Cal Poly Praxis

The Absurd.

"Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The absurd, as defined by Albert Camus, is the inescapable divorce between our desires and their inability to be actualized in the shattering face of reality. The absurd is a relational notion that arises in the liminal space between reality and our internal desire for meaning. It explores the way in which our human experience is always reaching towards this nameless meaning, always moving towards a brighter dawn, an existence that is somehow more glittering, or more full than our previous one. The collision between our irrationality and nostalgia, producing this idealization, creates a hope that we can somehow evade what is dull or meaningless. Camus, however, tells us we can't. Each moment, each single instant, we encounter life in all of its raw material, all of its frayed parts. We attempt to string these moments together into some meaningful end, we peer into them with a searching eye that pools all of its findings into a single, unified value. A value that is not inherently present.

You sit on the stained, upholstered blue seat of the train. The air is hot, thick, and acrid. All sound falls silently into the lap of the train track's drumming rhythm, the muted tunnel, the screeching brakes. Your body feels lethargic, eyes burning from sleep deprivation, stomach acid stirring among itself like an aggravated sea. You realize you haven't eaten since 5 p.m. yesterday. It's noon. Once you get off the train, you will find a place to eat. You open your phone to search for food near your stop. Your service falters and fails underground. You must wait until you're off the train. All will be dealt with the moment you climb above ground. Everything will fall into place. The absurd tells you that even when you arrive at the destination, that feeling of needing to arrive at someplace never leaves you. You will never get off the train.

The more you evaluate life itself, the more you realize that the absurd exists in everything, always. Our desires are always stagnant, always an end that we reach, a completion of the endless task of living. But the absurd is constantly reminding us that our journey is never complete. The "end" is always near, and somehow never realized. And we continue on in this mechanical way, without pause, until we stop and ask the question of "why?" This question catches us, consumes us. Reminds us that we are not being carried by time, but time by the individual. It reminds us that we are condemned to the heavy task of choice, to a radical and crushing freedom.

When struck by the feeling of the absurd, Camus leaves us with a couple of options. Suicide, whether it be philosophical or actual, allows us to avoid this feeling entirely. When we can no longer confront the meaningless void, the "silence of the world," it is easy to continue on mindlessly or not continue on at all. However, Camus encourages us to embrace what he coins as recovery, a definitive awakening of consciousness to the absurd as a form of revolt.

While Sisyphus's* actions seem to be the epitome of this mechanical life, one must pay attention to how he chooses to engage with his task. Knowing that his actions are ultimately futile, and still continuing on regardless of the consequences, he demonstrates a vivid awareness of the absurd. The revolt Camus discusses is one of subtlety, one of preserved awareness. The boulder comes tumbling down, our means exhausted, our bodies aching, and once again we are challenged to push it, knowing it will never reach stillness at the mountain's top. However, when we become fully acquainted with the fact that our life and actions are inherently meaningless, we encounter a life that stands naked in cruel light. We begin to realize all the meaning we find is ultimately contrived. And this, Camus tells us, is the feeling we must continuously encounter if we wish to be free. This is the absurd.

* The man who is condemned by the Gods to push a boulder up a hill, and have it continuously roll back down again, for all of eternity.