ABSURD REASONING

Soul, do not strive for eternal life, But try to exhaust what is possible.

Pindar. Pythian Songs (III, 62-63)

On the following pages we will deal with the feeling of the absurd, which is found everywhere in our age - about the feeling, and not about the philosophy of the absurd, in fact, unknown to our time. Elementary honesty requires from the outset to recognize what these pages owe to some modern thinkers. There is no point in hiding that I will be quoting and discussing them throughout this work.

It is worth noting at the same time that the absurdity, which has hitherto been taken as a conclusion, is taken here as a starting point. In this sense, my reflections are preliminary: it is impossible to say what position they will lead to. Here you will find only a pure description of the disease of the spirit, to which neither metaphysics nor faith have yet been mixed. Such are the limits of the book, such is its only bias.

Absurdity and suicide

There is only one really serious philosophical problem - the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories is secondary. These are the conditions of the game: first of all, you need to give an answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche wanted it to be, that a respectable philosopher should serve as an example, then the significance of the answer is understandable - certain actions will follow it. This evidence is felt by the heart, but it is necessary to delve into it in order to make it clear to the mind.

How to determine the greater urgency of one issue compared to another? Judging should be by the actions that follow the decision. I have never seen anyone die for an ontological argument. Galileo paid tribute to scientific truth, but with extraordinary ease he renounced it as soon as it became dangerous for his life. In a sense, he was right. Such a truth was not worth the fire. Does the earth revolve around the sun, does the sun revolve around the earth - is it all the same? In a word, the question is empty. And at the same time, I see a lot of people dying, because, in their opinion, life is not worth living. I also know those who, strangely enough, are ready to commit suicide for the sake of ideas or illusions that serve as the basis of their life (what is called the cause of life is at the same time an excellent cause of death). Therefore, the question of the meaning of life I consider the most urgent of all questions. How to answer it? There seem to be only two methods of understanding all essential problems - and I consider as such only those that threaten death or increase tenfold the passionate desire to live - the methods of La Palissa and Don Quixote. It is only when evidence and delight balance each other that we gain access to both emotion and clarity. In dealing with a subject so modest and at the same time so charged with pathos, classical dialectical learning must give way to a more unpretentious attitude of mind, based both on common sense and on sympathy.

Suicide has always been considered exclusively as a social phenomenon. We, on the contrary, from the very beginning raise the question of the connection between suicide and the thinking of the individual. Suicide is prepared in the silence of the heart, like the Great Deed of the alchemists. The man himself knows nothing about him, but one fine day he shoots himself or drowns himself. About one suicidal housekeeper, I was told that he had changed a lot after losing his daughter five years ago, that this story "undermined" him. It's hard to find a more precise word. As soon as thinking begins, it already undermines. At first, the role of society here is not great. The worm sits in the heart of a person, and there it must be sought. It is necessary to understand that deadly game that leads from clarity in relation to one's own existence to escape from this world.

There are many reasons for suicide, and the most obvious of them, as a rule, are not the most effective. Suicide is rarely the result of reflection (such a hypothesis, however, is not excluded). The denouement comes almost always unconsciously. Newspapers report on "intimate sorrows" or "incurable disease". Such explanations are perfectly acceptable. But it would be worthwhile to find out whether the friend of the despairing one was not indifferent that day - then he is guilty. For even this smallness could be enough for the bitterness and boredom that had accumulated in the heart of a suicide to burst out.

Let us take this opportunity to note the relativity of the reasoning carried out in this essay: suicide can be associated with much more valid reasons. An example is the political suicides that were committed "out of protest" during the Chinese revolution.

But if it is difficult to accurately fix the moment, the elusive movement in which the death lot is chosen, then it is much easier to draw conclusions from the act itself. In a certain sense, just like in melodrama, suicide is tantamount to confession. To commit suicide means to admit that life is over, that it has become incomprehensible. Let's not, however, draw distant analogies, let's return to ordinary language. It simply admits that "life is not worth living." Naturally, life is never easy. We continue to perform the actions required of us, but for a variety of reasons, primarily the force of habit. Voluntary death presupposes, albeit instinctively, the recognition of the insignificance of this habit, the realization of the absence of any reason for the continuation of life, the understanding of the meaninglessness of everyday fuss, the futility of suffering.

What is this vague feeling that deprives the mind of the dreams necessary for life? A world that lends itself to explanation, even the worst one, this world is familiar to us. But if the universe is suddenly deprived of both illusions and knowledge, man becomes an outsider in it. A person is banished forever, because he is deprived of both the memory of the lost fatherland and the hope of the promised land. Strictly speaking, the feeling of absurdity is this discord between a person and his life, the actor and the scenery. All people who have ever thought about suicide immediately recognize the existence of a direct connection between this feeling and the craving for non-existence.

The subject of my essay is precisely this connection between the absurd and suicide, the elucidation of the extent to which suicide is the outcome of the absurd. In principle, for a person who does not cheat with himself, actions are governed by what he considers to be true. In this case, belief in the absurdity of existence should be a guide to action. The question, posed clearly and without false pathos, is legitimate: does not such a conclusion lead to the fastest way out of this vague state? Of course, we are talking about people who are able to live in harmony with themselves.

In such a clear formulation, the problem seems simple and at the same time unsolvable. It would be a mistake to think that simple questions evoke equally simple answers, and that one evidence easily entails another. Looking at the problem from the other side, regardless of whether people commit suicide or not, it seems a priori clear that there can be only two philosophical solutions: "yes" and "no". But it's too easy. There are also those who incessantly ask questions without coming to an unambiguous decision. I am far from ironic: we are talking about the majority. It is also understandable that many who answer "no" act as if they said "yes". If one accepts the Nietzschean criterion, they say "yes" one way or another. Conversely, suicidal people often believe that life has meaning. We are constantly confronted with such contradictions. One might even say that the contradictions are especially acute just at the moment when logic is so desired. Philosophical theories are often compared with the behavior of those who profess them. Among the thinkers who denied meaning to life, no one, except Kirillov, who was born of literature, who arose from the legend of Peregrine (1) and tested the hypothesis of Jules Lequier, was in such agreement with his own logic as to renounce life itself. Jokingly, they often refer to Schopenhauer, who glorified suicide at a sumptuous meal. But there is no time for jokes. It doesn't really matter that the tragedy isn't taken seriously; such frivolity in the end passes judgment on the person himself.

So, faced with these contradictions and this darkness, is it worth it to believe that there is no connection between the possible opinion about life and the deed done to leave it? Let's not exaggerate. There is something stronger in man's attachment to the world than all the troubles of the world. The body takes part in the decision no less than the mind, and it retreats before non-existence. We get used to living long before we get used to thinking. The body maintains this lead in the race of days, which gradually brings our death hour closer. Finally, the essence of the contradiction lies in what I would call "evasion", which is both more and less than Pascal's "fun". Death Evasion - The third theme of my essay is hope. Hope for a different life, which must be "earned", or the tricks of those who live not for life itself, but for the sake of some great idea that surpasses and elevates life, endows it with meaning and betrays it.

Everything here confuses us cards. It has been subtly asserted that looking at life as nonsense is tantamount to saying that it is not worth living. In fact, there is no necessary connection between these judgments. It simply must not succumb to confusion, discord and inconsistency, but go straight to the real problems. Suicide is committed because life is not worth living - of course, this is the truth, but the truth is fruitless, a truism. Is this the curse of existence, this exposure of life as a lie, the consequence of the fact that life has no meaning? Does the absurdity of life demand that they run from it - to hope or to suicide? That's what we need to find out, trace, understand, discarding everything else. Does absurdity lead to death? This problem is the first among all others, whether it be the methods of thinking or the impassive games of the spirit. Nuances, contradictions, an all-explaining psychology, skillfully introduced by the "spirit of objectivity" - all this has nothing to do with this passionate search. He needs wrong, that is, logical, thinking. It doesn't come easily. It is always easy to be logical, but it is almost impossible to be logical to the very end. As logical as suicidal people who follow the path of their feelings to the end. Thinking about suicide allows me to pose the only problem that interests me: is there a logic that is acceptable up to death? I can know this only with the help of reasoning, free from the chaos of passion and filled with the light of evidence. This marks the beginning of a reasoning that I call absurd. Many started it, but I don't know yet if they went to the end.

