Albert Camus: The Philosophy of the Absurd
The philosophy of the Absurd came into existence with the appearance of
Albert Camus, who was the first one to explain this term systematically. Camus
argued that humanity had to accept the idea that a fully satisfying rational explanation
of the universe was out of its reach. In this way, the world must be seen as absurd.
The fact that Camus was born and bred in Algeria helped him to form a distant and
clear view of Europe and its culture. He was greatly concerned with human suffering,
mass murder, torture and the destructive effects of scientific discoveries. According
to Lev Braun, "Camus experienced the absurd as a social experience". This
philosophy of the absurd was born due to the fear and tension that people felt at that
time. In a period of 25 years, 70 million Europeans were uprooted, deported or killed.
Camus entered the intellectual and political life of France in one of its darkest
periods before World War II started. Everything was out of control; people felt
trapped in life and found that they were being led to a war that nobody wanted to
face. In this way, the philosophy of the absurd resulted from a pessimistic view of
Europe at that time. It reflected a belief in "Nihilism" or “Nothingness” and a sense of
emptiness that controlled the intellectual and social aspects of life. Camus expresses
his view of the absurd in his book The Myth of Sisyphus in which he states that the
absurd is the conscious awareness of leading a useless, aimless and yet mechanical
life. He compares man’s life to the myth of Sisyphus, who was sentenced by the gods
to roll a rock up the hill, and after he reaches the top, the rock rushes down once
more. He then has to push it once more to the top, and so on forever. This confirms
the fact that we lead a meaningless and purposeless life, what Camus calls the
“absurd walls.”
The absurd has always been subject to different interpretations. Some explain it
as the awareness of the passage of time and the approach of death as an end to
physical existence. Some see it as the strangeness of the world and life in general as
well as the feeling of estrangement from people and from the self. Thus, the absurd
refers to the clash which takes place between the mind that desires to understand the
universe and search for its unity, and the impossibility of achieving this aim. Camus
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was thus deeply concerned with the individual’s freedom and happiness on earth, but
found that it is not right to base his ideas on the abstract universe or on systematic
ideologies because they could not help him to reach this happiness. Thus, he bases his
beliefs on concrete grounds related to the material world: “what I touch, what resists
me—that is what I understand.” This resulted in the birth of a feeling of indifference
towards the future because the focus has become on the present, on what can be seen
and touched now.
As for the results of the absurd, Camus referred to “revolt, freedom, and
passion.” Revolt results from the awareness that we cannot accept the fact that fate
has the power to defeat us. Our love of life and fear of death provide the basis of
revolt. This is because man can find no promise of immortality for himself and
everything in his life confirms that life is short. Although life seems beautiful, this
beauty cannot last forever. Thus, Camus’ philosophy depends upon accepting the
absurd in life as a truth, believing in the present and revolting against any abstract or
absolute principles or beliefs whether political or religious. In order to keep this
philosophy, Camus explains that the absurd man must have two main features:
lucidity (rationality) and innocence. They will help him to accept the
meaninglessness of life; they will also lead him to live without tension, with what he
knows only, away from any uncertain things. This will certainly bring him happiness.
In this way, the first result of the absurd is the idea of challenge which is clear in
man’s confrontation with the realities of life and his understanding of its uselessness.
Camus states that the second result of the Absurd is freedom. However, he
believes that this freedom is limited and restricted because death is always there and
absolute values do not exist. The idea of the end of life makes it clear that man cannot
achieve eternal freedom, which exists only in the afterlife. Yet, Camus points out that
the absurd man is more free than the ordinary man because the first realizes that life
is useless and thus there are no rules that stand in the way of his freedom. Other
people are restricted to the achievement of their dreams and their freedom is thus
incomplete. However, the freedom of the Absurd man is also incomplete because it
cannot overcome death.
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The third result of the absurd, passion, is the product of the previous two
consequences. If one can revolt against the restrictions of life and can achieve
freedom, thus he will be able to live his life as fully as possible; this is what Camus
calls “passion.” Thus, Camus encourages people to live with passion and enjoy the
present time to the greatest degree because their awareness of life makes them sure of
its shortness. Thus, the three principles of revolt, freedom, and passion mean that any
man should live and enjoy his life to the fullest degree.
While the first two stages of Camus' intellectual thinking are "absurd" and
"revolt," a later stage is known as the emphasis on man’s humanism and the
formation of true and emotional relationships among people. Camus states that the
first two stages led him to a feeling of absurdity and a belief in concrete truths. Yet,
according to Camus, the world contains the truth of man. Thus, to live his life with
passion to the fullest degree, man should accept the irrationality of the world and try
to form gentle relations with people. To achieve this, man must revolt against any
system that limits or restricts his freedom to live passionately. Thus, revolt against the
“absurd walls” becomes an essential act as it represents a positive meaning, namely
the emphasis and protection of values. It enables man to defend himself and others
against the “master-slave relationship” of life and to defend their dignity, freedom,
and humanity. Thus, in a world of war and destruction, Camus desires to revive the
principle of humanism that would bring people together and guarantee that they will
not harm each other. He rejects war, destructive ambitions, and materialism,
believing that they are the cause of human suffering, isolation and lack of pity.
