...Yes,
Camus was a genius, to focus his attention on Sisyphus and on the absurdity of
existence, as revealed by his life in Hades. But my own emphasis here is on the
meaning of the “agonizing torment” of
slave toil, which is all such hard labor out of sheer necessity, without any
other redeeming value except to earn barely enough money to perpetuate an
existence for existence’ sake. This last thing kind of reminds me of a Benny
Hill skit, where someone asks him why he is not working. --- Why need I to work?’ he asks back. --- So that you can retire! --- Why retire? ---- So that you can stop working! --- But I am not working now!--- comes the immortal Benny Hill punch line.
A real theater of the absurd is exposed here, in Benny Hill’s skit! Yes, Camus
does have a powerful point, a point worth exploring.
Camus’
solution to the meaninglessness of life is, basically, to lay back and enjoy
the absurdity of it all, a kind of entertainment at one’s own expense, ensuring
one’s happiness. But what if the laborer already has a pursuit he is pursuing,
which happens to be more worthwhile than his forced daily routine of working
for the money, and nothing but the money. Does money alone provide a sufficient
motivation to keep on living as a proud survivor for survival’s sake? Or does
our worker have to follow Camus’ advice and learn the art of enjoyment of one’s
absurd circumstances as an act of fulfillment of one’s life?
It
may be alleged, not without a reason, that all people fall into two classes:
the lower class and the higher class. The lower class presumably pursues a
lower standard of happiness, and therefore it can subsist on lower, personally
unrewarding jobs, simply because the time spent on the bad job is not exactly
wasted, as it would surely have been wasted on low animal pursuits anyway. The
higher class, on the other hand, can turn their higher pursuits into a source
of good income, thus escaping the absurdity of life by combining a necessity
with the desideratum. Remembering Mayakovsky’s grotesque satire of America, white jobs for the white and black jobs for
the black?
There
are two rather obvious flaws in the above consideration. One is that it does
not follow at all from it that the higher income people are somehow less prone
to an absurd, meaningless, bored existence, where there is no redeeming value
in life whatsoever. Perhaps this kind of meaningless life of the rich is the
true apotheosis of absurdity. Why do all these useless, pointless people waste
our planet’s oxygen?, as the joke goes. It goes without saying that I have no
sympathy for such people and nothing but contempt for this kind of absurdity.
A
real tragedy of life is when absurdity is forced on those who would happily
have pursued their meaningful and valuable happiness, which alone, however,
cannot buy them the basics of animal subsistence. Is a person like that, enjoying
the absurdity of his or her life, while disregarding the time wasted, robbed
from the genuine pursuit of a meaningful but financially unrewarding happiness?
…So,
here our Sisyphus comes back into the picture, which he never left. From what
we know about him, starting with Homer down to Camus, he was not a man bored to
death with his life. Could such a man ever “conquer death,” or, rather,
overcome the curse of his own immortality in hell, to find a “happiness on the
rack.” Is absurdity ever capable of self-sufficiency?
No
matter how very guilty Sisyphus was of the crimes for which he now receives his
eternal punishment, I sympathize with his unimaginably terrible plight.
Eternity is a ghastly thing because it suspends change and thus kills hope.
Camus naturally disregards this eternal curse
of Sisyphus, applying his situation to the life of us mortals, where a set of
different parameters is at play. It is because of this application, or rather,
transfer of the Sisyphean condition to the temporal world, where strict limits
have been set by birth and death, that we might consider a different kind of
attitude toward his labor than an enjoyment of its absurdity. The aspect of
suffering, both physical and mental, is stronger here than the aspect of
meaninglessness. A different kind of “enjoyment” is open to the laborer, and a
different kind of happiness can be achieved.
In
my entry Talent For… Communism?, in
the Philosophy section, I had this
paragraph critically important to the subject of this entry:
Several
Russian thinkers of the early twentieth century (well summarized in
Merezhkovsky’s Last Russian Saint/Serafim Sarovsky and in his
religious-philosophical push for Russia’s adoption of a New Christianity)
must have been profoundly struck by Nietzsche’s implicit call to return
to the spirit of the race, but their common mistake had been to
misunderstand the nature of the Russian spirit that has proven itself alien
both to the spirit of Protestantism and to the idea of a New Christianity. (For
more on this, see my posted entry Merezhkovsky And His New Christianity [October 16th, 2011] in
the Religion section.) As a matter of fact, the spirit of the Russian
race focuses on the blessed nature of suffering (see my entry The Blessedness Of Suffering, posted on
August 24th, 2011), and thus provokes the interesting question of
whether such ready acceptance of suffering contradicts the spirit of human
nature or, on the contrary, provides an antidote to its sting once we realize
that suffering is an essential part of the human condition anyway. (This is
very similar to Camus’ argument on the acceptance of absurdity in his treatment
of the myth of Sisyphus. The absurdity of Sisyphus’ “life in hell” was no laughing
matter, involving not just the sheer senselessness of his job, but also a great
suffering, if we should believe Homer. Thus, Camus, without ever stating it this way, indirectly
encourages the reader [“Sisyphus”] to seek some kind of happiness in a life of
suffering, in parallel with the peculiar Russian/Christian way of looking at
it.)
…Mind
you, I am not suggesting that Camus consciously invites such a pursuit. But,
like all great thinkers, he stimulates our own thinking in several directions
at once, and it is precisely this kind of intellectual encouragement which
constitutes every philosopher’s greatest value.
No comments:
Post a Comment