Episode #087 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is on the great Albert Camus. I hope you love the show today.

So, as you probably know by now, philosophy or, more specifically, the more abstract, out-there ideas in philosophy can be a pretty tough thing to just cannonball into and fully understand them right off the bat. I think most educators realize this, and a useful tool that I think a lot of them use to sort of set up a skeleton of an idea that they can flesh out later with more of the details is they try to take big ideas or even entire branches of philosophy and distill them down into a single sentence or a single question.

For example, epistemology: notoriously referred to as the branch of philosophy that asks, “How do we know what we know?” Now, that’s great as a working definition of epistemology if you need some frame of reference as you’re learning about it. But the more you do learn about it the more you realize that that’s really only a fraction of what epistemology actually deals with. Another one. Metaphysics, right? Notoriously referred to as the branch of philosophy that asks, “What is everything made out of, and how did it get here?” Again, great definition for educational purposes, but the more you look into it the more you realize all the metaphysics that that definition’s leaving out.

Now, the guy we’re going to be talking about today, Albert Camus, he thought that he had found the most fundamental question in all of philosophy, a question that he thought, no matter what other philosophical question you could ever come up with, it was ultimately going to be a follow-up question to this question. But the problem is, if I just say the question, I’ve found that a lot of people initially disagree with him and end up poised waiting to disagree with everything else the guy’s saying. So, what I wanted to do to give some context to this question -- just so we can better understand where Camus’s coming from when he’s asking it -- is I want to tell you all a story. It’s a story from Greek mythology about a king named Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was the kind of king -- he wasn’t really feeling the whole pantheon of gods thing -- you know, the whole, you know, I’m going to rape you and then blast your remains all over the cosmos and make you into the big dipper. No. Sisyphus was known all throughout his life as somebody that really didn’t march to the beat of the drum of the gods. So it came as no surprise when one day when it was his time to die, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, came to get Sisyphus, wrap him in chains, and suck him down to the blackened recesses of his realm. Now, Sisyphus, cunning as he was, when death shows up to take him that day, he starts talking to the Lord of the Underworld, and he somehow convinces him of testing the chains that he brought out on himself before he uses them on him. It works. So, when death’s all chained up and says, “Yep, these chains definitely seem to be in working order, sir,” Sisyphus just throws him in his closet and goes on about his business.

Now, as you can imagine, there are some consequences when death doesn’t show up to work. For one thing, people can’t die. All throughout the myth of Sisyphus they give examples of how people would, you know, die on a battlefield and still show up to dinner that night. You know, people would get run over by a horse and just stand up and dust themselves off and be fine. Point is, the gods soon realized what had happened. So, as you can also imagine, for Sisyphus, kidnapping the Lord of the Underworld and hiding him in your closet for a couple days, yeah, that has some serious consequences as well.

So, the gods sentence Sisyphus to one of the most horrible fates imaginable. It’s a motif that we’ve probably all seen at some point in our lives. Sisyphus is the guy condemned by the gods to a lifetime of rolling a boulder up a hill -- backbreaking, grueling labor -- only to reach the top of the hill and have the boulder inevitably roll back down to the bottom for him to start all over again. Condemned to a lifetime of pain and anguish and working hard, only to have his efforts be completely futile in the end. That boulder is always going to, you know, roll back down to the bottom of the hill. I don’t know why I’m repeating myself.

Now, Camus would say, what a wonderful metaphor. What a wonderful metaphor for your life. And I’ll explain his reasoning here in a second, but just imagine if this is true. Imagine if the life you live right now is comparable to rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it inevitably fall back down again. If that is true, then as Albert Camus says, “there’s only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is the decision of whether or not to commit suicide.” This is his fundamental philosophical question that I was talking about. This is the question that underlies everything else to him. Should we commit suicide?

