"A day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd...Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in the mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd."
from The Myth of Sisyphus
Our relationship to time is linear. We know we have a beginning and an end. For those who don't believe in an afterlife, this is our one shot to get it right. Camus is talking here, I think, about the moments of self-consciousness that remind us of our mortality. (For we are all but dust.) His view of Sisyphus is related to this--Sisyphus has already experienced and known his mortality. Rather than despair, Sisyphus continues on his mission. His circumstances are outside his control; the gods banished him to this hill to roll this giant rock. Yet, he finds strength within himself to complete the task at hand, doing the best he can with what circumstances allow.
Discuss:
What difficulties do you foresee with the application of human
freedom, i.e., we are free to shape our destinies because we alone can create
meaning for ourselves? Could this freedom also be called responsibility?
Is Sisyphus truly free?
Have you ever had an experience that either made you
question your purpose, or helped you discover a purpose for yourself? Does this
mode of thinking help explain that experience?
Does existentialism, in your opinion, answer questions about
life and/or death?
Ha, what a funny cartoon! And, what a nice quote from Camus. I agree that one of existentialism's greatest boons is its emphasis on human experience as essentially characterized by that tension of time and mortality. If anything, I think existentialism encourages that we own up to that, whereas--as you point out--so many try to resolve that tension with appeals to an afterlife.
ReplyDeleteAnd that tension is indeed fascinating--Camus puts his finger right on it. I was just talking with someone this morning about the experience of parenting and how, while you do try to fully immerse yourself in the present moments, there's an anticipation of getting a big chunk of your life back when your kids go off to make their own way. But, as Camus gets at, in anticipating that we're also rushing toward our death and that of others, too. Moreover, said death might come prematurely! What's truly absurd, I think, about our relationship with time and mortality is that our relatively higher form of consciousness enables us to make all sort of desirable plans for the future, while the frailty of our bodies makes its quite possible (eventually inevitable) that those plans will never be realized. We're on a see-saw of sorts, with our hopes for the future heightening our thirst for life and our unavoidable mortality always dragging back down to--then under--earth. It's perhaps more than a little paradoxical that we can be so future-oriented considering what the future ultimately holds for each of us.
Maybe existentialism helps us with this by pushing us to take full stock of the present, of actuality, of what's right there in front of us.
Even funnier, from the vantage of 63: "A day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty..."
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