i decided to do something drastic and finally read the myth of sisyphus.
for the uninitiated, the myth of sisyphus is this essay by albert camus.
i have long known about camus and indeed i have long known that he was a very articulate and prosaic proponent of this thing, human freedom, which he found an inherently ‘absurd’ concept.
‘absurdism’ means basically just accepting how silly philosophy is but being a philosopher about it. here, philosophy is the Big Old Cosmic Search For Meaning what we preoccupy ourselves with.
philosophy, the search for meaning. camus, he recognises, okay, so we’re trying to look for this big old Message written into the Mystery of Life. but we also know that there is no Message, that the universe is cold and doesn’t care about little old us, because it doesn’t have the ability to care. therefore: we make our own Message, our own Meaning!
the cosmos doesn’t give a shit about us, says camus, and in doing so, it graciously emancipates us from having to care about what it has to say. freed from this burden of godly ways by the enlightenment, we may now live for ourselves! how radical! how liberating! he goes through all these contradictions in the prior attempts to understand Truth, and goes: how absurd! how wacky! how silly of us, the species. we are truly just apes on a ball. and we think we Know Things!
are you inspired by your cosmic insignficance? because we’re going to try and find meaning anyway! and now we’re free! free to find our own meaning! because you don’t Fucking Matter! this is absurd, little flea, and you should Love It.
it’s like, okay camus, but i have a job.
camus can’t hear me though because he’s too busy Not Mattering and Loving It. but i go back to my job and i am confronted with all the ugly ways in which i Matter, in a sense what is real to me.
camus, with a dearth of any real concerns in his ‘philosophy’, he fashions some shackles, fashions a key, puts on the shackles, then takes the shackles off. this brilliant display of human emancipation made manifest is a blueprint for real freedom, applied to the real shackles what people had thrust upon them and to which they have not the key.
what camus is doing here is he is making a philosophy for himself. but to camus, that’s the actual point of philosophy anyway.
the greeks, who very deliberately structured their philosophy around the language and assumptions of their society, and fucking killed socrates for not doing this; the greeks, who had their sophists go around and deliberately teach philosophy to other people; the greeks, who founded the very History of Ideas in which camus finds the genesis of his own Ideas; the greeks, who are called the first western philosophers; these greeks, they are missing the point of philosophy.
only camus and his higher-order sapience can properly get what they were laying down, the real meaning of It All that they couldn’t fathom. because they were still aspiring to this thing, Philosophy, which he now understands but they couldn’t.
the real meaning is in fact meaninglessness, that camus has called out to god and heard nothing. i guess that means when the greeks called out to god, god responded.
what the fuck happened to god, then? did nietzsche actually Kill him? or did you, camus? with your massive brain? have you got god Locked Up in your fucking Basement, camus. or are you Full of Shit.
the point is that the position of philosophy as some inherent search for meaning is ridiculous. the search for meaning in the form of philosophy comes when a ruling class adopts a position and thereby produces ideas. this is because consciousness is no longer attached to immediate reproduction but because we have produced the means of our own reproduction.
we know this thing, Ideology, it exists. and it is clearly useful inasmuch as it is a thing what Language does in society. it’s communicating signals in a structured way, and the signals can reference each other and thereby form a system.
when there arises a usefulness in describing a structure of material forces, you can then become an ideology guy who says why women and slaves are the property of free men. and you then get all into the primordial Essences to justify this because you know, you can start building more ideas on top of the ideas. this metastructure is what idealism is: it’s taking reality, describing reality, then describing the ideas with more ideas, to then use those ideas to say why reality is reality. in lieu of any real observable thing for these ideas, you get metaphysics, to which you can apply logic. these logical systems might be useful, they might not, but they’re also working with the metaphysics so it’s all self-referential at the end of the day until you apply them to real fucking things.
this, the metaphysics, is this thing camus misidentifies as the ‘pursuit for meaning’ what sums up all philosophy. the logical assortment of forms and monads and noumena and all the other basic essences what people built, this entire metaphysical system is, to him, Philosophy.
except, you know, the Philosophy is also about the women and the slaves what have meaning for themselves as made manifest in social production. but this meaning, per camus, is actually cruelly robbed from them by the metaphysics, which are what is actually conditioning their sense of ‘meaning’. the fact the slaves and women are Oppressed and Murdered and often don’t really think about the metaphysics, this is secondary to the metaphysics which now Own Their Fucking Souls.
metaphysics are still conditional on things which are conditional on the base social order though, so you know, sometimes reality slips through. kant goes, descartes, what the fuck are you saying. “i think therefore i am”? no you moron you are because you have other things you relate to.
this understanding, hegel uses all the sciencey Logic with the new Metaphysics and develops immanent critique. and then everyone loses it a bit again until marx comes in and says: “okay what about the Real Things, dude.” and everyone freaks out because he’s basically recognised the proles are human beings with agency and power and whatnot, not because of their Souls and Forms but because they actually make fucking Everything now and don’t need to be under any pretensions about it because you are demolishing their Churches and building Factories instead.
