Tag: Sartre

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Essay

Deconstructing Happiness

By Abdullah Rayhan

From Left to Right: Boethius, Keirkegaard and Montaigne. Courtesy: Abdullah Rayhan 
“Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?
   This happiness feels foreign to me.
      I am accustomed to despair.”

-Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), Iranian Poet and Filmmaker

We seek psychotherapy to deal with the distress, sadness, depression, and psychological dimensions that are beyond our reach. Even after going through the medical procedure, we are seldom left with the satisfying sensation we deeply crave. This is where philosophy comes in.

To Socrates, philosophy was basically the way to live a life. He mainly observed how life functions and examined the influences that allocate life with certain affects. Other philosophical ideas too somewhat try to interpret the nature of existence in a similar manner. There are tons of such schools: from absurdism, to existentialism, nihilism, Hegelian, Kantian, and whatnot. But, apart from offering ideas and perspectives on existence, what else do they contribute? It can be a bit vague to trace the purpose of such philosophical ideas where the basic understanding, instead of leading toward fulfillment, can plunge us into the deepest pit of darkest despair. Existential philosophy will constantly remind you of life’s futility, ethical philosophies will keep painting idealistic portraits all to no avail. Finally, you are left with novel knowledge that does not necessarily help you deal with the struggles drowning your heart within a blurry tumult.

Fortunately, practical application of philosophy exists. Last year, when I was particularly at my lowest, estranged from everything I adored, all prospects of happiness ruined, abandoned to face monstrous adversities with a heavy bleeding heart, I found Boethius[1] comforting.

Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche will comfort you with the assurance that you can construct optimism with your own effort. They tell your life has no inherent meaning, thus you are allowed to come up with your own sense of existence and give it any meaning you can conjure up at will. Bentham will tell you how to establish collective contentment. Kant will give you formulas to maintain peace. But none of them essentially gives a clear picture of what happiness really is. This makes Boethius unique. He doesn’t adhere to any false hopes, he rejects all things that are constructed, yet, through a transparent honesty, he shows a path that can lead toward organic satisfaction, not laced with any promises of universal fulfillment, just simple reasoning advocating for individual contentment.

Boethius basically inspires us to contemplate on our happiness. He directly questions the idea of happiness we so intimately endorse. Boethius asks you,

“Do you really hold dear that kind of happiness which is destined to pass away? Do you really value the presence of Fortune when you cannot trust her [Fortune] to stay and when her departure will plunge you in sorrow? And if it is impossible to keep her at will and if her flight exposes men to ruin, what else is such a fleeting thing except a warning of coming disaster?”

We consider ourselves lucky when we get our desired happiness. But, being lucky or ‘fortunate’ cannot be the standard that constructs happiness. In Boethius’ words, “happiness can’t consist in things governed by chance” mainly because there’s no guarantee it will last. He argues anything that is ephemeral, transient, and temporary cannot be of any value in terms of happiness as when that happiness evaporates, it is replaced by sorrow that is sometimes too much to bear. In this way, state of happiness is “a warning of coming disaster”. Happiness should not be the reason for despair and discontent. Thus, happiness brought by luck is not what it appears to be. 

He further asks if something that is temporary can really be claimed as one’s own. Boethius’s voice renders one mute when he states, “I can say with confidence that if the things whose loss you are bemoaning were really yours, you could never have lost them.”

A significant portion of Boethius’s argument is surrounding the transience of happiness. If happiness lies in what’s temporary, then isn’t misery temporary as well? Boethius puts it with much clarity. He comforts you, saying: “If you do not consider that you have been lucky because your onetime reasons for rejoicing have passed away, you cannot now think of yourself as in misery, because the very things that seem miserable are also passing away.”

Boethius inspires you to wonder about the nature of misery. We are miserable, sad, melancholic usually because we had a taste of happiness sometimes in the past, which is missing at the moment. We were happy once. But happiness is no longer part of our lives, and this absence is what’s causing our misery. Had we not had that happiness before, we wouldn’t have the misery that chokes our heart with a suffocating grip. This is the reason Boethius called happiness “a warning of coming disaster”.

