Self Encounter; 3; To Leap or Not to Leap

[Dr. Hazel E. Barnes]: The only philosophical problem that is truly serious says Albert Camus, is suicide. To judge whether or not life is really worth the living is to answer philosophy's most fundamental question. Now I, I suppose that if we could somehow make a calculation of all the people who had committed suicide, we would find that a very small number, if any, had ever sat down and made a cold rational calculation of the joys and the pains in life. And then because the answer was negative, had gone out and thrown it all up. Yet at the same time when we stop to think of the number of people who do commit suicide for a few reasons or for reasons or no reason, and then on the other hand the people who will battle with what seems to us unbearable tragedy and cling on to the end and even perhaps say it was good, it was worth it. Then we wonder, if after all, the clue to all this doesn't lie

in one's philosophical answer to this question of whether or not life itself is worth living. Obviously our view of suicide will vary greatly according to whether we put it in the religious context or the humanistic one. If we once assume that there is a God and that he had given man a purpose, a place in a universe that has a meaning, then the only attitude one can take logically is a negative one so far a suicide is concerned. But if we take the other point of view, If we assume that there isn't any overall purpose for the universe, then we have a different question. Albert Camus in his book, "The Myth of Sisyphus," what's the question in humanistic terms? "I do not know," he says, "whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it. But this, I am fully aware of

that if there is a higher meaning, it is not one which it is possible for me to know. And if the meaning is not a human meaning, then how can it be a meeting at all for me? In this case the leap in question is no longer the leap toward God and faith. It is a literal leap over the precipice toward death. But one encounters, if one assumes that there is no higher meaning, is what existentialist writers have called the absurd. Absurdity is a discrepancy, a gap between man's aspirations and that which he is capable even at best of achieving. It is the fact that when man appeals to the universe for meaning or form for unity, there is no answer. In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus has described how we

encounter the absurd in our everyday lives. Most of the time we go through without standing apart to ask questions. But suddenly, it may be in the midst of our seeming to be one with our environment, that the stage set that as is were collapses and we are left there against a backdrop of nothingness. In our lives we know that we rise. We take the streetcar. We work 4 hours in the office or the factory. We eat lunch. We work 4 hours in the office or the factory. We take the streetcar. We go home. We sleep. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday all in the same rhythm until one day, the why arises in that weariness that is tinged with amazement. [music playing] [drums beating]

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[drums beating] We encounter the absurd when the why arises, but we meet it also in time. Mostly we are carried along by time. We speak of later, tomorrow, when I get settled, when I get this done. But suddenly one day a man sits at a table and he looks at a mirror and he says, "I am thirty." Thus he situates himself with regard to his youth, he asserts it. But he places himself also in relation to time.

He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve, that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. But what is at the end? Death. He was looking toward that tomorrow of death when with all of his self he should have been cringing from it and that revolt of the flesh, that, too, is the absurd. The absurd comes not only from the inhuman universe sometimes men too can secrete the inhuman if we should suddenly see men's actions separated from this backdrop of meaning they too become only mechanical and silly. It's as though we were watching all of the time a man in a telephone booth, but could not hear what he said. He gestures, he speaks excitedly. For him there is a connecting link. But for us, it is foolishness. It is an incomprehensible dumb show. As Camus says, "This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble

before the image of what we are, this nausea is also the absurd." To me nausea as a philosophical term is a very strange thing and something which I think could not happen before the 20th century. But it is one of the most familiar concepts in existentialism. We all know nausea of this sort. It is a flat stale taste in our mouths. When we realize that one part of us at least, has no more reason for being here, is no more necessary than the brute things in the world around us. The most dramatic presentation of nausea can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, which is called simply "Nausea." In it the hero is sitting in a park and he experiences what he calls a horrible ecstasy. It is the very opposite of the religious pantheistic ecstasy where a man feels himself happily at one with the universe penetrated by God. Here the things of the world seem pour in upon him and he and they alike

are in the way. They're superfluous, unnecessary, de trop. [ambient sound] [Man]: Existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It was the very paste of things. This root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass; all that had vanished. The diversity of things, their individuality were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted leaving soft monstrous masses all in disorder, naked in a frightful obscene nakedness. Superfluous. De trop. It was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by the relationship to the statue. To compare their height with the height of the plane trees. Each of them escaped the relationship in which I'd tried to enclose it. Isolated itself and overflowed. De trop. The chestnut tree.

