Camus misunderstood by prof John Deigh?
In his great introductory ethics textbook (An introduction to Ethics. John Deigh (2010), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), John Deigh writes about existentialism as a form of ethical theory. I am not sure about the applicability of existentialism as an ethical theory to begin with, but im going to leave that aside this time.
Prof Deigh writes:
"Some existentialist writers, notably Albert Camus, have in effect proposed that acting with integrity requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. Only by first regardin the world as valueless and absurd and then commiting oneself to action from such a perspective does one take full responsibility for ones choices and actions, so these writers maintain, and anything less than taking full responsibility for ones choices and actions is a loss of integrity" (Ibid. p. 192).
And later:
"Even the person in despair about life, although he cannot see value in anything, still has beliefs about values. He knows, for instance, the difference between a boxing match and a bar room brawl, or between the performance of a symphony and clamoring of taxi horns on a crowded New York street".
(ibid. p 192)
But to me it seems Camus is making no claims about what anyone should do. In my reading, Camus is making a metaphysical claim rather than ethical - the world IS absurd, regardless of what anyone thinks.
Everything might seem stable and understandable until all of a sudden:
"It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythmthis path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
So the absurd is not something to adopt - rather it is something that is revealed:
"A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it." (Ibid. p 5)
And so, it is not that Camus thinks that we can, for a while, forget about meaning, like Prof Deigh seems to suggest, it is that there is no meaning, simpliciter. Camus admits that he can separate car horns and a symphony, but insists that, in truth, there is no difference between the two. All that is different is mans mental construction concerning the two phenomena:
"Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it
exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers." (Ibid. p 7)
And therefore, i suggest, Prof Deigh may have misunderstood Camus in a pretty drastic way. Am i right?
Prof Deigh writes:
"Some existentialist writers, notably Albert Camus, have in effect proposed that acting with integrity requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. Only by first regardin the world as valueless and absurd and then commiting oneself to action from such a perspective does one take full responsibility for ones choices and actions, so these writers maintain, and anything less than taking full responsibility for ones choices and actions is a loss of integrity" (Ibid. p. 192).
And later:
"Even the person in despair about life, although he cannot see value in anything, still has beliefs about values. He knows, for instance, the difference between a boxing match and a bar room brawl, or between the performance of a symphony and clamoring of taxi horns on a crowded New York street".
(ibid. p 192)
But to me it seems Camus is making no claims about what anyone should do. In my reading, Camus is making a metaphysical claim rather than ethical - the world IS absurd, regardless of what anyone thinks.
Everything might seem stable and understandable until all of a sudden:
"It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythmthis path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
So the absurd is not something to adopt - rather it is something that is revealed:
"A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it." (Ibid. p 5)
And so, it is not that Camus thinks that we can, for a while, forget about meaning, like Prof Deigh seems to suggest, it is that there is no meaning, simpliciter. Camus admits that he can separate car horns and a symphony, but insists that, in truth, there is no difference between the two. All that is different is mans mental construction concerning the two phenomena:
"Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it
exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers." (Ibid. p 7)
And therefore, i suggest, Prof Deigh may have misunderstood Camus in a pretty drastic way. Am i right?
Comments (41)
I always found the metaphysics (so to speak) in existentialism much more compelling than the ethics. So I basically agree with you.
Id say you have to take out the should when reading anything about our actions in existentialism (despite all of Nietzsches scorn against the lies and weaknesses), which sort guts ethics anyway.
Bottom line, I agree with you that Quoting Jussi Tennilä
Once we realize the absurd, specific acts are never a should (so not really ethical). You can do anything or nothing at any time or all of the time. The sole quasi ethical component is merely realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong.
Quoting Jussi Tennilä
Notice he says requires and not should. I think the practical point is that, when making a value judgement, one has to realize this is being made against an empty abyss. Each judgment needs to be admitted to oneself as ultimately absurd, before proceeding to judge and act anyway. Arguing whether a honking taxi is also a symphony is an exercise in absurdity. But that is because arguing, a human thing, is always arguing with the abyss. So if one chooses to value this above that and that below this, it requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. It requires choice and artifice.
Ultimately calling the existentialist approach to life ethical seems to misuse the term ethical to me. Its not acting ethical to take responsibility for ones absurd reasoning, its just the true nature of authentic acting. In the end, any particular act (murder or self-sacrifice, either/or) is meaningless in itself, beyond good and evil.
I think professor Deigh didn't actually misunderstand Camus but he put this author in the wrong group or literary current. Everything you explained about Camus is perfect, and I guess Professor Deigh is in the same sense. But he is not an existentialist but a nihilist. Honesty, when I read what professor Deigh thinks about existentialism, precisely here: ...despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. I thought about other authors or thinkers. My opinion is that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky can fit in the 'despair' of choosing the right code of conduct to live.
Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed religious, psychological, and philosophical concerns in his novels. His works explore such themes as suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. These are a real example of existentialist, or a existentialist literature that maybe Deigh was referring to.
