Absurd Creation

[Chapter 3] Absurd Creation and [chapter 4,] The Myth of Sisyphus

Summary statement: “Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought—revolt, freedom, and diversity” (117)

The inquiry: Having accepted a life“without appeal” [namely to meaning and value grounded in something higher than human; 102b], can one work and create without appeal?

Philosophical theology (a philosophical account of God). “Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premise: “If God does not exist, I am god.” To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being. . . . For Kirilov, as for Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.” (108a-b) Alyosha, Dostoevsky’s religious man typifies many: “Man exchanges his divinity for happiness” (111b).

Philosophy of religion. “Revolt against men is also directed against God: great revolutions are always metaphysical.” (127n). “The world continued to cherish its blind hopes” (111b).

The concept of Christianity (the primary figure of religion in MS). “Hell for [Don Juan] is a thing to be provoked. He has but one reply to divine wrath, and that is human honor” (71d). “What else does that stone Commander signify, that cold statue set in motion to punish the blood and courage that dared to think? All the powers of eternal Reason, or order, of universal morality, all the foreign grandeur of a God open to wrath are summed up in him.” (75d)

Christian-friendly lines. “Let me assert again: it is not the affirmation of God that is questioned here, but rather the logic leading to that affirmation” (24n). “Let us note this carefully in conclusion: what contradicts the absurd in [The Possessed by Dostoevsky] is not its Christian character, but rather its announcing a future life. It is possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of Christians who do not believe in a future life. . . . “Convictions do not prevent incredulity.” (112c) “Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either.” (94c). “These are our nights of Gethsemane” (the place where Jesus was in agony as he prepared himself for his betrayal, arrest, trial, and crucifixion; 122b).

“Spiritual” experiences for AC are the great times that emerge without one’s having betrayed the absurd; they do put the agony of the absurd into temporary eclipse (though “one always finds one’s burden again” 123d), but they are not predicated on a swerve toward the eternal (incomprehensible, intangible, and the enemy of the flesh and commitment to worldly engagement). “All is well” (122b; Sisyphus concludes). “In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. . . . He knows himself to be the master of his days. . . . This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, it itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (123)

Axiology (value theory). “The fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning” (136). Goodness and beauty are “our categories” (133c).

Aesthetics (philosophy of art and beauty and of the feelings more generally) “The absurd joy par excellence is creation” (93d). “A rule of aesthetics . . . . The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says ‘less.” There is a certain relationship between the global experience of the artist and the work that reflects that experience . . . . That relationship is bad when the work aims to give the whole experience in the lace-paper of an explanatory literature. That relationship is good when the work is but a piece cut out of experience, a facet of the diamond in which the inner luster is epitomized without being limited. In the first case there is overloading and pretension to the eternal. In the second, a fecund work because of a while implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected.” (98.1; this is a highly definite aesthetics)

More highly definite absurdist doctrine: if you take the absurd premise, there are things that follow. “An absurd attitude, if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no longer detach myself from it. . . . It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life.” (102c) [AC has a clarity and definiteness about his thoughts on art that he does not show in philosophy.]

The artist has many traits in common with the philosopher (96.1; 99d)

“All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.” (94c)

Metaphysics (reality-ology). Every great feeling brings its own world, its own metaphysics with it (10c-d). There is a method here, and each method has its own metaphysics (11d). “All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved [by death], at least for a time” (15d). “Metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience” (54b). “Today when thought has ceased to lay claim to the universal, when its best history would be that of its repentances, we know that the system, when it is worth while, cannot be separated from its author” (100d). “The preferences that [the great philosophical novelists] have shown for writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance. . . . The novel in question is the instrument of that simultaneously relative and inexhaustible knowledge, so like that of love. Of love, fictional creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination.” (101) “I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I cannot deny” (102b). “The fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning” (136). “[Kafka’s] work is universal (a really absurd work is not universal) to the extent to which it represents the emotionally moving face of man feleeing humanity, deriving from his contradictions reasons for believing, reasons for hoping from h is fecund despairs, and calling life his terrifying apprenticeship in death. It is universal because its inspiration is religious. As in all religions, man is freed of the weight of his own life. But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I also know that I am not seeking what is universal, but what is true. The two may well not coincide.” (136c-d)

Truth and meaning “In psychology, as in logic, there are truths, but no truth” (19c). “The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to” (31c). “Life is better lived without meaning” (53d). “the blind path that all have entered on” (95d) “Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth” (93d). “Truth contrary to morality”—a common theme in existentialist writing (133b). “A truth . . . by its very definition is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning” (135d-36a). “The method here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible” (12a).

Philosophical anthropology (what it means to be a human being; the human condition; includes philosophy of mind; social theory may be grouped here too)

Epistemology: philosophy of knowledge (refer to the earlier document on knowledge and truth.

Affirmations of loyalty to logic. “My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it” (49d). The heroes of the absurd are “attempting to be consistent” (91c). “What matters is coherence” (94n). “I merely want to see clearly” (86d). “Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion” (94a).

Elementary logic of propositional consistency, inconsistency, and implication.

