Camus and absurdity

Karim Benammar

Links:

http://karimbenammar.com/

https://www.udemy.com/why-are-you-alive-introductory-course/

Contents

Introduction. 3

1. Surplus. 4

1.1. Surplus energy. 4

1.2. Expenditure. 4

1.3. Life as a gift 5

1.4. Spending one's life. 5

1.5. Exercise. 5

2. Freedom... 6

2.1 Agency: the power to make choices. 6

2.2. Sartre's radical freedom... 6

2.3. Foucault's practice of freedom... 7

2.4. The freedom to shape your life. 8

2.5 Exercises. 9

3. Meaning. 10

3.1. Camus and absurdity. 10

3.2. Meaning as the first requirement 10

3.3. Giving meaning to your life. 11

3.4 Exercise. 11

4. Community. 12

4.1. The paradox of an individual consciousness in society. 12

4.2. Implicit and chosen communities. 12

4.3. The power of love: eros, philia and agape. 12

4.4. Common projects. 13

4.5. Exercises. 13

5. Purpose. 14

5.1. A challenging project 14

5.2. Projects and identity. 14

5.3. What do your bring to the world?. 15

5.4. Homo creator 15

5.5. Exercises. 16

6. Beauty. 17

6.1. Seeing and creating beauty. 17

6.2. The useless beautiful gesture. 17

6.3. Aesthetics instead of ethics. 18

6.4. Empowering everyone's potential 19

6.5. Exercises. 20

Conclusion. 21

Introduction

Making an active choice as to how we want to live is a great privilege, a great freedom, and a great responsibility. Now that our lives are no longer solely determined for us by necessity and nature, we have the opportunity to design our lives. So how do we make these choices? The awareness that we can and do shape our lives is the first step. We are the creators of our own existence.

Why are you alive? is my upcoming book on this subject. You can read the current prototype version below - click on "read more" for the full text in each chapter.

When we first think of the question "Why are you alive?", it may seem unanswerable. Human beings can think of the issue, turn it into a grammatically correct question, but this does not in itself guarantee that there is an answer to the question, much less a satisfying answer. Perhaps life on earth is completely accidental, as some scientists assure us, the fantastic result of a frighteningly unlikely set of circumstances.

"Why are you alive?" is not however a question about the existence of the universe or about life on earth. It is a question about your life, and what meaning you give to your own life. The good news is that there is an answer to this question. The further good news is that you are the only person who can answer this question for yourself.

I believe that finding an answer to this question can make your life more meaningful, more enjoyable, and more peaceful. There is a difference between being aware of why you are alive and living without ever thinking about it. Rather than finding an answer, as in discovering something that is already out there, it is a case of constructing an answer. Constructing the answer to why you are alive is a process.

You are not the first person to have thought about this question. It is a central question of philosophy. The Ancient Greeks asked about what living a good life would mean. Existentialist philosophers argued that human beings have to create the meaning of their own lives, because this meaning cannot be found outside of one's life. The philosopher Michel Foucault asked what it would mean to turn one's life into a work of art.

This question is becoming more pressing today. The reason is that many of us are healthier and wealthier than we have ever been. We are no longer primarily concerned with the business of surviving, as most of our ancestors were (and unfortunately large groups today still are), but are concerned with how to live. If we have enough to eat, to live comfortably, to go on holiday, to spend our leisure time, then the question as to why we are alive at all comes up more forcefully.

This book examines six elements of the art of living. These will help you answer the question of why you are alive. First, we look at the surplus energy that characterizes life and that all of us experience. This allows us to make something of our life. Next, we examine freedom: if we are to make our own choices and give shape to our own life, we must be able to exercise freedom. The third element is meaning: how do we give meaning to our activities, how do we bring meaning to our own life, if life as a whole is meaningless? The fourth element is community. Our consciousness is radically individual, but our experience of life is a shared experience – no one lives alone. We are born into implicit communities but as we grown up we can choose our own communities. The fifth element is the purpose we have in our undertakings, the projects and tasks that we take on, and the satisfaction this leads to. The sixth and final element is beauty – this is ultimately what we strive for, in our own life and as well as the legacy of our communal action.

