In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus speaks of two kinds of suicide. The first one is the event of killing oneself; the second one is faith as a philosophical suicide.
Suicide As Killing Oneself
“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.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus sees in the meaninglessness of existence a force delivering us into asking the only question that philosophy should be attempting to think. Meaninglessness delivers us into questioning our being in such a way that renders our non-being itself the question. The absence of meaning brings us face to face with our absence as a question. Absence doubling itself and rendering itself multiple. This is the force of Camus’s questioning.
In the writings of Camus, suicide could be metaphorically read as a philosophical endeavor naming an epoch pervaded by loss and valuelessness because of the death of God, but it could also be literally read as a genuine endeavor to render absent one’s existence.
This means that suicide names both the absence of meaning and our own absence. Suicide is thus our existing in a world lacking meaning, taking place as God, and our absence and non-existence.
Suicide is a world deprived of innocence because of our killing of God or our innocent attempts to escape the formlessness of a Godless world. Both interpretations lead to the same detours; both interpretations acknowledge that the death of God is unbearable. The Myth of Sisyphus is a response to the acknowledgment that existence has become unjustified after the death of God. Sisyphus responding to the madman in The Gay Science:
“Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? —Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
The declaration, the questions, and the assertion that we are the murderers speak of an epoch that only Sisyphus can understand and experience, for “what makes the madman mad, and what the crowd fails to understand, is how much of our lives, how much of our self-understanding, although seemingly unrelated, is inextricably intertwined with the concept of God, and, therefore, must die with Him”.
Yet Sisyphus must refuse this destiny. Although Camus acknowledges that Godlessness is unbearable and meaninglessness is groundlessness, he says that meaninglessness remains a symbol implying clarity. Meaninglessness symbolizes the existence of a unique existence that is aware of its suffering.
This means that suicide might be an innocent endeavor to elude meaninglessness, but it is also an unjustified betrayal of the consciousness that discovered the uselessness of hope. The consciousness that has glimpsed, and brought itself face to face with, the meaninglessness of existence should not be rendered absent; it should remain there, suffering whilst enjoying its understanding of the world in its being placed over against everything that is.
“If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Suicide, for Camus, must be rejected, for it is a betraying of our understanding; it praises vagueness and refuses the transparency belonging only to Sisyphus, the shining through which our existence reveals itself to us as absurd.
Faith As a Philosophical Suicide
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says that faith is another form of suicide; it is a philosophical suicide. For Camus, faith negates rationality, thinking, and philosophy, for it is an endeavor to elude the meaninglessness of existence by creating illusory transcendental values.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Kierkegaard’s thinking is an example of this philosophical suicide. Camus says that Kierkegaard fails to see meaning in the meaninglessness of existence and hence attempts to transcend this meaninglessness toward and into illusory worlds. That is, Kierkegaard refuses the lucidity of the absurd.
Yet the meaninglessness of which Kierkegaard speaks, the meaninglessness that Kierkegaard experiences, is different from the meaninglessness from which Sisyphus suffers. For Kierkegaard, meaninglessness is not Godlessness; meaninglessness first arises because of the existence of God.
For Kierkegaard, our existence is meaningless and absurd because it cannot exist for itself, it only exists for another existence, the other is God, the other is the gift, happening as meaningfulness. God is meaning and meaningfulness, placing itself over against our meaninglessness.
Our existence is meaningless; it exists for the meaningful; it exists for God. Meaninglessness is thus inevitable. The world must be meaningless, but the other world, in which God dwells, renders this meaningless world meaningful. Thus, only a leap of faith could link both worlds together. It is only in this leaping that meaning could be reached and held within. Faith brings these distant worlds together into the same horizon glimpsed only by leaping.
Both Kierkegaard and Camus thus speak of different meaninglessnesses belonging to the same lack pervading our existence. Meaninglessness is multiple, reflecting the same nothingness lying at the heart of being. Both Camus and Kierkegaard see the absence into which our existence is brought. What distances them from each other is the way through which this absence is traversed.
Camus rejects faith, since it is a turning toward the unseen, that which cannot be glimpsed, thought, or approached. Camus doubts this turning toward the unseen, for this turning turns toward what turns away from us and hides itself from our onlooking.
“I do not know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I 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 only understand in human terms.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche says the same impossibility of any turning toward and seeing through the unseen and what is forever concealed from us.
“We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Faith is a turning toward “what crushes” in its obscurity and an attempt at finding “reason to hope in what impoverishes”. For Camus, faith fails to see that there is meaning in the meaninglessness surrounding us. There is meaningfulness lying at the heart of every meaninglessness and every absence of meaning. The meaning inherent in every meaninglessness shines and shows itself only when absurdism is welcomed and embraced.
“My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It is that 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…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.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Meaning occurs when there is a passionate going through meaninglessness in its rich poverty. Sisyphus’s “passion for life” justifies its meaninglessness; “his hatred of death” gives meaning to his meaningless existence. Rolling the rock to the top of the mountains is purposeless, but Sisyphus’s rejection of death says that there is purposefulness in every purposelessness.
Meaninglessness pervades existence, but there is a sun calling forth an enjoyment that gives form to a formless happiness dwelling in Sisyphus’s heart. Life must be confirmed. Sisyphus’s rock “is his thing”; life should be our thing. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. The struggle toward and through meaninglessness is enough to fill our hearts. We must be happy.
For more articles explaining Camus‘s thought, visit this webpage.