Now, hold on, hold on, by golly. At this point many of you may be saying, “Alright, come on. Don’t you think that’s just a little bit melodramatic, Camus? My life isn’t that bad. I’m not condemned by the gods. I’m not rolling a boulder up a hill every day. I don’t even like boulders.” Well, it’s a metaphor. Camus would say, look, we’re born; we grow up; we get a job. And it’s so easy in this modern life for people to fall into this momentum of living the same exact day over and over again. You know, up, work, home, TV, bed. Up, work, home, TV, bed. This isn’t how human beings were meant to live. It’s monotonous. It’s tremendously unfulfilling. It’s practically devoid of anything that even feels remotely rewarding. Saddest part about it to Camus is, most people just go along with it and never really question it.

But not everybody ends up this way. Camus would say that if you’re not one of these people that just sort of sheepishly goes along with it and never questions it, well -- well, then you’re one of the lucky few people that get to have your very own existential crisis! Congratulations! Because what happens when you really take a look at that lifestyle, that up-work-home-TV-bed lifestyle is you start to wonder if any of this stuff that you’re doing every day matters. You start to feel isolated; start to feel alienated. You start to look at this death that’s looming on the horizon for you, waiting for you, and you start to wonder: am I wasting this gift that’s been given to me? Am I wasting my life? And when you have these feelings you can’t help but also feel pretty uncomfortable.

So, in an attempt to alleviate this discomfort, you start to ask yourself some really tough questions, questions that are trying to get some clarity about this existence that you’re in. What is the purpose of my life? What’s the purpose of the universe, for that matter? What is the meaning of all this? Is life really just me sitting in my front room, watching Netflix day after day, waiting for my kids to one day pick me up and go casket shopping?

Camus talks about how, when we find ourselves in this uncomfortable place, we seem to have this longing for happiness, this appetite for clarity or an appetite for being able to make sense of everything, trying to find the purpose that we serve. And an extremely common place that people start looking for that purpose -- just, you know, given the last several thousand years of human thought -- is they try to look for some sort of preordained, cosmically prescribed meaning to it all. They look at their place within the universe and they ask themself, “What plan did this universe have for me? What function do I serve in the grand scheme of things?” They ask these questions hoping for an answer, and what do they get? Silence. Nothing.

Nothing answers you back as a human being when you ask those questions. It’s not like there’s some customer service rep from the universe call center that picks up. Well,

Camus would say, given that fact, that leaves you with a very real problem on your hands. Because if nobody’s picking up at the call center for the universe, we don’t know what the purpose of the universe is. We don’t know what our purpose is or if we even have one. And what’s worse is that you’re just a human being. The only tools you have to arrive at the meaning of the universe are your eyes, ears, you know, your sensory experience, and your ability to reason. That’s it. The fact that you’re met with silence when you ask these fundamental questions about your existence probably means that the tools you have at your disposal aren’t doing the job that well.

Now, from here you can draw any number of conclusions. A common one that people draw is that, “Ah, just because nobody’s answering doesn’t mean that we don’t have a purpose. Maybe we do, in fact, have a purpose but, to whatever prescribed that purpose to us, it’s just not very important for us to know for certain what that purpose is. Or maybe, if we knew what our purpose was, it would sabotage our ability to fulfill that purpose.”

For example, Genesis 1:28. God tells Adam to rule over all the fish and fowl and every living creature that moves on the ground, right? Wow, which I just realized doesn’t really cover any underground animals. The point is, if you believe that the purpose of every animal in the world is for us to rule over them, part of that being that God allows us to eat these creatures, a cow doesn’t know its purpose. And you can imagine how, if that cow knew its purpose in the grand scheme of things laid out in Genesis, it might inhibit its ability to fulfill that purpose. You know, it’d be trying to stay away from us lucky humans as much as possible because it’s trying to survive. Maybe it’s the same way for human beings. Maybe if we were able to know for certain what our purpose was it would sabotage our ability to accomplish it.

Now, another possibility you might arrive at when you ask yourself these questions and you’re left with nothing but, you know, the celestial dial tone, is that maybe this universe has no meaning. Maybe the universe has no meaning. Or, even if it does have a meaning, maybe just because of these crude tools -- these eyes and ears and our ability to reason -- maybe it’s impossible for you to ever discover that meaning with certainty at all. You know what, when you’re asking these questions, who really wants to believe that? “I’m not going to let some existential crisis ruin my day. So, let’s hold out hope, how about that? Maybe I do have a purpose. After all, sure, I’m just a human being, but the flip side of that is, I’m just a human being. Who am I to make some proclamation about there being no meaning to everything in the universe?”

So, you arrive at this place. You decide you’re going to reserve judgment, keep your eyes peeled for that meaning all around you, and you’re going to go on with your life. Usually, people do this with a set of idealistic expectations about how the universe is going to be treating them. After all, it kind of makes sense. If you do play some sort of role in the grand scheme of things, easy assumption to make from there is that the universe must have some sort of way to protect that investment. So, you go on throughout your life armed with that set of expectations, keeping your eyes open, and then, inevitably, the universe smacks you in the face. Whap. Life happens. Your sister gets hit by a car. You don’t get the job that you wanted.

These sort of things happen all the time, things that we see as horrible tragedies, things where lives are often completely destroyed by them. You start to notice that human suffering in this universe is visited on a scale that’s pretty difficult to comprehend at times. And, when these things happen to us, one thing seems clear in that moment. Whatever purpose the universe has for you, it doesn’t seem to ensure that you’re going to be, you know, financially stable or surrounded by a big family that loves you at Thanksgiving. In these moments, the universe seems pretty uninterested in whether you’re going to be happy or not. In this moment, the universe seems pretty uninterested in you.

Now, Camus would say we find ourselves in these moments a lot, especially when we’re young. And, because we’re so desperately trying to find this cosmic meaning to our life that we swear must be out there somewhere, we start to get confused and scared. We start to have this inner monologue. “Why is this happening to me? All this tragedy just seems so random. I’m not a bad person. Why are all these terrible things happening to me and that criminal over there, he’s never had anything bad happen to him? Maybe, maybe the way I act doesn’t have any bearing at all on whether the universe allows some tragic course of events to unfold in my life. Maybe it all is just random. But, if that’s true, I’m still left with my original question. What is the meaning of my life?”

Now, listening to that inner monologue right there, there’s a lot of tension, right? Tension between expectations that person has about what should be happening to them and the reality of what actually did happen to them. Camus would say, this tension, tension he thought we all face at some point -- and I’m sure we’ve all had a similar inner monologue to the one we just heard at some point in our lives -- that tension is explained by the contrast between the fact that you’re running around searching for some cosmically determined meaning to your life that the universe is going to guarantee for you when the reality is, the universe doesn’t seem to have a meaning. Or at least, if it does, we don’t know what it is, and it’s impossible for us to know for certain what it is at least right at this second. What this means if this is true is that all that desire to find some cosmic meaning, all of the anxiety and regret, the pain that you feel when you see your loved ones in pain or however the universe decides to smack you in the face at that moment, that is the pain of you rolling the boulder up the hill like Sisyphus and watching the boulder tumble back down to the bottom, all of your efforts for nothing.

See, ultimately, to Camus, it doesn’t matter how hard you push the boulder; it doesn’t matter how much you agonize over trying to find that cosmic meaning. Eventually you’re going to die; everyone you’ve ever known is going to die. Your name’s going to be forgotten. Walmart’s going to take over the world. The sun’s going to inflate and explode and destroy any trace of you that could possibly be left. Ultimately, because you didn’t choose to be born, you have been condemned to a lifetime of pushing a boulder up a hill only to find out at the top that it was all pointless.

Now, if this sounds pretty ridiculous, this is why Camus describes this existence as absurd. He describes us as being in a state of the absurd. He says, “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Now, if you’re saying to yourself right now, “Wow, Camus, thank you. No, no, no, no, thank you. Thank you for that wonderful speech. You made your mother cry. You ruined Christmas again, Camus. Thank you. You know, call me crazy, but I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for the rest of my life for no reason. What am I supposed to do?”