It's not just about theory. In each chapter, there are exercises which you can develop into a regular practice.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, you are a unique human being. This collection of genes, of history, of actions will never again occur in the universe. Your consciousness – the consciousness you have at this moment of being yourself, your self-consciousness – will not be repeated. How are you making sense of this experience of life that you are having?

Surplus

Surplus energy

The world is not characterized by lack, but by a constant surplus. Life is energy emptying itself out in time. You are part of that life, part of that cosmic movement of energy emptying itself out. You are an unimaginably tiny part of it, to be sure, but a unique part of it nevertheless. You have individual consciousness of that bit of cosmic energy emptying itself out in time. How are you going to direct it?

The universe is an expenditure of energy producing stars, supernovas, galaxies: cosmic outbursts of energy of which our solar system is only a tiny fraction. Our solar system has its own furnace, the sun. Excess energy makes life on our planet possible. This energy consumes itself all the time, in geophysical upheaval, in the cycle of life and death, in evolution's cycles of species explosions and extinctions. Life is a constant surplus. This surplus is felt in everything we do. Life in its essence is not a lack, something that is barely surviving. On all sides, there is an enormous amount of energy, provided by the sun. This energy makes our existence possible. The whole of our life is an expenditure of energy. We are solar beings.

We are aware of this excess energy in our lives. We notice that it only requires a certain amount of energy to survive, and that all the rest is surplus. Our lives are bursts of energy. When we are young, we experience the energy of children who cannot stand still, whose very being is endless discovery punctuated by the need for sleep and food. As we are tamed in our upbringing, our energy remains in our play, in our learning, in our projects, in all the things that we are doing to survive and in all of our surplus activities.

Expenditure

Sometimes it is difficult to see this abundance in our lives - as Georges Bataille, the philosopher of abundance, already recognised. We are so focused on things we lack and on things that we want to acquire, that we forget that we are endowed with this fundamental surplus energy. Following Nietzsche, Bataille saw the sun as the origin of an enormous surplus. This surplus is the origin of all life, and makes all growth and diversification possible. We could say that we are blessed with all this energy, but Bataille instead chose to call this surplus "the accursed share" (la part maudite), because it has to be spent one way or another. Life cannot accumulate endless surplus without the accumulated energy bursting through. Like a dam that holds a certain amount of water, we can accumulate energy, but in the end it must be released. Humans can choose the way this energy will be spent, can direct the course of the water, but the fact that the energy must be spent cannot be avoided. The fundamental task that we have in life is to give shape to that expenditure of energy, because, whether we want to or not, we are an expenditure of energy, we are accursed with this constant surplus. While we live, we have energy to spend.

Of course, our lives are also fragile: we can die of disease, of scarcity, through accidents, through violence and warfare. Individual survival is not guaranteed by an excess expenditure of energy. But if we have survived childhood (which has become much easier through modern hygiene), if we reach adulthood, if we have an occupation or a way to meet our basic needs for food, clothing and shelter, security and rest, then we are in a position to direct our surplus energy, and hence to shape our life.

What do we do with this additional energy and the additional time to spend it in? This additional time has increased substantially. In the past most of the population had to labour and toil to make ends meet. The industrial revolution made people work long hours, a possible caesura with the way people previously worked in the fields. Only recently, in the last half century, have we spawned a whole industry of leisure. Some of this leisure time is spent on holidays, on travelling, on hobbies, on gardening, and so on. Much of it has been passive, as in watching television several hours a day, for many of us more than a thousand hours a year. Americans collectively watch half a trillion hours of television a year: 500.000.000.000 hours. We work all day and hang out in front of the television all night, then sleep to work another day.

Bataille argues that this excess energy can also be very destructive. The surplus energy in itself is blind, and it has a tendency to spend itself in a violent way, in what Bataille calls "catastrophic expenditure". This can be in the form of war, the push to expansion and conquest when there is excess military energy. It can also come in the form of destruction and in psychological expenditures of energy such as bitterness, envy or revenge fantasies which can consume us for months, years, or decades.