Think about it. Someone who is currently living the same life as you may not be in similar misery as you because, as they haven’t had the happiness you had, they are not burdened to deal with the absence that you are compelled to plummet in. Thus, neither happiness nor misery operate based on any strict blueprint, rather it is something formed by one’s own experience and are inter-dependent. Boethius puts it very eloquently saying, “There is something in the case of each of us that escapes the notice of the man who has not experienced it, but causes horror to the man who has […] Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity”. We lose our ability to “bear it (despair) with equanimity” because of our past interactions with pleasant experiences.

Perhaps you would relate to Boethius in terms of misery though not in an entirely literal sense. Boethius had everything. A beautiful wife, two affectionate children, popularity, respect, novelty, an amazing home, and enough money to live without any worrying. Yet, because of some false accusation, he was suddenly deprived of it all and was imprisoned. His happy life suddenly became a dark den overpouring with impenetrable despair. Many of our misery too is born because of its contrast to the time when we were happy. Now think about it for a moment. Boethius was devastated in the cell because he previously had a satisfying life. Had he lived like a homeless person with nothing of his own, the confined space of that very cell would appear satisfactory because of the roof over the head and chunks of food on the plate no matter how dim and damp the dark roof or how stale the smelly food. It shows how subjective the texture of happiness is.  

Boethius deconstructs the common perception of happiness, breaking it down to a rather ‘mundane’ prospect of life on the contrary to our belief of it being a significant one. He believes our idea of happiness itself is laced with misery. He proclaims, “how miserable the happiness of human life is; it does not remain long with those who are patient and doesn’t satisfy those who are troubled.”

So, if happiness indeed is of the nature that compulsorily leaves one unsatisfied, then does happiness deserves to be attributed with divine epithet? Boethius disagrees. He presents a compelling argument for this, saying, “[H]appiness is the highest good of rational nature and anything that can be taken away is not the highest good – since it is surpassed by what can’t be taken away …” It is the unreliability of our perceived idea of happiness that makes it a futile one with little or no value.

So, if happiness is something that is transient, unreliable, and can never offer the contentment it promises, then is happiness really something to chase after? “Happiness which depends on chance comes to an end with the death of the body,” propounds Boethius. Thus, to cling on to happiness is to cling on to a slippery rope dangling on top of a void filled to the brim with invisible abyss. You cannot do anything to make this notion of happiness fruitful in the sense you believe it to be. Boethius thinks it’s foolish to attempt to make this ineffective happiness endure and persist. He words it differently saying, “what an obvious mistake to make – to think that anything can be enhanced by decoration that does not belong to it.” Thus, again, the problem lies with the way we shape the notion of happiness.

As our immediate cognition tells us, the most apparent formula of happiness is a combination of romantic love and successful career. But is it really true? If you have understood Boethius, you probably realise that these temporary agents (romantic partner and career) cannot make you content for long. Something that is not entirely yours own cannot get you that contentment you crave. Kierkegaard too agrees how things that are not inherently one’s own are subject to loss, thus misery. Kierkegaard delivers the idea with a touch of subtle humour,

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both.”

Kierkegaard and Boethius clearly intersect at certain points. Having happiness too, with its transience and all, is always the cause of a constant despair. Boethius very wittily points out that when we don’t have happiness, we strive and struggle to attain it. Once we have attained it, we become anxious to preserve it because no matter how much we enjoy happiness, at the back of our mind, we are aware of its temporary and fragile nature. This is why Kierkegaard says all our prospects of happiness are ultimately fated to end up in regret. Michel de Montaigne words this human tendency more concisely saying, “he who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears”. In other words, as being in happiness always contains the risk of losing the happiness, this fear actually prevents one from ever fully attaining that state of mind.

Kierkegaard reaches such a conclusion because he too believed happiness as we know it is transient and fragile. The reason, as he locates, is its inorganic essence. Happiness modified with external force will never be permanent or make one content. He imagined happiness as an inswing door. He says, “the door of happiness opens inward, one should keep aside a little to open it: if one pushes, they close it more and more”. This is to say that one should not put any external force to influence happiness. That way, it’ll only cause more damage than good, or as Kierkegaard words it, the door of happiness will “close more and more”.

This overall means, our understanding of happiness, which is generally tied to external factors, can never bring within our reach the happiness we idealise with transcended romanticism. Thus, we are putting so much value in that idea of happiness in futile attempts, not knowing what it has in store for us while in reality it does not deserve to be the glorified item that sits at the epitome of human desire.

