Meditation on Camus

 

   It has taken me a long time to discover what philosophy is. It is what I might now call the hunger for reality. Not for knowledge in the narrow sense, not for theories or systems, but for something more.

     Over time, I’ve come to think of reason not as a faculty of calculation or detachment, but as our capacity to respond to reality in all its forms. That includes logic and clarity, but also receptivity, discernment, reverence. I no longer believe in the fiction of neutral reason. There is no view from nowhere. Every position, every conviction, every doubt arises from a way of being in the world, shaped by a particular life, a history, a mood. That does not make truth relative. It makes truth demanding, something we must be formed to receive. My convictions about the authority of grief, the reality of love, the good that breaks through even in sorrow. . . are not born of argument alone. They are tried and tested. Not by the reductionists, who dismiss such things from the outset, but by those whose despair or clarity leads them in another direction. Macbeth, with his deadened soul. Hamlet, suspended between being and non-being. Ivan Karamazov, who sees too clearly to believe in a reconciled world. Camus, who chooses revolt over meaning. I take these not as errors but as serious interlocutors, philosophical companions in the truest sense. They offer visions of reality as fully earned as I pray my own is.

     And this, too, is part of what philosophy is: the encounter with other ways of seeing, not to defeat them, but to test whether what I see can hold its shape when pressed against theirs. If my convictions were sentimental, they would collapse. If not, they deepen. Not through logical defense alone, but through fidelity to what has shown itself, what I have suffered, what joy I have known; in the people I have hurt, in the eyes of my children, and in the starry heaven that so moved Kant.

     Philosophy is not a method for securing certainty. It is a way of attending to what has been revealed, remaining vulnerable to it, allowing it to shape you. There is no clean foundation. Only entry points into the circle of meaning – love, joy, grief, hope, remorse, faith. One must begin somewhere. What matters is not where, but whether one remains faithful to reality as it continues to unfold. And so I go on thinking, not to solve, but to attend more deeply. I go on because the love that called me into this world has not yet said its last word. 

. . .

      It is not as though I deny the absurd. I see it too. I think people are confused who draw such conclusions about the world from metaphysical arguments like ‘nothing is real that can’t be in principle shown by physics’; my only response would be to show the error in reasoning. Things like that don't touch me directly; only indirectly thorough their cultural power and the effects of that power. But to believe the world is absurd or horrible because a bomb has killed everyone in your family is something else entirely. The brokenness, the seeming indifference of the world to our deepest hopes. The suffering of innocents. The fleetingness of joy. The cruel finality of death. I see all of this, and do not look away. I understand why Camus wrote that the absurd is born from the collision between the longing for meaning and the silence of the universe. I know that silence too.  I just cannot stop there.

      I have also known the experience of grief (not as a private psychological event, but as a revelation). I have seen in the grief of a father for his dead son not simply the collapse of personal hopes but the tearing open of a deeper truth: that the child mattered. That his life was not a contingency or a trick of nature or a projection of meaning onto an empty canvas. He was good. His life was good. The grief bore witness to that.

      The same with love. Not the cheap romanticism that passes for love in popular culture, but the love that endures, that protects, that forgives, that sees the beloved in their weakness and still says: it is good that you exist. It is easier to give such love, rare as that is, than to receive it. This, too, seems to me not a self-made illusion, but a response to something real. Something given.

      Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I can admire that in a way. There is nobility in refusing false hope, in carrying the burden of life with open eyes. But it still seems to me a kind of resignation. It is a defiance that presupposes the meaninglessness it then bravely accepts. It does not seem to me that Sisyphus’s joy could ever compare to the joy of a parent watching their newborn child sleep, or of a penitent receiving forgiveness, or of someone who feels, for the first time in a long time, that they are not alone. I do not deny the darkness. But I do not believe the darkness has the last word.

     And so I return to my central conviction, the one that keeps recurring: that our deepest responses – our response to birth, to death, to love, to beauty, to evil – are not distractions from reality but encounters with it. If these responses are not delusions, then Being is not empty. Then love is not a trick. Then hope is not madness.

     This does not mean I have certainty. Not knowledge in the Cartesian or Kantian sense, but a kind of trust. Not in myself, but in what is shown, if I am open enough to receive it. It is a form of being true to the Earth, as Nietzsche wanted us to be. 

      Camus challenges me as do the great tragic figures like Macbeth, Hamlet, Ivan Karamazov. They represent real possibilities. I do not sweep them aside. But I cannot live in their world. And the reason is not wishful thinking, but being true to experience.