Life as a gift

The task of our life should not be understood as a rat race for survival, as a fight against nature, against scarcity. It should not be a fight against others for a limited amount of reward. Life is not a debt incurred which you need to pay back at the end of your life, but a gift.

The fundamental thing, which Bataille so clearly saw, is that life is experienced as a gift. The sun is giving its energy without asking for anything in return. It's a gift, a shinning, an expending without return. And so our lives do not have a return either. Living is a one-way expenditure. This is what it is from the perspective of its essence as a gift. The only question that we face is how to live that gift. With what kind of attitude and approach shall we live that gift?

1.4. Spending one's life

We are blessed with excess energies and possibilities, find ourselves in an arena in which to explore our potential, the talents we discover in ourselves, the thirsts and desires we have. What direction, what arc shall we give to this primordial burst of energy of energy of which we realise we are part? How shall we expend our lives, how shall we live our lives? Why are we alive?

Exercise

Shifting from a focus on earning (a living) to a focus on spending your life. What will you spend your life on? Shifting from taking to giving. Arthur Ashe: "From what we get, we make a living; what we give, however, makes a life"

Freedom

2.1 Agency: the power to make choices

Now that we have established that we are blessed and cursed with a substantive surplus, which gives us plenty of energy to spend in our lives, the question is whether we are free to give direction to our lives. Do we have control over our decisions? Can we make choices that matter? Can we give direction to our lives? Do we have agency?

I am talking about essential choices as to what we want to get out of our life, how we want to live, not the choice as to what we will have for dinner. The choice about what we want to spend our lives on; choices as to we how we occupy the time that is given to us, who we want to spend this time with, whether we want to have children and when to have them, and what our attitude towards the world will be. These are more fundamental choices about what we want our lives to be; they are existential questions. What is the extent of our freedom and what are the barriers to our freedom?

In order to shape your own life, you must have a sense of agency. By agency I mean the capacity to act with a view to achieving a result you wish to attain. You can compare it to the set of skills you need when playing a game of tennis. In order to place the ball in the corner of the court, you need the skills to do so; the physical strength to hit the ball, but also the motor skills and the coordination to place it properly. In order to have the freedom to choose the corner, you must have the skills to place the ball there. It will not work all the time, of course: there are times when you misjudge or mishit, or the ball you receive may be too difficult to return properly due to all the spin. Notwithstanding this, in general you know that it lies within the limits of your skill to place the ball where you want to. This is the sense of control over our lives that I am trying to convey here: you feel that if you want to push your life into a certain direction, then you can. You are free in this sense.

It is crucial that we have a measure of agency over our lives. If we could not give any direction to our lives, if we could not make fundamental choices, then the idea of freedom would be moot, and there would be no point in discussing it. To the extent that we want to be free to make existential choices, the things that hold us back from making these choices, and hence limit our freedom, are crucial.

I want to examine the limits of our freedom by looking at two contrasting philosophies. The first is the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who upholds a radical idea of freedom. Sartre believes that our actions determine who we are. The second is the philosophy of Michel Foucault, who, especially in his early thinking, has a much dimmer view of the possibility and the extent of our freedom. According to Foucault, we are caught in power structures and disciplinary matrixes which limit and tame us, with the result that we have in fact very little freedom. At the end of his life, Foucault will change his perspective and propose the idea of "practices of freedom". These are practices through which we can train ourselves to achieve a level of freedom within the institutions of modern life which educate us, tame us, normalise us, and control us.

2.2. Sartre's radical freedom

Sartre's existentialism is based on a simple view of human nature: when we are born, we are nothing, and we become who we are through the actions we take in our lives. There is a fundamental difference between people and things, between what Sartre calls "subjects" and "objects". An object, a thing, has been made with a certain design in mind. Before we decide to make an object, we design it, and so its essence as an object, what it is and what it does, comes before its existence. With human beings, it is the other way around. First we come into the world. We exist, but do not have an essence yet. Our life is full of possibility; our essence is still to be determined by our actions. Because of this primacy of existence over essence, Sartre's philosophy and the whole philosophical movement came to be called existentialism.