Interestingly, Boethius, Kierkegaard, and Montaigne have similar ideas on obtaining true contentment. They all agree that it’s not attainable with external properties and should be dug up from ones within. They commonly emphasise internal resources over external acquisitions.

Montaigne, for example, closely focuses on the nuanced foundation where the true happiness lies. Yes, material and metaphysical attainments can make us happy, he agrees, but not genuinely as we want it to be. He suggests, “[W]e should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can, but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a backshop wholly our own.” Similar to Boethius, Montaigne too recommends not relying our happiness on subjects that are subject to transience. Rather he advices to “reserve a backshop”. This “backshop” is the inner sanctum, a profound part of ourselves that remains untouched by the outer world, free from all kinds of external force. He designs this backshop as a space “wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat”.

Kierkegaard too advocates for contentment that arises from within rather than from external influences whose essential nature is transient. In Kierkegaard’s perception, similar to Montaigne’s, it is silence, solitude, and introspection within us that can get us the contentment we idealise as happiness. He perceived all kinds of temporal gains as a reason for eventual dissatisfaction and advocated for things that remain untainted for eternity like intellect and truth.

Similar to Kierkegaard and Montaigne, Boethius agrees it is internal stability that overpowers the temporary shower of ecstatic sense of euphoria external fortune brings. Boethius advocates for this internal stability with better wording,

“If you are in possession of yourself you will possess something you would never wish to lose and something Fortune could never take away.”

This internal stability, according to Boethius, comes from one’s power of reasoning. Similar to Kierkegaard, Boethius prioritises intellectual resources because it has the ability to make one indifferent to their own fate. Intellect can make one recognise that there cannot be any prospect of contentment in things that are unstable, and everything that fortune brings is laced with this vicious instability. By fortune, Boethius does not mean a sudden stroke of good luck that potentiates all of our solvencies, but rather it’s everything good that happens to us without our own effort whether it’s a small gift from a loved one, or the smile of a baby. These make us happy, yet these are external forces. Fate intervenes in our life, leaving us with little to no control over our own selves. We can’t control a baby from smiling, and we won’t get out of our way and prevent a loved one from offering us a flower which they have invested so much thought in, but when babies do not smile at us, or when no one is left to offer even a stem of flower to us, that is when we experience a suffocation that could break our already shattered heart. Boethius asks us to realise all these with a clear conscience and allow our intellect and power of reasoning to locate what’s unstable and help us grip onto only what’s inherently ours.   

All these perspectives boil down to the fact that the reason we are not happy isn’t because we are constantly chasing it, but rather we have a wrong perception of what happiness is. Happiness is not the greatest good, nor is it anything to die for. It is, as clichéd as it may sound, something present within all of us with a very apparent eminence, and all one has to do to access it is have an open mind and reach ones within with honesty. Through this lens one doesn’t have to ‘imagine’ Sisyphus happy, rather Sisyphus is ‘happy’ for real and for eternity.

Works Cited:

On the Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard

[1] Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-524), Roman statesman, historian and polymath

Essais by Michel de Montaigne

Abdullah Rayhan studies Literature and Cultural Studies at Jahangirnagar University.

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Slices from Life

Baudelaire and Paris

By Sunil Sharma

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. 

I

Modern Paris was discovered by Baudelaire in his avatar as the flaneur. And Walter Benjamin made this figure intellectually respectful as a field of study.

In a recent visit to Paris, I hovered between two allied states of being a flaneur and a gawking tourist. I had come as a sightseer from Mumbai, India, allured by the tales and well-crafted image of a mythic Paris, drinking in the street flavours on those May days, passively registering the wide monuments and boulevards and palaces and towers in one clean and clear sweep — almost like a wide-angle shot in a Stanley Kubrick film. Spring had set in and the Paris of May 2014 was full of eager tourists from nations as wide apart as China and the USA; Africa and Middle East and Latin America. A bouquet of the ethnicities strung together.

Then, I became a flaneur, making a neat switch, in a single instant.

I became Baudelaire.

Different terms can make you look differently at a similar set of things or a common setting.

Of course, I did not have the urge to write a new millennium version of The Flowers of Evil. At best, you can parody a sacred text but you cannot re-write it, howsoever Borges-like you might be.

I am neither of the two.

