Camus's Introduction to Ethics PDF

PHL A11 Introduction to Ethics September 26 Albert Camus Albert Camus A 20th-century French existentialist who, believing that the world is meaningless, invites us to create our own meaning. 2 ● Meet Camus Lecture plan ● Idea 1: the absurd ● Idea 2: the point is to live 3 ● Recap of ideas...

PHL A11 Introduction to Ethics September 26 Albert Camus Albert Camus A 20th-century French existentialist who, believing that the world is meaningless, invites us to create our own meaning. 2 ● Meet Camus Lecture plan ● Idea 1: the absurd ● Idea 2: the point is to live 3 ● Recap of ideas 1 and 2 On Thursday… ● Idea 3: the myth of Sisyphus 4 ● Camus was born to a poor family in Algeria, then a colony of France. ● During World War II, he was editor-in-chief of a French Resistance newspaper, Combat. ● After the War, he became a journalist, novelist, and public intellectual. ● He is associated with existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (though Camus rejected the label “existentialist,” calling himself an “absurdist”). ● He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. ● He died at age 46 in a car accident. 5 Our first three philosophers exemplify three eras of Western history and culture Aristotle Kant Camus Ancient philosophizing about virtue and happiness The Enlightenment project of grounding everything in reason Post-war Europe’s new age of anxiety and atheism 6 Camus’s big idea 1: The absurd 7 Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus in a very provocative way: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (11). Don’t worry: Camus will argue that life is worth living. But he wants us to take the question seriously: to be disturbed by it. 8 The absurd Absurdity is meaninglessness. If the world is absurd, our lives don’t have any point or purpose or meaning. There’s also no objective “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad.” Camus doesn’t exactly provide an argument for this idea. Instead, he takes it as a “premise” and draws out its consequences. Camus takes for granted that: ➔ There is no God, and so we cannot turn to religion for meaning and moral guidance. Nietzsche: “God is dead, and we have killed him.” Dostoyevsky: “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” ➔ The project of the Enlightenment has failed: we cannot turn to “reason” to replace the loss of religious faith. Kant failed to ground objective morality in pure reason. 9 The absurd Rather than argue that life is absurd, Camus takes a different approach: he describes how an awareness of absurdity can arise in daily life. ➔ He describes ways of entering “that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again” (19). In other words, Camus describes pathways to an existential crisis. 10 The repetitiveness of daily life “It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement” (19). 11 The strangeness of the world “A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky; the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise” (20). See the chestnut tree scene in Sartre’s novel Nausea. 12 The awareness that each day is a step closer to death “The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event… No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition. (20). 13 A pathway to the absurd that Camus doesn’t discuss: contemplating the idea that our reality is just one among many possible worlds. (In philosophy, this idea is called modal realism.) Though we think we’re making meaningful choices, we’re just living in the timeline where we made these choices. Every other possibility exists as well, in another world. As Jobu Tupaki puts it in Everything Everywhere All At Once, if every possibility exists in some world, then “nothing matters.” 14 Back to the “truly serious” problem Remember, Camus isn’t trying to argue that life is absurd. He’s trying to invoke the feeling of absurdity—a feeling that he thinks his reader will find familiar. His question is: what do we do once we see that life is absurd? “[A]ll this has been said over and over. I am limiting myself here to making a rapid classification and to pointing out these obvious themes… But it is essential to be sure of these facts in order to be able to question oneself subsequently on the primordial question [the question of suicide]... If one is assured of these facts, what is one to conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything? (21-22) 15 The absurd: study questions Interpretative questions (about what the author means): What does Camus mean by “the absurd”? What are some of the ways in which Camus thinks we can be led to experience the absurdity of life? What is, for Camus, the “only truly serious philosophical question”? How does this question relate to the idea of the absurd? Critical questions (about whether the author makes a good argument): Do you think Camus us capturing something real—or something relatable—in this discussion of the absurd? Could you expand on his account of ways we can be led to experience the absurd? 16 Camus’s big idea 2: The point is to live 17 What to do? Lack of meaning wouldn’t be a problem for a simpler animal that can just live in the moment. But because we are conscious, we must find a way to live with the absurd. “It is essential to know whether one can live with [the absurd] or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide but rather in plain suicide. I merely wish to know its logic and its integrity. Any other position implies for the absurd mind deceit and the mind’s retreat before what the mind itself has brought to light” (48—not in reading package). “Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining” (59). 18 What to do? Live. Instead of turning to despair, Camus treats absurdity as a liberation. ➔ If there’s no meaning to life, then all that matters is that we live—that we soak up life for the time that we have. ➔ If there’s no higher “purpose” that we’re supposed to fulfil, then we get to decide for ourselves how to live. ➔ If every day is a step closer to death, we should “revolt” against death by living passionately while we can. 19 What to do? Live. “If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living” (59). “To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum” (61). 20 Choosing values Camus started this section by saying that embracing the absurd seems to require us to give up the “scale of values”: give up the idea that some things are objectively right or wrong, good or bad. But his actual view is that embracing the absurd means we must choose our ethical values. ➔ Without losing sight of the fact that these values are chosen by us: they are not objective. One value that Camus offers: we should seek to “break all records”—live more fully than people have done before. (It’s a sports metaphor.) 21 “But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing… The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live” (63). 22 The point is to live: study questions Interpretative questions (about what the author means): How does Camus suggest we respond to the absurdity of life? How does embracing the absurd lead to a kind of freedom, on Camus’s view? Critical questions (about whether the author makes a good argument): Do you think Camus offers a compelling response to the absurd? Do you have any concerns about what he says in this section? 23