The focus on actions is crucial to Sartre; it is not the dreams people have, not what we say about ourselves or what others say about us that make us into what we are; it is our actions and our actions only. If we act cowardly, we are a coward, even if we make up elaborate stories about our courage. If we steal something, we are a thief, no matter how much we disguise it as financial skill. If we have an affair, we are unfaithful, however much we would like to convince ourselves and the world differently. If we do not speak the truth, we are a liar, whatever the excuse is we provide for our actions.

The consequence of this position is that we are radically free. We are born into a specific situation, according to Sartre, but we can always make life-defining choices within that situation. For example, almost all of us are born either male or female; but as a man I can still decide and choose to live a woman's life, just as a woman can decide to live a man's life. That is still possible. Freedom is pretty much absolute; I can really become who I am. I am completely free to give shape to my life, to make important, life-defining choices. To be sure, these choices are reserved to our adult selves, when we are conscious of the context of our choices and have achieved a modicum of maturity.

The flip side of the story is that we are fully responsible for the choices that we make. If we really have the freedom to choose, then we forgo the possibility of blaming either the situation or other people for our actions and the direction of our life. We can't blame the fact that we are a woman, or that we cannot learn foreign languages, or that we are no good with money. Every situation we find ourselves in is determined in part by the choices that we have made and the actions we have taken.

We are thus fully responsible for our actions. Sartre saw that we have tendency to want to escape from this, a tendency he called "bad faith". We tend to act according to roles, such as 'student', or 'mother', or 'waiter', and we ascribe our behaviour and our actions to this role. We don't want to assume the full responsibility for our actions. As the American philosopher Robert Solomon put it succinctly, the philosophy of Sartre boils down to: "No excuses". Whatever you do will make you into who you are, and whatever you have done you could have done otherwise, and this makes you responsible for it. Even in situations in which you have very little choice, such a being drafted into an army or into a war, or having been born with severe physical handicaps, you still have the ability to make fundamental choices. There is always freedom within a situation: you can make the choice to desert or to stay in the army, and you can give shape to your life in the context of your physical body, as the lives of many physically handicapped people with full lives attest to. You can rebel, resist, acquiesce, condone, glorify, or vilify the situation – the only thing that matters is the actions you take. Even if you are standing in front of a firing squad and are about to be executed, you still have the freedom to die scared, or defiant, with a smile or with a tear. Even in that context there are still life-defining choices that can be made.

These are pretty dramatic examples, but they were dramatic times. Sartre conceived of his philosophy during the Second World War, when Paris was occupied by the Germans. People had to make decisions that mattered a great deal: join the resistance, collaborate with the occupier, or take care of their loved ones and hope to sit it out. This led Sartre to say that "we were never as free as under the German occupation". We can interpret this to mean that we were never as conscious of our freedom, never really lived our freedom as much as under conditions in which every act was a statement, every decision a commitment.

The idea of radical freedom and radical responsibility gives us an extreme view on our possibility for agency. We have maximum agency: we can steer our lives through our choices, our decisions and our action, and these actions have meaningful consequences. Sartre did not get married to his long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir, because he did not believe in marriage and did not want to be responsible for propagating it by doing it himself. He also refused the Nobel Prize for Literature, an action that marked his life.

2.3. Foucault's practice of freedom

Are we really so free? Many of us would contest that, because there are structures in which we operate and by which we are formed, and which determine our behaviour, choices and ultimately our actions. These restrictions are cultural, social, historical and psychological. Where we are born and to whom matters a great deal, as does what we believe to be normal. This has a powerful influence on what we are likely to do in any given circumstance. On this view, our life is not a blank slate. There are pressures from all sides to behave in a certain way. How strong are these constraints on our freedom?

Michel Foucault analysed a lot of these power structures in his early work, in which he examined the psychiatric clinic, the prison, the hospital, the school and other institutions which tame the individual. He concluded that our modern sense of self itself is not a natural phenomenon, but an historical and cultural construct. These includes barely visible structures, such as language. The way we talk about ourselves and about others, and the way others talk about us influences the way we act. You may consider yourself to be a second-rate citizen because of the status of the country you were born in, or because of your race, of your lineage, because you are an immigrant or a minority. The whole dynamic of superiority and inferiority in history and culture is shaped by derogatory and discriminatory language. The relationship between men and women is shaped by language, as is how they define themselves. Class systems, castes, upper class and working class, the difference between rich and poor. Our sexual choices between normal and deviant, for example with respect to homosexuality, which was long seen as – and in some countries still is – a perversion punishable by law.

These forces shape our identity, our understanding of ourselves and our behaviour, and direct our actions to a large extent. How others view us, and how we view ourselves in the categories and words of others. "You dirty heterosexual!" – does not make sense in our current categories, and sounds nonsensical and comical. So why does "you dirty homosexual!" sound any different? Our linguistic structures are inculcated through the education systems, our upbringing and cultural systems of hygiene (what is clean and what isn't).

How free can we really be when our understanding of the world is shaped to such a large extent by our upbringing, our education, our culture? If this is the case, then we have very little agency. We may be able to choose between different types or different brands of television, but the fact that we need to switch up to a high-definition flat-screen model is determined by our consumer society. We can choose within a certain range what work we want to do, or what type of person we will wed. We are free to have certain sexual preferences within what is considered normal, and in some cultures are even encouraged to explore this aspect of ourselves. We can make choices in our lives as long as they conform to power institutions and disciplining. We could say that we operate in a very narrow band of freedom. Fundamentally, our existential freedom - who are we, who would we like to be, how would we like to shape our life - is severely restricted. Much of how we will act and who we will turn out to be is determined by culture, by societal pressure and by consumer ideology. This position seems to be the very opposite of Sartre's position of maximum agency. Here our agency is reduced to a minimum, to a superficial choice in a largely structured world which even manages to get our acquiescence and collaboration by means of a myth of free choice.

Is it possible to free ourselves of these structures? There is light at the end of the tunnel. The latter Foucault started to see that the domination of a power system can never be absolute. Any kind of power structure allows for, and even invites, counter-forces. The pushing of people into behavioural systems leads to a reaction, as the counter-cultures of the fifties, sixties and seventies showed: the Existentialists, the Beats, the Hippies. There is always the possibility for reaction and challenge. The counter-powers can be mobilised and will question and rebel against the dominant view.

In his last works, Foucault became interested in practices of freedom. He did this through an analysis of the ancient Greek and Roman notion of the 'care of the self'. For the Ancient Greeks, this was about taming lust. In those days, sexual practices were not circumscribed, there were slaves, and there were hardly any restrictions on behaviour. But the ideal of the Greeks was a free man who is in control of his lust, and not a slave to his lust. The Romans were concerned with attention, with being a good paterfamilias, a head of a household. They focused on how to be fair, how to take responsibility for all those entrusted into their care.

These methods and practices increase our agency. They increase our sense that we can make choices about our life, about the kind of person we are, about our actions, about our reputation and about our personality. Foucault proposes an intensely personal ethics, which consists first of questioning all forms of domination, and second of engaging in a positive 'practice of freedom' to give shape to our lives.

Do Sartre and Foucault contradict each other? They do; from Foucault's perspective, Sartre's position is rather naïve. But Sartre's fundamental idea that we are free and that our actions turn us into who we are is still inspiring. On this view, we have maximal agency; we can take important decisions that affect who we will become, for example by making choices about marriage or receiving prestigious prizes. Many things may try to influence or stop us, but we can push things through. We can make decisions that matter. We can assert something about ourselves so that we can become who we want to be. We can only turn into who we want to be through actions. Unless we make use of our agency, we will just be shaped by the powers-that-be, and we will not lead an authentic life. Then we will not be leading our own life, but the life of someone else. This is the inspiration we get from Sartre.

The inspiration we get from Foucault is to realise the extent to which our freedom and agency is compromised by power structures and institutions. We should not be naïve about what we consider to be normal. We need to question our education, question our social and political structures, and question the ideologies of free-market capitalism or communism. We should examine our behaviour and be aware how much of it is shaped towards a sense of normalcy. We must realise it is going to take a lot of work to assert ourselves, that it will involve being aware of institutional power structures and establishing a 'practice of freedom'. We cannot become free by simply declaring ourselves to be free. We must establish and follow a 'training program' in which we practice our freedom. We will be able to judge progress in this practice, apply our agency to the aspects of our life that matter to us, and experience our life in a different way. Working on our freedom is a process of becoming free; it is by no means easy. It involves becoming aware of the social, political, sexual and linguistic institutions and structures and establishing ourselves as the person we want to be.

