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Albert Camus myth of Sisyphus summary. The myth of Sisyphus: an essay on the absurd

Albert Camus

The myth of Sisyphus

Pascal Pia

Soul, do not strive for eternal life,
But try to exhaust what is possible.

Pindar. Pythian Song III

LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE

Discourse on the absurd

The pages that follow are devoted to the absurd life-feeling dispersed in the air of our age, and not to the philosophy of the absurd proper, which our time, in fact, does not know. The simplest honesty, therefore, is to state at the outset how much these pages owe to a number of contemporary thinkers. It was not my intention to hide this so much that their statements will be cited and commented throughout the work.

At the same time, it is useful to note that the absurdity, which has hitherto been the result of inferences, is taken as a starting point in this essay. In this sense, it can be said that there is a lot of preliminary in my considerations: it is impossible to judge in advance about the position that would inevitably follow from them. Here you will find only a description of the disease of the spirit in its purest form. So far, it is without any admixture of any kind of metaphysics, of any kind of beliefs. This is the limit and the only deliberate setting of the book.

Absurdity and suicide

There is only one truly serious philosophical question- the issue of suicide. To decide whether a life of labor is worth living or not worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. All other questions - whether the world has three dimensions, whether there are nine or twelve categories of spirit - follow later. They are just a game; First you need to answer the original question. And if it is true that a philosopher, in order to inspire respect for himself, must, as Nietzsche wanted, serve as an example for others, one cannot fail to grasp the importance of this answer - because it precedes an irrevocable act. For the heart, all these are directly tangible evidences, but one must delve deeper into them in order to make them clear to the mind.

Having asked myself, how can one judge which question is more urgent than others, I will answer: the one that obliges to action. I don't know of cases where people would go to their death for the sake of ontological proof. Galileo, who possessed a very significant scientific truth, easily renounced it as soon as a threat hung over his life.

IN in a certain sense he did the right thing. His truth was not worth burning at the stake for. Whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth - all this is deeply indifferent. To tell the truth, this question is simply useless. But I see how many people die, having come to the conclusion that life is not worth the trouble to be lived. I see other people paradoxically dying for the ideas or illusions that gave meaning to their lives (what is called the meaning of life is also the glorious meaning of death). Therefore, I come to the conclusion that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? When it comes to essential things - by them I mean those that are fraught with the threat of death, as well as those that increase tenfold the passionate thirst for life - our thought has only two ways to approach them: the way of La Palisa and the way of Don Quixote. Only a combination of self-evident truths with a burning heart that balances them can open us access to both spiritual excitement and clarity. Since the subject of consideration is so modest and at the same time full of pathos, it is clear that the learned classical dialectic must give way to a less pretentious attitude of the mind, which would put into play common sense and friendliness.

Suicide has always been interpreted only as a phenomenon of the social order. Here, on the contrary, the relation between individual thought and suicide will be dealt with first. Like great works, it matures in the silent depths of the heart. The person himself does not know about it. One evening he suddenly shoots himself or throws himself into the water. I was once told about a caretaker who committed suicide, that five years earlier he had lost his daughter, that he had changed a lot since then, and that this story “undermined” him. More precisely, there is nothing to wish for. To start thinking is to start to undermine yourself. Society has nothing to do with principles of this kind. The worm nests in the human heart. That's where you need to look for it. It is necessary to trace and understand the deadly game leading from clarity regarding being to flight beyond the edge of light.

But if it is difficult to fix exactly the moment when the mind set for death, as well as to trace the sophisticated course of thought itself at this moment, then it is relatively easy to extract from the deed the content inherent in it. To kill oneself means in a certain sense - and in the way that happens in melodramas - to make a confession. Recognition that life has overwhelmed you or that it cannot be understood. Let's not go too far in comparisons and resort to common words. This is a confession that life is "not worth the trouble." Needless to say, life is not easy. However, for many reasons, the first of which is habit, you continue to act according to the demands of life circumstances. To die of one's own free will means to recognize, even if unconsciously, the ridiculousness of this habit, the lack of deep reasons for living, the absurdity of everyday bustle and the uselessness of suffering.

What is this inconsiderate feeling that awakens the mind from the sleep it needs to live? When the world lends itself to an explanation, even if not too reliable in its arguments, it is dear to us. On the contrary, a person feels like a stranger in the universe, suddenly freed from our illusions and attempts to shed light on it. And this exile is inescapable, as long as a person is deprived of the memory of the lost homeland or the hope of the promised land. The discord between the person and the life around him, between the actor and the scenery, gives, in fact, a sense of absurdity. All healthy people have thought about suicide at one time or another, and therefore it can be recognized without further explanation that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the craving for non-existence.

