existentialism is a Humanism." From Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, trans. Walter Kaufmann, pp. 3-4.
[2] Worth noting are the words that follow: “All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.” From "An Absurd Reasoning," in The Myth of Sisyphus.
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