#ian corbin

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Camus was not entranced by trees in general, but by this particular clump of cypresses. A great deal depends on what we choose to pay attention to. Camus attended, with great pleasure, to particular physical things, and his political thought reflects this. As Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, we all tend to excel at pursuits that bring us pleasure. A soldier who exults at the thrill of battle will simply tend to be a better soldier. A woman who revels in mathematics will simply tend to be a better mathematician. A man like Camus, who exults in the concrete particulars of a landscape, will be more likely to attend particular realities with care. It is no coincidence that on a panoply of political and ethical questions, Camus’s thinking is precisely marked by such attentiveness.

Ian Corbin, Entranced by Reality [x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

A normal, comfortable civilized life is unavoidably supported and protected by violence—police violence, warfare, the slaughter of animals, capital punishment, etc. But most of this violence is invisible to us on a day to day basis. Reasonable people can disagree about the justice of these various species of violence, but shouldn’t we have to look at what we’re doing? Isn’t there something cowardly about passing our violence into the hidden hands of certain designated violence-workers? It is darkly comic to read, in 2013, Camus’s assessment of his own day: “Just as we now love one another by telephone and work not on matter but on machines, we kill and are killed by proxy. What is gained in cleanliness is lost in understanding.” This was long before the rise of ubiquitous internet pornography, sexting, offshore help centers, and drone warfare. If anything, we are sailing higher and higher into the thin air, away from the cluttered floor of embodied reality.

Ian Corbin, Entranced by Reality [x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

This realization, that nature even at its most beautiful defies our attempts to understand it, stands irrevocably apart from us, is a deep root of Camus’s famous assertion that the world is “absurd.” Camus’s main idea of absurdity, as Zaretsky unpacks it, is a matter of imbalance between desire and reality—humans long for ultimate meaning and crystalline clarity, but the god-shorn cosmos offers neither of these. It remains coldly, majestically indifferent and inexplicable. The first part of Camus’s response to this fact is to advocate for clear-eyed acceptance—we should commit to live fully in this absurd world, “without appeal” to God or Progress or any quasi-mystical utopian politics. This is simply all there is, and once again, we should look straight and hard at reality, without veiling it behind the gauzy fabric of some high concept or conceit.

Ian Corbin, Entranced by Reality [x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

[x]

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

[Camus], for his part, was too much entranced by mere reality to take his leave of it. In an essay titled “The New Mediterranean Culture,” he describes a deep spiritual connection between Mediterranean people and “the courtyards, the cypresses, the strings of pimentos” that mark their land. He concludes that “There are, before our eyes, realities stronger than we ourselves are. Our ideas will bend and become adapted to them.” This “fidelity,” to mere reality, Zaretsky explains, is the source of Camus’s “measure”—his stubborn refusal, or perhaps inability, to trade the finite real for visions of some infinite ideal.

Ian Corbin, Entranced by Reality [x]