Like Mallarme and Verlaine, you can carry forward an idea by expanding it further but cannot imitate with complete fidelity to the original.

So, not in a mood for a cheap replication of a master praised by Proust so profusely, I took on the stance of a flaneur and became a connoisseur of the street-life.

Was it possible?

Assuming the role of a figure long dead or supposed to be dead? Replaced by a tourist? Solo or in a group?

Armed with a camera or a cell phone, in casuals, the modern tourist — guided by brochures and online information and a city map — looks at the urban skyline vicariously familiarized by prior research. Or, could it be at a professional polyglot guide spewing bits and pieces of history like a typical street performer or an amateur actor? A mass tourist consuming the city, architecture, culture, food, arts and clothes — public life — in a predictable way and sequence largely decided by the tourist industry. A few breaks are possible in that routine.

But to resurrect the role and agency of the classic flaneur, you have to take on a different position and way of seeing.

And what was that?

I could not become a dandy—detached, arrogant, inheritor of a small fortune, an idler walking a tortoise on a Paris street of the nineteenth century. Even if I had the means, I could get arrested for an act of animal cruelty!

Those were different times!

So what can be done?

The clues lie in The Flowers of Evil, perhaps.

Will this title be acceptable today? With changing definitions of evil? With life becoming more liberal and open?

Baudelaire was a dandy and a cultivated flaneur—the painter of modern life; a gentleman stroller of the city streets. Part of, yet apart from, the crowds.

But then, not every dandy is a flaneur and every flaneur, a dandy?

Again, dandy is a historical invention, a social-engineering, manufacturing of a social type for a particular age.

Perhaps, a metro-sexual male, now no longer fashionable.

Is he a voyeur?

Perhaps, we all are, given the nature of our society.

Or, a keen participant, an acute observer, a chronicler?

For me, the answer lies in the personality of Charles Baudelaire who in turn was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. But that would be complicating things further.

Let us stick to our central figure Baudelaire. His genius lies in radicalizing the trope of the French flaneur. A theme that fascinated Walter Benjamin who, in the twentieth century, tried to essay the same role performed so well by Baudelaire in the industrialized Paris of the nineteenth century. The former could not capture the underlying passion of Baudelaire in this unfinished project.

In fact, by the late 1990s and start of the 21st century, author-flaneur proved an impossible figure.

Market forces, on global level, have incorporated author as a producer of kitsch or dystopia. Dissidents were slowly and subtly disenfranchised.

We are all sellers!

Baudelaire resisted this initial process in Paris. Beckett was next. Sartre and Camus too tried.

Then the flow stopped.

The Flowers of Evil mounts a challenge to the order and morality of the Second Republic.

The poems challenge the bourgeois morality and conception of order and beauty and aesthetics in a radical way. The book talks of evil and implies that the source of evil lies in its origins — capitalism.

In that simple gesture of observing, participating, recording of street life, Baudelaire liberates himself from his historical position and becomes a true artist. By talking of prostitutes and vampires, the poet shows the underbelly of capitalism. His creations provide the material basis for highlighting these themes and give credence to outcasts from the system that feed on the blood of the innocent and the gullible.

The Flowers of Evil is the greatest indictment of the French bourgeoisie by a person deeply embedded in it as a bourgeois but a radical one that unveils the brutal face of a system that once talked of revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity!

An evil society can produce evil flowers!

Vampires are for real!

II

That Baudelaire had not died in 2014 was proven on a street near the Eiffel Tower on that memorable trip.

A Roma girl, bold and audacious, stole my son’s cell phone from his shirt pocket. She returned it after a cop intervened.

I could smell evil in the air. The disenfranchised and the ethnic Roma are still the threat — like the prostitute and the vampire, the perpetual outsiders.

The Paris of Baudelaire is not safe.

The shoot-out at the Charlie Hebdo proves that.

The vampires are out.

This time round, Baudelaire the flaneur has disappeared. There is no one to warn us of these sinister presences.

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Sunil Sharma, an academic administrator and author-critic-poet–freelance journalist, is from suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 22 books so far, some solo and some joint, on prose, poetry and criticism. He edits the monthly, bilingual Setu: http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
For more details of publications, please visit the link below:
http://www.drsunilsharma.blogspot.in/. This story was first published in Scarlet Leaf Review.

