His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. “What, then is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. Human existence is absurd because it finds itself violently separated and distanced from a world closing itself off in its foreignness, unintelligibility, and rejection. The world is merely obscure and unintelligible. This means that, for Camus, it is not the world that is absurd, but rather the human condition itself. Understanding is reducing that which is foreign in the universe to what is human so that a reconciling with happiness could take place: “There is no happiness if I cannot know.” The absurdity of existence arises and holds sway because of the unfulfilled and unrealizable desire, appetite, and nostalgia for unity, clarity, familiarity, and understanding. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse for the human drama” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. The truism ‘All thought is anthropomorphic’ has no other meaning. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the ant-hill. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. “The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. The world rejects and evades our attempts at reducing it to our own concepts, feelings, and thoughts. What renders existence absurd and life meaningless is that the world refuses to be reduced to that which is human by being understood. The absurdity of existence occurs and holds sway because of the non-familiarity, obscurity, and incomprehensibility lying at the heart of human existence. The fact that existence is absurd and meaningless is certain, yet not everyone comes face to face with this meaninglessness and with this absurdity. Camus thus says that there is a difference between the “fact” of the absurdity of existence and the recognition and realization of this absurdity. Our failure to glimpse or grasp this meaninglessness does not negate the meaninglessness in which we are placed. Human existence, for Camus, is meaningless. Yet, this inability to become aware of the meaninglessness of existence does not mean that life is not meaningless. Meaninglessness often hides itself and remains unnoticed it does not show itself to everyone. Suicide is a “philosophical problem” because it constantly presents itself to us as a response to the human condition and as a justified attempt at escaping the meaninglessness of existence.īut, according to Camus, not everyone notices and suffers from this meaninglessness. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide”. “Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. Suicide, for Camus, is a “serious philosophical problem” because it arises and announces itself only when what is questioned, doubted, and disputed is the meaning of life in its privacy, particularity, and individuality. All the rest- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories-comes afterwards” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. The endeavor to “resolve the problem of suicide” brings the whole essay face to face with what precedes and leads to the attempt at killing oneself, with what is constantly entangled with every endeavor to render oneself absent, that is, the absurd. Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the question of suicide, but it is the thought of the absurdity of existence that holds together Camus’s whole essay and confirms its force.
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