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Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education

"Russian Academy of National Economy

and public service

under the President of the Russian Federation"

FAR EASTERN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT

Faculty of State and Municipal Administration

Specialty State and municipal administration

Abstract by discipline:

Philosophy "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus

Performed:

1st year full-time student

FULL NAME. Katona Kristina Rolandovna

Group: 111B

Checked: Position, academic degree and (or) title:

Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor

Uncle Nikolai Pavlovich

Khabarovsk 2015

Introduction

Conclusion

Bibliographic list

Introduction

IN modern world the problem of "Sisyphus of labor" is extremely common. Are there many people today who see a certain goal in their work that they want to achieve? Who work on the basis of the interests and awareness of their actions, and not in order to do all their business "in a hurry" and go on with their own business?

The purpose of my work is to consider and study the "Sisyphean Labor" of today's student youth.

The objectives of this essay are the following:

set out summary essay by A. Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus";

analyze "Sisyphean labor" in the activities of modern youth students.

By solving these problems, I will get the necessary data to analyze this problem in the modern world.

Absurdity and suicide

"There is only one truly serious philosophical problem- the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories is secondary, ”A. Camus begins his essay with these lines. Indeed, how important is this issue? It is very much connected with the problem of the meaning of life, therefore it is widespread in the world.

Camus considers suicide not as a social, but as an individual act: "suicide is prepared in the silence of the heart." And only the last straw in this decision can be something external, a reason for suicide, since "a little could be enough for the bitterness and boredom accumulated in the heart of a suicide to break out." When deciding on the cause, "it is necessary to understand that deadly game that leads from clarity in relation to one's own existence to escape from this world."

Life in many ways is a habit, and voluntary death is "the recognition of the insignificance of this habit." What a strange feeling leads the mind of a person to such conclusions, destroying his illusions about the world, and without these illusions, the connection of a person with the universe collapses, he becomes an outsider here: "the feeling of absurdity is this discord between a person and his life." Thus, Camus slowly moves on to the main theme of his work - the theme of the absurd in life: "the subject of my essay is precisely this connection between the absurd and suicide."

But awareness of the absurdity does not lead to a solution to the problem. After all, if we take into account that in philosophy there can be only two answers “yes” or “no”, then this does not lead to an unambiguous answer, since “many who answer “no” act as if they said “yes””. Therefore, the idea that people die of their own will, realizing that life has lost its meaning, does not give any result.

absurd walls

All feelings are universes, and so are individual emotions. Emotions give us an experience of beauty or awaken a sense of absurdity, which in turn "waits for us at every corner." This feeling is elusive and therefore deserves special attention.

“We start with an atmosphere of absurdity. The ultimate goal is to comprehend the universe of absurdity and that attitude of consciousness that illuminates this inexorable face in the world.

Boredom is the result of a mechanical life, but it also sets the mind in motion. This awakening leads to two outcomes: a return to the ordinary, or a final awakening, which may end in suicide or "restoration of the course of life." Thus, boredom brings the awakening of consciousness and the birth of absurdity.

A person is constantly rushing into the future, and when he reaches the desired point in time, he understands his dependence on it and wants to renounce. "This rebellion of the flesh is absurd."

"The basis of any beauty is something inhuman." Realizing this, a person realizes his detachment from the universe. She moves away from us, becomes hostile; illusory scenery is crumbling. This foreignness of the world to which we belong is absurd.

Further, the author cites several more manifestations of absurdity, also saying that he is interested not so much in the manifestation of this feeling as in its consequences. Camus gives Aristotle's proof of the mind becoming entangled in itself during the proof - the first vicious circle. “In order to understand the world, a person must reduce it to the human, put his seal on it”, only in this case we can know the world around us. Reason constantly strives for the One, and, overcoming this contradiction, it "proves the existence of difference and diversity, which it tried to overcome" - the second vicious circle. Thus, our desires always come up against an "insurmountable wall". The author is sure that true knowledge is impossible.

The world is unreasonable, and the clash in it of “irrationality and a frenzied desire for clarity” is absurd. This is the only connection between man and the world. And when it is realized, it becomes a "painful passion." “Why does the heart not burn at the moment of the appearance of a feeling of absurdity?”

philosophical suicide

"The feeling of the absurd is not the same as the concept of the absurd." Against this background, the problem of suicide will be considered, "how they leave and why they stay."

Pausing his reasoning, Camus decides to examine in detail the concept of absurdity. It is not a state of the object, but is born only when two compared elements collide: "action with the world lying outside this action." "It is the greater, the greater the gap between the terms of comparison." Thus, absurdity does not exist separately in the world or in man, but is a connection between them.

A person knows what he wants, what the world offers him and what unites him with the world. And it is impossible to throw out a single element from this chain-triad, because this will destroy everything. The first principle of the Camus method: "If I intend to solve a problem, then my solution should not destroy one of its sides." “The condition of my research is the preservation of what destroys me”, that is, it is impossible to remove the absurdity - this will disrupt the course of the whole reasoning. In this logic, consent cannot be accepted, because "absurdity makes sense when it is not agreed with." A person who once accepted something as true cannot get rid of it.

