QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?Living without appeal
Does life have a meaning?The absurd

Living without appeal

Albert Camus 1913 · 1960The world is silent: live lucidly, in revolt.
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What it claims

Neither suicide nor the leap answers the absurd. One must keep it alive, that is, live in revolt, without hope or renunciation.

Why

The absurd is a confrontation between the mind and the world; suicide, like the leap toward God, ends it instead of keeping it.

In short

"Living without appeal" is an argument by Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: the absurd). Its claim: Neither suicide nor the leap answers the absurd. One must keep it alive, that is, live in revolt, without hope or renunciation. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942
Valid with an implicit premise

Camus opens his essay with a question: if life has no meaning, should one leave it? He calls the absurd the face-off between the human mind, which asks for meaning, and a world that gives none. He examines two exits: suicide, and what he calls "philosophical suicide", the leap toward God or the eternal that he reads in Chestov and in Kierkegaard. His answer is not consolation: it is to hold this face-off, without hope and without renunciation. Kierkegaard died in 1855: it is Camus who answers him, not the other way round.

P1The absurd is a confrontation between the mind and the world, and it cannot be divided: to destroy one of its terms is to destroy the whole. To keep it is therefore to maintain the confrontation.
P2Suicide, like the leap toward God or the eternal, is a consent: it settles the absurd instead of keeping it, so it ends the confrontation.
P3 · implicit premiseWhoever holds the absurd to be true wants to preserve it: what he judges true must govern his conduct, without cheating.
Therefore neither suicide nor the leap answers the absurd. One must keep it alive, that is, live in revolt, without hope or renunciation.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where the absurd is a confrontation, suicide ends it, and the person does not seek to preserve it: nothing then rules out suicide.
Valid with P3, which Camus sets as a rule of method rather than proving it. Without P3, one can grant that the absurd is a confrontation and that suicide ends it, without concluding that suicide must be avoided: one could also decide not to preserve what one believes true, or to leave it.
Analogy. A chess player who finds his position difficult is not allowed to overturn the board and say he has won. If he really wants to play the game, he must keep the pieces as they are, even when he dislikes them.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

J
Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard's pseudonym), Postscript 1846 · attacks premise 2

Faith is not a rest that would remove the tension. For Climacus, it is the very contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and objective uncertainty: without risk, no faith, and if I could grasp God objectively, I would not believe. The leap therefore does not settle the divorce, it carries it to the end.

Camus replies
Camus
Camus answers, about Kierkegaard, that he does not maintain the equilibrium between the irrational of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, and does not respect the relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the feeling of absurdity.
The debate goes on (our summary) Kierkegaard could not answer Camus: he died in 1855. Camus reads him "beyond the pseudonyms" (§50), whereas Kierkegaard asked that the pseudonym be quoted, not himself. A note also says he is not examining Kierkegaard's philosophy: he borrows a theme to see whether its consequences fit his rules. Readers of Kierkegaard hold that the faith Climacus describes keeps the tension instead of calming it: that is the heart of the disagreement.
Pascal, Pensées 1670 · attacks the conclusion

One cannot stay neutral before God: "you must wager, you are embarked". If reason does not decide, living without appeal is already a wager, and the possible gain (infinite happiness) far outweighs the stake (a finite life).

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Camus in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus never names Pascal about the wager in The Myth of Sisyphus. He writes that the absurd man wants to live only with what he knows and bring in nothing that is not certain (§68), and he himself calls the choice of the absurd "the heartbreaking and marvellous wager" (§67). A note specifies that it is not the affirmation of God he challenges, but the logic that leads to it. The two sides disagree on what an honest choice under uncertainty is.
O
Objection: describing is not prescribing attacks premise 3

Even if the absurd is self-evident, a fact commands nothing. Why should it be "preserved" rather than ended, or forgotten in distraction? One more principle is needed, which nothing proves: "one must stay faithful to what one holds true".

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
We have not yet found a direct reply by Camus in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus sets this principle without proving it: "for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action" (§7). It is a demand of honesty, which one may refuse. Nine years later, in The Rebel, he himself judges that the absurd cannot serve as a rule of life: "to breathe is to judge", he writes, and the absurd supplies no values that would say whether one may kill. This leads him to revolt as the starting point of a shared value (see the next argument).
Master Changwu, in the Zhuangzi (ch. 2) attacks premise 3

A character in the Zhuangzi asks: how do I know that love of life is not a delusion, and that he who dreads to die is not a child who has lost the way and cannot find his home? In the same speech he adds that fools think they are awake, and that a great awakening might show this life to be a great dream. If what seems evident to us (clinging to life, refusing death) may be a dream, why should the confrontation Camus holds to be true be preserved at all costs? One could also learn to let go of it, without suicide and without God.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Camus in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus does not discuss Chinese thought in these texts. The passage doubts the love of life and the fear of death, not directly the need for meaning: this objection is a confrontation we construct, not a historical debate. It does touch a real point, since Camus defines the absurd as "consciousness and refusal of death" (§70) and holds that consenting to what wounds the mind ruins the absurd: "The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to" (§43). It remains to ask whether Taoist detachment is a consent of that kind, another "leap", or another way of living the same condition: the debate is open.