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Essay

Rebellious Thoughts At The Café de Flore

By Gaither Stewart

Whether revisionists and debunkers agree or not, the Café de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard Saint Germain is a living institution. Since its founding in 1870 it has existed as a café and a second home for French-speaking writers, artists and intellectuals of the likes of Apollinaire, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and frequented by Hemingway and Truman Capote. In the 1920s and 30s, the Flore was the meeting place of the Right, after World War II of the Left. Forming a triangle with the famous but touristy Deux Magots (today taboo for the Parisian intelligentsia) and the Brasserie Lipp just across the street, the history of the Flore has always been linked with Paris, culture and political ideas. A remarkable vocation!

For purposeful urban walkers like Henry Miller certain cityscapes like Parisian coffee houses palpitate with the violent ideas that have made great cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, Berlin, Munich and Budapest. It is impossible to pass the Café de Flore without pausing a moment to imagine Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre ensconced at a back table in that left-bank citadel of thought on a rainy November day, in fervent discussion of the rage and the alienation and the revolt and the urge for revolution of their age.

In their works those existentialist intellectuals wrote the biography of European rebellion born with the French Revolution. Much of their thought was discussed or born in the Flore. Now, out on the boulevard just looking in, you might pause to wonder who is going to write the history of the great modern American Revolution, perhaps im gestation. When will it begin, some now wonder? Or has it already begun somewhere in the guts of America? The Flore stirs such thoughts in some minds.

There in the Café de Flore the two bold intellectuals, Camus and Sartre re-hashing again and again the idea of the metaphysical rebellion born in the western world after 1789, certainly evaluating also the year of 1848, the year Michael Bakunin and Friedrich Engels witnessed in a delirium of hope the second wave of revolution sweep across Europe, from Paris to Berlin and Vienna. Wave after wave of rebellion and revolution.

Sitting on the terrasse of the Flore today you can still evoke images of Paris 1968 here, right in front of you on this boulevard where many of the mobile scenes passed, an explosion only vaguely imagined by Sartre and Camus. The year that briefly, so very briefly, changed the world began here—until the tide of reaction rebounded, sweeping the eternal liberal bourgeoisie back into place in the world.

But readers of Camus will recall his conditioning in his books every Sartrean provocation with his own conviction of the Greek idea of limits. And you wonder who was right.

THE MASKS

Social masks are a threat. Yesterday, as today. In peace or war. In Fascism or in the revolution of workingmen. The bourgeoisie’s support for liberals has always been and always will be a great mystification to confuse the revolutionary. That is the reason for our mistrust of bien-pensant liberals, yesterday as today. The more liberals turn to the Right, the happier the bourgeoisie and the greater its support for “liberal” causes. And therefore the marriage of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

As it stands the gap between the people and what we call bourgeois capitalism is unbridgeable. Protest does not count a whit. Though the ultimate tremendous effect on the people of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria is unimaginable, popular protest meanwhile still goes unheeded. Actually, the conclusion is simple: superpowers should never be confused with democracies.

Rebellion is a story of saying ‘no!’ But rebellion is not revolution. Today more than ever before rebellion against the current state of affairs and the transformation of rebellion into revolution is the task of the socially aware. With your back to the wall, in an over-loaded era, when the necessary decisions quiver and vacillate and become elusive, you nonetheless must choose.

Revolution is not only the explosion. Revolution is a long up and down period of drastic social change. Of the final reversal of everything that once was and its breath-robbing transformation into the new. Revolution is the new. Reaction to it represents the old.

REBELLION OR REVOLUTION?

Therefore the difference between rebellion and revolution is fundamental. Protest, peace marches and sit-ins are rebellious, not revolutionary. It’s a kind of either/or. However, rebellions do form a chain. In explosive ascendance. For there is no revolution without goal-conscious rebellion at the start, without saying “no!” to what was before. On the other hand, we see over and over that rebellion does not automatically produce revolution. As a rule it subsides and disappears until the next time.

So where do we stand today? Where are we in America? In Europe?  “An armed uprising anywhere is an absurd proposition”, an important person in my life recently wrote me. Those words underline the fundamental condition, the point of departure: consciousness. The consciousness, the awareness of one’s desperate situation makes rejection of that situation possible. Refusal to continue along the same old dead-end paths, refusal to accept them any longer. That awareness can lead first to rebellion, and from there it might mushroom into revolution. Might, because the three steps are not automatic and consequential. One does not necessarily lead to the next.

