Many people, most perhaps, find Albert Camus’ philosophy bleak.
That’s alright, we all make mistakes. But more importantly, we’re all allowed our subjective takes on the things we subjectively consume. This implacable sovereignty each of us possesses on the contents of our own mind, seems to cause dissonance in some minds. That’s alright, we all make mistakes.
But certainly any intellectually honest survey of the impact of his work, the anecdotes of those who found sunshine in Camus’ bleak or, should suffice to show the folly of definitive, overarching, or in some cases- incredulous- commentaries on the rebellion that is Camus’ call-to-action.
Now most of those who read this will be blessed people, for we are born in the great and special subcontinent, Bhārata Māta. We are Brahman’s chosen people. Puruṣa, Prakṛti and the Holy Ātman (not the same as spirit). We’re graced by the beatitude of Dharma. Ah the follies we can see others wring, while our ancestors wrought a Culture Eternal. Don’t get us wrong- we will never actually, explicitly claim a Utopia. When we speak to you of happy grandmothers even at the pit of misery, we aren’t actually pretending no grandma suffered here ever. When we speak of the bleak, atomized societies of the West, it’s not that we think no human ever felt alone in India. We’re not ignorant that we quested for harmony so hard we did indeed kill the Sarasvati, and at least once dried up the Ganga (needed restart by Bhagiratha, remember?). So it would have to be the dissonance that others’ sovereignty over their own felt-experience brings in us, that would make us compare the body of work of 1 particular Frenchman (or anyman) to the accumulated wisdom and praxis of an entire continuing tradition. Yeah, I know, measure and proportion were not really our strongest suits. It’s why we are given more to the infinities of expression, to the aesthetic flowering of all arts, to maximum expression in every dimension. Is why we’re multi-coherent, a fractal maṇḍala. But you can read about that elsewhere. Continue here if you’re curious about that Frenchman.
So what is this bleak philosophy from just south of the isles, that creates so much tension in us? For one, Camus tells us that life is pain.
That’s alright. It’s word error, I know. But we can say “revealed” if we’re talking of things on our side, you see. Our great ṛṣis, the propounders of Sāṅkya, they “revealed” that existence is pain. The avatāra of Mahāviṣṇu, Gautam Buddha, he “perceived” how existence is suffering. Dukha.
South of the isles? There’s no dukha, there’s depression. So Camus is only allowed to “tell us” that life is pain. And put this way, that’s bleak indeed man.
We like this semantics? It’s fun? I’d rather move on to the pain, for looks like Camus and Buddha have already agreed that yeah, life be pain. You and I could follow our respective gurus and yet do quite the same.
The question that emerges- what do we do about it?
Shouldn’t be needed, saying this, but let’s say it anyway- Camus doesn’t ask you to pop some pills. He wont exhort you to explore your gender or sexuality, no. He doesn’t prop up an idealized notion of the individual, so individualized that it is cut off from family and community. He wasn’t born in the great subcontinent, Bhārata Mātā. He didn’t know that smiling grandma, but he did know a half-deaf melancholic mother. All this praxis and systems we have? He knew none of it. Bleak, yes. Camus’ own world was bleak. There, you’d be fortunate to die in old age, surrounded by a full family, rested at a generational home. It’d be a mighty happy death, if not bombed midway, that is.
A happy culture, a fullfilled praxis, we say, creates a happy person.
Yeah, so we’d understand what that bleak world creates. Not you. Not me. Not the happy Hindu son of glorious Culture Brahman’s chosen one. Someone else. Let’s take out that inter-cultural evaluation sheet and make all the notes we like, of what that soil lacks, why it produces at best almost-ṛṣis, never a full one. In the meantime, this someone else’s misery? Is misery just the same, someone has to feel it.
Born to his world, his culture, not ours, Camus deals with it a different way. He knows not to deny to people their felt-experience. Life is blessed! We are fortunate to be alive! But we are not even we! We are the same as the Eternal Truth! Brahman and his chosen peeps are all actually the same thing. Mahāviṣṇu naps atop Śeśanāga and has a dream, and you are him, experiencing the dream from within!
No, he does not say any of that. A culture different, a single man striking alone into the dark, with his inquiry and intellect, he sees the first big struggle as acceptance. Let us accept that this universe is bleak. That life is painful. a myth of sisyphus. To minds who don’t relate to that dreaming Brahman, who are too dumb to understand why your shraddha and bhakti is not the same as faith and belief, that what is reconfigured other than inside your head, that turns that idol to a murti, to sad people of all varieties anywhere, there is a often a rope at the end of such reassuring words.
