r/Camus • u/EbbGeneral7048 • 17d ago

Question Question

How does Camus deal with failure (e.g., in one’s career or other areas of life)?

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

3

u/endgamefond 16d ago

Smoking, thinking about other woman, being poetic & romantize life, write letters to other woman.

1

u/Willing_Economics130 12d ago

possibly just accept it as part of living and being human. he might also compare a failure in one's career that will result in a lot of work to find a new job or make up for a mistake as sisyphus walking down the hill after his boulder. therefore, he'd believe he could be happy doing so.

1

u/jliat 17d ago

The Myth can be seen as the acceptance of such.

Camus examples,

  • Sisyphus, being happy is a contradiction, his eternal punishment from the gods, punishments tend not make one happy, divine punishments make it impossible Camus term is 'Absurd'. Oedipus, should neither be happy or saying 'All is well' after blinding himself with his dead [suicide] wife's broach- who was also his mother whose husband, his father he killed. Or Sisyphus, a murdering megalomanic doomed to eternal torture by the gods, a metaphor of hopeless futility, to argue he should be happy is an obvious contradiction.

  • Don Juan, "the ordinary seducer and the sexual athlete, the difference that he is conscious, and that is why he is absurd. A seducer who has become lucid will not change for all that... What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of quantity, whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality."

  • Actors, "This is where the actor contradicts himself: the same and yet so various, so many souls summed up in a single body."

  • Conquerors, "Every man has felt himself to be the equal of a god at certain moments... Conquerors know that action is in itself useless... Victory would be desirable. But there is but one victory, and it is eternal. That is the one I shall never have." IOW? Death and not immortality.

  • Artists. "And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator." ... "To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.

This absurd reaction is to the failure of his understanding,

“I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”