“Stayin alive” plays on as Moriarty waits on the rooftop
for the final chapter with Sherlock and you can’t help but break into applause
for BBC’s TV series Sherlock, the modern take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s epic.
For me, Professor Moriarty’s reincarnation in the Facebook generation is a
digression from a crooked genius in the original to an Absurdist in motion.
While Moriarty has the certainty of his inevitable death on the rooftop
sequence, he only reflects the boredom his life has been thrust into dealing
with the ordinary and in creating distractions to amuse him, Sherlock Holmes
being the most recent one. Moriarty listening to Bee Gees while calling
Sherlock an eternal naïve for not catching the binary translation of Bach’s
tune is a near about Absurdist and certainly as close as this generation can
witness one.
Mersault, the protagonist of The Stranger by Albert Camus
is a character that confuses you with the decision of what sort of emotions to
invest in it. Is it empathy or objectivity or distaste for a total display of
callousness and a hardened matter –of- fact approach to life? You are left
undecided throughout and that is the whole symbolism Camus wants to exhibit for
Absurdism and that’s exactly where the novel becomes an
existentialist/absurdist tour de force.
While the source of all philosophical thought is wonder (Aristotle’s
inference), Absurdism is distinct for its almost mathematical approach and the
fact that it starts with the death of all philosophies. The whole idea of
Absurdism centers on the confrontation or constant opposition between two
ideals- man’s incessant desire to find a meaning and significance to his life
and the universe that is silent, cold and indifferent to a single man in larger
scheme of things and whose existence is there without any inherent meaning. Thus,
while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life's purpose,
Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and
the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence
itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This
paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and
the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the
absurd.
Albert Camus extends the idea in The Myth of Sisyphus “There
is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding
whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in
philosophy. All other questions follow from that”.
What then is Camus's reply to his question about whether
or not to commit suicide? What is the Camusean alternative to
suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in
“revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Full
consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit,
and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus's answers. This is
how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials, life's
pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits. In
response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and
active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to
reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to
speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.
They are inseparable” .
It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily
to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting
human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot
help wishing to go beyond what is possible. For Camus, happiness
includes living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with tragic
(due to lack of inherent meaning), lucid, and defiant consciousness, sense of
limits, bitterness, determination to keep on, and refusal of any form of consolation. Camus is
also similar in this to Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes to
life,” and live as completely as possible at every moment. Nietzsche's point
was that to be wholly alive means being as aware of the negative as of the
positive, feeling pain, not shunning any experience, and embracing life “even
in its strangest and hardest problems.
Now, returning to where I started: - rendering an
absurdist theme to Shelock’s chief villain may or may not be accurate but
definitely is a constructed meaning. Life, an abstract entity like fiction can
also be rendered a constructed meaning but claims of a divine purpose or cosmic
significance are nothing but a mere escape. Absurdism is one of the most
attractive school of thought and resembles closely to Existentialism and
Nihilism in its contents but divert significantly at the finer points. Here’s
avery helpful chart I found: -
Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of
tensions and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are
in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we avoid trying
to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can never successfully purge
ourselves of the impulses that threaten to wreak havoc with our lives. Camus's
philosophy, if it has a single message, is that we should learn to tolerate,
indeed embrace the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.