When Karl Jaspers, having shown the impossibility of mentally constituting the unity of the world, exclaims: “This limit leads me to myself, where I no longer hide behind an objective point of view, reduced to the totality of my ideas; to where neither I myself nor the existence of another cannot become objects for me", he, like many others, reminds me of those waterless deserts where thinking approaches its limits. Of course, he speaks after others, but how hastily he seeks to leave these limits! This last turn, which shakes the foundations of thought, is reached by many people, including the most obscure ones. They renounce everything that is dear to them, that was their life. Others, aristocrats of the spirit, also renounce, but go to the suicide of thinking, openly rebelling against thought. Just the opposite requires effort: to maintain, as far as possible, the clarity of thought, to try to examine closely the bizarre forms that have formed on the outskirts of thinking. Perseverance and insight are the privileged spectators of this absurd and inhuman drama, where hope and death exchange lines. The mind can now begin to analyze the figures of this elementary and at the same time sophisticated dance before enlivening them with its own life.

absurd walls

Like great works of art, deep feelings always mean more than what consciousness puts into them. In habitual actions and thoughts, the unchanging sympathies or antipathies of the soul are found, they are traced in conclusions about which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings conceal a whole universe, which can be majestic or miserable; they highlight a world endowed with its own affective atmosphere. There are whole universes of jealousy, ambition, selfishness or generosity. The universe presupposes the presence of a metaphysical system or mindset. What is true of individual feelings is all the more true of the underlying emotions. They are indefinite and vague, but at the same time "reliable"; as remote as "presences" - like emotions that give us the experience of beauty or awaken a sense of the absurd.

A sense of absurdity awaits us at every corner. This feeling is elusive in its mournful nakedness, in the dim light of its atmosphere. This elusiveness itself deserves attention. Apparently, the other person always remains unknown to us, there is always something in him that cannot be reduced to our knowledge, eluding him. But in practice, I know people and recognize them as such by their behavior, the totality of their actions, by the consequences that are generated in life by their actions. All irrational feelings inaccessible to analysis can also be practically determined, practically evaluated, combined according to their consequences in the order of intellect. I can catch and mark the weight of their faces, give the outlines of the universe of each feeling. Even after seeing one actor for the hundredth time, I will not claim to know him personally. And yet, when I say that I know him a little better, having seen him for the hundredth time and trying to sum up what he played, there is some truth in my words. This is a paradox, and at the same time a parable. Its moral is that a person is determined by the comedies he plays no less than by sincere impulses of the soul. We are talking about feelings that are inaccessible to us in all their depth; but they are partly reflected in actions, in attitudes of consciousness necessary for this or that feeling. It is clear that by doing so I set the method. But this is a method of analysis, not of knowledge. The method of cognition presupposes a metaphysical doctrine that determines the conclusions in advance, despite all the assurances that the method is unpremeditated. From the first pages of the book, we know the content of the latter, and their connection is inevitable. The method defined here conveys a sense of the impossibility of any true knowledge whatsoever. It makes it possible to enumerate the appearances, to feel the spiritual climate.

Perhaps we will be able to uncover the elusive sense of absurdity in the different, but still kindred worlds of intellect, the art of life and art as such. We start with an atmosphere of absurdity. The ultimate goal is to comprehend the universe of absurdity and that attitude of consciousness that illuminates this inexorable face in the world.

The beginning of all great actions and thoughts is insignificant. Great deeds are often born at a street intersection or at the entrance to a restaurant. So it is with absurdity. The bloodline of the absurd world goes back to a beggarly birth. The answer "about nothing" to the question of what we think, in some situations there is a pretense. This is well known to lovers. But if the answer is sincere, if it conveys that state of mind when emptiness becomes eloquent, when the chain of everyday actions breaks and the heart searches in vain for the lost link, then the first sign of absurdity appears here.

It happens that the usual decorations collapse. Rise, trams, four hours in the office or at the factory, lunch. tram, four hours of work, dinner, sleep; monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, all in the same rhythm - this is the path that is easy to follow day after day. But one day the question arises "why?". It all starts with this bewilderment-tinged boredom. "Beginning" is what matters. Boredom is the result of a mechanical life, but it also sets consciousness in motion. Boredom awakens him and provokes further: either an unconscious return to the usual track, or a final awakening. And sooner or later, awakening is followed by consequences: either suicide or the restoration of the course of life. Boredom itself is disgusting, but here I must admit that it is beneficial. For everything begins with consciousness, and nothing apart from it matters. The observation is not too original, but we are talking about the self-evident. For now, this is enough for a cursory review of the origins of the absurd. At the very beginning lies simply "care".