I think Camus goes beyong than just that. I agree when you say his work are metaphysical in the sense of the absurdity of the beginning of the world. Furthermore, nihilism is life-denying, so it is not worried about ethical dilemmas or the anxiety of what is the right choice. Camus affirms that life is meaningless, but further declares in the preface that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.
My conclusion is that while Camus was looking for 'what is a purpose' of life (nihilism), existentialist authors debate the despair of what should be the proper behavior to follow in a life already produced.
Quoting Jussi Tennilä
Partially. He was indeed a nihilist... But I don't know if we can label his works as true examples of existentialism. I think it is not that drastic. Both concepts seem similar, but they aren't.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus
Not a moral nihilist at all, but a deeply moral thinker. Perhaps it is not so much John Deigh who misunderstands Camus, as the contributors to this thread.
In a rough-and-ready way I'd say sure to your description, but if I want to be more precise I'd say Camus is no nihilist, or at least would want to note distinctions.
But I very much doubt that the professor misunderstands Camus -- I think what you'll find, as you read more philosophy, is that there is more than one understanding of a text.
Keep at it!
But also remember that summations are meant to help you rather than the prove a point. To prove a point for Camus you'd have to write it in French ;)
I'm not arguing that Camus isn't an ethical thinker.
This all depends what you understand a nihilist to be. I don't think all versions of nihilism preclude morality. It rejects inherent meaning and morality.
Hence what I wrote:
Quoting Tom Storm
OK cool. I wanted to note there are distinctions of nihilism, and so in some senses he's no nihilist and in others' he is -- the negative connotation of "nihilist" is mostly what I'm rejecting, at least as a way to say "nihilist" has shades.
Nice OP. I thought everyone had forgotten about Camus since existentialism is so out of fashion. The fear Husserl had that modernism was leading to a loss of meaning, and Heidegger as well in his Concerning Technology essay (and "the they" that rules dasein's inauthenticity), I mean, they did see this coming, the flattening out of human existence to dull interest in "standing reserve" mentality toward the world. But to speak of Heidegger brings up the point you raise regarding the making of an metaphysical claim rather than an ethical one. One could argue that the two are not separable. After all, in The Stranger, Meursault may be indifferent to the affairs around him so important to others, but his indifference put him under the guillotine for murder. Isn't Camus telling us something about ethics: kill and arab, don't kill an arab, who cares? Metaphysical nihilism is after all metaethical nihilism. And it certainly can lead to bad consequences.
Reading his essays, I am struck by the very conceptions of the absurd forged by the prose themselves: Camus is not arguing so much as constructing a rhetorical narrative out of what I would call "terms of despair". It is not an objective work, and one could claim not a metaphysical work either, for it is mostly a vivid exposition of the "mood" of metaphysical dispossession that occurs when one all religious hope is lost. See the way his prose works here:
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of mans own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this nausea, as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.
Don't get me wrong, I think his writing is compelling, and he knows how to write persuasively, but what we are witnessing here is more psychological than philosophical.
In my opinion Camus didn't understand our existence very well because he never understood metaethics.
I think I'd make a pretty hard distinction between existentialism and nihilism.
Existentialism is the philosophical response to the necessity of nihilism: given how we've lived meaningful lives before, and given how things have progressed this world feels absurd: the absurd is always an encounter. And absurdism is different from existentialism in that absurdism is a little more specific -- Sartre was no absurdist, so far as I can tell.
Nihilism is something like solipsism, but in the ethical realm -- it's an extreme point that people diverge from in various ways, and few (if any) actually adopt it philosophically (though they may in practice).
I never said Camus was a nihilist. I dont really even know what nihilism means. I see why people attach nihilism to existentialism, but the existentialists actively resist that attachment and so would I.
You dont see the absurd without looking for meaning and truth.
And when you find the absurd you dont forget the truth and meaning of it.
I think "quasi-ethical" is probably where this lies. But then, if one is "doing it right," where is the standard to determine this? Certainly it is not self evident, for there is no "evidential standard" for anything. Nihilism is nothing across the board!
It could be argued that the only evidence there is, is the world itself, and in this world things matter, as in being in love, avoiding guillotines (unlike poor Meursault). and the rest. But how, one asks Camus, does this world's ethics fail to register metaphysically?
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'd say this is more the nihilist position.
Where I reject Camus is in his answer, but not in his question.
I think "taking responsibility" has a lot of ethical "weight", even if another disagrees with the reasoning -- even if they call it absurd.
The difference is that Camus answers his question, whereas you reject his answer and think everything is meaningless "in itself".
But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy. I don't think there ever was much of a movement that thought what was good was obvious, ethics trivial, or one that believed in any "objective/inherit meaning/value," that stood apart from an agent who knew these things. A certain sort of relativism is sort of the norm in ancient thought, with its disdain for "barbarian ways," whereas something like awareness of the Absurd shows up in ancient literature (e.g. Ecclesiastes is around 450-200BC IIRC).
And that's why I now think of them more as responding to their specific era and the rise of positivism and scientism, which also spurred an anti-modernist fideist backlash in religion as well. From the first you get "in-itselfness," "meaning-of-itself," and objectivity as the gold standard that all knowledge, including moral knowledge, needs to meet. From the second you get the idea that the good is obvious and has been through all history, and cannot be shaped by context.