you see? so, like, there was this realness latent to a fragment of the metaphysics, and the system of philosophy, it Got There eventually, because it was still about real things.
marx was using philosophy not to interpret and critique the present metaphysics, but to critique the world, and in that same moment, change it. everyone freaked the fuck about this, doubly so when the bolsheviks had their Whole Ordeal. and the bolsheviks, they weren’t very Moral about it and they killed a lot of people for their future.
killing people for your future, as camus understood it, is much less Moral than dying for someone else’s present. this is why when he, a white frenchman born in algeria, identified with the pied-noir more than the national liberation front, and scolded the latter for killing the people what were killing them, and then scolded the pied-noir for killing as well, he felt very good about himself.
then they all kept on killing each other. and camus, sighing at the failure of his Diplomacy, decided to scold algerians for actually striving to achieve this Postulation of his, human freedom. he couldn’t unify absurdism with a real thing so he just fell back on his more banal bigotries. turns out there was Real Meaning for the algerians, and their freedom was accordingly not in Absurdity, but Lucidity.
so all that’s left is some fucking french racist with his collection of self-help books. this isn’t “philosophy” but people will look you in the eye and tell you it is. that camus has discovered some important, liberatory truth by understanding that there is no truth. that camus, this Soulful White Boy, he figured it out by just giving up and railing against anyone with skin in the game.
it’s the shit some idiot bong-smoking flatmate says as a sort of ersatz Thought: man, think about it. we’re all so small, man. we mean nothing, man. but man, doesn’t that… man. that makes us free… because we like, make our own fates, dude…
except that flatmate then later goes: “fuck algeria” because in fact he doesn’t “mean nothing” he has real biases what the world has given him.
this kind of bullshit only happens because you have someone who can’t be fucked to read into the people around them.
so, like, take this camus banger:
It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to analysis. I can define them practically, appreciate them
practically, by gathering together the sum of their consequences in the domain of the intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally.
this is fucking Ridiculous and when i read it my jaw fucking Dropped because it reads like a Satire what i wrote while Angry about The Idealists. sometimes i wonder if i Hate The Idealists Too Much then i realise, No, i actually don’t Hate them Nearly enough.
A Man does not remain ‘forever unknown to us’. that is fucking Moronic. there is a Man, dude, he is this thing what you Talk to. this Man has an interiority but inasmuch as it actually exists for anyone this is only so far as his real actions dictate. you know them by “their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence”. because that is what is Useful. not the anguished or enchanted Soul within.
a moralist might argue: but say, what if there is someone who appears like they aren’t suffering, but they actually are. are you not Fucking This Guy Over?
no, that guy’s being Fucked Over by someone else because if i cannot tell this is fucking happening because it is Impossible to figure out, then i cannot do shit about it and you know, this mythical person who is in Torment is also a social stakhanovite who will never ever let it show in any action in evidence.
but for those of us in the real world, we know that actually, these flaws do show. when someone to whom we consistently relate is suffering in a real sense, it does actually begin to show in their words and deeds. and we know even the big old moral titans in our lives, who put on a brave face all the time, they can collapse if they suffer enough. and that brave face? we learn that it’s not the whole story, and we can talk to them about their Worries. and if they trust us, they tell us; and if they don’t tell anyone, and instead Repress it, you know, they can collapse.
that’s what all this means in a real sense.
the more insidious logic is when you take someone who’s suffering but say they’re actually happy. when we take the Noble Savage, this person living an existence of Raw Necessity but who still has feelings and emotions and variable lives; people reduce this person to a state of primordial goodness because of an ascribed primitiveness that is inherent to their soul and then corrupted by modernity, rather than a real product of the orders in which they exist.
so after all this bullshit sophistry, camus summarises the myth of sisyphus in a perfect lie to encapsulate all his other lies.
sisyphus is a guy who is suffering really badly. he has to roll a boulder up a mountain forever, as punishment from the gods. and he can never reach the summit.
camus says, though, we are sisyphus. we’re punished by god to move boulders. and in that, we suffer. but you know, that suffering, that’s the meaning in lieu of god. our struggles, our motives, our earthly deeds, they are in service of the Essence of meaning which we vest in ourselves, but can never admit is Real to anyone else; and that in this ordeal, whipping yourself like a medieval peasant trying to drive back the plague through Divine Repentance, that is the Meaning we seek. it’s not the quality of struggle, merely the quantity of it.
so you know, you can get this guy, sisyphus, and every single bit of evidence on earth points to him being miserable.
but camus, he tells us, sincere as he is, with his flagellant gospel of the Absurd, a lie so ridiculous that we feel ourselves compelled to believe it:
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
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