Faced with a ridiculous world, what should we do? ｜ Epidemic Diary 04

Because of this sweeping epidemic, many people think of Camus' "The Plague". During this time, I was also thinking about this novel, but what came to my mind more was all the revelation that Camus brought me. This article hopes to connect Camus' other works to his life and tell me some of my feelings.

Kierkegaard's book "The Stages of the Road of Life" has always been a name I like very much. If Camus's life is divided into stages, he probably created three eras of his own: the absurd The age, the age of rebellion, and the age of freedom.

The Plague, which frequently reminds us of this period, belongs to Camus' second era, while the more well-known "The Outsider" and "The Myth of Sisyphus" belong to the first era.

Many times when we think of Camus, we think of the absurd, the alienation and powerlessness of the outsiders Mosol and Sisyphus, but that is not all of Camus.

Let me start with Camus' first absurd era.

In the article "Give You the History and Sunset of a City", I also quoted Camus' recollection of his early life:

"I was born at the beginning of the First World War. A little longer, the crisis of 1929; Hitler's persecution at the age of twenty. Then the Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Munich Agreement. These are what we teach Basics. Then World War II, defeat, and Hitler ravaging our homeland."

"Growing up in a world like this, what do we believe? No. Nothing but the stubborn denial that we were forced to live in in the first place. The world we claim to live in is absurd, with nowhere to hide. world."

Everything that happened in his early years, the history of Algeria and the sun, Hitler's persecution, the Ethiopian war, the Spanish Civil War, the Munich Agreement, the Second World War, the occupied country, the ravaged homeland, made Camus feel nothing else, Only incomprehensible absurdity.

Here, what Camus calls absurdity is not metaphysical, but the absurdity he feels is the real situation of catastrophe in this world.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he explained the absurd. The absurd is not a thing, but a relationship, a relationship between man and this bad world. Without people, or without the world, or without both, there can be no absurdity.

It is precisely the coexistence of people and the world, and the world in which Camus lives is so unbelievably bad. Therefore, the absurd is born between man and the world, and seems to be the whole relationship between man and the world.

Therefore, in this extremely bad era, Camus is confused, painful, and then alienated, escaped, and is "a stubborn denial forced to be in it". So in such absurd times, he has written "Caligula", "The Outsider" and "The Myth of Sisyphus".

In these three books, Camus explores almost all the possible situations that humans can face alone.

Caligula is a strong man, an emperor of nothingness, and a conqueror who cannot resist fate; the outsider Mosol is a weak man, a little man at the mercy of fate, he does not care about the death of his mother, the meaninglessness of his work, and the manslaughter. It doesn't matter if he is sentenced to death for a person, he is so alienated that he can only ignore everything and become an outsider in this world and even his own life.

In Camus's only theoretical work, The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus becomes a complex. His ultimate solution can only be to despise the judgment of the gods and use despised will to transcend fate. , to despise the punishment of the gods, and to assume that he is happy because the "struggle up the mountain" is enough to fill his heart.

To be honest, this is also some of my mentality in the previous years, but it also misunderstood Camus, intentionally or not.

It seems that Camus described a helpless and useless human condition, and both Caligula and Mosol said goodbye to the absurd with death (as I said before, the absurd is the relationship between man and the world, and once the man is gone, the absurd will naturally disappear. ), Sisyphus endlessly endures and despises the absurd (and this answer is clearly unsatisfactory), and then it's all over, this is the world we can't change, so be it.

Is it feasible and desirable to end absurd relationships with human death? Of course not.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus opposed both suicide to end the absurd, and Kierkegaard, Jaspers and others used a "leap of faith" to end the absurd - Kierke Gower believes that where reason cannot reach the truth of the world, man can only complete the leap to the belief in God. And this, in Camus' view, is no different from suicide. In his discourse, this leap of faith is rather a spiritual suicide (I think Camus is not against Christianity, but against a jump).

But what else can we do?

In that book, Camus offers several unsatisfactory solutions, be it the life of Don Juan, or the life of the theatre (that is, being a theatre actor), or else, be the conqueror Let's live... But in fact, the 29-year-old Camus still can't provide an answer to his own satisfaction.

It will take ten years for a new answer to emerge.

Thus, in the following ten years, Camus created his own new era, "the era of rebellion".

After writing the "Absurd Trilogy," Camus said, "The absurd ends, and freedom begins"—reading this sentence, we have to remind ourselves that this is the beginning of freedom, not freedom itself.

