Albert Camus’ Definition of the Absurd Man

Camus defines the absurd man as “He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal". The absurd man uses “courage and reason” in order to “live without appeal” and to recognize his limits. He is aware of and comfortable with his mortality and does not long for an afterlife where things will be more favorable. Instead, the absurd man is totally absorbed in living his finite life optimally by means of revolting from convention, being passionate about the present moment, and thinking as freely as possible. This is my personal interpretation of Camus’s definition of the absurd man. I feel that this is a fundamentally beneficial way to perceive and live and I do think that all people have the capacity to live in the absurd. However, I think most people live either in a state of hope or a state of despair and fail to recognize the third possibility which is living in absurdity.

Camus clearly illustrates some examples of people who successfully live in the absurd. One example is Don Juan in The Myth ofSysiphus, and another example is Meursault in The Stranger. People are indeed capable of living between hope and despair, not only comfortably, but experiencing immeasurable gain from it as well. All living organisms experience pleasure and pain during their lives. Those who live in the absurd are no exception. We are all constantly swinging on a sort of pendulum between experiences of pleasure and experiences of pain, and this swinging is inevitable. People who live in hope or despair, I believe, have unhealthy attachments to one side or the other of the swinging motion of the pendulum. In the case of Don Juan, no such attachment exists. He is not attached to any particular woman and he experiences only fleeting nostalgia when he separates from a woman and moves onto another.

He is not fully invested in either the love of one woman or the pain of separating. He is instead fully invested in living and experiencing his own life. Camus explains this by saying, “There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all those rebirths together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life“. Unlike Don Juan, the hopeful person chooses to only focus on the moments of pleasure, and is sorely disappointed when the pendulum inevitably swings back to painful experience. And the more one pulls the pendulum in one direction, the harder it swings the other way, The hopeful person is unprepared and perhaps unable to accept painful experience due to the imbalance of only having focused on good experience Similarly, the person living in despair only focuses on painful experiences and makes himself unable to appreciate moments of happiness when they occur.

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When people only focus on one side of the pendulum arch, they are failing to acknowledge fundamental aspects of this reality and suffer as a result. The hopeful person is focused on the future because of his desire or expectation that it will be better. The loathsome person is equally focused on the future out of fear that it will bring more pain. Neither individual is focused on the present moment, not to mention happy therein. Neither hope nor despair can bring happiness, but I think that a person can easily find a healthy balance by focusing on the stable neutral center of the pendulum arch. By doing so, hebrings the pain and the pleasure into View and becomes well acquainted with them both. This allows him to break from a life of habit and living only for the future. Rather than loathing and living in fear of painful experiences to come, he begins to embrace and accept the pain of existence.

Rather than constantly hoping and yearning for pleasurable moments, he breaks free from habitual desire. He recognizes the pleasure as inevitable and therefore not worth yearning for. He also recognizes the pain as inevitable and therefore not worth loathing. He enables himself to imagine and accept an infinitely broad spectrum of possible experiences that this reality offers, rather than only focusing on a finite portion of that spectrum and finding disappointment when other parts of the spectrum are revealed. He also recognizes hope and despair as a single force spiraling outward from the stable balanced center of acceptance where happiness exists. This way of perceiving the world, I think, is the crux of the Absurd man that Camus describes.

This is also the crux of Meursault in The Stranger, who I think exemplifies the Absurd man. Throughout the narrative, Meursault is unshakably calm in all scenarios While viewing his mother’s casket, for example, he seems unable to express the emotions of grief and sadness that we would expect from someone whose mother has just died. Instead of leaning towards these emotions, he takes a more neutral stance on the matter and allows himself to be more absorbed in his surroundings. He pays extreme attention to detail and observes the entire situation, notjust his emotions. Meursault’s absurdity is contrasted with the not—so-absurd characters that he interacts with in the narrative, such as Marie. When Meursault is arrested, Marie expresses hope and desire that he will be freed and they will get married.

In a similar way, the magistrate feels despair when his hope that Meursault will accept Christ is not realized. Pulling from The Myth of Sysiphus, Camus says, “As for the others.” the absurd man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to justify” (Myth, 67). This is precisely the behavior that we see from Meursault on multiple occasions in the text. He cannot justify in his mind marrying Marie, yet he cannotjustify not marrying her, and so he takes a neutral stance on the matter: “That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn‘t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to”. This kind of universal acceptance of the absurd man can easily be mistaken for a negative sort of indifference or passivity by the people who view Meursault as a “stranger”.

In short, I feel that Camus makes an excellent observation in his claim that human nature is fundamentally absurd. I would even take it a step further and argue that existence as a whole, not just human nature, is fundamentally absurd, paradoxically neutral, stable, and not holding a preference for pain or pleasure. I see pain and pleasure, as well as hope and despair, as dualities brought into existence by a central unifying paradox that is the absurdity Camus speaks of. It is clear from my personal view that residing in this stable paradoxical center is a much more effective way to live humbly and perceptively than the more common attitude of simply focusing all of one‘s attention on the pleasurable side or the painful side of human existence.

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