Shestov believes that the only way out in resolving the absurd, in getting rid of irrationality, can be an appeal to God, even if he is "evil and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory." “The greatness of God is in his inconsistency. His inhumanity proves to be proof of his existence."

For Kierkegaard, Christianity was despair, and then becoming salvation, destroying the absurd, "absurdity is sin without God."

Camus calls the existential approach - philosophical suicide, the God of the existentialists - Denial (denial of the human mind).

absurd man

For an absurd person there is no eternity. He accepts the time that "life has given him." There is only one moral: given by God he lives without this god. All life is permeated with rebellion. A person is initially innocent, but permissiveness does not mean complete impunity. "The absurd shows only the equivalence of the consequences of all actions." The absurd person accepts responsibility for his actions rather than blame for them. This experience of duty will serve the next time. “The result of the search for an absurd mind is not the rules of ethics, but living examples that convey to us the breath of human lives.” The very nature of experience is indifferent to such a mind, since the former is only useful when it is realized. Sisyphean labor absurd suicide

Don Juanism

Don Juan loves all women equally passionately and does not seek to find a sublime feeling. He accepts one of the principles of absurd knowledge: he prefers not qualitative, but quantitative characteristics of experience. “He leaves a woman not at all because he no longer wants her. But he desires another, which is not the same.” He cannot be called unhappy, because "they are sad for two reasons: either out of ignorance, or because of the unfulfillment of hopes." And he has no hopes, and he knows the limits of his mind, in which he is a genius. Don Juan, being a vulgar symbol of the seducer, is aware of this, and therefore is absurd. In this endless stream of love, he does not lose himself, does not dissolve in another person, leaving the forces of the soul to rebel with the world. According to the author, the hero is ready to pay for his life, ready to suffer ridicule and punishment.

Camus gives two options for the death of Don Juan: death at the hands of an ill-wisher who wants to punish the libertine and voluntary imprisonment in a monastery. The latter can hardly be considered repentance; he "worships and serves God as he previously served life."

For modern man theater is a place where you can gain experience that applies to your life, without spending a lot of energy on it. It is hope for something better for oneself, but for an absurd person there is no hope. It "appears when hopes are over, when the mind no longer admires the game, but enters into it." The fate of the actor is absurd: he lives his roles, and they live in him. The contradiction in the unity of many souls in one body is absurd. These roles live in different eras, and the actor, performing them, travels in time. But, no matter what, the main punishment of life will overtake him in his time - death. “As for an absurd person, an untimely death is irreparable for an actor. You can’t compensate for those faces and centuries that he did not have time to embody on stage.

Camus compares the actors with the traveler: their path is time, and the goal is souls.

The Church does not accept such behavior of the actors, considering it heretical.

conquest

In a lifetime, a person is looking for evidence of only one truth. "If it is obvious, it is enough for life alone." The time comes and the individual must make a choice: contemplation or action. This is what will mean that he became a man. Camus chooses action for himself, because he does not tolerate compromises. It means to take the side of the absurd, the struggle. Greatness for the conqueror does not mean victory, because man is not able to achieve the highest victory over the world.

“Man is a goal in himself. And he is his only goal." The goal is to know the truth. Realizing his greatness of his mind, at least for a while, a person exalts himself, considering himself “divine”. The Conqueror is a man who lives for such moments of greatness. The only luxury for him is "human relations".

For reason there is no eternity, it is not comprehensible. And so the main punishment is death, which ends everything. The conqueror is trying to conquer her too, calling ahead of time.

The same people who argue with action choose contemplation, the eternity of the world. They worship death by accepting it. They are the opposite of a conqueror. Experiencing the trials of his fate, a person can sympathize with himself. But only the strong in spirit can do this.

The myth of Sisyphus

“The gods sentenced Sisyphus to lift a huge stone to the top of the mountain, from where this block invariably rolled down. They had reason to believe that there is no more terrible punishment than useless and hopeless work.

Camus considers the hero of this myth an absurd person. “He is like that in his passions and in his sufferings.” Sisyphus is punished for his earthly passions, disobedience to the gods and sincere love for the world.

The state of the hero at the moment of a short stop is interesting - a pause between endless suffering. It was at this moment that consciousness returned to him. The tragedy of the myth is based on the conscious behavior of Sisyphus.

Camus compares the life of modern man with this myth, considering it just as tragic and in many ways absurd. The actions of people are routine, monotonous and do not bring any benefit. The idea of the similarity of the work of Sisyphus with the work of modern people is undeniable. After all, there is little use in bureaucracy, statistics and similar activities. They do not create something new, but only repeat routine actions. The happiness of Sisyphus is in his work and the fact that he sees the meaning in it.

"Sisyphean labor" in the life of modern youth students

As I already gave an example above, "Sisyphean labor" is manifested in the actions of a person, in his routine work. If we consider this myth as a sphere of allocation of this myth in terms of student youth, then we can see that this term can be fully applied to it.

Today, the day of information technology, young people have qualitatively changed. She became much lazier, more passive. You don't expect much from her! Only a few can correctly direct their skills in the right direction, and work not at random, but with high quality!

What drives today's youth? Is it really a variety of variously applicable gadgets? Availability mass media and ease of getting it? What prevents pupils / students from gaining knowledge, and not from visiting the site of the first link, copying and pasting the text into their work without even reading the content?

This is how many students write their papers. What is the meaning of this work? To get rid of the teacher with your sheets, to say I did everything, get an assessment and leave? Where is the point of this? Is it possible to gain knowledge in this way and apply it in life? I think that this is a stupid job, it does not make any sense. First of all, the student learns for himself, developing his skills and abilities, and not for someone else.

Also in this example, you can give the following situation:

there is a lecture, many students sit on the back desks to play the fool, sleep. They think that the teacher will not see them there, they go to pairs for show. I consider it wrong.

When I was still at school, our social studies teacher said this thing: “If you come to a lesson, try to get the most out of it. useful information. You won't get any worse than this. What's the point of coming and doing what you want. What will be the productivity of this? Without taking anything out of the lesson, you spent an hour of classes in vain, so it’s better not to come to class at all, it won’t get worse for me, but it will obviously become for you. There were 10 of us in the group. And everyone took this information seriously. Personally, I realized for myself that indeed, by coming to classes and taking at least something out of there, I personally get more benefit for myself than disrupting lessons, etc. I try to stick to this principle because it seems right to me.

And whenever I start to get distracted, something reminds me of these words, and I return to the assimilation of information. It's not because we were once intimidated or something like that, it's because I realize the meaning of the words spoken to us then, and I try to spend my time usefully.

I believe that every student, if he does not want to see some kind of routine in his studies, he should at least interest himself in studying, because it does not happen that a person is not interested in some discipline, it happens that the teacher presents it too boring and uninteresting, then he must interest himself in this, in the search for some non-standard information.

It depends on it future life how it will develop, in a routine, or efforts.

Conclusion

In conclusion of my essay, I can say that "Sisyphean labor" is present in almost all human actions. A person must understand that he needs to get rid of it.

Is there enough time to engage in meaningless activities? Having correctly set his priorities, a person is engaged in the structure of his life. Whether life will be filled with interest or routine is the decision of absolute everyone. everyone builds his own life, builds these step-by-step steps. But for some, these steps will lead “up”, into the distant future, and for someone “down”, perhaps to the loss of the meaning of life, loss of faith in God, etc.

Everyone knows that sooner or later death comes to him, so it’s better to fill your days with something unusual, some business that will satisfy your spiritual needs, or invariably go to work like hard labor, living a break until lunch, weekends , holidays, etc. Labor must be conscious and good. It should not bring moral exhaustion.

Each person chooses to work for him or to work. Based on this choice, we can say that a person is happy or not.

Bibliographic list

1. A. Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus" essay on the absurd

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Albert Camus
The myth of Sisyphus

Pascal Pia

Soul, do not strive for eternal life,
But try to exhaust what is possible.
Pindar. Pythian Song III

LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE

Discourse on the absurd

Absurdity and suicide

There is only one truly serious philosophical question - the question of suicide. To decide whether a life of labor is worth living or not worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. All other questions - whether the world has three dimensions, whether there are nine or twelve categories of spirit - follow later. They are just a game; First you need to answer the original question. And if it is true that a philosopher, in order to inspire respect for himself, must, as Nietzsche wanted, serve as an example for others, one cannot fail to grasp the importance of this answer, because it precedes an irrevocable act. For the heart, all these are directly tangible evidences, but one must delve deeper into them in order to make them clear to the mind.

In a way, he did the right thing. His truth was not worth burning at the stake for. Whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth - all this is deeply indifferent. To tell the truth, this question is simply useless. But I see how many people die, having come to the conclusion that life is not worth the trouble to be lived. I see other people paradoxically dying for the ideas or illusions that gave meaning to their lives (what is called the meaning of life is also the glorious meaning of death). Therefore, I come to the conclusion that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? When it comes to essential things - by them I mean those that are fraught with the threat of death, as well as those that increase tenfold the passionate thirst for life - our thought has only two ways to approach them: the way of La Palisa and the way of Don Quixote. Only a combination of self-evident truths with a burning heart that balances them can open us access to both spiritual excitement and clarity. Since the subject of consideration is so modest and at the same time full of pathos, it is clear that the learned classical dialectic must give way to a less pretentious attitude of the mind, which would put into play common sense and friendliness.

Suicide can have many different causes, and the most obvious of them are often not the most decisive. Rarely commit suicide as a result of reflection (although this hypothesis cannot be ruled out). What unleashes a crisis is almost never controllable. Newspapers usually refer to "heartbreak" or "incurable disease". Explanations of this kind are legitimate. And yet one should know whether his friend did not speak with indifference to the despairing man on that very day. This friend is responsible for what happened. An indifferent tone may be enough to cause a collapse of the accumulated resentment and fatigue, which for the time being remained in a suspended state, as it were. 2
Let us not miss the opportunity to note that the statements of this essay are by no means unconditional. For suicide may also depend on considerations worthy of greater respect. Example: political suicides during the Chinese revolution, called protest suicides. - Note here and below. author.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the question of to what extent suicide is a solution to the problem posed by the absurd. It is permissible to proceed from the principle that the actions of a person who avoids dissembling with himself are guided by the truth in which he believes. Belief in the absurdity of existence must therefore determine its behavior. It will therefore be perfectly legitimate curiosity to ask clearly and without false pathos whether the above-mentioned conclusion about absurdity obliges us to part with circumstances that are incomprehensible as soon as possible. Of course, I am talking here about people who tend to be in agreement with themselves.

Clearly stated, this question may seem both simple and insoluble. It is erroneously assumed, however, that no less simple answers are given to simple questions, and that obviousness entails the same obviousness. Judging a priori, it seems that one either commits suicide or does not commit suicide, according to the two possible philosophical solutions to the question itself: either "yes" or "no." But it would look too nice. We must also take into account those who always ask questions, avoiding answering. Here I am almost not ironic: we are talking about most people. I also see that those who answer "no" act as if they think "yes". And indeed, if I accept Nischze's criterion, they somehow think yes. On the contrary, among those who commit suicide, there are often those who are convinced that life has meaning. And you run into conflicts like this all the time. One might even say that they reach their extreme sharpness just where logic seems to be especially desirable. It has become commonplace to compare philosophical teachings with the behavior of those who profess them. But it must be said frankly that, with the exception of Kirillov, who belongs to literature, Peregrinus, who belongs to legend, 3
I have heard of one of Peregrine's rivals, a post-war writer who, after completing his first book, committed suicide to draw attention to it. He really attracted attention, but the book was found to be bad.

And Jules Lequier, in whose case one is content with a hypothesis, none of the thinkers who denied life a meaning went so far in his logic as to refuse to live himself. Often, for the sake of a joke, they recall how Schopenhauer lavished praise on suicide, sitting at a plentiful table. But this is no laughing matter. There is no particular harm in this way of not taking the tragic seriously, and yet it eventually casts a shadow on the one who resorts to it.

In the face of all these contradictions and obscurities, should we think that there is no connection between a possible opinion about life and the act by which we part with it? Let's not exaggerate anything here. There is something in man's attachment to life that transcends all adversity in the world. The judgment of our body is every bit as important as the judgment of our mind, and the body avoids self-destruction. The habit of living develops before the habit of thinking.

And in that daily run that gradually brings us closer to death, the body retains this inherent advantage. And finally, the very essence of the contradiction lies in what I would call evasion, because it is both less and more entertainment in the Pascalian sense of the word. The fatal evasion, which is the third theme of our essay, is hope. Hope for another life, which must be “deserved,” or the swindle of those who live not for the sake of life itself, but for the sake of some idea that surpasses it, elevating this life, giving it meaning and betraying it.

Everything then helps to confuse the cards. Hitherto, not without success, have indulged in a game of words and pretended to believe that the refusal to recognize life as meaningful necessarily entails the conclusion that it is not worth the trouble to be lived. In fact, there is no necessary correlation between these two judgments. It is only necessary not to let the inconsistencies, confusion, and inconsistency already mentioned by me confuse you. We must eliminate all this and turn directly to the real essence of the issue. They kill themselves because life is not worth the trouble of being lived - that is the undoubted truth, but also fruitless, because it is a truism. But does the insult inflicted by this on the existent, does such an all-encompassing exposure of it stem from the absence of meaning in it? And does the absurdity of life require getting rid of it with the help of hope or suicide - that's what needs to be shed light, that's what needs to be explored and revealed, pushing everything else into the shadows. Whether the absurd forces one to die is a question to be given precedence over all others, to be considered outside of all established modes of thought and outside the play of an unprejudiced mind. Shades, contradictions, psychological admixtures, always brought by the “objective” mind into the essence of questions, have no place in this research and passionate search. All that is needed here is a merciless, that is, logical thought. And it's not easy. It's always easy to be logical. And it's almost impossible to be logical to the end. People who lay hands on themselves follow the slope of their feelings to the very end. Thinking about suicide then gives me the opportunity to pose the only problem that occupies me: is the death logical? I can find this out in no other way than by continuing, without the confusion introduced by passion, solely in the light of evidence, the reflection, the origins of which I have here indicated. This is what I call thinking about the absurd. Many people have taken this kind of thinking. So far, I don't know if they've managed to stay true to their original premise.

When Karl Jaspers, discovering the impossibility of recreating being in its entirety, exclaims: “This limitation brings me back to myself, where I no longer hide behind an objective point of view, but only represent it, where neither I myself nor existence others cannot become an object for me,” he, following many of his predecessors, recalls those desolate, waterless lands where thought approaches the limits of what is accessible to it. Following many others - yes, of course, but how they were all in a hurry to get out of there! This last turning point, where thought hesitates, has been approached by many, among them also thinkers filled with humility. Here they renounced the most precious thing they had - from own life. Others, the princes of the spirit, also renounced, only resorting to the suicide of thought in the midst of the purest rebellion. The real effort, on the other hand, is to maintain balance as long as possible and to examine closely the bizarre vegetation of these regions. Perseverance and perspicacity are the privileged spectators of that inhuman game action, during which absurdity, hope and death exchange remarks. The spirit is then able to analyze the figures of the simplest and at the same time exquisite dance, before reproducing and experiencing them itself.

Walls of absurdity

Deep feelings are like great works, the meaning of which is always wider than what is consciously expressed in them. The constancy of the movements of the soul or its repulsions is reproduced in the habits of behavior and mind, and then refracted in such consequences, of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings bring into life the whole world, magnificent or miserable. A one-of-a-kind world where they find a climate that suits them, illuminated by passion. There is a universe of jealousy, ambition, selfishness or generosity. The Universe - that is, its own special metaphysics and its own spiritual structure. But what is true about individual feelings is all the more true about experiences with their basis as indefinite, vague and at the same time just as undoubted, just as distant and just as “present”, like everything that causes in us a feeling of beauty or a feeling of absurdity.

A sense of absurdity can hit in the face of any person at the turn of any street. By itself, in its dull nakedness and dim light, it is elusive. However, the difficulty itself deserves consideration. It is perhaps true that a person is never completely comprehended by us, something always remains in him that stubbornly eludes us. However, in practice, I know people and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their actions, by the traces they leave as they pass through life. And it is exactly the same with those irrational experiences that cannot be analyzed - I can practically define them, practically evaluate them, bring together their consequences in mental activity, catch and designate all their guises, outline their universe. Undoubtedly, personally, I most likely will not get to know the actor more deeply because I will see him for the hundredth time. But if I combine all the heroes in which he reincarnated, and say that on the hundredth role I have taken into account, I learned a little more about him, this will have its share of truth. Because this apparent paradox is also a parable. A story with its own moral. She teaches that a person's hypocrisy can say no less about him than his sincere impulses. And the situation is exactly the same on another level - with experiences: it is impossible to comprehend what they are in the depths of the human heart, however, they are partially betrayed by the actions caused by them, and the mood of the mind set by them. One can therefore feel how I define a method in this way. True, one can also feel that it is a method of analysis, and not a method of cognition. Like any method, it implies its own metaphysics and, willy-nilly, reveals those final conclusions that at first it seems to be sometimes unaware of itself. So the last pages of the book are already contained in its first pages. Linkage of this kind is inevitable. The method I am defining here frankly admits that it starts from the premise of the impossibility true knowledge. It is only possible to go over the visibility and feel the climate.

In that case, perhaps, we will be able to display manifestations of an elusive sense of absurdity in such different, although related, areas as intellectual activity, the art of living, or simply art. The climate of absurdity is present in them from the very beginning. At the end, the universe of absurdity and a special attitude of the spirit appear, in which it sheds its light on everything around so that that chosen and merciless face that it knows how to recognize shines.

*** * ***

All great deeds and all great thoughts go back to negligibly small sources. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant hallway. So is absurdity. The world of the absurd, like no other, derives its virtues from the miserable circumstances of its birth. When in some situations the question of what a person is thinking about is answered: “About nothing,” this can also be a pretense. loving friend other people are well aware of this. But if the answer is sincere, if it conveys that special state of mind when emptiness is eloquent, when the chain of everyday actions suddenly breaks and the heart searches in vain for a link that can reconnect the torn ends, in such cases this answer may turn out to be the first sign of absurdity.

Sometimes the decorations fall apart. Getting up in the morning, a tram, four hours in an office or a factory, food, a tram, four hours of work, food, sleep, and so on, in the same rhythm, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Most often this path is followed without much difficulty. But one day, the question “why?” suddenly arises, and it all starts with fatigue, highlighted by surprise. It starts - this is important here. Fatigue is at the same time the last manifestation of mechanical life, and the first manifestation of the fact that consciousness has come into motion. Fatigue awakens consciousness and causes everything that follows. What follows may be either a return to unconsciousness or a final awakening. In time, at the end of the awakening, either suicide or a restored balance follows from it. There is something repulsive about fatigue as such. In our case, I must conclude that it is beneficial. After all, everything begins with awareness and only through it acquires value. There is nothing original in all the considerations expressed. But they have the dignity of obviousness, and for the time being this is enough to reveal in in general terms origin of the absurd. The root of it all is simple “concern.”

And in the same way, in the dull everyday life, we are always carried by the flow of time. But sooner or later there comes a moment when we ourselves have to take on and bear the burden of time. We live in the future: “tomorrow”, “later”, “when you achieve a position”, “with age you will understand”. Such inconsistency is delightful in its own way, because in the end you have to die. However, there comes a day when a person says out loud or to himself that he is thirty years old. Thus, he claims that he is still quite young. But at the same time he arranges himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he is at one of the points on the curve, which, according to him, he must pass. He belongs to time, and by the horror that the thought of it inspires him, he judges that it is his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he wanted tomorrow, while with all his being he should reject it tomorrow. Absurdity reveals itself in this rebellion of the flesh. 4
True, not in its own form. After all, this is not a definition, but a listing of feelings that can contain absurdity. When the enumeration ends, the absurdity is by no means exhausted.

A step below us is waiting for the feeling of our alienness in the world - we will discover how “dense” it is, we will notice how alien to us, how unyielding it is, with what force nature, the landscape itself can deny us. Something inhuman lies in the depths of beauty, and everything around - these hills, this gentle sky, the outlines of trees - suddenly loses the illusory meaning that we attributed to them, and now they are already further from us than a lost paradise. The primordial hostility of the world reaches us through the millennia. At some point, we cease to understand this world for the simple reason that for centuries we understood only the images and drawings in it that we ourselves had previously invested in it, but for some time now we have not had the courage to resort to this unnatural trick. The world eludes us because it becomes itself again. The scenery, disguised by our habit, appears as it really is. They are moving away from us. And in the same way, there are days when, when you see the face of a woman whom you have loved for many months or years, which you have loved for many months, you suddenly find her as if completely alien, and you, perhaps, even desire this discovery, which makes you suddenly feel so alone. . However, the hour for this has not yet struck. One thing is clear: in this density and this strangeness of the world, absurdity reveals itself.

People also exude something inhuman. Sometimes, in hours of extreme clarity of mind, the mechanicalness of their gestures, their senseless pantomime makes everything around them somehow stupid. A man is talking on the phone behind a glass partition; you can’t hear him, but you can see his facial expressions, devoid of meaning, and suddenly you wonder why he lives. The painful confusion before the inhuman in man himself, the involuntary confusion at the sight of what we really are, in short, “nausea,” as one modern writer called it all, also reveals absurdity. As well as reminding us of the absurdity, the stranger who sometimes moves towards us from the depths of the mirror, that dear and, however, alarming brother in us, whom we see in our own photographs.

I come finally to death and how we experience it. On this occasion, everything has already been said, and it is appropriate to refrain from pathos. Nevertheless, one will never be able to be sufficiently amazed that everyone lives as if they “knew not to know” about death. No one really has the experience of death. For experience in the proper sense is that which is personally experienced and realized. And in the case of death, it is possible to speak only about the experience of someone else. It is a substitute for experience, something speculative and never completely convincing. Conditional melancholic lamentations cannot inspire confidence. In fact, the source of horror is the mathematical immutability of the event of death. If the passage of time terrifies us, it is because the problem is first stated and then solved. All eloquent words about the soul receive here, at least for a certain period of time, confirmation from the contrary with its novelty. The soul from this immovable body, on which even a slap in the face leaves no traces, has disappeared somewhere. The simplicity and irreversibility of what happened give content to the feeling of absurdity. In the deadly light of this fate, its uselessness comes through. No morality and no efforts are obviously justified in the face of the bloody mathematics that governs the human lot.

Once again: all this has already been said, and repeatedly. I confine myself here to a cursory list and an indication of the most obvious topics. They run through all literature and all philosophies. They serve as food for everyday conversations. There is no question of reinventing them. But one must firmly believe in these evidences in order to ask oneself a question of paramount importance. I want to repeat: I am not so much interested in discoveries of the absurd as in their consequences. If the facts themselves are convincing, what conclusions must be drawn from them and how far should one go in this so as not to deviate from anything? Should one voluntarily accept death or hope against all odds? But first of all, it is necessary to make the same cursory account on the plane of intellect.

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The first business of the mind is to distinguish between the true and the false. And yet, as soon as thought thinks about itself, it first of all discovers a contradiction. It is useless to try to prove it convincingly here. For centuries, no one has found clearer and more elegant evidence than Aristotle: “With all such views, what everyone knows necessarily happens - they refute themselves. Indeed, he who asserts that everything is true makes also the statement opposite to his own true, and thereby makes his statement untrue (for the opposite statement denies its truth); and he who asserts that everything is false makes this assertion also false. If they make an exception, in the first case for the opposite statement, declaring that only one of them is not true, and in the second case for their own statement, declaring that it alone is not false, then one has to assume an innumerable number of true and false statements. , for the statement that a true statement is true is itself true, and this can be continued ad infinitum.

