Albert Camus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The feeling of the absurd is not yet the concept of it. That distinction matters. The feeling arises first — that confrontation between the human longing for clarity and the world's unreasonable silence — and from this encounter, l'absurde is born.1 But the feeling does not stay still. It is alive, which means it must either die or reverberate.
The question is what happens next. Most thinkers who have genuinely felt the absurd — Kierkegaard above all — have then done something with it that I cannot accept. They have leaped. They have taken the very anguish that the absurd produces and used it as a springboard toward God, toward eternity, toward some consoling beyond. I call this move philosophical suicide: the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation.2
The thought arrives at the edge, sees the abyss clearly, and then — rather than remaining there — jumps across it. The negation becomes the god. Reason is abandoned precisely at the moment it was most needed. Kierkegaard is the sharpest case. He sees despair, names it with terrible precision, and then offers it as the proof of God's necessity.3
But seeking what is true is not the same as seeking what is desirable. If the absurd man must feed on the roses of illusion to escape the anxious question of what life would be without God, he prefers to adopt Kierkegaard's own answer — despair — rather than resign himself to that falsehood. The leap is not courage. It is evasion wearing courage's clothes.
Husserl goes the other way but makes the same error. He claims to follow the evidence rigorously, to escape the comfortable habits of thought — and then restores the eternal through the back door of phenomenological method.4 The final leap gives him comfort. But the danger, I insist, does not lie in the abyss itself; it lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap, when one might still choose to remain.
Being able to remain on that dizzying crest — that is integrity.5 Everything else is subterfuge. What I ask for is a rule of life adequate to the absurd state — not a resolution of it. What I am offered instead, by the existential tradition, is a negation of one of the two terms whose tension constitutes the absurd: either the world is rationalized away, or the human need for clarity is sacrificed to faith.6
Both moves destroy the very thing they claim to address. To mask the evidence, to suppress the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation, is not philosophy — it is flight.7 The absurd man refuses the leap. He does not fully understand what is being asked of him, and he will do nothing he does not fully understand.8 He is told this is pride.
He does not recognize the sin. What he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows — to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain.9 From this refusal comes not despair but something harder and cleaner: the question of whether one can live without appeal.
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 10
I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide... It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 14
Kierkegaard's view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 14
Husserl claims to obey the desire to escape 'the inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well-known and convenient conditions of existence,' but the final leap restores in him the eternal and its comfort.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 17
Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 17
I ask for the rule of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 14
There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 17
All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 18
He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 18