You also see self-government and self-control morph from being the key thing that you need to be free, to often being seen as a sort of tyranny enforced from the outside. It sort of strikes me that industrialization and the attendant alienation from one's labor, and compulsory education might have something to do with this.
Which is more just commentary on my own initial ignorance. I would have to go back and read them again to see if there is a historical awareness of this in the texts themselves. I've read Nietzsche more recently and I didn't really see it. It seems helpful for a framing of the views though.
Ha, just so.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I am painting too stark a picture, even for existentialism, but just to highlight the point.
Quoting Astrophel
The absurd becomes the standard. If you are doing something without any irony, with absolute certainty instead, without at least a nod to the absurd whatsoever, you are wrong (and so are an example of the absurd, because you would be thinking you found a new standard.)
But this doesnt leave you with nihilism, nor is it a dogma. Everything is still there as it was, just now you placed yourself, in it, up against it, experiencing it, making the very disconnection you now absurdly endeavor to reconnect, knowing you never will.
You can lean towards the barren side of this bleak picture, and call this leaning nihilism, but that is just a leaning. Or you can lean towards you, the subject, in it. The existentialists had real bodies, and never let go of this instinctual being, but facing the predicament that is the human in it, the being with.
This is where the ethical component of existentialism comes in. The OP drew a line between the metaphysical and the ethical components of existentialism, and leaned towards the metaphysical. Ive been staying on this to highlight the metaphysical backdrop in which existential ethics sits. It has to be an ethics that addresses not only the fact of our reasons and choosing, but also the fact of the absurd.
Again, there is plenty of room left to talk about ethics. But the backdrop, where Dionysian instinct for Nietzsche lives, where either/or matters and matters not the same, the abyss, where existence precedes , where Sisyphus absurdly climbs again. Precise in its starkness, yet somehow setting the widest stage. I love that stuff.
At this lonely place of separation, you build an ethics of authenticity, something intimately tied to a self and need foremost ones lonely disconnected will, to chose, and only then be ethically.
This is interesting. Existentialism comes in various forms, including Christian existentialism. But isn't existentialism of the secular variety built upon similar notions as nihilism? The absence of meaning. Nihilism holds that life, existence and reality itself are devoid of inherent meaning, purpose, or value. It rejects the notion of any objective significance or ultimate truth. Existentialism tends to identify same lack of meaning and then moves in to fill the void.
I would often consider myself to be a nihilist. But I don't tend to see this approach as one of destructive apathy, or assertive repudiation, rather a more cheerful springboard to make decisions about what choices you will make and what you will do. I would not consider myself to be an existentialist.
My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course (but must visit Hume, Descartes and Locke and Hegel). But if I had to stay local, Id never want to leave Greece - they tried to describe all the same things we discuss still today, right now, and gave us all the questions wed ever need.
Nietzsche was a correction after all of that. Needed. He was right.
Reason had become a facade, a monolith, standing in place of everything. Platonic eternal forms more cherished than a cup of coffee - rediculous!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Never need to leave Greece. Cratylus, Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus..
Existentialism addressed everything. It showed that the sum total of our progress was both a loss, and something new. I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era. Like 500 years from now, when we line up the renaissance, and the enlightenment, through the romantic to the modern, it is existentialism that brought the modern, the era that we are still living today. The internet and digital life may finally bring something new (but post-modernism, like post-existentialism, still refers to the modern, to the existential.)
Most of the famous existentialists demanded they were not relativists or nihilists. With the bleak scene they create it is easy to see why they had to scream so loudly.
Its hard to describe, but I dont see the relativism or nihilism. I just see the existential as the stage, the basecamp for being human. Its necessity and purpose as much as it mingles with nothingness and becoming. The existentialists just were sick of talking about the truth of it all because we had so often botched it, lost our sense of what there really was in life to talk about - our disconnection, our predicament wondering what else is there besides these ancient questions.
In the end though, we need more than existentialism to explain who humans are here at basecamp. Existentialism is good stuff, but not enough.
Hmm. I dont think everything is meaningless. So Im giving you the wrong impression.
Camus answer is that it becomes absurd to seek answers where answers all vanish in the grasping. He allows himself to stop asking the question. I love the question anyway. I see that the answers vanish in the grasping, so absurdity is always lying in waiting, at every step, around every corner, but also that seeing this, knowing absurdity, is now fixed and permanent clear and rational.
Personally I see:
1.absurdity outlines the rational mind that is confounded by it, and,
2.the rational mind creates the conditions for its absurdity,
as the one and the same thing.
One object in opposites united is the meaning.
The absurd, or instinct, is enough to beget all of all that.
The claim I am making here is that Prof Deigh seems to suggest that Camus is making ethical arguments, whereas, to me, he is only stating a metaphysical claim. It seems to me that there is no two ways about it. Prof Deigh explicitly attributes to Camus the argument that [I]to live with integrity, one must make a choice from the absurd perspective[/I]. To me it seems Camus is making no such arguments. He simply does not care whether anyone lives with any kind of integrity. Camus does show us how live in moderation and integrity [I]if[/I] one has realized the absurdity of it all (in the stranger, the plague and the rebel). But that is not the same as what prof Deigh attributes to him.
