On Camus
I've long enjoyed Albert Camus. I was forced to read The Stranger in high school, and enjoyed it so much that I went on a local radio station to talk about it. In my early thirties, I read The Myth of Sisyphus and dug it. I really like his notebooks, but could never get a firm footing in The Rebel. He was raised a Catholic and enjoyed the works of the Spanish mystics, but he lapsed early, even though there are strong indications that he was returning to the faith when his life was cut short in a car accident.
Camus' sense of the absurd is consistently refreshing. My opinion in this regard might seem odd, since his philosophy is normally associated with darkness. The question of suicide (and later murder) were his touchstones. He famously wrote, "There is only one really serious philosophical problem, that of suicide. To judge that life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived, this is to reply to the fundamental question of philosophy.”
I don't entirely agree. I think the question of whether to live is the first serious philosophical problem--and obviously the most practical one--that a person should address, but after that, a person has a host of problems to consider. In particular, once he figures life is worth living, he must figure out how to live that life. It's an ongoing question that I thought I had figured out 15 years ago, but about which I am now more skeptic than dogmatic.
Nonetheless, Camus comes down on the side of life and his unique insight into suicide is compelling and refreshing. I wrote the following in my notebooks about ten years ago, and regular TDE readers will recognize the argument, if not the exact prose: In the Introduction to his 1951 book, The Human Revolt (a/k/a The Rebel), he said about suicide: “[F]rom this act of self-destruction itself a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live.” In other words, Camus asked, Why would you commit suicide? And from that answer he weaved together a reason for living. The mere idea of committing suicide has the seeds of a reason for living inside it. By committing suicide, a person says there is nothing to live for–and thereby implies there should be and, if there should be, then there must be something to put the imperative in there in the first place. A wannabe suicide walks up to you and says, “I want to die because my hopes are dashed.” You can respond, “And where did you get those hopes and why did you put so much stock in them? What is it about you that hopes and dreams and gets disappointed? If there is something in you or about existence in the world that shoots so high, there is something in you or about existence in the world that deserves not to be shot.”
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The foregoing was triggered by a quote in the current issue of Forbes about revolutions. Revolutions, of course, are tearing apart Camus' northern Africa. It's fitting that he'd have something to say about them. The quote is great:
Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
It's worthy of serious consideration. We are repeatedly told that the Muslim revolutions are revolutions of the young, who just want jobs, food, and freedom. They're the technologically-connected (using cell phones to coordinate their efforts). They are a refreshing force against oppression. They're everything that backward Muslim fundamentalists aren't. They are, in short, people who want a shot at a society that exhibits many traits of America's open society.
I have no doubt that their revolutions are justified. They have been living under strong men for years. But I don't hold out much hope that, if they succeed, they'll be any better. If Camus is right, they'll become the new strong men (oppressors) or they'll become heretics to their cause. If they become heretics to the ideals of economic and political freedom, that would appear to leave only one viable alternative: Muslim fundamentalism.
