Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

– Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (Powell’s | Indiebound)

De Botton is quite adept at aphorisms.

The chapter on “Art” has convinced me to read Mansfield Park, which I think is the only major Austen novel that I haven’t read yet. Unfortunately, it did not similarly convince me to attempt Middlemarch again.

De Botton very deftly undermines the idea that modern society is a true meritocracy but without explicitly saying whether he believes there is any truth to the assumption at all. He also refrains from saying whether he believes meritocracy is worth pursuing—a question that I’ve been seriously pondering myself—though he does argue that the assumption of meritocracy makes us unhappy. I think I would be happier if he dropped the facade of objective detachment and observation; the whole myth of “American meritocracy” could be explored in all its complexity if de Botton was willing to wade into thornier social issues instead of alluding to them as neutrally as possible. But then his entire premise presupposes the individual perspective rather than the social, and his audience is clearly situated in the middle-to-upper class.

The current chapter I’m reading, “Politics”, does start to address this subject more directly. Interesting though how he manages to sidestep any discussion of Marx so far, even though Marx was quoted in previous chapters.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

But when I realized this, that I’d be liberated if I knew that I had to die in the next few weeks, I suddenly understood what the heck Camus was talking about with his whole “Absurd Freedom” chapter. Now, I understood most of it before, but only in an intellectual sense. The absurd has a lot to do with facing the inevitability of your own death, an aspect that I usually ignored because it was a little bit confusing. But now it makes sense. By living with the absurd, by living with the knowledge that you will die and your life will not matter, you are liberated from the burden of living your life! You are freed from making plans for the future, freed from the desire to seek happiness, freed from the social expectations that tell you to move forward and onward and ahead with living. Instead, you are forced to remain in the present, anguished and uncertain, but freed nevertheless. Once you realize that you are not truly free, you are liberated from the burdens of exercising that freedom. Once you realize that you must die, you are liberated from the burdens of living life.

It’s awfully depressing and I don’t agree with Camus at all, but I finally realized what he was trying to say. So in a paradox worthy of Camus himself, I’m really happy about this depressing epiphany. Go figure.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

So if any of you were waiting breathlessly to see how Camus would affirm life when one lives in the condition of the absurd, expect to be disappointed. Basically, he says, we would not confront the absurd if we were unaware or unconscious. Awareness is what perpetuates the absurd, this paradox between our need for unity and the chaotic uncertainty of the world. So if we are to cling to what we know, which is that we do not know, then we must keep on living to preserve the absurd, “through a constant awareness.” Suicide is not a legitimate course of action, because it eliminates our awareness and renounces the absurd.

A bit of a cop-out isn’t it?

He’s now talking about how this state of living with the absurd is a state of freedom, because one recognizes that one is not free and then is liberated from the burdens of bearing responsibility for one’s free will. Urgh. More paradoxes. This is actually not that much of a headache, however, because it’s been said before by many others, and all you need is an appropriate analogy to figure it out. Interestingly, Camus refers to those analogies. I’m growing incoherent, yes, but I doubt anyone’s following this anyway. He is trying to explore whether living with the absurd is a feasible act, right now, which I think he should have dealt with before coming to his cop-out solution.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

Camus has now discussed how the phenomenologists end up escaping the absurd in a different yet essentially the same kind of “leap of faith” that the “theistic” existentialists did. Instead of deifying the irrational and turning to religion, they turn to Reason (with the capital R, yes) to provide meaning to the universe. Yet the absurd is a confrontation with the meaninglessness of life so it again denies the absurd like Kierkegaard and Chestov. I don’t really understand phenomenology that well, so I’m just assuming Camus is correct. He says that the phenomenologists, especially Husserl, see consciousness as a direction of attention and believe that all experiences of all objects are equally important. Sounds good so far? They don’t deny the fragmented nature of our perceptions and do not assert the “unifying” principle of reason. We cannot explain the universe; we can only describe. Still pretty good, right? And then somehow, this all becomes understanding the “essence” of an object through being conscious of it. What? Je me suis perdue! Again! Anyway, if anyone can provide me with a concise explanation of phenomenology, I’ll be very, very grateful.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

I am still in the middle of The Myth of Sisyphus, by Camus, or rather I returned to the book after a week of avoiding it. The subject matter is probably way over my head. After reading for three pages without really understanding what was going on, a sentence finally clued me into what the last section was about. You see, Camus is describing in languid analogies the paradoxical state of expecting a rational world and living in an utterly irrational reality, in the context of the uncertainty of all empirical experiences. He then goes on for quite some time about how this describes the state of the absurd, the “desert” as he calls it, and what is one is forced to accept and not accept about it. Except what he is really doing is exploring every nook and crevice of the same paradox, and I didn’t even realize that he was describing a paradox until now! Oy vey! I mean, I was trying to understand why he was saying one thing and then something else which completely contradicted it! He could have simply said, explicitly, “I am discussing a paradox,” instead of letting me suffer. You probably won’t understand why I had no clue for three pages, unless you’ve been reading the same translation I have. And unless you’re as dense as I am. But seriously, I don’t think I’m that dumb. I was paying attention! I think Camus was being too obscure! Okay, I’ll stop ranting.

But now it’s getting pretty interesting. He is saying that all the existentialists before his time chose to escape the absurd through religion, by deifying and surrendering to the utter irrationality of the universe, but in the same moment denying and rejecting the absurd, because the absurdity of the irrational world does not exist if we no longer struggle to see it rationally. And BTW, irrationality is not simply refusing to argue logically or leaping to unfounded conclusions. Irrationality is the inherent inability for us to know anything about ourselves or the world around us. In that sense, it is the complete opposite of the empiricists who claimed that we can only know through experience, because it says that we cannot know, but it is also the consequence, the child as it were, of empiricism. Isn’t that weird? Come to think of it, that was what Camus was discussing in the third section, even though I didn’t get it at the time. Anyway, M—, if you’re reading this, this means that the irrationality we’re discussing here is not your type of irrationality, but a confrontation with the possibility of nihilism which you completely refuse to acknowledge. Or at least I hope you refuse to acknowledge it.

So according to Camus, the previous existentialists were caught up in the paradoxical state of escaping the absurd by embracing it. He says that this is unacceptable, because he can only be certain of one thing and that is the absurd. (If you look at that statement closely, it’s another paradox: certainty of only uncertainty.) He must seek a new way to live with the absurd without ending up denying it and without ceasing to struggle against it. Yeah, I know, you must be thinking, “Eh?” How on earth is that possible? Well, one of the options is suicide, which we know only because Camus opened up by considering the “problem of suicide,” as he calls it. But because in the introduction, he says that he ultimately concludes that suicide is not legitimate after all, we’ll just have to wait and see what the other option is.

Anyway, I didn’t realize that he was talking in paradoxes in order to discuss the paradox of the absurd until now.

One thing came to mind while I was reading on the subway. All those existentialists prior to Camus, Sartre, and the rest of their generation are indeed the “theistic” existentialists, as my mother’s philosophy professor told her in college. And Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and the rest of them, whoever they were, are considered the “atheistic” existentialists, precisely because of what Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus: they are unable to accept religion as a way to live with the absurd because they see it as an escape and a denial of the absurd even though it is also an acceptance. Kierkegaard with his leaps of faith into the irrational, religious stage of existence is what Camus refuses to accept. I was wondering whether historians of philosophy recognized this split between the “theistic” and “atheistic” existentialism simply because Camus pointed it out first or whether because it is obvious.