Pretty hard for me to see how to read Camus and end up where prof Deigh seems to be. I might be wrong, that's why I asked!
Yes, I think there's a dialogue there, but a distinction.
Heh OK fair. I'll eat my words, then, because now that you say this I feel like I know what you mean, but I'd also say this isn't the position I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines that nihilism is the end of value, and value is desired -- a kind of negative nihilism? Basically an extreme position that people wouldn't find attractive, but can serve as a conceptual benchmark.
EDIT: Though I'd still stand by my comment that Camus is no nihilist, I think, even of the sort you put here. I don't think a joyful springboard is what comes to mind when I think of Camus, but more of a resolute hero.
You list the novels. But have you read the essay The Myth of Sisyphus? That's where I'd draw from to point out his ethical thinking.
I'd say Camus answers the absurd with heroism. It doesn't matter which role you take on, but this is still a deeply ethical thought about the world we live in: what do we choose in the absurd world?
The opening of The Myth of Sisyphus...
[quote=Camus]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. All the rest
whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind
has nine or twelve categoriescomes afterwards.
[/quote]
And -- here's a quote from Camus in the preface to The Myth of Sisyphus to back up where I'm coming from:
[quote=Camus]
For me The Myth of Sisyphus marks the beginning of an idea
which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the
problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of
murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which,
temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary
Europe. The fundamental subject of The Myth of Sisyphus is
this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a
meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide
face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in
God, suicide is not legitimate.
[/quote]
Which also backs up your account -- that these writers are using an old philosophical conceit to write philosophy which is for the times and in response to their times.
An interesting mix. Plato and Aristotle have a pretty similar vision of the human good, but Nietzsche and Kant's seem very different from each other and from Plato and Aristotle.
I think this is absolutely true. I would imagine the Nietzsche is the philosopher most read by the general public today, and Sartre and Camus are probably up there. I always check bookstore's philosophy sections just to see what is considered marketable, and the section is generally small (shrinking) with the same few titles. Nietzsche almost always has the most shelf space.
It really seems like the movement came to dominate popular culture and the arts after WWII. And I'd agree that we still seem to be in that era. Although we seem to have hit a sort of second stage where something like Nagel's ironic stance on the Absurd has become more dominant than the deadly seriousness of the earlier era.
The positivism/reductionism that inspired modern existentialism does seem to be cracking up. If scientism is one half of the modern secular "religion/world view," then you'd expect the philosophical side to change when science moves away from reductionism. After all, while you don't need reductionism/smallism to justify the absurdity of the world, the case for its absurdity [I]is[/I] often made through appeals to "everything being meaningless particles in the void."
But that view seems to be declining in the sciences, along with the "anti-metaphysical" view, whereas in philosophy proper at least "objectivity" has increasingly been redefined in order to make it coherent, so that it is no longer the "view from nowhere," or a synonym for noumenal and "in-itself."
The other reason for change I see is how the message of existentialism, the drive to "create yourself," has been co-opted into the self-help literature of late stage capitalism, increasingly applied to career success, having a "grindset," side-hustles, etc. This cheapens it and ties it to relatively noxious parts of modern culture and individualism run rampant. Plus, it seems at odds with societies undergoing rapid declined in social mobility.
The other thing is that the increasingly histrionic political/social enviornment seems at odds with the ironic turn of existentialism. The political climate in turn has turned up the volume on identity, and of course much of identity politics seems to tie existence up in essence.
I don't know what comes next though. There is DFW's "post-irony," a sort of new sincerity that looks back prior to the modern era. The science writers turned social critics of our era (Pinker, Rovelli, etc.) tend to put forth a sort of pragmatic liberal neo-enlightenment humanism, but I just don't see it taking off. You might lump Harris in there too.
I appreciate the way you put this, the despair of choosing. I think to question that defines this unique despair is better expressed Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky than Camus. K and D understand that this is metaphysical despair, and they will not reduce this to psychology. Once one leaves the familiarity of plain events, like Meursault's mundane life that is enjoyed so mundanely (reading The Stranger and the way Camus presents his own values one gets a real feel of disappointment: it is an aesthetically deflationary account of life, not just an intellectually responsible rejection of unearthly spirituality, but a miserable pale abstraction from the fullness of living that spirituality brings, and by spirituality I certainly do not refer to churchy trivialities and religious superficialities. One must think as Emerson did, as he put it:
[i]TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.
