Life, Meaning, Rebellion, and Art

To say yes to the world, to reproduce it, is simultaneously to re-create the world and oneself, to become the great artist, the creator.

—Albert Camus

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My first encounter with Albert Camus’s writing was in high school. Someone, likely with good intentions but also an immensely overestimated sense of the philosophical capacities of teenage brains, made the lamentable choice of selecting The Stranger as required reading for a literature class. I read it reluctantly. I did not find it interesting. It made me uneasy for reasons I could not explain then and would not understand (or have the capacity to understand) until many years after.

My second encounter with Camus’s writing occurred several years later, during my (involuntary) military conscription. This time, it was The Myth of Sisyphus. I found the book, tattered and torn, in a mobile library during one of my deployments. I picked it for no real reason other than that at the time immersing myself in a book—any book—was a welcome and necessary (to me) distraction from the reality of military life. I still lacked much of the philosophical foundation needed to fully grasp the book’s depth, but, unlike The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus moved me profoundly.

By chance, a constellation of circumstances brought The Myth of Sisyphus into my life at a critical moment. I was a young person disguised as a soldier, caught in a conflict I wanted no part in, a sensitive pacifist thrown into a world of senseless violence, a freethinker forced into a regimen of strict, irrational, unthinking discipline. Mired in deep, relentless depression, I felt I had no reason to believe that life—even after my so-called “service”—had much for me to look forward to.

I waited until 2am to open The Myth of Sisyphus as I began a solitary four-hour shift atop a remote guard tower, hoping to distract myself from the thoughts that plagued my mind. The opposite happened—thankfully. At the very beginning of the first page, Camus’s words eerily echoed my thoughts: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

There have been few times in my life when I came close to entertaining the possibility that the universe may be speaking to me. That was perhaps the first and most jarring of these. I had to keep reading.

Like most naïve young people, I believed then that somewhere “out there,” waiting to be discovered, there was an answer to the perennial question, “what is the meaning of life?” I also believed—optimist that I was, or as close to it as I got—that this answer, whatever it may be, would amount to a reason for living—a decisive, unambiguous “affirmation of life” as Nietzsche called it.

A few paragraphs later, eeriness returned. As if reading my mind from beyond the grave, Camus again put words to my thoughts:

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living . . . I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it?

Meaning in life may take many forms and come in different degrees but ultimately amounts to this: feeling that life is worth living— that life makes sense and that its rewards outweigh its drawbacks: that there is reason to go on living beyond just fear of dying.

As human beings who measure the worth of our lives in terms of meaning, it makes sense that we ask such questions as, “what is the meaning of life?” But this is also our error, and the reason that, despite many thousands of years of searching, nobody has yet come up with a definitive, universal answer.

The error lies in two assumptions underlying the question: 1) The assumption that there is a definitive, objective answer out there in the world for us to find, and 2) The assumption that this answer is the same for every person in every circumstance. Both assumptions are (at least based on our inability so far to find an answer) incorrect, rendering the question “what is the meaning of life” (ironically) meaningless.

All our attempts to find objective meaning for our lives out in the world have so far led to the same outcome: silence. Camus referred to this awkward predicament—feeling impelled to seek meaning in a meaningless world—as “the absurd.” In is words: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

In light of our absurd predicament, Camus’s opening question becomes starkly poignant: If the world we live in is (so far as we can tell) devoid of meaning, and if meaning is an essential condition for life to be worth living, then can we conclude that life is not worth living? Camus’s answer: absolutely not. That is the wrong conclusion.

There may not be such a thing as the (objective) meaning of life, but there can absolutely be such a thing as (subjective) meaning in life.

There are three ways we may confront the absurdity of our condition, according to Camus. The first two are outright wrong: we may choose to end our lives, or we may choose to find meaning in irrational beliefs (which Camus termed “philosophical suicide”).

The third way—the right way—is to acknowledge and admit the absurdity of our existence rather than to deny it. Then, in full acceptance of the absurd, rebel against it—assert our own meaning rather than persist in the false hope of finding meaning in the world.

How do we rebel against the meaninglessness of the world? By using our creative powers to create our own subjectively meaningful worlds—not to replace or deny the real world, but to add our own meanings into it. One way to do so is by becoming creative artists.

In his later book, The Rebel, Camus explained how making creative art can be an act of rebellion—an act of asserting subjective meaning against an objectively meaningless world. “Artistic creation,” he wrote, “is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.”

Put another way, works of art that rebel against the meaninglessness of the world must do two things: reject aspects of reality that detract from our sense of meaning, and elevate aspects of reality that elevate our sense of meaning.

Note that rejecting the “absurdity” of our condition is not the same as denying the truth of this condition—that the objective world really is devoid of meaning. If we deny that the world is meaningless, then we’ll have nothing to rebel against. Rebellion involves resisting—pushing against, not denying the existence of—real forces and conditions we wish to transcend and free ourselves of.

To be a creator is to bring new things into existence: in this case, new worlds—personally meaningful worlds. As Camus put it, “The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.”

A rebellious work of art, therefore, must strike a balance between realism and abstraction. It must not be entirely realistic—it must reject parts of reality that lack or detract from meaning. It must also not be entirely abstract, which would eliminate all reality, including aspects of it that are meaningful and that elevate life. In Camus’ words:

By the treatment that the artist imposes on reality, he declares the intensity of his rejection. But what he retains of reality in the universe that he creates reveals the degree of consent that he gives to at least one part of reality—which he draws from the shadows of evolution to bring it to the light of creation. In the final analysis, if the rejection is total, reality is then completely banished and the result is a purely formal work. If, on the other hand, the artist chooses, for reasons often unconnected with art, to exalt crude reality, the result is then realism. In the first case the primitive creative impulse in which rebellion and consent, affirmation and negation are closely allied is adulterated to the advantage of rejection. It then represents formal escapism, of which our period has furnished so many examples and of which the nihilist origin is quite evident. In the second case the artist claims to give the world unity by withdrawing from it all privileged perspectives. In this sense, he confesses his need for unity, even a degraded form of unity. But he also renounces the first requirement of artistic creation. To deny the relative freedom of the creative mind more forcibly, he affirms the immediate totality of the world. The act of creation denies itself in both these kinds of work.

To Camus’s credit, he realized his comments may require some qualification specific to the medium of photography. Photographs, even when ostensibly purely realistic, still may express an artist’s rebellion—rejection of certain aspects of reality, and elevation of others. Photographers may do so by way of their choice of composition: by their deliberate choices about what to include in and what to exclude from a photograph. To wit, Camus made this (to my knowledge, his only reference to photography in any of his writings) comment in The Rebel:

Even the very best photographs do not represent reality; they result from an act of selection and impose a limit on something that has none.

The balance that creative artists—each in their own way—choose to strike between pure realism and complete abstraction (formalism), is what Camus refers to as the artist’s style. As he put is:

The realist artist and the formal artist try to find unity where it does not exist, in reality in its crudest state, or in imaginative creation which wants to abolish all reality. On the contrary, unity in art appears at the limit of the transformation that the artist imposes on reality. It cannot dispense with either. This correction which the artist imposes by his language and by a redistribution of elements derived from reality is called style and gives the re-created universe its unity and its boundaries. It attempts, in the work of every rebel, to impose its laws on the world, and succeeds in the case of a few geniuses.

. . .

Whatever may be the chosen point of view of an artist, one principle remains common to all creators: stylization, which supposes the simultaneous existence of reality and of the mind that gives reality its form. Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest.

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