The freedom to shape your life

So, how much agency do we have? How free are we to give shape to our lives in a meaningful way? My conclusion is that we potentially have a lot of agency, the agency of a skilled tennis player who is able to place the ball where he or she wants it no matter what the situation, in other words no matter what life throws at him or her. Sartre's radical freedom shows us the way.

On the other hand, I also believe that being free in this sense requires the kind of application and training that becoming a skilled player requires, and the recognition that it is not a simple matter of making a decision to give shape to one's life. It requires application and practice, trial and error. It leads down blind alleys and to mistakes, to success and disenchantment. Becoming who your are is a disruptive process. If we don't train ourselves in the skill of freedom, if we do not practice our agency, we will not be able to deal with what comes our way, or we will just react in the most predictable manner possible. This is what Foucault's concept of a practice of freedom entails.

There is thus both an opportunity and a warning for us on the path of putting our freedom into practice. The opportunity is this: if we have surplus energy and a degree of freedom and agency, then what? What are the next steps? We will explore the other elements that come into play in the process of giving shape to our life, of turning our lives into a work of art: meaning, community, purpose and beauty. These other elements require agency, depend on our capacity to make free choices and put them into practice. We need a sense of who we want to become and a sense of how to achieve this.

Exercises

1. Sartre's motto can be summed up as"No excuses!". What are my excuses for my actions? Do I act in bad faith by turning myself into a thing, or by playing a role?

2. According to Foucault, freedom can only be achieved as a practice; this requires a training program. Ask yourself:

1. What aspect of my freedom will I focus on? What pattern, action or emotion needs work?

2. Why do I want to train this? – what reason or inspiration do I have?

3. How will I practice this? Through reflection, meditation, awareness...

4. What is the purpose of this training? How will becoming more free make my life meaningful?

Meaning

Camus and absurdity

We have to understand that life has no intrinsic meaning, that there is no master plan, no ultimate guideline, no owner's manual as it were. Whatever you do, life is meaningless. Human activities have no greater meaning than human capacities can fathom and work out.

The idea that life has no meaning is very difficult for human beings to accept. It's so depressing.

It's hard to get our head around the fact that nothing that we do has any meaning outside of ourselves, outside of human life and human valuing. Nothing of what we build, nothing of what we create, nothing of our existence matters. It does not matter to the universe whether we survive collectively or get hit by an asteroid and disappear. None of this has any meaning within the larger framework of the universe.

The universe is an enormous burst of energy, as we saw in chapter one, energy emptying itself in time. This expansion has no ultimate goal. On the one hand, the universe is moving to an increasing state of disorder because of entropy. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of living forms in evolution occurs through self-organising negentropic systems. Life itself is negentropic, as it is fed by energy.

The clash of this lifeless, unresponsive universe with human beings' need to make sense of life, and sense of their life, is what Albert Camus called the absurd. Camus' philosophy describes the world as absurd, because human beings want to endow the world with a meaning it does not have. Human beings are confronted with the absurdity of existence and confronted with the absurdity of their life in a "universe without master".

What do we do when we are faced with the absurd? According to Camus, our reaction can take three distinct shapes: suicide, hope and rebellion. Do we refuse the task by committing suicide? This does not make the world less absurd, so it's not a solution to the question. Do we "fall asleep" by believing in our self-made religious fictions? This is tempting, but nothing more than self-deception. The appropriate reaction is one of rebellion, the non-acceptance of our absurd fate in full recognition of its absurdity. Human beings affirm their humanity through their rebellion against the absurd.

What does this mean for us? It means we have to realise that we need to create meaning: our lives will only be composed of our acts and the attitude that we take towards life. This can be an attitude of rebellion at a metaphysical level, as Camus suggests, a rebellion accompanied by passion, by a desire to state what being human means, what humanity is, a desire to make sense of passion and love and solidarity.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29