I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate
between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was
made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies,
the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how
great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations
the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every
night come out these preachers of beauty, and light the universe with
their admonishing smile.[/i]
Contrast a passage like this to this one Camus writes in Absurd Walls:
[i]....absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying nothing when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void be-comes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
Not so much an argument, not a rigorous discursive analysis here. It is an appeal to an "encounter" with the world at the most basic level. And words literally, in the two cases above, construct what this is about. The French are notoriously pessimistic (Baudelaire comes to mind, and his flowers of evil) while Americans have a long history of Christian optimism.[/i]
But for the matter to be more carefully presnted, I think your mentioning Kierkegaard is perfect. Not the rosy optimist nor a celebration of despair. But then, not a middle grounder either. There is no sign that K can do what Emerson could do and make a genuine "leap" toward affirmation. But note Emerson is not arguing! Like Camus, he is describing. Both he and Camus do not argue well. For this see Heidegger, who drew from K his description of human existential despair in anxiety. H's salvation comes from art.
Just a few ideas I thought you might find interesting
Rather brilliantly put, Ologist. I, too, love this stuff. It is about our existence, and so all that is affirmed or denied has its validity in the "impossible" world that stands outside of language possibilities. Referring to the "metaphysics" of our existence, and this kind of things finds it objective expression in phenomenology.
Here is where I might take issue, where you say,
The OP drew a line between the metaphysical and the ethical components of existentialism, and leaned towards the metaphysical. Ive been staying on this to highlight the metaphysical backdrop in which existential ethics sits. It has to be an ethics that addresses not only the fact of our reasons and choosing, but also the fact of the absurd.
The metaphysics of the absurd is never a mere factual account because there is nothing absurd about facts. The absurd is essentially bound to value, the caring that there is this foundational indeterminacy in our existence. Why does one care at all? Caring is in the nature of the absurd, I mean, if there is no caring, there is no existential absurd. It is not about some division between the finite and the infinite, phenomena and noumena apart from the caring and valuing IN the friction between these. So as I see it, one has to look at the "fact" of the absurd in a different light, for the concept hangs on affectivity of caring.
And this affectivity of caring is central to ethics, for one cannot imagine ethics without it. As in, one cannot be in an ethical issue regarding the killing of an arab on the beach if one simply does not care at all about killing the arab. Others may be very ethically engaged, but not this on, not Meursault, and this is part of Camus' point. His "metaethics" is an existence without caring, and therefore without the dimension of existence that drives ethics, value. Notice how little his protagonist cares, and how descriptions of his affairs are so lacking in vigor and excitement. This IS what kills the arab.
One has to wonder how the metaphysics of absurdity by its own nature leads to this. Why not have Meursault blissfully engaged in everything? That smile on Sisyphus' face is disingenuous. To me Camus' perspective a reduction to his psychology. It lacks the ethical because the ethical can only survive if it is affirmed in metaphysics, and I think Camus would agree with this. Only Camus was simply a single-dimensioned person. He reminds me of Hemmingway, and going darker still, Baudelaire. javi2541997;895669 rightly brings in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. But it is not the objective fact of the absurd in play here, but the proposition that values, as Wittgenstein put, have no value (and Witt was a very interesting person. Passionate, like these others. He aligned with Kierkegaard in affirmation. Value has no value because one cannot SAY what value IS. Not because the world as such was absent of "value" like Camus).
I guess I am saying that the metaphysics cannot be removed from the ethics. The question then is, if one is pursuing this, what does the "presence" of value-in-the-world mean? Wittgenstein aside, value is, after all, IN the world.
It is very strange how some people consider Kierkegaard a nihilist. When I read this OP, I decided to search for information to back up my points, and surprisingly, Kierkegaard appeared as an example of a nihilist. Very disappointed with this! I think K was a lover but pessimistic about how Christianity was ruling in Denmark. In his diary, K confessed he was a true Lutheran. If he was that religious and a believer in faith, how could some people label him as a nihilist? For a nihilist, life is meaningless and there is no despair about choosing the right decision because everything is pretty absurd (as Camus points out).
On the other hand, I personally believe that a true nihilist doesn't recognize the existence of a sacred authority. For example, the quote of 'without God, everything is permitted' by Vania Karamazov. This phrase is wrongly connected to nihilism, but what Dostoevsky goes beyond just that.
https://friesian.com/existent.htm
Every character of Dostoevsky is Christian, but often display what later will seem to be Existentialist attitudes and ideas. The main concerns explore such themes as suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems. Christian Themes in Crime and Punishment.
What I attempt to say is that while K and D are true existentialists for dealing with ethical dilemmas, Camus is a nihilist because he doesn't bother to debate about this issue. :smile:
I have, and the rebel is no novel either.
One of the basic tenets of Christianity has always been that the world is essentially evil. Buddhists think like this as well if you accept suffering as evil. I don't know of any other way to define evil than this. Most want to reserve the term for describing behavior, but then, it begs the question, what is it about bad behavior that makes it evil? One has to then turn to the world and its human and animal afflictions. But the concept of evil in the biblical sense raises suffering to metaphysics. Our familiar term of things being merely bad seems without controversy, but call it evil, and we are taken into a new order of things. This is Moby Dick's Ahab's world---recall how it is not the white whale that is the object of Ahab's revenge, but what lies behind it, the unnamable source that is being itself that belongs to eternity.