“The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.” (106d; AC interprets the first premise to mean that if God does not exist, one has the freedom of not having to serve an eternal being; therefore the meaning of the first premise does not in fact authorize the following line, and the reasoning is fallacious).

“Of course like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, [Stavrogin] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind it to ask: “What does that prove?” (109d) [Here a point of elementary logic is being made. That point can be expressed as a warning not to commit the ad hominem fallacy of seeming to refute a view or a practice by finding weaknesses in an advocate of that view or practice.]

An artist expresses the same basic thought in all his works, even though there may be contradictions between some of them (114b-c; 114d).

The higher logic.

“The absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting point” (2c). And what before that? “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. . . . [There is] an odd state of soul in which the void becomes 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.” (12b-c).

The absurd: “my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that binds them together” (50a).

“There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.” (31d) “Opposite the essential contradiction [death?] I maintain my human contradiction [revolt]. I establish my lucidity in the midst of what negates it. I exalt man before what crushes him, and my freedom, my revolt, and my passion come together then in that tension, that lucidity =, and that vast repetition.” (79d)-88a) [A contradiction, here, is what negates something that we naturally cherish.]

“The novel has its logic, its reasonings, its intuition, and its postulates. It also has its requirements of clarity.” (100c)

If you accept the absurd premise, there are things that follow. “An absurd attitude, if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no longer detach myself from it. . . . It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life.” (102c)

“Art can never be so well served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors. (113d-114a).

There is no contradiction in Sisyphus being both wisest and most prudent of mortals and also a thief (“highwayman” 119). Obviously there is no formal contradiction, but neither is there a deeper contradiction either. The absence of an ethic in a conventional sense (effectively asserted in the section on Don Juanism) is the key to the non-(higher) contradiction.

Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial shows no surprise in being found accused of a serious crime without any idea of what he might have done. This is a surprisingly passive acceptance of a contradiction—but not on the level of propositions (innocent, guilty) but on the level of the deep contradiction of injustice in society and life that is so pervasive that we customarily cease to revolt against it (126a).

The material expression in art of a spiritual tragedy is in itself a paradox since colors have the power “to express the void” and daily gestures are given “the strength to translate eternal ambitions” (126b). Here is a wondering at levels of the real; a wondering about how a phenomenon of what might in some sense be called of a lower level can express a higher level truth (or illusion).

“These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the absurd work.( 126c). An oscillation is not a simultaneous assertion of one proposition and its contradictory in elementary logic. It is the juxtaposition of different orders that is here called paradox and contradiction.

“Absurd thought . . . may put forward several solutions [to a question], very different from one another” (104n).

Philosophy of science.

Facts. “Once and for all, value judgments are discarded here in favor of factual judgment” (61a). “The era, its ruins, and its blood overwhelm us with facts” (85 re: e.g., world war?).

Causal claims. Chestov errs by excessively dismissing science. “The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or else, they may justify themselves on the level of description without for that reason being true on the level of explanation.” (36d) “Of course like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, [Stavrogin] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind it to ask: “What does that prove?” (109d)

Philosophy of science. Science can be impressive as it takes me from perception toward more and more encompassing explanation, but before giving what I wanted—comprehension of the universe—it ends in models, images, myth. (19d-20c).

Philosophy of nature or cosmology The striving for a humanly comprehensible universe proves in vain (17). “The absurd man catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness” (60a). “I do not want to get out of my depth” (60c).

In the domain of beauty, the philosophical discipline is aesthetics, the philosophy of art and beauty.

Artistic living. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus “That laugh, the conquering insolence, that playfulness and love of the theater all clear and joyous. Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself. . . . The moment he knows, his laugh bursts forth and makes one forgive everything. . . . Today, on the mouth of that woman he recognizes the bitter and comforting taste of the only knowledge. Bitter? Barely: that necessary imperfection that makes happiness perceptible!” (70a-b, Don Juanism)

In the domain of goodness, philosophy’s discipline is ethics, covering morality and the virtues of excellent character.

Morality. The absurd man is released from common rules by death (59b). “It is the world that pulverizes [man] and I who liberate him. I provide him with all his rights” 87a). “There is but one useful action, that of remaking man and the earth. I shall never remake men. But one must do ‘as if.’” (87b). I liberate him. I give him his rights. I remake man and earth—“as if” (86d). “These images [Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror] do not propose moral codes and involve no judgments” (90d). “Men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage” (71b in the context of the sketch of Don Juanism).

Character. “One can be virtuous through a whim” (67d).

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence, the doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.” (117.1) “There is in the human condition (and this is a commonplace of all literatures) a basic absurdity as well as an implacable nobility. The two coincide, as is natural.” 127b)

Re: Don Juanism. Love which involves total self-giving is criticized as “devouring the other” (73b-c); but what of Don Juan? “Loving and possessing, conquering and consuming—that is his way of knowing” (75). In an absurd universe “kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage” (71b). The absurd man “might charm and attract a lucid heart” (77d). What is the bitterness in the kiss? Just the necessary ingredient to make happiness perceptible (70c).