And he’d probably say back to you, yeah, no kidding. Nobody wants to feel that way. You’re living in a constant state of absurdity with the universe. But, whether you want to acknowledge it right now or just shove your head back in the sand, the fact remains, you are like Sisyphus. And that uncomfortable feeling that you want to avoid for the rest of your life, everyone else wants to avoid it too. And Camus would say that people have no shortage of creative ways they’ve come up with over the years to escape this state of acknowledging the way that things actually are.

Now, one of the go-to ways that might come to mind when you’re in this absurd state is to just, you know, commit suicide. After all, if you’re condemned to a life of the painful and agonizing work of pushing a boulder up a hill, and you know that all that pain, effort, and sacrifice isn’t really leading to anything, why wouldn’t you just, you know, cling onto the boulder like a koala baby and just let gravity do the rest down the hill? It certainly does solve your problem, right?

Well, Camus would say, no, it actually doesn’t. Somebody that commits suicide as a response to the absurdity of the world, they’re looking at the problem in a really misguided way. The problem is not with the fact that you’re alive. The true problem is with the disparity between your search for meaning and how the universe doesn’t seem to have a meaning that you can arrive at. If this is truly the problem, any solution to that problem is going to have to do with repairing that disparity. All you’re really doing by committing suicide is running away from the actual problem. It’s like fixing a leaky faucet by moving to a different house. Got news for you: that thing’s still in there dripping. There must be a better way.

Now, let’s remember Camus’s fundamental philosophical question. Should we commit suicide? Now, when we think of suicide, we typically think of it as like, you know, toaster-in-the-bathtub suicide, but Camus says that’s not the only way you can commit suicide in this existence. There’s another type of suicide. The one we just talked about is what he called “physical suicide.” The other kind of suicide is what he calls “philosophical suicide.”

So, at the risk of sounding redundant, I just want to reiterate something real quick so you guys can see just how similar these two types of suicide are to Camus. Here’s our life: you find yourself in a state of the absurd; the reality of this world that we live in is that you want to be able to make sense of it and find meaning in it, but you don’t know that meaning; you don’t know how to find that meaning; and it may ultimately be either entirely meaningless or impossible for you to ever find that meaning. So, when you live in that world, one way to leave that world is to commit physical suicide. But, as we just talked about, by doing that you aren’t really solving the problem. The faucet’s still leaking inside of the house; you just live in a different house now.

Now, another way to leave this world that doesn’t actually solve the problem is to commit philosophical suicide, or to focus your attention on some other world that doesn’t actually exist, a world where this anxiety and tension that comes along with the reality of this absurdity no longer exists. This is like living in a house with a leaky faucet and it’s driving you crazy day and night, you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t sleep. But instead of fixing the faucet, you just put in earplugs and pretend like faucets don’t actually exist.

Now, the most obvious example of this from human history would be religion. I mean, common to most denominations, at least in our modern world, they literally focus their attention on another world, one that’s devoid of anxiety, one that provides meaning to everything you do in your life. But, make no mistake, followers of religion are not even close to the only people guilty of philosophical suicide, to Camus. Though I do think it’s interesting to pause on them for a second to notice something that’s unique about Camus’s approach.

He may throw around the word “meaningless” a lot, but let’s not misunderstand where he’s coming from here. Camus doesn’t see himself as some sort of anti-Thomas Aquinas. You know, he’s somebody that goes into great detail and writes entire books presenting how he has a philosophical proof of how the universe has no meaning. No, he didn’t do any of that. He sort of comes at it from the other side. He just tries to explain the reasons why there’s such a huge incentive to create that cosmic meaning for ourselves and then confer that meaning onto the universe. Again, that state of the absurd is a pretty horrible place. Camus’s saying, if somebody’s willing to physically commit suicide to get away from it, they’re definitely going to be willing to adopt some awesome-sounding meaning to their lives where they get to live forever and then walk around with a confirmation bias.