Unfortunately, social awareness is yet to be born in a concrete form in America. But that first basic step is in active gestation in today’s pandemic crisis. Some people are thinking. Why no public health care? Why no employment? Why the wars? You can imagine its bursting forth. To be followed then by contagious rebellion. And then, revolution can be made. Revolution is not a spontaneous affair; it is a result.

The events of 1968 on Boulevard St. Germain parading before Camus and Sartre were spontaneous and in time sputtered and extinguished amidst waves of predictable reaction. Spontaneity however helped plant the seeds of rebellion which each time splinter into a little streams and die out if minor objectives are achieved. But an overturn of everything that was and still is has to be nourished and managed.

Meanwhile, we of today have to deal with the very first step. With awareness. Without awareness of our real condition every act of rebellion is gratuitous and infantile, like. stamping one’s foot and saying “no” just to be ornery. Essential is the awareness of the real reasons for rebellion.

That is where 99% of Americans and Europeans stand today: dissatisfied but enmeshed in a cloud of unawareness of our real situation. Afraid to look into a mirror and see ourselves for what and where we are.

LIMITS

I try to imagine them today, the post-World War II intellectuals, in the Café de Flore, arguing, discussing, plotting, distinguishing. But ours are other times. New times. More complex times. They are not discussing revolution in Parisian cafés today. Maybe un petit peu of rebellion. Un petit peu of protest. Sneers and accusations against the reactionary, austerity-loving, European Union. Some lament the evaporation of the French-German-Italian Left. Staring into the Café de Flore from the street I imagine Sartre and Camus’ disappointment in the European Left, steadily losing ground to the nationalist, fascistic right everywhere.

But revolution? Non, merci! The only visible signs of even revolt against multinational Europe governed by its great banks subsidized by the taxes of the working classes are disgruntled Italy’s complaints against the European Union for its failure to help in the time of need when Italy was the only EU country infected by the coronavirus.

The French philosopher, Alain Badiou, once said in an interview with Rome’s La Repubblica that “often revolt remains entrapped in the modern world, reduced to a mere symptom of the illness. In the West, revolts are for the most nostalgic persons who aim at conserving the golden epoch of welfare in the name of an already superseded past.” The Occupy Wall Street movement, though with praiseworthy intentions, represented a handful of the endangered middle class. It was a petit bourgeois protest, in the absence of a link with the real disinherited of the planet. Few even remember it today.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN REBELLION AND REVOLUTION

In his book The Rebel, Camus deals with the Greek emphasis on “limits”. Even revolt (rebellion) has limits. In Camus’ vision “bad revolution” knows no set limits. On the contrary, so as not to degenerate into terror, the “good” revolution relies on the true sources of rebellion. Therefore, the “good revolution” must draw its inspiration from a system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits in the first place. Camus was not Robespierre.

Marx and Engels and Lenin spoke at length about this tricky topic. It’s good to refresh one’s thoughts at the source. The classical distinction is that made between a non-Marxian, spontaneous “insurrection” or “rebellion” or “uprising” and a formal revolution according to communist precepts. Of historical spontaneous insurrections, the classical case is the Spartacist revolt in post-World War I Germany, whose ill-conceived program soon met with defeat. The justicialist peasant revolts throughout the Middle Ages, which Luther denounced, shared that semi-anarchic aspect, even though at times they were led by charismatic figures, Spartacus himself being one.

One might say: My heart is with spontaneous insurrection, my reason is for eternal rebellion morphing into revolution.

This however is a false contraposition. For eternal rebellion is bound to morph into revolution, which perforce becomes “permanent revolution” or “constant revolution”. Rebelliousness without a real cause is a juvenile or neurotic disorder, a waste of human potential.