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Absurd Theatre
The “Theatre of the Absurd” is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the
work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The term is
derived from an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In his “Myth of
Sisyphus,” written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as basically
meaningless and absurd. Coined by American critic Martin Esslin, the term "theatre
of the Absurd" can be defined as a kind of drama that presents a view of the
absurdity of the human condition by the abandoning of usual or rational devices and
by the use of nonrealistic form. Essentially, Camus sees Absurdity as a disparity
between "man" and everything that "man" uses to identify self.
The 'absurd' plays by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean
Genet, Harold Pinter and others all share the view that man is inhabiting a universe
with which he is out of key. Its meaning is incomprehensible and his place within it is
without purpose. He is bewildered, troubled, and obscurely threatened. The origins of
the Theatre of the Absurd are rooted in the avant-garde experiments in art of the
1920s and 1930s. At the same time, it was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the
traumatic experience of the horrors of the Second World War, which showed the total
impermanence of any values, shook the validity of any conventions and highlighted
the precariousness of human life and its fundamental meaninglessness and
arbitrariness. The trauma of living from 1945 under threat of nuclear annihilation also
seems to have been an important factor in the rise of the new theatre. At the same
time, the Theatre of the Absurd also seems to have been a reaction to the
disappearance of the religious dimension form contemporary life. The Absurd
Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of myth and ritual to our
age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by instilling in
him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and ancient anguish. The Absurd Theatre
hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has become trite,
mechanical, and complacent. It is felt that there is mystical experience in confronting
the limits of human condition.
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The roots of the Absurd theatre can be found in the allegorical morality plays
of the Middle Ages and the allegorical religious dramas of Spain. It can also be found
in the nonsense literature of writers like Lewis Carroll; the dream plays of Strindberg
and the dream novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka. Its direct forerunners were the
Dada movement and the Surrealism of the 1920s and '30s. The term theatre of the
absurd derives from the philosophical use of the word absurd by such existentialist
thinkers as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. Camus, particularly, argued that
humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation
of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen
as absurd.
The playwrights loosely grouped under the label of the absurd try to convey
their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face of an inexplicable
universe. They rely heavily on poetic metaphor as a means of showing their
innermost states of mind. Hence, the images of the theatre of the absurd tend to
assume the quality of fantasy, dream, and nightmare; they do not so much portray the
outward appearance of reality as the playwright's emotional perception of an inner
reality. Thus, Beckett's Happy Days (1961) expresses a generalized human anxiety
about the approach of death through the concrete image of a woman sunk waist-deep
in the ground in the first act and neck-deep in the second. Ionesco's Rhinoceros
(1960) demonstrates the playwright's anxiety about the spread of inhuman totalitarian
tendencies in society by showing the population of a city turning into thick-skinned
savages. Writers outside France who in the 1950s and '60s showed the influence of
the theatre of the absurd include Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in England, and
Edward Albee and Sam Shepard in the United States.
Absurd plays assumed a highly unusual, innovative form, directly aiming to
startle the viewer, shaking him out of this comfortable, conventional life of everyday
concerns. In the meaningless and Godless post-Second-World-War world, it was no
longer possible to keep using such traditional art forms and standards that had ceased
being convincing and lost their validity. The Theatre of the Absurd openly rebelled
against conventional theatre. Indeed, it was anti-theatre. It was surreal, illogical,
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conflictless and plotless. The dialogue seemed a total mess. Not unexpectedly, the
Theatre of the Absurd first met with incomprehension and rejection.
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language
as a means of communication. Language had become a vehicle of stereotyped,
meaningless exchanges. Words failed to express the essence of human experience,
not being able to penetrate beyond its surface. The Theatre of the Absurd constituted
primarily an attack on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool
of communication. Absurd drama uses conventional speech, clichés, slogans, and
technical jargon. By ridiculing conventional and stereotyped speech patterns, the
Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond
everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically. Objects are
much more important than language in absurd theatre: what happens transcends what
is being said about it. It is the hidden, implied meaning of words that assume primary
importance in absurd theatre, over an above what is being actually said. Other
characteristics of the Absurdist convention include an expression of absurdity and
futility; a strong sense of irony and satire; caricatured or stereotyped characters who
personify certain ideas; meaningless or empty conversation and manners; disparate or
inconsistent action and many symbolical objects.
Source
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
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