Now, as I said, followers of religion are not the only people out there, to Camus, that are looking to another world to alleviate this feeling of the absurd. And what I mean by another world is simply some pre-manufactured system of beliefs that don’t really reflect this world’s reality; it’s just an attempt to simplify the world down into terms that are easily understandable so that you don’t have to contend with the true unbridled ambiguity of it all. And really that could be any number of things: nationalism, racism, sexism, your political outlook, even things like watching TV or playing video games all day.

Again, the goal of committing philosophical suicide is to sort of revel in a state of certainty that somebody else gave you, a state of certainty that doesn’t actually exist so that you can get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of answering those fundamental questions about your existence. Again, it’s like putting earplugs in and pretending like faucets don’t exist. And, if that’s a funny visual, look around you right now. Most people are doing it.

Now, for Camus, philosophical suicide runs into the same problem as physical suicide. It doesn’t actually solve the problem. It just deludes you into believing that you already know everything about existence. Now, if you’re one of those people out there saying, “What’s wrong with a little bit of hope, Camus?” he’d probably say back, hope? Stop hoping. Stop looking at some other world that doesn’t exist that’s inside of a TV screen or inside of a book or inside of your reductionist view of the way that things are. Stop looking at that other world and start looking at this one. That hope, that constant looking to some other world, robs you of so much in this one. Hope may well be a calming influence when you’re in that state of absurdity. But think of the cost to you. It robs you of the here and now, everything you could be experiencing now but aren’t.

See, Camus didn’t think that any form of suicide was the right answer to this existential crisis. Physical suicide and philosophical suicide are just two different ways of running from the problem. But Camus thought, how about instead of running from the problem you welcome the problem with open arms. You embrace the problem, chain yourself to the problem, find comfort in the uncomfortable. See, the thing Camus thought that people that commit philosophical suicide never understood is that not running from the absurd but facing your existence head on and acknowledging it, standing in its face, that makes you a pretty amazing person. That’s a pretty awesome accomplishment. How many other people you know that are brave enough to do something like that? And bravery is how he thinks of it. You know, to Camus, somebody that faces their existence and doesn’t run and hide from it is known as an absurd hero. That’s what he calls them, a hero. See, because to be aware of the absurd and stand in its face, in a strange way, is to be superior to it.

Take the absurd head on. Stop hoping and looking to another world that may not ever exist. And spend your time in the wealth of here and now, which to Camus seems to be sensory in nature. Camus talks about, you know, enjoying the little things in life, enjoying the company of family and friends and good food, and just sort of appreciating the sensory experience that we were given, one that we’re certain of. The picture that he’s been painting starts to become very clear and very beautiful, you know. Do the things that make you feel good. If you love spending time with your family, enjoy them and appreciate them because you never know when this disinterested universe is going to take them away. Enjoy your food if you have it. You never know when this disinterested universe is going to throw a worldwide dustbowl our way and you’ll be fighting to the death for a bag of peanuts.

Yeah, maybe we are like Sisyphus. Maybe nothing we do will ever live on eternally, and maybe the anxiety and the regret and all the hard world that we put into this life is going to ultimately be meaningless. But the gods only condemned Sisyphus to push the boulder. They didn’t condemn him to resent the process. Camus says we should imagine Sisyphus smiling while pushing the boulder, understanding the ultimate futility of his efforts, but enjoying it anyway as much as he can. This is a model of how we should live our lives. You don’t need to hate or run away from the absurd. You can embrace it and smile anyway.

I mean, imagine if you were 13 years old again, and your parents grounded you for staying out too late or something. The only reason that punishment works is because you hate the idea of being grounded. The only reason your parents use it is precisely because you don’t like it. I mean, how much sense would it make for your parents to say, you know, “You’re grounded. Now go to Disneyland!” It wouldn’t work. Imagine enjoying every second of being grounded. Wouldn’t have been that bad, to be honest. This is what we have to do with the absurd, push our meaningless boulder up the hill, but smile and enjoy it as much as we possibly can while we’re here.

Now, the last two episodes have been on Sartre and Camus, two people that for part of their life were practically best friends and the other part of their life were worst enemies. The next episode is going to be on one of the most famous back-and-forth debates in the history of the world between Sartre and Camus.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.