Lenin, Mao and Fidel suggested “constant revolution” or, “constant cultural-political revolution,” as the cure for the gradual corruption of a revolutionary project. Under conditions of “eternal revolution” (which the bourgeoisie caricatures as constant chaos) the masses do not retreat from the direct exercise of power as can easily happen. They do not sit back and become spectators of history, leaving all power in the hands of representatives who, with the passing of time, become a new privileged stratum, not a CLASS, as many claim!” (Milovan Djilas, The New Class)

BRUSSELS

The European Union (EU) appears today as the bourgeois restoration following the signs of rebellion that spread across the world after 1968. Some years ago the then French President Sarkozy in his role as rotating President of the EU assured his political model, George Bush, that the situation in Europe was under control. Aggressivity and rigidity were things of the past. The twenty-seven European nations had a common position. No more divisions. No more sass. Europe now spoke with one voice. Albeit a reactionary voice. And today reaction continues to sweep across Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Berlin to Rome.

This reactionary Europe is in a quiet, still subtle revolt against its brothers in the United States. This capitalist, reactionary Europe, though wounded by American hegemonic measures, wants to be heard, not however in disagreement with American capitalism. I fear it just wants more of it … a bigger piece of the cake.

The typical customers at the fashionable Café de Flore are no longer the intellectuals. Before the virus epoch began, tourists camped out on the heated veranda were looking for celebrities. Also on the terrasse and at the window tables inside the old café were the TV celebrities and the chic graduates of Paris’ elite schools like the ENA (Ecole National d’Administration) or the ESSEC business school, all dressed in their uniform, body-hugging black clothes and short black topcoats and fashionable stiletto pointed shoes. These elite school graduates—many of whom are the heirs of 1968—in our crisis situation today demand more and more lenient laws on firing and hiring. They evoke the American and British systems. Their motto is that of elite capitalism: “Fired today, a new job tomorrow.”

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Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture, have been published (and translated) on many leading online and print venues.

First published in Countercurrents

Categories
Essay

Cavorting with Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus

By Rakhi Dalal

Camus, as a writer, receives mixed response from the readers. It is understandable when some readers avoid reading him, because he seems a difficult writer whose works are taken to be disturbing. Some readers appreciate his writings though they do not agree with him. While for some, Camus’ ideas are irrelevant when compared with those proposed by existential philosophers. Although Camus is often categorised as an existential philosopher but he himself never approved of that. In one of his interviews he said:

“No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. It’s a joke actually. Sartre and I published our books without exception before we had ever met. When we did get to know each other, it was to realise how much we differed. Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.”*

Albert Camus

When compared with different periods of his life, his writings offer an insight into the state of mind Camus was often fraught with. The penning of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, which he did almost simultaneously, came at a point when he himself faced despair about the kind of life he was living, which included his anxiety about his future as a writer and finding his place in the World. At this time he was in Algiers, his native land, far from the hubbub of Paris. His more mature works , like The Rebel and The Plague, came later on where Rebel dealt with the problem of “murder” as against the problem of “suicide” which he dealt in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’.  We can notice the change in the focus of the writer, which turned from inner to outer, from individual to social as he moved from one work to the other. As he matured as a writer, Camus himself felt annoyed at his proposed idea of absurd. He said:

“This word “Absurd” has had an unhappy history and I confess that now it rather annoys me. When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to make a “tabula rasa,” on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something. If we assume that nothing has any meaning, then we must conclude that the world is absurd. But does nothing have any meaning? I have never believed we could remain at this point.”**

Now this is what keeps me in awe of the writer. He is one writer, who has never been afraid of opening his heart, his thoughts, anything which plagues his mind, before his readers, before this world. In that sense, he may be termed as a radical and approached with scepticism, but it cannot be ignored that the ideas he proposed came to influence the generation of writers engaged in the works of absurd, for example, Samuel Beckett who contributed significantly to the Theatre of Absurd.

The idea of repetition which he proposed with Sisyphus, which in turn was inspired by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, is witnessed significantly in the works of Beckett too. What is more, his ideas also, even now influence the readers like me in whose face the “why” of existence suddenly strikes one fine day. It wouldn’t be an overstatement or some form of fervent adherence to the writer if I admit that he inspired the mind to seek more and not be satisfied till the response unites the thought and the experience.

He is not an easy writer to read, agreed, but his writings are not disturbing, specially if one gets to understand that his writing, whether The Stranger or ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, is a declaration of writer’s notion that the life must be lived fully in awareness of the absurdity of this world.

