Renodus

The Absurd

11 min read

The Absurd

The Absurd is what happens at the meeting point between two facts that don’t fit. Fact one: the human being is a creature that demands meaning, coherence, and intelligibility from its situation. Fact two: the world has no obligation to provide any of these things, and on inspection it doesn’t. The collision between the demand and the refusal is the Absurd. It is not the world being meaningless on its own (a stone in a field is not absurd), and it is not the human being meaningless on its own (a child crying is not absurd). It is the gap between the two — the silence that meets the question.

The word’s twentieth-century philosophical career is associated mainly with Albert Camus, whose page is not yet in the EN tree. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is the canonical statement: Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill forever, is the human condition stripped to its mechanism, and the central question of philosophy is whether the absurdity of this condition justifies suicide. (Camus’s answer: no — Sisyphus must be imagined happy, because the lucid recognition of the absurd is itself the response to it.) Until Camus arrives in the EN tree, the absurd has to be approached here through the writers we do have, who arrived at the same diagnosis from other angles — above all through Nietzsche, whose “God is dead” is the event the twentieth-century absurdists are reporting from.

Nietzsche: The Absurd Before Its Name

Nietzsche is the predecessor Camus will not stop naming. The absurd is what opens up in the space Nietzsche calls nihilism — the condition that arises, as Kazantzakis’s exposition puts it, “as soon as we realize that there exists an implacable and irreconcilable disparity between the real and the ideal.” The human demand for meaning (the ideal) collides with the world’s refusal to supply it (the real), and the collision is the absurd. Nietzsche’s name for the precipitating event is the death of God. [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Thus Spoke Zarathustra]] opens with it: “Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!” And with God die the whole architecture of meaning Christianity had constructed — the cosmic purpose, the final judgment, the underwritten moral law, the heaven where injustice gets corrected.

What follows is the fork Nietzsche is the first to see clearly. On one side: the Last Man, who has noticed the absurd and responded by making himself small enough never to suffer it — the modern democratic subject who “blinks” and says “we have discovered happiness.” On the other: the Übermensch, who says yes to the absurd so completely that he wills it back forever — the eternal recurrence test. Would you will this life, unchanged, with all its pointlessness and pain, eternally? The Übermensch can. Anyone who cannot is still a secret Christian, still holding out for redemption somewhere else. Camus’s lucid revolt and Nietzsche’s Amor fati are, at the deepest level, the same answer in two vocabularies.

Nietzsche also gives the diagnosis that the absurdists will inherit: every philosophy, every religion, every moral system is a human attempt to impose meaning on a meaningless ground ([[beyond-good-and-evil|Beyond Good and Evil]] §6 — philosophy as “involuntary and unconscious memoir”). The absurd is what appears once that imposition stops working — once the human animal catches itself in the act of projecting.

Sartre and the Nausea of the World

Sartre’s Nausea (1938) is the cleanest pre-Camus statement of the absurd in fiction. Antoine Roquentin sits in a public park and the chestnut tree’s root in front of him stops being a chestnut tree’s root and becomes a pure, gratuitous lump of being with no reason to be there, no reason not to be there, no reason for anything. The objects of the world refuse to mean. Roquentin’s nausea is the bodily form of the recognition.

Sartre is not Camus. The vocabulary in Nausea is “contingency” and “facticity” rather than “absurdity,” and the cure Sartre eventually proposes (commitment, project, the construction of meaning by the for-itself) is more activist than Camus’s (lucid revolt). But the diagnosis is the same. The world owes us nothing. We are alone with our demand for it to make sense. That is the situation we have to start from.

In [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] Sartre formalizes the picture. The in-itself — the brute being of objects — is what it is. The for-itself — consciousness — is what it is not and is not what it is. The two never coincide. Every project of trying to become the kind of solid, finished, self-identical being that the in-itself effortlessly is — every attempt to escape one’s freedom by becoming a thing — is bad faith. And bad faith is the everyday flight from the absurd. The waiter who plays at being a waiter so perfectly that he no longer notices he is choosing it; the woman who pretends not to notice that the man holding her hand is making a pass; the Antisemite who wants the comfort of certainty about the Jew so that he doesn’t have to live with the open question of his own self — all are fleeing the absurd in the same way.

Kafka and the Trial Without a Charge

Kafka writes the absurd from the inside, as dream rather than as argument. The Trial (1925) is the absurd given a courtroom. Joseph K. wakes one morning to find he is on trial for an unspecified offense, conducted by a court whose location, procedures, and verdict will never be made clear to him. The novel never lets him understand what he is being charged with, and the reader never gets to decide whether the trial is an external persecution, an internal guilt, or something stranger that doesn’t separate the two. The novel ends with K.’s execution — “Like a dog!” — and the executioner does not explain.