I bring this up so as to identify the nature of metaphysical nihilism. Ahab was not a nihilist, for he affirmed the meta-status of our familiar term, the (aesthetic/ethical) bad. He blamed God; after all, the whale that embodies the evil was God's color (in standard thinking), white, and the sea is abyssal, like eternity. Were Ahab an ethical nihilist, he would have just gone for a swim, for the ocean is just water and there is no higher order of things. But what of the leg viciously torn off? How can the nihilist simply ignore this dimension of human existence? Ahab was right to complain. It is Camus who misses the point: One CANNOT be this kind of nihilist that Camus boasts about, because this is not a genuine response to the fundamental problematic of our existence. We are thrown into existence to suffer and die and this comes to us in an interpretative vacuum, to hang in space without a peg. One, I argue, has to look very close at this, because it is there to find that suffering INSISTS on a remedy with the same doxastic insistence one finds in logic, apodicticity, that is, the necessity of a metaphysical remedy. This is something even Kierkegaard does not argue.
Quoting javi2541997
I agree. Philosophical nihilism refers to the absence of an absolute in our visible affairs. This not only is compatible with metaphysical ethical affirmation, it is the basis for validating such affirmation. Only in the presence of the world's miseries do we discover the need to overcome.(Of course, Camus adores this kind of rationalization, which seems to him blatantly indefensible.)
Quoting javi2541997
Well, the reason the word existentialism caught on lies where Kierkegaard responded to Hegel by saying the latter had, in his radical rationalism, forgotten that one exists, thereby turning all attention to the distance between reason and the world. See how this is so well played out in Sartre's Nausea in which the world of existing things are set loose from the meanings we have about them. The world is not bound to logical necessity. It CAN do anything, and logic wouldn't blink.
Camus falls in line here. There is nothing rational about our existence. because existence is not rational. One is confronted by the question, is ethics rational in its essence? Kierkegaard said yes to this. They both, he and Camus, look to the world and one's existence in it.
I have read The Myth of Sisyphus a lot though.
I suppose that's why I'd say he's more than a metaphysical thinker -- based on that reading.
Yes. Basically, what I learnt by reading those authors is that bad behaviour doesn't mean anything in the beginning. I mean, when someone is acting with bad manners or not accordingly, he is not aware of these actions. When only he is pushed to a trial of the soul, he realises if he acted or not with evil. If ever someone decides to act unethically on purpose, this means he has a huge problem because he cannot distinguish between good and evil. Nonetheless, most of the dilemmas are not that simple. I understand that most people don't want to act with bad manners, but each specific case has its exceptions. This reminds me when we debated about how a chain of bad behaviour can putrid my soul. We can agree or not that a spirit either exists or not, but if we care about these concerns and dilemmas, it means we care about life, and then we give it a meaning or a value. We are not nihilists, but existentialists. Kierkegaard argues that Abraham is his hero because he had a strong dilemma with choosing between he cared the most: his son and God. This despair and anxiety is a good example of an existentialist dilemma!
Quoting Astrophel
Absolutely, yes. I agree.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting javi2541997
Interesting conversation here.
I think Im realizing why my favorite existentialists were always Nietzsche and Camus. Nietzsche was the most metaphysical and Camus was the least ethical.
I like the science, be it gay or otherwise. Existentialism disallows any pretense, at least more so than any other approach to inquiry. We start in the absurd, facing the abyss, where everything human is false, and any move may make the situation worse.
I always threw out ethics with reason and truth and all the rest that was suspended and upended by the existentialists, and I paid less attention to whatever ethics were recovered and more attention to what wisdom or truth could be recovered. Ethics was like their vehicle for delivering metaphysics and secondary to me.
But I think you are both right, that the ethical is essential to existentialism, and Camus stripped it down too far, being the closest to a nihilist of the bunch.
You both have me at an existential crisis with my understanding of existentialism! I thought I knew what meaninglessness meant, but now
Great conversation.
Thank you! :smile:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Maybe we (if @Astrophel wants to be included) could be wrong, but yes, I personally believe that ethics are the key element for existentialism. Why? For the following points:
1) We all have to face dilemmas often. Discerning about what is the 'right' way to act makes us feel despaired. Some philosophers, like Kierkegaard, for instance, prefer to name this issue as anxiety. But the important element of the dilemma is that we actually care about life, we give it a meaning and this is why we suffer from anxiety about what is the right way to behave. A nihilist could not care about the way to act accordingly...
2) There is even more anxiety when we think about what will come afterwards. I mean, is there a Trial of the Soul?
If I lie, or I cheat, does my soul get rotten? Etc. For a nihilistic, this is all absurd and doesn't care that much.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Honestly, I do not know what comes first. I think ethics is a very relevant element in existentialism, but I don't know which is the proper approach, whether ethics, metaphysics, or meta-ethics.
I think these interlink.
A metaphysic often implies an ethic, and vice-versa.
I've been chewing on how to write out a "map" of existentialism/nihilism/absurdism, at least for myself -- because I believe I have a grasp of these intuitively but I don't know how to make that grasp explicit.
I think said map would probably include all three when we make it explicit, though. And probably changes a bit depending on which authors we are considering, or emphasizing (or the readings of authors we are emphasizing, in the case of some)
One example of Dostoevsky:
- The Brothers Karamazov, Book II, Chapter 6.
