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.These examples revolve around the antithesis of man’s determi-nation to see in the universe a reflection of himself and the universe’s inability to resemble him.It is important to understand the natureof the demand that Camusian man is making.He is asking for cer-tainty: not intellectual knowledge, but the feeling that he is part of a greater intelligence, which means an emotional and spiritual bondwith some sort of God.This is why Camus can write that no scientific comprehensioncan satisfy man and that ‘to understand is above all to unify’.Even76THE STRANGERreason is identified with the hunger for the absolute – ‘man’s thought is above all his nostalgia’ (134).Psychoanalytical and historicalinterpretations of the human condition are as irrelevant as science, which leaves only religion.However, The Myth goes on to argue that religion offers a false solution.Camus lists the thinkers who have taken leaps of faith that are mere forms of suicide.The early Existentialist, Karl Jaspers, the phe-nomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky,Shestov and Kafka are scrutinized and rebuked.Camus praises themfor asserting that the world cannot be explained by reason, but be-rates them for then deciding to embrace the irrational.The readermay be surprised at seeing so many different artists and philoso-phers lumped together in a fairly brief discussion (although theseare the names that crop up everywhere in 1940s’ French writing),but Camus is using them to illustrate his central theme.Man needsthe totality which only religion professes to offer, but religion cannot really offer it.One of Camus’s friends, Louis Bénisti, said that the young Camuswas not an atheist nor even an agnostic, but that he believed in ‘aGod of whom you could ask nothing’.So the curious entity thatCamus calls man is defined by his need for an absent God.But sincethis need cannot be satisfied, why should man not try to shrug it off and concentrate on history or psychoanalysis? Certainly not, replies Camus.The attempt to satisfy the need for God is indeed a sicknessor a suicide, but the need, which we might redefine as the capacityto be aware of the divine, can become a positive force.It involvesa dual act of defiance in that man spurns the false explanations ofthe world that are offered by judges and governments, and also inthat he refuses to yield to the need itself.Although the absurd may now be redefined as a defiance of the godhead, it remains a form ofreligious experience because it stems from man’s awareness of thegodhead.Without what Camus calls nostalgia, the absurd – thatnon-meeting of man and the universe – could not take place.Before we trace the positive implications of the absurd, we mustreturn to The Stranger and consider how our interpretation of it is affected by our reading of The Myth.First, if the religious urge involves the temptation of suicide, we may brood, retrospectively, on thefigures of the mother and the Arab.Might they not possess – alongEarly Camus and Sartre77with their psychoanalytical and political associations – religiouselements before which Meursault recoils?More importantly, the trace of the godhead that was present in thelast chapter has grown clearer in The Myth, and we might reread the passage about ‘the night full of signs’.The absurd existence, which Meursault has learned to value, is happy because of these signs,which are the signs not of the night but of his nostalgia.Already in The Stranger the absurd was acquiring a shape and a coherence.The second half of The Myth spells out what this coherence might be.The ‘heartrending, marvellous gamble of the absurd’ (137) liesin the lucid refusal of reconciliation with the universe.Key words in The Myth are ‘enumerate’ (in contrast with ‘explain’) and ‘quantity’(in contrast with ‘quality’).Since there is no causality, experiences must be listed rather than re-arranged into an order.Since there are no qualitative distinctions, choices are to be made by quantity.It is not better, for example, to be an actor than to be a judge; a man can merely act or judge with greater or lesser intensity.Yet here again Camus suggests two or three ways of organizing experience, whichemerge from the lucidity that is inherent in the absurd.Man maybecome homo ludens or he may create new moral values.If the universe offers no values, life can be a game or a play.Camus offers as a model the actor who feels no emotions but mimesthem all, who combines intensity with distance, and who acquiresa large quantity and diversity of experience [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.These examples revolve around the antithesis of man’s determi-nation to see in the universe a reflection of himself and the universe’s inability to resemble him.It is important to understand the natureof the demand that Camusian man is making.He is asking for cer-tainty: not intellectual knowledge, but the feeling that he is part of a greater intelligence, which means an emotional and spiritual bondwith some sort of God.This is why Camus can write that no scientific comprehensioncan satisfy man and that ‘to understand is above all to unify’.Even76THE STRANGERreason is identified with the hunger for the absolute – ‘man’s thought is above all his nostalgia’ (134).Psychoanalytical and historicalinterpretations of the human condition are as irrelevant as science, which leaves only religion.However, The Myth goes on to argue that religion offers a false solution.Camus lists the thinkers who have taken leaps of faith that are mere forms of suicide.The early Existentialist, Karl Jaspers, the phe-nomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky,Shestov and Kafka are scrutinized and rebuked.Camus praises themfor asserting that the world cannot be explained by reason, but be-rates them for then deciding to embrace the irrational.The readermay be surprised at seeing so many different artists and philoso-phers lumped together in a fairly brief discussion (although theseare the names that crop up everywhere in 1940s’ French writing),but Camus is using them to illustrate his central theme.Man needsthe totality which only religion professes to offer, but religion cannot really offer it.One of Camus’s friends, Louis Bénisti, said that the young Camuswas not an atheist nor even an agnostic, but that he believed in ‘aGod of whom you could ask nothing’.So the curious entity thatCamus calls man is defined by his need for an absent God.But sincethis need cannot be satisfied, why should man not try to shrug it off and concentrate on history or psychoanalysis? Certainly not, replies Camus.The attempt to satisfy the need for God is indeed a sicknessor a suicide, but the need, which we might redefine as the capacityto be aware of the divine, can become a positive force.It involvesa dual act of defiance in that man spurns the false explanations ofthe world that are offered by judges and governments, and also inthat he refuses to yield to the need itself.Although the absurd may now be redefined as a defiance of the godhead, it remains a form ofreligious experience because it stems from man’s awareness of thegodhead.Without what Camus calls nostalgia, the absurd – thatnon-meeting of man and the universe – could not take place.Before we trace the positive implications of the absurd, we mustreturn to The Stranger and consider how our interpretation of it is affected by our reading of The Myth.First, if the religious urge involves the temptation of suicide, we may brood, retrospectively, on thefigures of the mother and the Arab.Might they not possess – alongEarly Camus and Sartre77with their psychoanalytical and political associations – religiouselements before which Meursault recoils?More importantly, the trace of the godhead that was present in thelast chapter has grown clearer in The Myth, and we might reread the passage about ‘the night full of signs’.The absurd existence, which Meursault has learned to value, is happy because of these signs,which are the signs not of the night but of his nostalgia.Already in The Stranger the absurd was acquiring a shape and a coherence.The second half of The Myth spells out what this coherence might be.The ‘heartrending, marvellous gamble of the absurd’ (137) liesin the lucid refusal of reconciliation with the universe.Key words in The Myth are ‘enumerate’ (in contrast with ‘explain’) and ‘quantity’(in contrast with ‘quality’).Since there is no causality, experiences must be listed rather than re-arranged into an order.Since there are no qualitative distinctions, choices are to be made by quantity.It is not better, for example, to be an actor than to be a judge; a man can merely act or judge with greater or lesser intensity.Yet here again Camus suggests two or three ways of organizing experience, whichemerge from the lucidity that is inherent in the absurd.Man maybecome homo ludens or he may create new moral values.If the universe offers no values, life can be a game or a play.Camus offers as a model the actor who feels no emotions but mimesthem all, who combines intensity with distance, and who acquiresa large quantity and diversity of experience [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]