Camus is an interesting writer. He addresses themes which appeal to me, such as the absurdity of human life. I don’t believe that human life is absurd or meaningless, but I recognize that, epistemically, it might be, and that the question of whether or not life is meaningless (and related questions) is a profound philosophical issue.
And yet much of Camus’ work is hindered by an inconsistency between his laudable moral ambitions and an ontology that can’t support them. For example, as this article indicates, one of Camus’ themes is the “absurd hero.” The theme is present in some of his best works, such as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Notwithstanding the value of these books, it seems to me that ‘absurd hero’ is a contradictio in adjecto.
Let’s consider the terms separately.
On one hand, ‘absurd’ can mean “unreasonable,” “logically inconsistent,” “incongruous,” or “unintelligible.” As the author notes, for Camus, human life is absurd in the sense of being unintelligible, senseless, unreasonable, and purposeless. He seems to have held that human morality and values are merely subjective projections, since there is no God and no Platonic forms to give our values objectivity and transcendent structure. We invent and project our values onto a silent world that cannot underpin them. In this sense, human life – that is, the existence and experiences of embodied, conscious, rational, and moral agents endowed with axiological sensibility – is incongruous with the ontological home in which it lives.
On the other hand, ‘hero’ is a moral term. A hero is objectively worthy of admiration because he possesses some virtue or achieves some good which goes beyond the requirements of moral duty. A hero is supererogatory. But supererogation is possible only in a world with objective moral duties; going beyond the call of duty requires non-subjective moral standards such that if one meets them, one performs one’s duty, but if one does not meet them, one fails in one’s duty, and if one goes beyond them, one is supererogatory.
Now, if the world is marked by Camusian absurdity, then there are no objective moral duties and therefore no such thing as supererogation. The concept of ‘hero’ is thus ungrounded. There is no non-subjective moral standard above which the hero stands out as heroic.
In short, in Camus’ worldview, there is no bar over which the hero must jump to count as heroic, and hence there are no heroes. His worldview undermines his heroism.
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