Albert Camus: Suicide and The Absurdity of Life
Albert Camus was a 20th-century writer, philosopher, and existentialist. He wrote many books and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Albert Camus was born into a poor French- Algerian family with his mother being illiterate and his father dying when he was still a child. In his younger years, he was struck with tuberculosis, an illness that affects the lungs, and often spent many months bedridden with the illness in extreme pain. He lived in poverty and in many ways, his early life struggles set the tone for his later work. Albert Camus’ views centered around Existentialism as well as the rationality behind suicide in both its literal and mental form. Existentialism is a branch of philosophy that concerns itself with questions regarding personal identity, freedom, meaning in life, and free will. Its origins can be traced to the 19th century but it was really in the 20th century after World War II that this branch of philosophy really took off. Due to the horrors of the war, many questioned not only the existence of God but also questioned how meaningful life really was, after all, how much value did this life really have when the war had taken the lives of millions within a few years? This school of thought brought Camus to contemplate the question of suicide and the rationale behind it. As Camus puts it in the first sentence of his famous Essay The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide, judging whether or not life is or is not worth living is to answer the fundamental question in Philosophy.”
In order to understand this dark inquiry, Camus examined human nature and its relationship to the universe around us. Camus saw that there was this conflict between what we want in terms of answers to our existential questions, and the results we get in nature. Since human beings are animals capable of self-reflection and consciousness there is natural importance we place on life. We naturally seek to gain control over our lives and the world around us. In fact, when we look around we see this playing out all the time. We have naturally tried to live longer and healthier lives through technological as well as medical innovations all based on the assumption that our lives have some set direction or purpose. This sort of self-prescribed importance or purpose of humanity in the eyes of Camus immediately finds itself at odds with the universe and its response to that self-prescribed importance. You see, while we may want answers for our life’s meaning, the universe often responds indifferently to our search for that meaning. In other words, since humans are creatures that are aware of their existence they naturally are inclined to have questions about it. In response to these questions, the universe gives us a silent answer which only further drives our anxiety of not understanding our purpose. This discrepancy between man’s intrinsic need to search for purpose and the universe’s indifference and refusal to provide solid truths is what Camus defined as the “Absurd”. The Absurd for Camus reveals itself in our lives when life seems to not make any sense. That the reasoning we naturally prescribe it seems to be actually the work of some randomness that makes us uneasy. Think about human beings and the fact that despite being technically animals we constantly destroy the environment around us. This sort of absurdity of being animals yet being unable to live in the environment without succumbing to destroying it is exactly the sort of absurd contradiction Camus saw when looking for a purpose. The Absurd also didn’t have to just be limited to natural observation either, this contradiction can also be found in ethical situations as well as our daily struggles.
Most of us would like to think the world operates on some sort of just system of Karma, that people who are evil will be punished and those who do good will be rewarded. Yet it wouldn’t take you long to see that this is sometimes not the case at all. Not only do sometimes really good people get stricken with unfortunate circumstances but sometimes bad people get away with their misdeeds. So, when we look to reaffirm our belief in some sort of order or sense of justice in the universe, its response tends to be one of indifference and silence. It’s basically the equivalent of the Universe answering our concerns with an indifferent “maybe” . Examples of these random instances where the world seems to be absent of justice or meaning are exactly the sort of absurdity that human existence suffered from. It is because of this indifference the natural world has towards human existence and its intrinsic need for reason that made the rationality behind suicide such a powerful issue for Camus. If our lives are merely random with no meaning Camus felt that we would naturally contemplate if we should simply be done with it all. It was this conflict that creates much of the anxiety or depression we feel. Often times life seems to be constantly shutting down our best efforts. Things don’t go our way and the reasoning behind why is often unable to be understood. This sort of constant cycle seemed to create a feeling of futility and pointlessness about life in human beings according to Camus.