What Kafka adds to the absurd, that the philosophers don’t quite have, is its texture. The absurd does not announce itself as a metaphysical event. It announces itself as a banal Tuesday morning in which the ordinary structures one had relied on quietly stop working. The bank examiner shows up and his clothes don’t fit the role; the lawyer’s office is in an attic above someone’s laundry; the priest tells a parable that doesn’t resolve. The absurd, in Kafka, is not a recognition that floods consciousness. It is a quiet, persistent, dream-logical refusal of the world to behave the way it is supposed to. It is harder to wake up from than the philosophical version, because there is no clean argument to wake up from.

A Hunger Artist (1922) is the absurd as career: a performer whose art (public fasting) was once a recognized discipline and is now an obsolete curiosity, fasting on in his cage past the point of any audience’s interest, and dying with the line “I always wanted you to admire my fasting. … But you shouldn’t admire it. … Because I have to fast, I can’t help it. … I couldn’t find the food I liked.” The absurd is the artist’s persistence in a calling whose recognition has evaporated.

The Older Source

The absurd has a longer history than its twentieth-century articulation. Pascal in the Pensées (1670) describes the human condition in terms that Camus would have recognized: a creature suspended between two infinities, bound to die, dependent on diversions to keep from noticing its situation. Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century names the absurd as the structural condition of religious faith — the leap into believing what cannot be made rational, what cannot be made rational, because if it were rational it would not be faith. The Christian who believes that an eternal God became a particular man in first-century Palestine is, for Kierkegaard, embracing the absurd, not refusing it. Schopenhauer in [[the-world-as-will-and-representation|The World as Will and Representation]] (1819) supplies the metaphysical pessimism the twentieth-century absurdists inherit: the world is the senseless striving of a blind Will, the satisfactions of consciousness are temporary, and the wise response is renunciation. Camus rejects renunciation; he keeps the diagnosis.

Dostoevsky and the Religious Frame

Dostoevsky is not an absurdist in Camus’s sense, but he stages the absurd as a religious problem. Ivan Karamazov’s “if there is no God, everything is permitted” is the absurd taken seriously: in the absence of cosmic underwriting, why should anything matter? Ivan refuses the religious answer (he “returns the ticket” to a God who allows children to suffer) and falls into nihilism and madness. Alyosha and Zosima represent a different response — the kissing of the earth, the pouring of love over the meaningless world until the world begins, again, to bear meaning. Camus would name what Ivan refuses; Dostoevsky already wrote the refusal sixty years earlier.

The Cinema

Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is the absurd given a chess game. The knight returning from the Crusades plays chess with Death across a plague-stricken Sweden and is given the same answer Camus’s Sisyphus gets: there is no audible God, the silence is the situation, and what one does inside the silence is the only thing one can call meaning.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a long meditation on whether the absurd has an inside or only an outside. The Zone is a region where the laws of the everyday do not apply; the room at its center grants wishes, allegedly, but only the true wish, the unconscious one. The three pilgrims arrive at the threshold and refuse to enter. The film never decides whether the room is real, whether the journey was meaningful, or whether the pilgrims have escaped the absurd or merely re-encountered it inside the Zone.

Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is the absurd as old age: a retired professor reviews his life on the morning of his honorary doctorate and finds that almost none of it carried the meaning he had assumed it carried. The film’s tenderness is the recognition that this is everyone’s situation, not just his.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the absurd at cosmic scale: a species reaches across the solar system to find that the meaning, if there is one, has been left behind by something the species cannot understand. The film’s silence is its argument.

What to Do With the Absurd

The classical positions are roughly four.

  • Suicide — Camus’s question. Reject. The act doesn’t answer the absurd; it cancels the question without resolving it.
  • Religious leap — Kierkegaard’s answer. Embrace the absurd as the condition of faith, and choose to believe what cannot be rationally grounded.
  • Lucid revolt — Camus’s answer. Hold the recognition open without flinching. Sisyphus pushes the boulder. We must imagine him happy.
  • Project — Sartre’s answer. The for-itself constructs meaning by committing to a project, knowing that the meaning has no foundation outside the commitment.

The twentieth century then runs each of these positions through every medium it has. The Absurd is, in this sense, the most fertile philosophical idea of the century — the one that produced the most novels, plays, films, and theological responses.

Connected Works and Pages

Awaiting

A proper page on this theme will eventually require Camus in the EN tree — The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Plague. Until those arrive, this page borrows their argument by name.

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