When Albert Camus faces one of the most pressing and controversial questions of philosophy, the point of living, his aversion to contradiction drives him from being indifferent to suicide. He juxtaposes human beings and the world in an effort to explain the pursuit of the meaning of life. For Camus, we confront existence and demand of it our meaning, our significance in living. But this, he says, is absurd, for despite our repeated questioning, the world answers only with indifference to our existential struggle. Endlessly we pursue an understanding of the meaning of life, yet find no ultimate answer. And upon seeing the absurdity of our condition, the Sisyphean nature of human existence, Camus concedes that some people might resign themselves to suicide. And so he creates an argument to assuage those distraught with nihilism.

The absurd condition is within the human, not out in the world, he says. And so to commit suicide (or to kill someone else) in reaction to the absurdity is to remove the absurd condition in a simultaneous affirmation and denial of its existence. With the exception of the Rebel, the simultaneous affirmation and denial of our condition is a contradiction, and avoiding contradiction is reason enough to perpetuate the absurd condition, rather than eliminate it. Further, we can find joy in being like Sisyphus through the ethic of quantity, Don Juanism, where we find happiness in life by choosing to eternally roll the boulder up the mountain. We can learn to enjoy the process of experiencing the absurdity over and over again.

In judging human beings to be something fundamentally distinct from the natural world, we create a juxtaposition similar to the one Camus uses to begin his explanation of the absurd condition. Since the European Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of modern science, we tend to be especially confident in our sense of superiority over nature. We feel that humans are over and above the rest of the ecosphere. And so we go about our business, consuming the natural world to an unprecedented extent to serve the purpose of progress.

In doing this, we deny our connection to the ecosphere by acting in such a way that undermines the life-enabling conditions of the planet. Yet we simultaneously affirm our ultimate unity with nature by demonstrating our dependence on its resources – an ecologically absurd condition. Thus we arrive at a contradiction similar to Camus’; our current behavior is a simultaneous affirmation and denial of our utter connectivity to the Earth, and we should strive to avoid contradiction. We should be sure that our pursuit of progress, of meaning, does not undermine the very environmental premises of our existence. Should progress be seen as Sisyphus’ boulder, the pursuit cannot be undertaken at the expense of the mountain. Our pursuit, by the ultimate oneness of human beings and nature, is inevitably bound up in the fate of the ecosphere. So too should be our sense of meaning in life. Is this not just cause for a revision of the classical idea of progress?

JM Kincaid