Excerpt: Absurd Walls
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) | An Absurd Reasoning: Absurd Walls
Hermit Thoughts: Camus highlights that the scientific worldview is also of no use in grounding the individual in any kind of coherent external meaning. Eventually the layers of what is known always run into the unknown, either at the largest scale or the smallest, or the beginning or end of time. It reminds me of my Evolutionary Biology class in college, where the prevailing theory taught to us about the origins of organic life from the inorganic had to do with inorganic proteins helping to lubricate different kinds of clay, with some quasi-Darwinian element to the progression and proliferation of these pre-life proteins over time into a selection process which yielded organic proteins.
But, for me there, beyond the question of “how” could they know such a thing, the question of “why” always remains. Whatever the explanation, at the root level of the universe, life was always potentiate and must arise at some point given enough time. And the universe has an eternal amount of time, in its cycles, so it was guaranteed to happen. And, as Camus discusses here, science too eventually puts up walls where “why” is not allowed. “It just is so, it’s a natural system” is just the empirical, atheistic “God works in mysterious ways”.
And the calculations of physics, the proofs, become as obtuse to the layman as a Latin mass to an illiterate peasant. It all becomes belief, a matter of faith in an ordained authority figure: the theoretician becomes a hierophant.
Useless for personal meaning; walls between you and any chance of truly grasping an ordered outer universe.
And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the hear relaxes -- how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.
All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.
