It seems to me that one of the central tragedies of the 20th Century is the failure of faith that assailed good men like Albert Camus.  It is tragic in the sense that it made their own lives miserable, but also in that someone like Camus used his genius to propound a philosophy that is enormously dangerous in the hands of men who are, unfortunately, not as decent as the author.  The danger, as Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, is that: If there is no God, everything is permitted.  Try as he might, and I believe that his career was essentially one long attempt to do so, Camus was never able to disprove this dictum.

Camus begins his essay by stating the proposition that:

    There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.  Judging whether life is or
    is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

This indeed is the essence of Existentialism when turned inward upon the self; if there is no point nor purpose to our existence, then why should we continue?  Now if it should turn out that there is no good answer to this question, there's not much danger to the rest of us, existentialists can all just kill themselves.  But there's a more insidious corollary to this question, one that arises when you turn Existentialism outward upon others : if human life is purposeless, isn't it also valueless?  And if human lives have no value then what reasonable basis is there for morality?  Why should we refrain from killing each other?  Camus unceasingly sought to answer these questions, but, given existential assumptions, his answers are necessarily feeble and therein lies the danger.  A philosophy that relies on the inherent goodness of man's nature, and fails to posit absolute laws of behavior, is completely inadequate.  And the absolute, by it's very nature, assumes something--some being, some power, some law--external to man.  If man is the measure of himself, then everything is relative and anything goes.

Existentialism though, does not merely require that it's adherents deny the possibility of the divine, it also requires them to deny reality, by failing to acknowledge human progress.  The famous eponymous metaphor that Camus uses to explain existence is the myth of Sisyphus.  Like his better known compatriots Atlas and Prometheus, Sisyphus challenged the gods of Greek mythology and for his temerity was sentenced to push a huge boulder up a hill every day and every day as he reached the top, it would roll back down.  Camus draws a parallel here to the human condition, that we, like Sisyphus, toil away at senseless and ultimately futile tasks.  But to believe that this is true, one must willfully ignore the enormous strides that we have made as a species in the realms of science, medicine, and social justice.  Though our lives may seem at times to be as difficult and unproductive as Camus maintains, at the end of each day we've moved that boulder a little further, and though some slippage does occur, even the most pessimistic among us would have to concede that it's pretty far up the hill at this point and shows virtually no likelihood of ever rolling back to the bottom.  In fact, it even seems possible that the summit is in sight.

It may be that Camus was simply a victim of time and place; being French and living through two World Wars would be enough to whip the optimism out of most anybody.  It's probably hard to be too upbeat when you spend all your time with one ear cocked, listening for the roar of German guns coming to pummel your nation into submission, again.  We, on the other hand, certainly live in a time when it is easy to be optimistic--everything from the cosmos to the genetic code seems to be yielding to our inquiries these days.  But it is important not to let Camus off the hook quite that easily.  Like Orwell, he should be remembered as a man of great moral courage, character and intellectual honesty, one of the key figures (post Darwin, post Freud, post Nietszche) in trying to preserve ethical standards of conduct for Man in the absence of God.  But it should also be recalled that had his philosophy prevailed, enormous harm would have resulted.  For the ultimate, inevitable result of his philosophy is to destroy the foundation upon which moral standards must be built. The Myth of Sisyphus is an admirable attempt to rebuild those foundations, but it's real significance lies in it's very failure to do so.  Existentialism, which starts out by denying God, ends by denying Man, and is, therefore, anti-human.

(Reviewed:22-Jul-00)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet