Cosmos and Camus. Shai Tubali
coherent universe, with its own metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics.
There is, however, a much deeper reason why Camus has remained an outsider to philosophy. As Zaretsky (2013: 13) points out, in The Myth ←6 | 7→of Sisyphus Camus determinedly left behind philosophy’s traditional terminology and methodology. One could even think of this central essay on the absurd as a protest against philosophy’s failure to respond to the “one truly serious philosophical problem” (MS, 1). The essay is “a philosophy that contests philosophy itself” (Aronson 2017: 2), one that rejects the very idea of a philosophical system and, when confronted with the immediate and pressing question of whether life is worth living at all, it occasionally abandons the solid ground of argument and analysis altogether in favor of metaphors and impressions. This led Francis Jeanson to claim that absurdist philosophy is a contradiction in terms, not a philosophy but “an anti-rational posture that ends in silence” (ibid., 2); yet, such an exaggerated contention fails, in my opinion, to capture the complexity and coherent logic of Camus’ ideas. After all, Camus never opposed rationality and reason, but rather clarified their limited efficaciousness for comprehending “the ever-resurgent irrational” (MS, 34).
In some respects, Camus’ absurd has a philosophical status similar to that of “film as philosophy.” Both clearly carry philosophical content, but their tendency to elude the explicit argument, prioritize experience and convert thinking into impression and metaphor – thus creating Mulhall’s “philosophy in action” (2016: 4) – leads systematic idea-makers to regard them with suspicion. They thrive on the “open border” between philosophy and art (Baggini 2018).6 This shared destiny may prove to be the cause of important mutual influence.
Hughes (2007: 55) suggests that the “one truly philosophical problem,” as presented by Camus, is located either “at the limits or even outside philosophy itself.” Absurd reasoning requires the very act of philosophizing to stretch beyond an unduly narrow conception of philosophy when confronted with this fundamental life-or-death question. If anything, the role of philosophical thought is, in this case, to systematically negate itself by acknowledging its limits. In his rejection of not only every existing answer to the question, “What is the meaning of existence?” but also our very capacity to answer, Camus shifts his concern to an experience that is of ←7 | 8→“extremely limited philosophical import” (ibid., 56). Since this matter is simultaneously too humble and too emotional, it needs to be captured at the experiential level before it can be reached by philosophy (Aronson 2017: 6). Above all else, the absurd is a feeling, which arises arbitrarily, and it is therefore beyond argument and justification.7 Put simply, it cannot be “philosophically justified” (Golomb 2005: 123).8
The concept of the absurd – the lucid recognition of human reality as a juxtaposition of “a yearning for the absolute” and an “awareness of the limitations and finality of human ability” (Sagi 1994: 283) – begins as a feeling and as an experience. It is therefore plausible to assume that, since the feeling of the absurd conveys more than any explanation of the absurd could, “it is up to other forms of discourse,” the various arts in particular, to make up for the limitations of theoretical philosophy (Hughes 2007: 57). In Camus’ words, “If the world were clear, art would not exist” (MS, 95).
The absurd unveils a truth about the human condition that eludes formal arguments (Zaretsky 2013: 45). It is perhaps for this reason that The Stranger preceded The Myth; only after we have come into contact with the feeling that permeates Meursault’s life, as much as it permeates our own, can we advance to the essay – and even this evades justification and centers on a description and “diagnosis” of the human predicament (Golomb 2005: 120). The right order is from art to the “phenomenology of the ‘notion of the absurd’ ” (ibid., 120–121). The absurd is a crisis of meaning, lurking at every corner, waiting to strike at any moment, evoking the painful “Why?” in the face of a silent and indifferent universe. Yet, Camus appears uninterested in destabilizing this inherent tension by answering the question; the unsettling feeling and its manifestations – weariness, anxiety, strangeness, nausea, and horror in the face of one’s mortality – should be pursued all the way to their origin (Pölzler 2018: 2). Camus strives to maintain the ←8 | 9→sense of a “consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence” (Zaretsky 2013: 13).
Even some of Camus’ critics, among them analytic philosophers, have acknowledged the unfailing presence of the absurd in human life. Ayer recognizes an undeniable “emotional significance” in The Myth (ibid., 47). Nagel (1971: 718) believes that although the arguments for absurdity are logically feeble, they seem to “express something that is difficult to state, but fundamentally correct.” He regards this absurd predicament as a feature of our very humanness (ibid., 726). The absurd, as a pre-philosophical, concrete reality, may be more conceivable. It is “an experience to be lived through” (TR, 8).
All of this raises the possibility that, in the same way that Camus felt compelled to move back and forth, from literary and theatrical expression to essays and vice versa, a different, less philosophically rigid medium is required to help us to bring the experience of the absurd and Camus’ vision of the human–cosmos relationship more sharply into view – a medium that is ideally located on the border that loosely separates philosophy from art.
The choice to employ science fiction film for this task has at least three advantages: First, film strives to create symbolic and imaginative representations of the world that remain believable and consonant with our actual human experience to enable us to reveal something we have not noticed before or to “make sense of it in a different and helpful way” (Baggini, 2018).9 Second, the perceptible thought-experiments of science fiction film are largely centered on asking, and attempting to answer, life’s most urgent questions regarding the nature and meaning of the human phenomenon. A third advantage, however, may best explain the suitability of science fiction film; I shall elaborate on this third advantage in the following section.
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The thematic and methodological interconnection of absurdism and science fiction film
Camus’ philosophy of the absurd is almost completely absent from discussions of the philosophy of film, and the philosophy of science fiction film in particular.10 This is intriguing, since there is a strong thematic and methodological link between the two: They are both engaged in testing and exploring the limits of human experience through humankind’s relationship with the cosmos, either in the form of another species or with the universe as the ultimate other. Furthermore, both are doing this – Camus consciously and the films through a suggestive philosophical interpretation – in the hope of extricating not only the nature of humanness, but also the human potential to attain lucidity, authenticity, freedom and even happiness.
If Schelde’s (1993: 3–4) assertion that science fiction film weaves our modern mythology is right, Camus’ own myth – that of Sisyphus as the archetypal human – fits into this mythology well. At the core of the Sisyphean experience, there is an unresolvable tension between human consciousness and the cosmos. Camus painstakingly describes this inherent tension as the friction between longing and limit: the longing for meaning and the inability to find it; the longing for reason and lucidity and the limit of knowing; the longing for unity and the limit of separation; the longing for rebellion and the limit of a predetermined fate; the longing for tomorrow and the limit of death, and the longing for the heights and the limits of circularity and repetitiveness. The foundation of all of these frictions is a consciousness struggling with the recognition of its barriers and finitude: “lucid reason noting its limits” (MS, 47).
This is perfectly congruent with science fiction’s – and especially the nonhuman subgenre’s – philosophical inclination toward marking or questioning the boundaries of human existence. Just as science