In the ‘Myth of Sisyphus’, he terms the world as absurd because it doesn’t offer any answer to the question of existence, it being a silent spectator to the suffering of whole humanity. In a universe, divested of meaning or illusions, a man feels a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. But does this situation dictate death? Camus ponders upon the problem of suicide and contemplates then whether suicide is the only answer to this absurd world which doesn’t answer anything.  He opines:

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it. Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgement is as good as the mind’s and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

And to kill one self means to allow both life and death to have dominion over one. Hence, the absurd doesn’t dictate death but calls for the awareness and rejection of death. It calls for living it with consciousness —- with revolt, freedom and passion.

Neither religion, nor science for that matter, provides answer to a questioning mind satisfactorily. While the former tends to imbue it with an idea of eternity; an extension of life in heaven, the latter merely tries to explain it by hypothesis. But Camus cannot believe either of them.

Then turning to existential philosophers, he says that they “without exception suggest escape”.

“Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them.”

To further explain this, he presents to us the ideas proposed by different philosophers. For example he says:

Of Jasper:

Karl Jasper

Karl Jasper, psychiatrist and philosopher, writes: “Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?”

So that Jasper proposes the existence which cannot be defined as “unthinkable unity of the general” and the “inability to understand” as the existence which illuminates everything.

Of Shestov:

Lev Shestov

Lev Shestov, the Russian existentialist philosopher, names the fundamental absurdity by saying: “This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”

For Shestov, reason is useless but there is something beyond reason, even if that something is indifferent to us.

Of Kierkegaard:

Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard calls for the third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: The sacrifice of the intellect. He says, ‘In his failure, the believer finds his triumph.’

Kierkegaard substitutes his cry of revolt for frantic adherence.

Camus doesn’t agree with these philosophers, who did, all of them, tried to understand the absurd but finally gave into that which they found impossible to define. He calls their giving up as philosophical suicide. He cannot believe in Jasper’s idea of Transcendence. In response to Shestov, he says “To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.” He chooses ‘despair’ instead of Kierkegaard’s frantic adherence. He says “I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.”

 So now when faced with absurd and being in consciousness, how best to live the life? Camus advocates the life of a seducer (Don Juanism) actor, conqueror or creator following the three consequences of absurd i.e. revolt, passion and freedom.

 By revolt, Camus means to keep the absurd alive by challenging the world anew every second.  

By freedom, he means losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently removed from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of it.

By passion, he means being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum.

Though he praises the absurd man in a seducer, actor or conqueror, it was his stance on creator which I drew me towards his ideas. He says:

“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”

Sisyphus

Towards the end of this essay, he compares absurd with Sisyphus, who, according to the myth, was condemned to rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it rolling down back every time he reached the top. He says that though Sisyphus is well aware of his fate, of the continuous struggle he has to engage in, but he is still passionate about his life and doesn’t give up. It is during his descent, that Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained.

Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The other essays in the collection, ‘Summer in Algiers’, ‘The stop in Oran’, ‘Helen’s Exile’ and ‘Return to Tipasa’ are worth reading too. In ‘Return to Tipasa’, we observe Camus prevailed over by nostalgia for home, for his land. It is here that he says:

In the direction of the ruins, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but pock-marked stones and wormwood, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystalline air. It seemed as if the morning were stabilized, the sun stopped for an incalculable moment. In this light and this silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again. And awake now, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds of which the silence was made up: the figured bass of the birds, the sea’s faint, brief sighs at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the blind singing of the columns, the rustling of the wormwood plants, the furtive lizards. I heard that; I also listened to the happy torrents rising within me. It seemed to me that I had at last come to harbor, for a moment at least, and that henceforth that moment would be endless.

What I realized reading these essays over again was that despite of being labelled as the proponent of absurd, it is actually living that he so fervently speaks about; Not just living but living passionately and fully. Living in awareness and questioning. Though he seems to be recommending a negative faith (as James Wood says in introduction) against the religious or existentialist ideologies, he nevertheless demonstrates a distinctive way to the seekers to come to terms with the existence; the way to be chosen henceforth, of course, depending upon the individual, starting every day with an ever new light.

“In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

*From an interview with Jeanine Delpech, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, (1945). Cited in Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, Vintage (1970)

** From an interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, (1951). Cited in Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, Vintage (1970)

Source : http://www.camus-society.com/albert-camus-existentialism.html

Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ . She lives with her husband and a teenage son, who being sports lovers themselves are yet, after all these years, left surprised each time a book finds its way to their home.