It was from 1941 to 1951, and "The Plague" was in it, and it became the most worthy of interpretation and the most enlightening work.

During that time Camus wrote "Misunderstanding," "The Plague," and "Rebel," the first a play, the second a novel, and the third an essay.

"Misunderstanding" may still follow some of the characteristics of the absurd times, but Camus believes that this is "not completely negative", what he wants to say is, "happiness is not everything, people still have responsibility."

This idea then came to "The Plague". The "revolt" in Camus's sense really begins at this time. The boring city of Oran, hit by the plague, and the crowds after the lockdown is largely an allegory, a metaphor for the 200 million Europeans in the underground anti-German movement in Paris.

This story is a story of rebellion against the "fate of the plague" and against the world of the absurd - the absurd here is not purely metaphysical, it is a real catastrophe.

And the protagonists of the stories in this book are no longer isolated and helpless like Caligula, Mosol or Sisyphus, standing alone, either not resisting or only despising, everyone is atomically alienated , do not know each other's existence.

In "The Plague", the protagonists fight against the fate of the plague together under the overall disaster. The common destiny made Doctor Lille, Father Panaru and others together (even the reporter Rambert, who had been planning to escape from the city at first), united and rescued the world from the common level of body and mind.

Because, "Whether you like it or not, we are allies, sharing the fate of death and disease and fighting against it. Not even God can separate us now."

I still have the same feeling when I reread this novel - this rebellion against the plague of fate, there is no blood boiling, no belief in victory, not even a plot of miracles, the plague dissipates by itself - scattered to the human eye The place, hidden in the world where humans thought they were victorious, will come back one day. The people in the story have more of a responsibility of "Must be so? Must be so!" - this seems to correspond to the sentence, "Happiness is not everything, people still have responsibilities".

I would be inclined to say that what Camus is trying to say here is that "personal happiness is not everything, man also has responsibilities".

Because people are not only private and atomic, but also public and city-state.

The master Kil died at the end, he did not see the day when the plague dissipated, but he made his own choice and rebelled against the plague's fate. And his resistance made him see the resistance of others. Just as others saw his resistance, these rebels were united at the level of mind and action.

Therefore, in the face of absurdity, Camus already had his own answer in The Plague.

In his later "Rebel", he roughly also wanted to say that in absurd experiences, absurd suffering is personal. Everyone is in a world where they can't see each other, suffering from the absurdity of the world, isolated and helpless. The emergence of resistance made us realize that "pain is collective, and this is our common experience."

Using Descartes' "I think, therefore I am", Camus believes that in our daily ordinary life, an individual's resistance is similar to "I think", and a "revolt" is a proof of existence. , which is our initial salient fact.

And when this fact goes further, it will lead to another fact. We see the other party's resistance because of our resistance. We are no longer atomized lonely individuals. It establishes the first common value in all people: I Resist, so we exist.

After writing "Rebel," Camus asked himself, "Will the world be free?"

Obviously not, he is still on his way. Even though World War II is over, what he is about to face is a new absurdity and a new resistance.

However, when the "era of freedom" he was trying to create at the end of his life had not yet had the final answer (perhaps there will never be a final answer?), Camus carried his last posthumous manuscript "The First Personal", died suddenly in a car accident.

The car accident resembled his original novel. Because of the publication of a new book last year, Camus' death has also become a huge mystery. Did he die in an accident or in a KGB conspiracy? This death mystery many years later has made both metaphysical and metaphysical absurdity at the same time.

Camus is not Kafka.

After writing about nihility, alienation and alienation, he wrote about resistance and freedom, about the possibility and responsibility of human union, and deeply embraced the humanity of this world. Perhaps this is why Susan Sontag thinks that, of all modernist novels, only Camus can read love for humanity. His opposition to suicide in any form (spiritual and physical) has rekindled the light of humanitarianism and the deep predicament of us now.

These are what Camus brought to me during this pandemic. Each of us, has stages of our own path in life, and at this moment we are stuck, like Mothor, like Sisyphus. But remember what Camus' life practice tells us.

Was Camus finally free? I have no idea. I think he may have the answer to tell the world in the future. But he has told us enough.

To be in the midst of the pervasive absurdity, of nothingness, of alienation, of alienation, is spiritual suicide, and we have to live beyond the absurdity.

(The fourth chapter of the diary in the epidemic)