They're opposite me, a little to the left. De trop, the statue and I, soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thought. I, too, was de trop. I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives, but even my death would've been superfluous. De trop. De trop my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden and the decomposed flesh would have been de trop. The earth which would receive my bones at last cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been de trop. I was de trop for eternity. And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to existence. The key to my nauseas, to my own life. In fact all that I could grasp beyond that, returns to this fundamental absurdity. Every existing

thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Had I but dreamed of this enormous presence? It was there in the garden, toppled down into the trees, all soft sticky soiling everything. All thick. A jelly and I was inside. I, with the garden, I knew it was the world. The naked world suddenly revealing itself and I choke with rage at this gross, absurd being. You couldn't even wonder where all that sprang from or how it was that a world came into existence rather than nothingness. It didn't make sense. The world was everywhere. In front, behind. Of course there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it not to exist. I shouted "filth! What rotten filth!" And shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held

fast and there was so much. Tons and tons of existence, endless. I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness and then suddenly the park emptied as if through a great hole. The world disappered as it had come or else I woke up. In any case, I saw no more of it. Nothing was left but the yellow earth around me out of which dead branches rose up. [Barnes]: This experience is to say the least unusual. It would be very easy for us to dismiss it with this complacent thought, that our young hero is sick and after all thank heavens we are not like him. But as Freud has said, the abnormal is only the exaggeration of the normal written large so that we can see it and understand. One of the functions of literature is to hold up before us these extreme situations, so that we may see

ourselves in them, just as though we were looking into a magnifying mirror. One place where I think with less difficulty we all encounter and recognize the absurdity of existence as when we bump up against needless, meaningless suffering. Camus has explored this aspect of the absurd in his play, "The Misunderstanding." Here two women a mother and a daughter have murdered a wealthy guest for his money. The daughter discovers that it was really her own brother she had killed. When the young wife finds out what has happened to her husband, she is horrified and use it as a tragic misunderstanding. But the sister will have none of this. It is no misunderstanding. This is the normal course of events. In life nobody has ever recognized all of existence, all of suffering, all

tragedy is pointless. [Martha]: We cheated I tell you. Cheated. What do they serve, those blind impulses that surge up in us, the yearnings that rack our souls? Why cry out for the sea, or for love? What futility. Your husband knows now what the answer is, a charnel house where in the end we shall lie huddled together side by side. Try to realize that no grief of yours could equal the injustice done to man. And now, before I go, let me get a word of advice. I owe it to you since I killed your husband.Pray your God to harden you to stone. It's the happiness he has assigned himself. The one true happiness. Do as he does. Be blind to all appeals and turn your heart to stone, while there still is time.

But if you fell you lack the courage to enter this hard line peace, then come and join us in our common house. Goodbye, my sister. You see it's all quite simple, you have a choice between the mindless happiness of stone and the slimy bed in which we're awaiting you. [Maria]: Oh, God. I cannot live in this desert. It is on you I must call and I shall find the words. I place myself in your hands. Have pity on me. Turn toward me. Hear me and raise me from the dust oh heavenly father. Have pity on those who love one another and are parted. [Old Manservant]: What's this

did you call me? [Maria]: Oh, I don't know, but help me. Help me for I need help. Please be kind and say that you will help me. [Old Manservant]: No. [Barnes]: But are suicide and stony indifference really the only alternatives? The wife says that she cannot live in this desert. But Camus asks precisely this. Can we or can we not live without appeal to any idea of higher purpose to guarantee us? Camus points out that most people illogically mix up the idea of an external higher purpose and the worth- whileness of life. But there is no reason he says for us to feel that because the universe has no meaning, my own life cannot be worthwhile.

How many of our everyday actions are really governed by the belief in the worthwhileness of the universe? Suppose we had in the world or suppose that the world were a gigantic chinese checkerboard with nothing but a heterogenius assortment of marbles in a disorganized ?set of poles?. The older philosophers have proceeded as though there were only two points of view one could take, either one confined by faith or by rational investigation, that there is a pattern after all underneath it all. Or, that there is nothing and we might as well give it up. It can't possibly be worthwhile. The existentialist takes neither view. He says, "I can create my own pattern. I don't need any other pattern. If this is personally gratifying to me, if I can enjoy participating in it and sharing it with others, this is enough. This is the meaning and the significance of my life."

