The Artlives Group discussed the issues of Camus and the Absurd Man online and enclosed are some of the excerpts from the discussion:

From: Karin Doleske
To: artlives@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: [artlives] Sisyphus
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I have some thoughts which may or may not tie in to your own on the matter. What comes to mind also is the operation of that essay as a work of art. That is, the way it operates as a distancing/detaching method (could call it strategy but would that be reading too much into Camus' awareness?) which enables the artist to deal with his/the larger field of "emotional noise" of that which he's trying to make sense of.

To be able to make a work of art at all seems, to me, is both a result and a process. I'm reminded of the actor's studio way of working: of "being in the moment," but that curious sort of just a breath separate from "being the moment." From my limited experience with the method, training develops so that the actor becomes able to both be in the emotion and a sort of other awareness/ having possession and use of it at the same time.

Pyschologically, myth as functioning as a way to step back from emotional concerns and to look at the operation of what's going on, enables understanding and transcendence, that is finding purpose, and meaning, and reasons to keep on going. In may ways Camus had an exquisitely torturous enterprise: answering old questions in some new way- old gods being profoundly dead on many levels - to find yet another reason, something else, to validate life over death. (This is not to denigrate what he was going through, or the suffering of the culture at large.) He appeared to be using myth quite consciously (but for that purpose?)and achieved that effect/affect in himself.

His statements: Homer saying Sysyphus was wise and prudent, the "other tradition" calling him a highwayman, and then his own position, "I see no contradiction in this." - Brings to mind Blake's, "...catch their shrieks in cups of gold." (His statements may be an indication that he was conscious of his artistic operations.)

Other thoughts: He did not further question his resultant "owned" (new? rejuvenated?) psyche position, or judge it. He did find it sufficient, but did not question whether "sufficient" was enough, good enough, all he/humankind was capeable of. He stopped where he stopped in the line of inquiry. I read into it an indication of the profoundness of the suffering he was engaged with and engaging, but now "reading into" and "reading" becomes a line of inquiry. I'm at the point where a list of questions becomes my concern, so I'll stop. (A"postmodern" orientation brought to the work!) Regards, Karin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Heller" taurus29@vtlink.net
To: artlives@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: [artlives] Sisyphus

Karin, hello! About Camus: he is always now referred to as an 'existential'. I prefer to accept his rejection of the label. He was a thinker, and a writer above all, he had a voice. Another thing which is often forgotten is that he was a passionate man--passionately fighting the terrors, the injustices, and passionately holding onto the joy of living, of feeling the sun. The paradox he defined so well is the possibility of finding meaning in life, while first rejecting the old time religion and then accepting the result of that, namely the meaninglessness in the absence of the god.

There is no question now that Camus, at the end of his life, was returning to some kind of concept of the divine. This is crucial, not so much because it denies much of his thought, but because it is the recognition that it is impossible to live without ultimate meanings. Being a cork in the middle of an ocean is not living. It is, maybe, existing, but it is not living. So Camus becomes a speculation. I would say that he was way ahead of his time, and that both his thought and his dilemna are applicable to today's circumstances. Peter

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Haber" jhaber@haberarts.com
To: artlives@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 3:11 PM
Subject: [artlives] Camus.

Alison's seminar notes are a remarkable summary. I think they're accurate, concise, and clear. Karin's range of insights are very strong indeed.

I guess my first encounter with modern fiction and with philosophy were with Existentialism (Kierkegaard's moving story of Abraham, much of Camus, Sartre's "Les Jeux Sont Faits"). It's natural going to high school in the 1960s and early 1970s: you get exposed in school to a previous generation's cutting edge. It moved me a lot -- in part because it seemed to be about life, death, and individual responsibility (good themes for a teenager), in part because I felt challenged by something I knew I didn't really understand.

In time, I soured on Kierkegaard and Camus because, even with the latter, I felt an overlay of religous debates that didn't mean much to me. Not having grown up with religion, I didn't EXPECT to find meaning or value from above or in a teleological sense, so I didn't feel the ground cut out from under me in his way. In no small part, I am sure we're in agreement: just as he prefers what he calls value to meaning, I feel more comfortable talking about right and wrong, good and bad, than good and evil. I still just this month in writing about Anthony Blunt tried to bring his wrongs down to earth, away from an incarnation of an Other, apart from our own experiences and responsibility.

At the same time, and for almost the same reason, I grew to feel something disembodied in Camus. I know I've whined here that existential anxiety feels like a poor excuse for analyzing real human anxieties and neuroses, caused by personal and social experience. Even suicide is an act, not a contrast to a life of action: for most, it is an attemp to create meaning, to declare one's relationship to specific evils, perhaps even telling oneself one's helping others by sparing them one's burdensom existence. I wasn't joking in saying that rolling a ball uphill feels like the words of a writer apart from an ordinary social context of epxerience and doesn't make sense to me in the sense of continuing: if we do little or nothing, we pretty much continue. The real problem for most is to go to work knowing it'll be just as hostile an environment and just as far from done the next day. And then the real problem is knowing not how to continue but when to quit -- or to make a revolution. I think that artists know about that dilemna, too!

I got back to Existentialism after college, with my first encounter with Heidegger, then hitting Sartre big time (Being and Nothingness; "Les Mots," which was my model for my own online autobiography, and the social-novel trilogy), and finally Beauvoir. I saw the movement in terms both of more traditional philosophical problems (the nature of knowledge and experience) and as clearing ground for the mind to discover its connection to others -- and so to politics, whether of class, of nations, or of gender. I can see it now apart from coffee-house anxieties of the 1960s, themselves more socially dependent than they knew, what with the age of the bomb, the Cold War, and the suburban commuter. So Camus's philosophy still makes me squirm, but I want very soon to reread "La Peste," since it's about someone's responsibility for others in a situation where one isn't the center of things and can't "solve" the problem so much as live with it ethically. I'll see. Thanks for listening! John