And then, a very different text by Camus but with a similar concern at the same time:
https://friesian.com/existent.htm
This is very interesting! :smile: And we could spend hours and hours debating on this topic. Yet I think it is plausible how a text by an existentialist suffers from despair about doubting what is the right way to act. While a nihilistic jokes about this.
Cool.
I have more positive feelings towards absurdism than the thread has so far expressed. I'm a lover of Camus -- at least what I've read, and I think he's the only one I'd say is an absurdist as opposed to an existentialist (though I'd classify him as an existentialist, in a historical sense)
Quoting javi2541997
That's insightful! Though Nietzsche, with The Gay Science, would be an obvious example to bring up in terms of how you parse him into those categories. He can be read as both at once, or neither: he's no nihilist as much as an anti-nihilist, and is joyful in the meta-ethical anti-realist sense that @Tom Storm expressed (at least as I understand him), and uses that joy to counter the sad and somber nihilism that he associates with Christianity(socialism, etc.)
The notion of "suffering" makes sense as a uniting theme, even if there are more joyful existentialists (or, if we prefer, post-existentialists -- thinking Derrida and Levinas now more than categorical classifications)
Both K and N explicated some kind of doubt about what we believe we're doing and why, and the latter existentialists -- so I interpret them -- attempted answers to those questions. In this sentence I mean "existentialists" in the historical sense, rather than philosophical sense (the group of people we usually associate with the word, and the interpretations of their works)
Well -- that's enough rambling for now.
Good point! I agree with you, Moliere. :up:
Quoting Moliere
True! Existentialists often considered themselves as 'weak' in philosophy because most of their writings were parts of novels, and not essays about philosophy in the proper sense of the technique. I was reading some notes about Dostoevsky's life, and he considered himself 'weak' in philosophy. But, paradoxically, his characters and the Christian dilemmas they pass through, were an inspiration to the existentialists of the 20th century!
Furthermore, I forgot a very important fact you mentioned in the comment, and it is the historical background. Indeed, existentialism depends a lot on this. Why X happens and how we should act, causes the circumstances we currently live in. This is another matter between the Russian authors and Kierkegaard.
The circumstances of our existentialism are the main cause of our despair or are we the ones who make those circumstances because of our choices?
I don't think they start there as much as reject nihilism -- but I'd still interpret them, personally, as meta-ethical nihilists. But I'm kind of mix-and-matching here -- meta-ethical antirealism is a very analytic position, and in analytic philosophy you often try to strip terms of their emotional valences in order to set out a clear set of logical relations between propositions so they can be evaluated.
Neither Camus or Nietzsche wrote in this style, so I'm kind of introducing an interpretive device to their works in calling them meta-ethical nihilists -- I think it's the appropriate categorization, but it's not the categories which Camus or Nietzsche are using.
For Nietzsche it's Christianity and its attendant slave-morality, in light of the death of God, that brings about the most decadent kind of nihilism. Even though his project is descriptive here I can't really read Nietzsche other than preferring master-morality over slave-morality, given his general criticisms of all the examples of slave-morality he puts forward.
That master-morality preceded slave-morality, and so in a way you can read Nietzsche as restoring the good, old religion in the face of the decadent religion of the last man: Though what he calls "good" isn't what Christian's call "Good", obviously, and has more to do with aristocratic self-overcoming in their pursuit of power to a point of overcoming even the overman -- the overman overcomes himself.
So meta-ethically I'd still classify him as a moral antirealist because he's not really the sort to propose true moral propositions -- but that's not the sort of nihilism he's rejecting either.
****
With Camus I think he considers the possibility of nihilism because of the absurd encounter, and begins with the only question that one need answer in light of the absurd: to kill oneself or not. But then through the process of thinking that question he arrives at a position where that even if there are no values (or God) suicide is not permitted at a logical level -- which seems to me to count as a pretty strong ethical belief.
For him there's the possibility of nihilism, the absurd encounter, but then heroic rebellion and acceptance of the absurd is the logical conclusion one should follow rather than the path of suicide -- a kind of ultimate nihilism where nothing matters, even subjectively, and so one kills oneself to escape the inescapable nothing.
****
So given all that I'd say yes, you're right, but there's more, and thanks for the prodding because it's helping me to think through these authors and try to make some distinctions in drawing out a "map"
Quoting Moliere
When you mentioned Levinas and Derrida, my thoughts went to exactly the place where this issue is expressed so well, if mysteriously, as you can expect with someone like Levinas. It is this essay by Derrida called Violence and Metaphysics and it is a kind of review by Derrida of Levinas' Totality and Infinity. This issue is the way Levinas labors to explain this impossible impasse that occurs when inquiry confronts metaethical boundaries. One has to hold on tight for a discussion that wants to go where language's possiblities have no place, which is, as Levinas puts it, "prior to the unveiling of Being in general, as the basis of knowledge and meaning of Being, there is a relation with the extant which is expressed; before the ontological level, the ethical level.: Derrida concludes, "Ethics is therefore metaphysics. The absolute overflowing of ontology----as the totality and unity of the same: by the other occurs as infinity because no totality can constrain it."