Even without, they like Camus. He may be bleak, but he doesn’t pretend. He doesn’t ask them to be grateful for being alive, for simply being anointed a “privilege to breathe”. No one likes an imposer. People feel comfortable where they are accepted for what they are, how they are. They tend to feel there at home. For such people, and here’s my own anecdote- your happy culture can appear my own death noose. I know. I had two sisters die to this happy culture. Their mother melancholic forever hence. Maybe she should have gone to meet that anecdotal grandma.
What Camus asks you to do against this pain, against the absurdity he describes we find ourselves in, is to Rebel with a capital fucking R. “One must imagine sisyphus happy.” Atomized indeed, his world was. There, the individual fending for himself was name of the game. No community center to find apparent solace in, no family that apparently never oppressed you subverted you to the honour and needs of the clan. Not even the supreme peace that can descend, if you are born into the conditions just right for you, for you to achieve your own nirvana, at the bottom of the social hierarchy and qualia chain. You can’t even be a harijan, see. None of it.
His was a blueprint one man developed- ironically exhibiting the acceptance and self-redemption our famous grandmas have we claim- despite the lack of the cultural soil these grandmas operated within. And the blueprint was, fundamentally, for those like him. That’s one art nuance I can testify to. We write what we want to read. We craft what we need to consume. We deliver what we need, fundamentally, to easen our own pain. I thought you knew that too. We’re good people, we don’t judge a man working through his pain.
Have you ever written something, where the title carried the word “absurd,” or a variation of it? I have. This piece is one such writing too. We use this word for what we create, when our own mind doesn’t fully wrap around it. We speculate. We shout out what has been our gathering of this blessed experience of breath in breathe out till with the Supreme Brahman you are brought into yoga with again. Against the accumulated wisdom and praxis of a continuing tradition, is in fact a humble and candid act to label one’s works as The Absurds. Of course, Camus wasn’t making any comparisons. Those are ours, we make them, for some reason.
And now for the great laughable claim- laughable for you, my great claim. Camus’ isn’t a bleak philosophy. It’s not the dark tunnel you mayhaps think it is. Camus’ is the uplifting journey, the hero’s tale to redemption. His is the roar, the call-to-action, of Krishna upon the war’s advent. The rebellion he incites? It’s a rebellion of heal, no more pain. Should be easy to accept that, even if it worked on one person, never a culture it became.
Sure, he has his way. Provocatively he delivers this message. Go die, it almost appears he says, but here’s how I put it, the call to action. YOU have a choice- you the subjective experiencer of this thing called life. The center of the universe. The agent, the one who must do karma, follow dharma. Krishna said it to Arjuna.
Camus is no Krishna, but neither am I the Partha. Let Camus talk to me, it’s okay, since the message is the same. Inaction, indecisiveness, doubt- these they both disclaim.
And you, the ponderer of this absurd position, Camus says, bearing the burden of being rational creatures in an irrational world, must accept this absurdity and continue to love, laugh, live anyway. Rebel, flip off the universe. Show a middle finger to God. Camus din’t care, neither do I. If you’re offended, you shouldnt have read thus far to begin with. Camus’ krishna-esque positive engagement doesn’t stop there. He reminds us of that children’s soccer game- the ones they play each evening. Cricket here, hockey there. The names don’t matter, that’s semantics again. The children play, some days one set wins. Another day the other. Win, loss, it doesn’t matter. The children play, for the sake of play itself. Leela. Krishna kahe to Bhagavad Gita. Camus kahe toh message pheeka. Fair enough. Others like that juice.
Now, no doubt concessions are due. There’s no divinity in Camus’ world. you might be tempted to bracket him with Neeche, who declared God dead. Fair, but I see clear nuance. There are people agnostic on the matter of god. There are others, like me, agnostic to her salience. We don’t care, we gotta do our own ting down hea anyway. Ours is a cultivated apathy to god.
There’s none of that redemptive force we know our culture doth contain. And yes, let’s right away call colonized those that question how your divinity different to desert divinity. How your surrender to ma different to their love Jesus. Let us waste not our time for such idiots. Colonized the lot of them. We have these people among us, true sādhakas they are I tell you. They call themselves Aghoras. They have ritual and performative practices that seem to push the boundaries of society. The Aghoras laugh and play, it’s all leela after all- a madness- and what a beautiful culture it is that has space for them. This culture, insofar as is mine as well, points no fingers at a lonely frenchman when he too sees the Absurd. Hold it not against him that he isn’t among the Aghoras. He’s there, atomized, alone, but bearing, suffering, writing and toiling and actually bringing out the redeeming as the output of his pain. You see his yajña, the ghṛta he produces. What’s the meaning of dharma again?