This vicious circle is only the first in a series of similar ones, and on each of them the mind, peering into itself, is lost in a dizzying whirlwind. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them irrefutable. Whatever play on words and logical acrobatics are used, to understand means, first of all, to resort to a single yardstick. The deepest desire of the mind, even with its most sophisticated operations, merges with the unconscious feeling of a person in front of the universe - the need to make it close to oneself, the thirst for clarity. To understand the world means for a person to reduce it to the human, to mark it with his seal. The universe of a cat is not the universe of an ant. The truism "All thought is anthropomorphic" has no other meaning. And in the same way, the mind, striving to comprehend reality, is able to experience satisfaction only when it reduces it to its own concepts. If a person knew that the universe can also love and suffer, he would feel reconciled with fate. If thought were to discover in the changing mirror of phenomena the eternal connections that are capable of reducing these phenomena and themselves at the same time to a single principle, then one could speak of its happiness, in comparison with which the myth of heavenly bliss looks like a ridiculous fake. The longing for unity, the thirst for the absolute express the essential movement of the human drama. However, the undoubted existence of this melancholy does not mean that it must be immediately quenched. Indeed, in the event that, having crossed the abyss between the desired and the achieved, we recognize, together with Parmenides, the actual existence of the One (whatever it may be), we will fall into a smile-producing contradiction of reason, which affirms the complete unity of the existent, but by this very statement we prove our own difference from the existing and the multiplicity of the world, which we claimed to eliminate. And this other vicious circle is enough to dampen our hopes.

All this again is obvious. And I repeat again that they are of no interest in themselves, what is interesting are the consequences that can be drawn from them. I am aware of another evidence, it says that a person is mortal. However, one can count on one hand those who have drawn from this all the consequences, even the most extreme ones. In this essay, we must take as a constant starting point the unchanging divergence between what we think we know and what we really know, agreement in fact and feigned ignorance, which keeps us living with ideas that should have turned our whole life upside down if we really felt them. This irreducible contradiction of the spirit helps us to truly realize the full extent of the gap that separates us from our own creations. As long as the mind is silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything reciprocates and is ordered in the unity it so desires. But at the first movement, this whole world cracks and collapses: an infinite number of shimmering fragments offer themselves to knowledge. We must say goodbye to the hope of someday recreating from them a smooth surface that we perceive as something familiar, which would return peace to our soul. After so many centuries of persistent searching, after so many renunciations of thinkers, we know that such a farewell is right for cognitive activity. With the exception of rationalists by profession, everyone today despairs of the possibilities of true knowledge. If it were necessary to write an instructive history of human thought, it would be a history of successive repentances and feeble efforts.

Indeed, about what or about whom do I have the right to say: “I know this”? I can feel the heart in my chest and claim that it exists. I can touch things in the world around me and claim that it exists. But this is where my science ends, everything else is just the construction of the mind. After all, if I try to catch and briefly define that “I”, in the existence of which I am sure, how it becomes like water flowing between my fingers. I can describe one by one all the faces that it takes, as well as all the faces that it was endowed with, the upbringing it received, its origin, ardor and moments of silence, greatness and baseness. However, you cannot put all these faces together. And the very heart that belongs to me can never be defined. Between my certainty own existence and with the content that I try to put into it, a moat lies, and it will not be filled forever and ever. I will always remain a stranger to myself. In psychology, as in logic, there are truths, but there is no Truth. "Know thyself" of Socrates has the same value as "Be virtuous" in the mouths of our confessors. It distinguishes both longing for knowledge and ignorance. All of these are fruitless games for significant reasons. Games justified to the extent that they are approximate.

And here are trees, and I know how rough their bark is, here is water, and I know its taste. The smells of grass and stars, dark nights, other evenings when the heart relaxes - how can I deny the existence of this world, the strength and power of which I feel? However, all earthly science does not give anything that can assure me that this world belongs to me. You describe it to me and teach me how to sort it out. You enumerate its laws, and I, thirsty for knowledge, agree that they are true. You take apart his device and my hope grows. In the end, you tell me that this wonderful motley world can be reduced to an atom, and that the atom, in turn, can be reduced to an electron. All this is good, but I look forward to continuing. And you are talking to me about an invisible system of electrons that spreads over the entire universe and revolves around its nucleus. You explain the world to me with the help of an image. And then I state that you turned to poetry - it turns out that I will never have knowledge. Isn't it time for me to be outraged by this? But you have already changed the theory. This means that science, which was supposed to explain everything to me, ends up putting forward a hypothesis, the promised clarity turns into a metaphor, uncertainty is embodied in a work of art. But was there a need for so much effort? The soft outlines of those hills yonder, and the evening that laid its hand on my excited heart, would teach me much more. I'm back to where I started. I understand that with the help of science I can identify and enumerate phenomena, but I can’t master the world in any way. Even if I feel with my finger all the windings of its relief, I will not learn more about it. You are asking me to choose between a description that is reliable but does not clarify anything for me, and hypotheses that claim to teach me something but remain unreliable. Alien to myself and the world, devoid of any help except thought, which denies itself at the very moment when it affirms something - so what kind of destiny is this in which I can find peace only by refusing to know and live , and where does the lust for possession run into blank walls that defy any siege? To want is to generate paradoxes. Everything is arranged in such a way that that poisoned peace arises, which is brought by carelessness, the sleep of the soul and deadly self-denial.

02.09.2020

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