Camus, Romantic

 Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus could just as well have been called The Myth of Prometheus. Because really, the entirety of the essay can be found anticipated and paraphrased in Byron's poetic tribute to the Titan who taught humankind the use of fire. Camus's ideal for how to confront life is that of the "metaphysical rebel," as he would put it in a later work—the human being who accepts their fate without flinching, in defiance of the gods—those who choose to live "without appeal." (O'Brien trans. throughout.)

"There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn," as Camus puts it. The ideal "absurd man"—the person who sees and acknowledges the absurdity of man's fate but embraces it anyway—the tragic figure—who, like the protagonist of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge—avers "I—Cain—go alone as I deserve—an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!"—is the same ideal that Byron articulates in his poem: 

And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.

It is important to understand how this attitude differs from what is commonly understood as "existentialism." Camus is often remembered as the great popularizer and literary prophet of mid-twentieth century existentialism. But, in The Myth of Sisyphus—that ostensibly most existential of works—Camus actually writes critically about the existentialists, and goes out of his way to distinguish his approach from theirs. Much of the essay is in fact an explicit rejection of what he calls existentialism. 

The main difference between them, in Camus's telling, is that he is not recommending any sort of a "leap of faith." He portrays the Kierkegaardian assertion of an ultimate meaning to the universe as a form of intellectual cowardice and dishonesty. After all, the existentialists recommend the "leap," as Camus calls it, simply because the alternative is absurdity. But merely because absurdity is repugnant, that is no proof why it could not be the case. "Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable," he writes. 

But, in asserting that there is an ineffaceable pride and dignity in humankind's acceptance of absurdity—and willingness to bear life in spite of it, to "scorn" fate—is Camus not in fact pulling a similar move? Is he not also—like the existentialists with their "leap"—recommending the assertion of value in the face of the apparent valuelessness of the universe? 

He would say no. He would say that his assertion of the value of humanity's pride and daring is not a bare rejection of absurdity; not an attempt to evade it—but rather, that it is implied in the terms of our condition of absurdity itself. 

Camus paraphrases the position of a genuine existentialist—Karl Jaspers in this case—as follows: "without justification, as he says to himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life." It is a bald assertion of ultimate values, in other words—which rejects nihilism and absurdity simply because they are too horrible to be faced directly. 

Camus, by contrast, is drawn to the possibility of finding some basis for ultimate values from within the condition of absurdity itself. As he puts it in a preface, "even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism." 

This is a move that often appealed to Camus. In the Rebel, he sought to proceed to the realization of values through the necessary implications of the very state of valuelessness. If the world appears to us empty and naked of meaning, he wrote, then in the very act of finding it to be devoid of value, we are asserting some standard of value by which it may be judged and found wanting. 

In the Myth of Sisyphus (an earlier work), Camus sought to proceed by a similar transcendental argument—an argument that reasons from the necessary implications of its own concepts. He suggests that the means of asserting human values in the face of absurdity is implied within our concept of absurdity. After all, the essence of the absurd lies in the appearance of disproportion—the comparison between the vastness, on the one hand, of human aspiration and ideals, and the sordidness of our reality. 

If humankind were as narrow, paltry, and finite as our earthly fate, after all—there would be no absurdity. A limited creature enduring a limited fate would hardly be absurd—it would be natural. 

What makes humankind's fate truly absurd is the fact that we contain infinite ideals, within such a finite compass. It is the fact that we conceived godlike powers of imagination and will, even though we have such a short mortal span. The "disproportion" between our pride and our fate is what makes the latter absurd. 

It is the fact that humanity's "spirit may oppose" itself to our fate and prove itself "equal to all woes," as Byron's poem put it, that creates such an absurd contrast between our transcendent ideals and our pitiful earthly existence. Our transcendence is therefore implied in the very fact of absurdity. And so—Camus has succeeded. Instead of merely positing a "leap" so as to escape from nihilism, he has found "within the limits of nihilism [...] the means to proceed beyond nihilism." 

What he is doing, then, is perhaps very far from existentialism as we typically understand it. Perhaps he is not so much a genuine existentialist, then, as a romantic. For indeed—even though we tend to think of "absurdity" as a quintessentially modern condition—Camus points out that it was known to the ancients; and indeed, to human beings in every stage of history. The fact of absurdity, writes Camus, is "a commonplace of all literatures." One need look no further than Qoholeth or the Greek tragedies. 

But the essence of the tragic vision of the Greeks was that humankind is ennobled through the confrontation with their fate. The key emotional turning point in the classical drama—and peak of catharsis—was always the moment of "discovery"—the scene in which the protagonist finally realizes the truth about their fate and condition and the consequences of their own actions—but at the same that it is too late to do anything about it (Northrop Frye observed that this is the key difference between tragic and comic "discovery"—in the latter, it does not come too late to change one's fate; whereas in the former, it does). It's the moment when Oedipus realizes his true identity; or when Creon—in Antigone—realizes that his stubbornness has caused the death of his own beloved son. 

Creon is the antagonist for most of Sophocles's play. But he achieves a tragic grandeur and nobility of a kind at the end of the play, because he realizes the consequences of his actions and repents. It is in such moments—following the tragic "discovery"—that the tragic protagonist achieves "the full dignity of man"—to quote the essayist Nicola Chiaromonte. 

As the cultural historian Johan Huizinga once put it: the moment of tragic "discovery" is when the audience reaches "the state of mind produced by the spectacle of tragedy, the stillness of heart in which compassion and fear have been dissolved, the purification of soul which springs from having grasped a deeper meaning in things; which creates a grave and new preparedness for acts of duty and the acceptance of fate; which breaks the hybris as it was seen to be broken in the tragedy." 

This is essentially Camus's attitude to life. He is inviting us into the moment of tragic "discovery"—when we see the reality of our fate in all its hopelessness and choose to embrace it anyway—when we accept our fate and shoulder our duty without fear and trembling; when we acknowledge the condition of absurdity and choose to go on living in spite of it—when we say, with the mayor of Casterbridge, that the punishment of our fate is not greater than we can bear. 

Is this attitude one of "humility"? Not necessarily. In another essay in the same collection, Camus rejects the label. What others might call "humility" is, in his telling, really another word for its opposite: "man's pride, which is fidelity to his limits, lucid love of his condition." It is saying we are aware of the absurdity of our fate, but choose to endure it to the end regardless. It is saying that in spite of the impenetrable night that surrounds us, we will not "wince nor cry aloud," as Henley put it. To quote the poet John Davidson: 

It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;

It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;

It’s walking on a string across a gulf

With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;

But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;

And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.