From day to day we are carried by the time of a bleak life, but there comes a moment when we have to shoulder its burden on our own shoulders. We live in the future: "tomorrow", "later", "when you have a position", "with age you will understand". This inconsistency is delightful, because in the end death comes. The day comes and the man notices that he is thirty years old. Thus, he declares his youth. But at the same time, he relates himself to time, takes a place in it, recognizes that he is at a certain point on the graph. He belongs to time and is horrified to realize that time is his worst enemy. He dreamed of tomorrow, and now he knows that he should be renounced. This rebellion of the flesh is absurdity (2).

It is worth going down one step lower - and we find ourselves in a world alien to us. We notice its "density", we see how alien in its independence from us is the stone, with what intensity nature denies us, the most ordinary landscape. The basis of any beauty is something inhuman. It is worth understanding this, and the surrounding hills, the peaceful sky, the crowns of trees immediately lose the illusory meaning that we gave them. From now on, they will be removed, turning into a kind of paradise lost. Through the millennia, the primitive hostility of the world ascends to us. It becomes incomprehensible, because for centuries we understood in it only those figures and images. who themselves invested in it, and now we no longer have the strength for these tricks. Becoming itself, the world eludes us. Colored by habit, the scenery becomes what it has always been. They are moving away from us. Just as we suddenly discover behind an ordinary woman's face a stranger whom we have loved for months and years, perhaps the time will come when we will begin to strive for that which suddenly makes us so lonely. But the time has not yet come, and so far we have only this density and this alienation of the world - this absurdity.

Humans are also the source of the non-human. In a few hours of mental clarity, the mechanical actions of people, their meaningless pantomime, are clear in all their stupidity. The man is talking on the phone behind a glass partition; it is not audible, but meaningless facial expressions are visible. The question arises: why does he live? The repulsion caused by the inhumanity of man himself, the abyss into which we fall when we look at ourselves, this "nausea", as one modern author says, is also absurd. In the same way, we are disturbed by a familiar stranger, reflected for a moment in the mirror or found in our own photograph - this is also absurd ...

Finally, I come to death and the feelings we have about it. Everything has already been said about death, and decency requires us to maintain a pathetic tone here. But what is surprising: everyone lives as if they "know nothing." The thing is, we don't have the experience of death. Experienced, in the full sense of the word, is only what is experienced, realized. We have the experience of the death of others, but this is just a surrogate, it is superficial and does not convince us too much. The melancholy conventions are unconvincing. The mathematics of what is happening is appalling. Time frightens us with its evidence, the inexorability of its calculations. In response to all the beautiful arguments about the soul, we received from him convincing evidence to the contrary. In a motionless body that does not respond even to a slap, there is no soul. The elementarity and certainty of what is happening constitute the content of the absurd feeling. In the deathly light of fate, the futility of any effort becomes apparent. In the face of bloody mathematics that determines the conditions of our existence, no morality, no effort is justified a priori.

All this has already been said more than once. I will confine myself to the simplest classification and point out only the topics that go without saying. They run through all literature and philosophy, fill everyday conversations. There is no need to reinvent anything. But it is necessary to ascertain their evidence in order to be able to raise the fundamental question. I repeat once again, I am not so much interested in the manifestations of the absurd as in the consequences. If we are convinced of the facts, then what should be the consequences, where should we go? To die voluntarily, or, in spite of everything, to hope? But first of all, it is necessary to at least briefly consider how this situation was understood in the past.

The first business of the mind is to distinguish the true from the false. However, as soon as thinking engages in reflection, a contradiction is immediately revealed. No amount of persuasion will help here. In the clarity and elegance of evidence, no one has surpassed Aristotle for so many centuries: “As a result, with all such views, what everyone knows must necessarily happen - they refute themselves. Indeed, the one who claims that everything is true makes the statement true opposite to his own, and thereby makes his assertion untrue (for the opposite assertion denies its truth), and he who asserts that everything is false, makes his own assertion also false. statement, declaring that it alone is not true, and in the second - for its own statement, declaring that it alone is not false - then one has to assume an innumerable number of true and false statements, for the statement that a true statement is true, itself is true, and this can be continued ad infinitum.

