1942 when Albert Camus called the universe absurd, meaning
unreasonable. His call made no sense. People and arguments can be unreasonable,
but there's no way the universe can be unreasonable. It just is.
The harm appeared when people who accepted Camus' statement
started to make deductions from it. "If the universe is absurd then it's
foolish to approach it rationally. Logic is useless." Logic, though, could
have shown them (if their dismissal hadn't already deprived them of it) that by
what they had said there was only one possible universe in which a rational
approach was foolish: a universe where everything was equally absurd. In other
universes, including those most packed with absurdities, you'd have to discriminate
among them, and only reason could do that. You'd be wise to use it.
With some people, though, the harm was fixed as soon as the
deduction about logic was made. They were deprived of the instrument by which
they could test their belief. Their absurdism was self-validating, hedged
against any threat.
Seeing a mind abused by a mistake in philosophy is always a
caution to us, but when the abused mind inhabits a classroom we teachers feel
downright alarm. Here the abuse reduces our ability to lead students through
the logical consequences of a belief, an ability vital to the Socratic teacher.
The existentialist-abused minds of the sixties and seventies threatened to take
away his calling.
If that threat had materialized we'd have to rank misuse of
"absurd" among the most harmful in history. It didn't materialize,
though. It couldn't. The value of logic was too evident in the daily world.
Very few things could be gained there without probable inference and an
implicit if-then chain of reasoning.
So how could those abused minds keep going back to
existentialism for more abuse? Was the barrier to logical testing so high they
couldn't see over it? Or were the signals from the word "absurd" just
so strong they overpowered any impulse to examine its meaning?
I'm inclined to think it was the latter. Though all words
from a philosophy signal "deep," "absurd" signaled
"Parisian deep." Consider the era. As Tony Judt points out in trying
to explain the world's tolerance of Sartre's long support of Stalinism, every
signal from Paris in those early postwar years got a boost from its place of
origin. Romantic, sophisticated, daring, classy. See that in a lover and sure
you'll put up with some abuse.
The affair did come to an end, though. The New York Times
and The New York Review in the last thirty years either ignore absurdism or
condescend to it, as they do to existentialism. Does this mean that misuse of
"absurd" did no long-term harm?
It's very hard to know, but I see it in the minds of those who
were students in the later postwar years, the ones who took logic and even
mathematics to be a social construction, or took logic to be a male, European
construction, rather than a codification of reasoning standards.
I suppose there are always going to be students coming out
of humanities classes needing to be told that, no, logic is not humanly warm
and creative, it only tests what the warm, creative imagination has come up
with in the way of propositions. And I'm sure there are always going to be
retired professors like me unhappy with what their replacements are teaching.
And I'm sure they'll be quick to connect it with the evils they fought in their
own time. What I'm most sure of, though, is that the human mind won't quit
making connections, and that mine keeps making this one between what I heard
from students in the nineties and what their teachers heard in the sixties.
I'm obliged to ask if it could have been different? If Camus
had started things off with proper expressions might there have been in the
eighties and nineties a greater respect for logic? What expressions could he
have used?
Not "irrational universe." That has the same
defect as "absurd universe." Not "meaningless universe."
That would have gotten him tangled in the old ambiguity, "meaning" as
"significance" and "meaning" as "purpose." Though
he did occasionally use both words, neither is an advance on
"absurd." No, the appropriate expression, the expression that would
fit everything else he was saying, and would make sense to us, is
"indifferent universe." There's no sign in the universe of care for
human beings.
Why didn't he say "indifferent universe"? Was it
that that expression was just the one a Darwin-shocked Christian would use?
Camus was an atheist, advanced to the point of anti-Christian scorn, conversing
in circles where that scorn was common. He couldn't use the word that was
correct, right, maybe even perfect, without sending a signal he didn't want to
send, and looking like somebody he didn't want to look like: a Christian unable
to recover from his Darwin-shock.
There's a lesson here about personal signals. Give more than
two or three and, unless you are not the mess most of us are, some of them are
going to contradict others. I think the signals in the following passage
contradict the signal Camus sends with "absurd":
I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason
is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart.... The world itself, whose
single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could say
just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.
Camus can't lament the absence of a single meaning in the world without being seen to lament, along with everybody else who talks this way, the absence of God, the one being who gives a single meaning to the universe and a purpose to man. He's signaling Darwin-shock. And th at signals an immature atheist. Mature atheists have gotten over their shock, and speak more matter-of-factly.
Note: It will not be apparent now but Camus's (or his translator’s)
use of the word "absurd" was a misuse that should have been apparent
then. Dictionaries at the time
carried only "unreasonable" and its synonyms. Only later was the secondary
meaning, "manifesting the view that there is no order or value in
human life or in the universe," added — as we see now in Internet
dictionaries. More testimony to
the power of Camus and the existentialists.
No comments:
Post a Comment