The Irrelevance of the Absurd

For reasons entirely unrelated to philosophy, I recently found myself reading Albert Camus’s post-nihilist defense of a para-stoic life. And if you’re interested in a musical interpretation of the Absurdist take on the myth of Sisyphus, you can watch the music video here.

Up the hill and down again

There’s nothing at the top

Repetition isn’t sorrow

And he’s never going to stop

Now, I am very much sympathetic to Camus’s take on existence. To meet the undeniable madness of the world with scorn, a shrug, and a half-smile is, at least for some of us, about as much as we can hope to reasonably achieve. And yet, it is a philosophy constructed on a false foundation.

Camus was careful to insist that the Absurd is not a property of the world and not a property of Man, but the confrontation between them. He was right about that. The Absurd requires two terms held in opposition: Man’s demand for meaning, and the silence of a universe that refuses to answer. Remove either term and the philosophical structure evaporates. Camus knew this and said as much without equivocation. The first term is real enough. Men do want to know what things are for. Man observably yearns for meaning and for purpose. It is the second term that is the erroneous assumption, because the silence of the universe was never observed. It was stipulated. Camus did not go out to interrogate the world and come back with a report of no reply. He inherited a conceptual world that had already been silenced by other men, for other reasons, and then he wrote about how terribly quiet it was.

As those who have read The Refutation of Kant already know, that silence was installed in 1781 by Immanuel Kant. His doctrine of the thing-in-itself shifts from Reading A, which says that any cognizing apparatus is constrained by the shape of its cognition, to Reading B, which says that reality as it actually is remains unknowable in principle, totally and without remainder. Reading A is trivially true and no one disputes it. Reading B is the operative claim, it is asserted rather than argued, and it is what seals the phenomenal envelope shut. Once knowledge is confined to appearances, formal and final causes go out with the noumenal, because a thing’s form and its end are claims about what the thing actually is, not about how it presents to us. Strip those out and what remains is Camus’s silent universe: brute matter in motion, with no answer to the question of what anything is for, not because there is no answer, but because the question was ruled inadmissible before it was asked.

The silence of the world is not God or His Creation declining to speak. It is a man who has turned off his phone demanding to know why it will not ring.

Which means Absurdism is not a discovery about the human condition. It is a merely a consequence of a bad epistemology. Restore the full causal vocabulary and the confrontation Camus describes never occurs, because the second term never appears. A world with formal and final causes is not silent, it is intelligible, and the man who asks what his life is for is asking a question that has a valid answer. He is not shouting into the void, the Abyss, or an empty well. Sisyphus does not need his scorn. He needs a better metaphysics, and once he has one, the rock has a form, the hill has a summit, and the labor has an end that is not merely the labor.

Camus spent his life constructing a philosophical heroism to meet a problem that was manufactured upstream of him by a philosopher he barely engaged. The heroism is genuine, the honesty is admirable, and both were expended defending a position that was never under attack by anything except an unargued inference in the Transcendental Aesthetic. The Absurd is not refuted. It is obviated, and it has nothing to say.

But I would be remiss if I did not provide at least one illustration from the source.

After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.

- Absurd Walls, Albert Camus

Look at what is actually offered in support of his claim. Centuries of inquiry. Abdications among thinkers. A history of regrets and impotences. This is an appeal to the track record of a discipline, offered in place of an argument. It is an appeal to the accumulated authority of the field that provides no engagement with the substantive claim. The word abdications is the tell. Camus is citing the surrender of prior thinkers as evidence that the position they surrendered was indefensible. A history of failure is being converted into a proof of impossibility, and the conversion is performed by tone rather than by argument or evidence.

The dismissal of “professional rationalists” completes the maneuver. Anyone who still holds the contrary position is labeled as an interested party before his objection is stated. This is inoculation, not refutation. Note also that it concedes, in passing, that the contrary position was still held by people in 1942, which contradicts the claim that we are all well aware of the opposite.

As is so often the case, the philosophical argument rests upon an amphiboly. “Know” is operating in two senses here, and Camus uses only one. The restricted reading is that knowledge is immediate, incorrigible acquaintance, the sort of thing that cannot be doubted because nothing stands between the knower and the known. The full reading is that knowledge is reliable, independently checked, predictively successful contact with reality. Camus adopts the restricted reading, observes that almost nothing satisfies it, and reports the resulting scarcity as a discovery about the human condition rather than as a necessary artifact of his own limited definition.

“There ends all my knowledge” is not something Camus feels in his heart or touches with his hand. It is a construction, and by the standard set by the sentence, the sentence is not knowledge. This is the verificationist self-refutation, the criterion of admissibility failing its own test, and it fails for the same reason: a rule that disqualifies all mediated claims is itself a mediated claim of maximal generality. The positivists at least stated theirs formally enough that the failure could be demonstrated in one line. Camus states his claim beautifully, which obscures its flaws without changing the result.

Everything downstream follows from this paragraph. If all knowledge terminates at feeling and touching, then no answer to the question of what anything is for can ever qualify as knowledge, and the world is therefore guaranteed in advance to return silence. Camus does not discover the silence in the world. He derives it, from a definition, and then spends the rest of the book treating it as a datum confronted rather than a corollary assumed. The confrontation he calls the Absurd is actually a confrontation between a man and his own restriction on what he deems worthy of contemplation.

A history of thought written as a record of successive regrets and impotences is exactly what the Veriphysics argument predicts, and the correct reading of that record is the one available to anyone willing to consider that the failures should indict the premise rather than impugn its target. Three centuries of men failing to ground knowledge on a restricted definition of knowledge is not evidence that knowledge is impossible, but rather, evidence that the restriction was wrong. Camus surveyed the wreckage of the Enlightenment project correctly, then drew a false conclusion that the philosophical wreckage does not actually support.

In the end, there is something at the top.