To illustrate the futile cycle found in human experience Camus used the Greek story of Sisyphus to compare his fate and mankind’s when we become conscious of our own existence. Sisyphus was a clever but mischievous king who had cheated death twice by tricking the Gods. For example, Sisyphus trapped death in chains in the underworld thus temporarily creating a world where people couldn’t die. You can imagine the sort of chaos that ensued because of Sisyphus’ lies and deceit. For this sort of disobedience and attempts to be cleverer than the Gods, Sisyphus was severely punished. The Greek Gods had a reputation for strict and cruel punishment. For Sisyphus, they felt that no punishment would be more terrible than that of futile labor. For his punishment, Sisyphus would be forced to roll a heavy boulder up a cliff. The catch was the boulder would fall and roll back down the cliff each time Sisyphus was about to reach the top. This would occur each time Sisyphus rolled the boulder. He was sentenced to roll a heavy boulder up a cliff, watch it roll all the way down, go back down, and repeat the same thing over again. This sort of futile and repetitive nature of Sisyphus’ daily tasks was an analogy used to describe our situation as human beings. We wake up, eat, go to work, sleep, pay bills, and die. This sort of cycle we have is similar to the fate Sisyphus was punished with. Now it could be argued that all biological creatures face this same repetitive dilemma, yet because we have the ability to recognize this cycle consciously, it makes it that much more gripping and terrible. This sort of mundane repetition that we all are subjected to was the perfect example of the Absurd Camus wanted us to learn to cope with. Despite the anxiety, and hopelessness this fate may give us when we truly think about purpose or meaning in life, there was still reason for hope.
Despite being condemned to an eternity of the same boring cycle and struggle of rolling the boulder up the hill only to see it roll all the way back down again, Camus urged us to “Imagine Sisyphus happy.” Like Sisyphus, we are condemned to the same repetitive and futile cycle of living our lives according to a similar pattern. In spite of this Camus saw that human beings could rebel against this fate similar to how Sisyphus rebelled against the gods and their punishment by being happy. To put it into context, imagine you are sentenced to 10 years in prison, a terrible fate, right? Yet if we manage to learn to enjoy those 10 years in prison it negates the purpose of being sent to prison in the first place (To punish us). Camus saw this sort of rebellious attitude to being the key to happiness. He saw that if we learn to embrace life and the fate we have been dealt as our own like Sisyphus, we could be happy. Camus describes Sisyphus as being heroic, he was heroic because he didn’t kill himself despise his fate but he endures it. This rebellious non-defiance in the face of life’s inevitable absurdity was to be relished in not avoided by suicide. To do this Camus felt that it was necessary for us to have the realization that life’s absurdity gives us the ultimate freedom and not to subscribe our lives to any set belief system out of attempts to ignore this problem.
Because of life’s lack of truth, indifference to our existential questions, and the ensuing absurdity, it would cause, Camus understood that it ironically granted us the freedom to be whatever we wanted to be. Embracing life’s absurdity and the inherent act of rebellion one commits when one does this comes in many forms, but it begins when we embrace our current situation as our own. It comes in taking in one’s struggles and triumphs as their own. It lies in finding beauty in things we take for granted. A good meal, the feeling of falling in love, a child’s smile, watching the sunset, listening to good music, all of these acts and more are the embracement of mankind’s condition and our endurance of it in a rebellious nature. They are forms of rebellion because they are all aspects of life’s absurdity, yet we enjoy them anyway. These things make us happy despite our fate because we embrace them as our tasting of food, as our feelings of love, our experience of watching the sunset, and our idea of good music.
Albert Camus’ early life was filled with many struggles. Like many of us when we go through struggles, I am sure he contemplated the purpose and futility of it all. Despite these hardships, Camus realized something that I think we all should have the ability to realize, that we are free to choose happiness. Camus won prizes for his writing, was extremely successful with women, posed for Vogue magazine, fought for human rights, and more. He gives us hope that when one realizes the futility of life there is no reason to despair because we have been granted freedom beyond our wildest dreams to endure our fate in the most beautiful manner possible, rebellion. In many ways, we are like Sisyphus, condemned to a life of repetitive cycles and struggles, but thinkers like Albert Camus show us no matter how hard life may seem these hardships are special because they are our own and if we can embrace them, we can learn to happy.