Levinas finds the moral dimension in our existence in the encounter with the other person, the face that reveals "what cannot be an object or a simple 'objective reality'. Philosophy cannot forget that we exist, says Kierkegaard, and our existence is the setting for ethical experiences. Camus' biggest trouble lies with his own lack ethical experience. He would simply say to Levinas, What "Other" are you talking about? because he doesn't understand anything beyond what is in plain sight, and what is in plain sight has NO Other. E.g., the Arab nurse in The Stranger "has a bandage wrapped around her face, which has no nose; she is virtually faceless."
I think Camus' absurd is a manifestation of his plain, journalistic psychological constitution. Ethics is NOTHING in this plain description of our affairs. Ethics is literally nothing without metaphysics and Camus simply notes this to be the case. This is Levinas' point. I would add that Wittgenstein knew this, too. The world and ethics is "mystical" for him. Ethics is transcendental in its essence.
AS I try to argue, before one can talk about the nature of ethics, one has to first observe actual ethical cases: what makes something ethical at all! It is not the rules, as Kierkegaard thought, for rules are in practical matters as well, I mean, there is nothing of what ethics is in a rule or principle. It must be somewhere else that we find "the ethical" in these daily affairs (for at this point there is no metaphysical assumption in place). What remains is the good and the bad. It is such an odd thing to say in this climate of confidence in natural science, but there is a metaethical dimension of ethics. The ethical "good"?? What IS this? This is nothing to someone like Camus, and I dare say most people who think such matters through, these days.
There is a nihilism that runs through popular culture because those who give this culture its voice, our intelligencia, are devoid of metaethical understanding, for ethics cannot be "seen". Pain, being bad, is not, in its badness, observed like one observes a cup or a lamp shade. The badness is all the same there, what G E Moore called a non natural property.
To understand Camus, one needs to see what he is NOT. And he is not a metaphysician. He's just a very talented naturalist.
I think existentialism and phenomenology are terms that overlap. Heidegger didn't like the term, I don't think Sartre objected. But the whole movement was an attempt to return to existence from rationality as a grounding for philosophy. You might find the way Heidegger originally puts this in Being and Time. A brief passage:
By this time we can see phenomenally what falling, as fleeing, flees in the face of. It does not flee in the face of entities within-the-world; these are precisely what it flees towardsas entities alongside which our concern, lost in the they, can dwell in tranquillized familiarity. When in falling we flee into the at-home of publicness, we flee in the face of the not-at-home; that is, we flee in the face of the uncanniness which lies in Daseinin Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being. This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the they, though not explicitly.
You don't have to have read Being and Time to get the basic idea. Dasein is our human existence. When we go about our daily affairs so thoughtlessly, it is as if those affairs are blindly carried out and run themselves. Heidegger calls this verfallun, our throwness and lostness in the world, this just going-along never stopping to "resolutely" determine our own destiny. Lost in the "they" as we get caught up in "idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity." When one is in this sort of default condition of existing, one is fleeing AWAY from what one really IS. And this is freedom and awareness. When one becomes aware of one's freedom, one no longer can be a mere player on a stage, for the performance has now lost its spontaneity. The question (the piety of thought!) undoes one's "tranquilized" existence of just going along.
See where Heidegger gives nihilism itself analysis:
[i]The saturation of existence by nihilative behavior testifies to the
constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestation of [b]the
nothing[/b] that only anxiety originally reveals. But this implies that
the original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is
there. [b]It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through
Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the
Oh, yes and the Oh, no of men of affairs[/b]; but most readily in
the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically
daring.[/i]
Heidegger had little interest in the world in which people were not very aware of their own existence. Those who are, he calls "daring." Sound familiar? See what Kierkegaard said a hundred years earlier:
Innocence is ignorance. In innocence the human being is not characterized as spirit but is psychically characterized in immediate unity with its natural condition. Spirit is dreaming in the human being. This view fully accords with that of the Bible which, by denying that the human being in its innocence has knowledge of the difference between good and evil,* condemns all Catholicisms fantasies concerning [Adams] merit.15 In this state there is peace and repose, but at the same time there is something else, something that is not dissension and strife, for there is nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that at the same time it is anxiety. Dreaming, spirit projects its own actuality, yet this actuality is nothing, but innocence always sees this nothing outside itself.
What Heidegger calls repressed, sleeping, Kierkegaard calls dreaming. Camus had read all of this, of course. It is in the way the "nothing" is treated that makes all the difference. Raise one's head out of the sand of mindless participation, and realize that one is there, thrown into existence, and indeterminacy all around, saturating being in the world, here lies absurd faith, or absurd pessimism. Camus wants to treat this as a true nothing, but he just doesn't see that this not possible, literally. Why? because one literally has never even witnessed this nihilism, one is NEVER free from what Heidegger called attunement: the affectivity of judgment, the caring. There has never been witnessed a true nihilism. Such a thing is just an abstraction from the palpable world of valuing things. Even as the self proclaimed nihilist announces her position, she stands in a performative contradiction, caring as she does about the very saying.