Background
I walked along the canal and spoke to myself. I discussed my transition and its nuances. I’ve been seized with the idea of an explant. Masculinity has been slightly pulling me in its direction—not as a form of regression, but a reclamation.
I’m currently interested in the materiality of my brain and its thoughts—to direct attention towards illusory social structures seems counterproductive. Consequently, it’s difficult to care about immaterial things like identification, in spite of the fact that this topic seems to dominate the broader discourse I observe. I don’t intend to dismiss social structures, but instead position them subordinate to questions of material conditions and causality analyses.
To anyone outside of my head, this may seem like an argument in favour of detransition. However, herein is the substance of my discussion: why would my transition ever end? Why does my current distinction as “woman” terminate my transition?
A core tenet of my transition is a tendency to rebel against external pressures which seek to shape my existence. Intellectual integrity dictates that even the concept of transition itself should not be shielded from such rebellion. A key ritual of my transition is to scrutinize “transition” itself.
“Transition”, then, is a symbolic concept, not a formal one. It does not have its own substance, but points to something else—a behaviour, or a logic. I cannot formalize it with any intellectual integrity beyond what I said above: it is an sort of protean rebellion.
It’s Sisyphean, I said to myself. With this impulsive thought came the urge to finally read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.
Summary
Camus explores the question of suicide, which he considers to be the most central question to philosophy. To solve the problem of suicide is to answer the question of human existence. He answers through a couple of separate essays.
The first essay explores philosophical thinkers. These include Kierkegaard and Jaspers. Camus seems to focus on thinkers who have found an articulation of God after exhausted attempts at material rationality.
The second essay explores literary works. These include Don Juan, and Dostoevsky’s The Diary and The Brothers Karamazov. The former stands out as a departure from the relation between the absurd and God, though (obviously) the latter keeps with theme of his prior essay.
Camus ends the body with a short (five page) meditation on the myth of Sisyphus. In this final essay, he ties up the substance of the prior two essays.
Camus also provides an appendix, in which he closely reads Franz Kafka’s works. His analysis of Kafka provides a nice balance to Dostoevsky. Kafka’s function as a rhetorical device is more similar to Don Juan than it is to Dostoevsky and Kirilov/Ivan.
Camus refers to the absurd as a refrain throughout the text. Succinctly: the absurd as what emerges when the human drive for clarity or meaning collides with the universe’s emptiness and indifference. Earlier on, he repeats at a few different instances that the absurd is what binds humans to the universe.
Camus is careful to clarify that he does not provide a solution, but rather a general formula. At a broader level, all examples function not as solutions, but as equations. As such, anything within his work is not to be taken as authoritative, but rather as an abstract tendency.
To acknowledge the universe’s emptiness and indifference is to liberate oneself from hope. Without hope, there is no future. One’s concept of the future relies on one’s nostalgia, which is an illusory vision of one’s past. The future, therefore, is illusory. Illusion is not truth. To live in intellectual integrity, then, is to recognize hope as insidious and misleading.
Camus does not suggest that a lack of hope leads to nihilism, but the opposite. Even without hope, the human continues to mimic the archetypal Creator. Without the illusion of hope, these mimes of creation contain an inexhaustible meaning.
The final sentence of the book’s body is widely known:
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I call to this not due to its poetics (which I do enjoy), but rather because it operates with a strong link to Nietzschean philosophy. Sisyphus could be tortured, or he could be calm; the reality is our decision. Therein is the potency of “the myth” of Sisyphus. Myths are interpreted, and their interpretation has a significant impact on our mental fortitude and excellence.
Thoughts
I did not expect Camus to undertake such a heavy exploration of the concept of god. Obviously, this was not the main conceit of The Myth of Sisyphus, but Camus continually employed the broad concept of god as an argumentative device. This was a nice surprise, as it provided a strong link in my mind to Simone Weil’s thought. It’s worth noting, as well, that Camus provided Weil praise in the preface to L’Enracinement; I didn’t realize how much potential connection I would find between the two.
