A Sociobiological take on Absurdism

Albert Camus

According to Wikipedia:

"Absurdism is the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd. ... An important aspect of absurdism is that the absurd is not limited to particular situations but encompasses life as a whole. ... An important component of the absurd on the practical level concerns the seriousness people bring toward life. This seriousness is reflected in many different attitudes and areas, for example, concerning fame, pleasure, justice, knowledge, or survival, both in regard to ourselves as well as in regard to others. 

But there seems to be a discrepancy between how serious we take our lives and the lives of others on the one hand, and how arbitrary they and the world at large seem to be on the other hand. The collision between these two sides can be defined as the absurd. This is perhaps best exemplified, for example, when the agent is seriously engaged in choosing between arbitrary options, none of which truly matters."

Yes, the universe doesn't care.

So what should the Absurdist do in a universe without meaning? According to Camus, "there are three possible responses to absurdism: suicide, religious belief, or revolting against the absurd."

Camus prefers option 3, although according to his own criteria this also makes no sense.

---

Philosophers tie themselves in knots because they operate only in the realm of ideas. When a problem is intractable, it invariably means that we've reached the limits of the paradigm itself. 

Like those irremovable infinities in physics.

A better approach is to generalise: is life absurd to a housefly? To ask the question seems to involve a category error (perhaps houseflies don't have elaborated intuitions regarding the absurdity of existence?). 

Bear with me.

In a natural sciences paradigm, houseflies are an instance of a biological system which exploits free energy - prevalent on Earth - to sustain a Darwinian process of self-replication. Living things are what you may well get in physics given the boundary conditions on this planet. 

So you might as well - or as uselessly - ask whether the universe itself is absurd. Good luck with that, as you ponder something from nothing.

Absurdism only becomes real when human beings - who, as articulate social mammals, readily self-understand as purposeful, causal and meaning-driven - apply this essential framework of social life to the ultimate underpinnings of what it is to be human.

When framed like this, Absurdism is the pessimistic pseudo-answer to the pseudo-question: "What is the Meaning of Life?".

The answer is that the whole concept of "meaning" (= purpose) is in the end ungrounded, and thus unanswerable. The better question is to ask why we carry on doing what we do, to which the answer is that our rationality is the slave to our desires, which in a Darwinian sense are optimised for the survival of our descendants (and hence, usually, ourselves). 

If there were any Absurdists who cared to take the suicide route, then the genes which encoded such excessive rationalism were lost to the gene pool.

---

Why am I reading Camus ('The Plague')? 

Because the hero of Jerry Pournelle's military-SF book "Prince of Mercenaries" (John Christian Falkenberg) recommends it to the main POV character, Prince Lysander of Sparta. 

Good advice.

---

Postscript (20th July 2022)

I finished The Plague and was struck both by its immersion in the plague-ridden city of Oran - the compelling reactions and sentiments of the unfortunate inhabitants - and the conceptual responses of the author's main protagonists.

In the presence of arbitrary death, the priest, Father Paneloux, asserts an 'all-or-nothing' Christian faith, a faith without reason or understanding; the traveller, Tarrou, is a disillusioned left-wing activist and seems to have reconciled himself to an abstract humanism based on 'sympathy' (rather Buddhist, I thought); the hero, Dr. Rieux, seems to put his trust not so much in grand abstractions as in the individual: the conscious, feeling personality to be protected from suffering and death.

If Absurdism is the rebuttal of all grand schemes for humanity, perhaps Dr Rieux's way is best, grounded as it is in the specifics of being human that predate knowledge, memory or competencies: the raw experience of waking up in the morning without even knowing where or who you are ... but knowing nevertheless that you are. 

Being human may be absurd, but we are human - that is our point of departure, not the standpoint of the cold universe. That I think is Camus's philosophy here: our values come from our emotions, not our intellects.