Pragmatists, too, take much the same position, but they have a heartier stomach and they don't worry all the time for fea of someone suddenly shakes the board. But if we are going to say, all right then, I create my own significance my own worthwhileness, how can we do it? One answer is that we live the creative life and one form of creativity is artistic creativity. In a later passage in "Nausea," Sartre shows us his hero, Roquentin, still worrying about existence, deciding now to leave the town where he had the horrible ecstasy and we find him sitting in a cafe. [Servant]: Your record, Monsieur Antoine, the one you like so well, can I play it for you again for the last time? [Roquentin]: Please. I said that out of

politeness, but I don't [jazz music playing the background] feel to well disposed to listen to jazz. Now there is this song on the saxophone and I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has been born, [womn singing] an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone, they come and go. They seem to say, you must be like us, suffer in rhythm. The melody does not exist, it is even an annoyance. If I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn't reach it. It is beyond, always beyond something, a voice, a violin note through layers and layers of existence it veils itself. And when you want to seize it, you find only existences devoid of sense. It is behind then, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous. All the rest is superfluous to it. It is

and I, too, wanted to be. I think about a clean shaven American with thick black eyebrows, suffocating with the heat on the 31st floor of a New York skyscraper. He is sitting in shirt sleeves in front of his piano. He has a taste of smoke in his mouth and vaguely a ghost of a tune in his head. The moist hand seizes the pencil on the piano and that's the way it happened. That way or another way, it makes little difference. That is how it was born. So, two of them ?I say.? The composer and the singer. They have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Oh not completely of course, but as much as anyone can. Can you justify your existence then and why not I just a little? Couldn't I try? And naturally, it wouldn't be the question of a tune, but couldn't I in another medium, it would have to be a book.

I don't know how to do anything else. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this book and say, "Antoine Roquentin wrote this. A red headed man who hung around cafes." And they would think about my life as I think about the Negress's: as something precious and almost legendary. A book. Perhaps one day thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I waited for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself that was the day, that was the hour when it all started and I might succeed in the past in accepting myself. [Barnes]: To write a book or to compose a piece of music seems somehow redeeming to Roquentin. For it is to lift something out of the flux of experience and bestow upon it its own unique form, its own

inevitable beginning, middle and end. But this is not the only kind of artistic creation. A man may learn to find a creative pattern in his own life and Sartre has said that the highest of all artistic creations is the construction of a freely chosen value system by which one is willing to live. Camus has derived three consequences from his confrontation with the absurd. In "Revolt," a man asserts the worthwhile of his own life in the very face of the universe which denies any purpose. In "Freedom," we learn that without any external purpose we are then and only then free to decide what will be the significance of our existence, not being determined by anything from the outside. And then there is passion. One may learn to cultivate full awareness so that he maybe derive from each moment all that it has to

offer in the way of pleasure, of pain but always of intensity. And we may learn to find it all somehow interesting. Camus tells of how and when he was a young man in North Africa, he learned to love the beauty of this world for its very indifference. In a subdued ecstasy totally unlike the ecstasy of Roquentin, he found that there was a happiness and a truth of the sun, and of the sea. [Camus]: I love this life with abandon and I want to speak of it without reservation. It makes me proud of my condition as a human being. Yet people have often said to me, "there is nothing in that to be proud of." Yes there is something: the sun, the sea, my heart leaping with youth, my body with a taste of the salt still on it and that immense setting where tenderness and glory meet in the yellow and the blue.

[Barnes]: Years later Camus returned to the shores of Africa sickened with the memory of war and destruction, trying to find out whether he might even yet find the solace of an ancient beauty. [Camus]: Here I recaptured the former of beauty, a young sky and I measured my luck realizing at last that in the worst years of all madness the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end it kept me from despairing. Here the world began over again everyday in an ever new light. Oh light. This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. For this last resort was ours too and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I had last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. [Barnes]: The world offers us no reasons for living, but it may if we let it, help us to find our lives more worth the living. Life by itself makes no

sense, but it is ours to make sense of. If we confront a blank canvas, we don't have to throw mud at it or kill ourselves. We must set about creating a painting, a painting which sets its own artistic laws, which provides its own reason for being. Of course I think one has to go to others ultimately and yet Camus is probably right in saying that we must confront the situation first, each man alone and for himself. In the "Myth of Sisyphus," he asked whether we could live without any external meaning. In a later work, the letters to a German friend, he writes again on the same question. I continue to believe that this world has no higher meaning but I know that something in it has meaning and that is man. For man is the one being to insist on having a

meaning. This world has at least the truth of man and our task is to provide man with reasons to justify him against destiny itself. There are no reasons other than man and it is man who must be saved if we want to save the idea which we form of life. [music playing] [music playing] [Announcer]: The scene from "Misunderstaing" is to be found in "Caligula and Three Other Plays" by Albert Camus, translated by Stewart Gilbert. Other material was taken from "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus translated by Justin O'Brien. Both books are published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. This is National Educational Television