In the earlier essays, I was continually struck by the number of arguments Camus positioned that I also position myself. I often paused to question how unique or independent my thought is—evidently, it’s not that unique. I’ve increasingly been unable to pull apart what I read and what I think. It’s a good way to beat my ego into place, so I really enjoyed this.
After a conversation with a friend in Montreal a couple of months ago, I’ve been keen on emergence. Emergence is how I describe the vast majority of my behaviour—when my body collides with my mind, the collateral debris is emergence. Camus’ description of the absurd maps onto my description of myself as a system. I often paused on this as well.
As I worked through the book, I had to begin to ask myself: am I the absurd man that Camus describes? Without reading this book, I had positioned myself in the relations that he traced out—but am I just reading this in after the fact? I’m still not sure about this.
Perhaps the mind, trying to capture my thoughts on The Myth of Sisyphus, is not the absurd man. Though, I recall The Gumgum Galaxy, where I described addiction. My addiction to heat is independent of my mind; it’s my body who has the authoritarian final word on what I need. I phrased this as albertine—it’s albertine who needs heat, it’s albertine who is mortified by death.
I have been suicidal. albertine has not been suicidal. So, perhaps I am not the absurd man, but albertine is.
albertine is the absurd man. albertine is god. The line that binds us together is evidence enough for me to cast myself as the absurd.
Though, for what reason? I suppose it’s helpful to categorize when I’m communicating my ideas, but it does not have a material impact to me. So, I’ve made the classification, only to immediately dismiss it.
ଘ(੭˃ᴗ˂)━☆ﾟ.*･
Quotes
Pg. 6
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly deprived of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
Pg. 8
The body’s judgement is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.
Pg. 8-9
One merely has to refuse to be misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously pointed out. One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth—yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity escape it through hope or suicide—this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest.
Pg. 14
The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood it solely in the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again.
Pg. 15
This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths.
Pg. 17
Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled.
Pg. 21
I said the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation between this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together.
Pg. 22
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question.
Pg. 30
In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them.
Pg. 31-32
There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural. But it is just as natural that he should strive to escape from the universe of which he is the creator. All the foregoing has significance only on account of this paradox. Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted the absurd climate. Nothing is more instructive in this regard than to scrutinize the way in which they have elaborate their consequences.
Pg. 32-33
Yet without justification, he says to himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when he writes: ‘Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?’ That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing logically prepares this reasoning.
Pg. 41 ☆
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: ‘what would life be?’ one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehoods, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: ‘despair.’ Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
Pg. 49
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
Pg. 49-50
My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It is the divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. Kierkegaard suppresses my nostalgia and Husserl gathers together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was a matter of living and thinking with those dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse. There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.
Pg. 50
The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.
Pg. 51 ☆
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I do know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand.
Pg. 65
‘Prayer,’ says Alain, ‘is when night descends over the mind.’ ‘But the mind must meet the night,’ reply the mystics and the existentialists. Yes, indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and through the mere will of man—dark, impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which remains lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps the white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of intelligence.
Pg. 67 ☆
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion.
Pg. 88
Every man has felt himself to be the equal of god at certain moments. At least, this is the way it is expressed. But this comes from the fact that in a flash he felt the amazing grandeur of the human mind. The conquerors are merely those among men who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure of living constantly on those heights and fully aware of that grandeur. It is a question of arithmetic, of more or less. The conquerors are capable of the more. But they are capable of no more than man himself when he wants. This is why they never leave the human crucible, plunging into the seething soul of revolutions.
Pg. 94
For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Pg. 97
For the work of art likewise is a construction and everyone knows how monotonous the great creators can be. For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work. That osmosis raises the most important of aesthetic problems. Moreover, to anyone who is convinced of the mind’s singleness of purpose, nothing is more futile than these distinctions based on methods and objects. There are no frontiers between the discipline that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same anxiety merges them.
Pg. 108 ☆
Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise: ‘If God does not exist, I am god.’ To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence. If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us. For Kirilov, as for Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the gospel speaks.
Pg. 114 ☆
To work and create ‘for nothing’, to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.