This vicious circle is only the first in a series that brings the mind, immersed in itself, into a dizzying whirlpool. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them inevitable. Whatever verbal games and logical acrobatics we indulge in, to understand means, first of all, to unify. Even in its most advanced forms, the mind connects with an unconscious feeling, a desire for clarity. In order to understand the world, a person must reduce it to the human, put his stamp on it. The universe of a cat is different from the universe of an ant. The truism "all thought is anthropomorphic" has no other meaning. In striving to understand reality, the mind is satisfied only when it succeeds in reducing it to thinking. If a person could admit that the universe is also capable of loving him and suffering, he would be humbled. If thought were to discover in the changing contours of phenomena eternal relations to which the phenomena themselves were reduced, and the relations themselves were summarized by some single principle, then reason would be happy. In comparison with such happiness, the myth of bliss would seem a pathetic fake. Nostalgia for the One, the desire for the Absolute express the essence of the human drama. But it does not follow from the actual presence of this nostalgia that the thirst will be quenched. As soon as we cross the abyss separating desire from goal and affirm, together with Parmenides, the reality of the One (whatever it may be), we fall into absurd contradictions. Reason affirms unity, but by this assertion it proves the existence of difference and diversity, which it tried to overcome. Thus a second vicious circle begins. It is quite enough to extinguish our hopes.

Again, we are talking about the obvious. I repeat once again that they interest me not in themselves, but from the point of view of the consequences that are derived from them. I also know another evidence: a man of deaths. But you can count on the fingers of those thinkers who have drawn all the conclusions from this. The starting point of this essay can be considered this gap between our imaginary knowledge and real knowledge, between practical agreement and stimulated ignorance, because of which we quietly get along with ideas that would turn our whole life upside down if we experienced them in all their truth. In the hopeless inconsistency of the mind, we catch the split that separates us from our own creations. While the mind is silent, immersed in the motionless world of hopes, weight is reflected and ordered in the unity of its nostalgia. But at the very first movement, this world cracks and falls apart: knowledge remains in front of an infinite number of brilliant fragments. It can be frustrating trying to reassemble them, restoring the original unity that brought peace to our hearts. So many centuries of research, so much self-denial of thinkers, and in the end, all our knowledge turns out to be in vain. Except professional rationalists, everyone knows today that true knowledge is hopelessly lost. The only meaningful history of human thought is the history of successive repentances and confessions of one's own impotence.

Indeed, about what, on what occasion, could I say: "I know it!" About my heart - after all, I feel its beating and claim that it exists. About this world - after all, I can touch it and again consider it to exist. This is where all my science ends, everything else is mental constructions. As soon as I try to grasp this "I", whose existence is certain for me, to define it and summarize it, it slips away like water between my fingers. I can describe one by one the images in which it appears, add those given from outside: education, origin, ardor or silence, greatness or meanness, etc. But these images do not add up to a single whole. Outside all definitions, the heart itself always remains. Nothing can fill the gap between the certainty of my existence and the content I am trying to give it. I am forever alienated from myself. In psychology, as in logic, there are numerous truths, but there is no Truth. "Know thyself" of Socrates is no better than "be virtuous" of our preachers: in both cases only our anguish and ignorance are revealed. These are fruitless games with great objects, justified only insofar as our ideas about them are approximate.

The roughness of trees, the taste of water - all this is also familiar to me. The smell of grass and stars, other nights and evenings that make my heart skip a beat - can I deny this world, the omnipotence of which I constantly feel? But all earthly sciences cannot convince me that this is my world. You can give it a detailed description, you can teach me how to classify it. You enumerate its laws, and in my thirst for knowledge I agree that they are all true. You disassemble the mechanism of the world - and my hopes grow stronger. Finally, you teach me how to reduce this wonderful and multi-colored universe to an atom, and then to an electron. All this is great, I'm all in anticipation. But you are talking about an invisible planetary system where electrons revolve around the nucleus, you want to explain the world with a single image. I am ready to admit that this is poetry inaccessible to my mind. But is it worth it to resent your own stupidity? After all, you have already managed to replace one theory with another. So science, which was supposed to give me omniscience, turns into a hypothesis, clarity is obscured by metaphors, uncertainty is resolved by a work of art. Why then my efforts? The soft lines of the hills, the evening calm will teach me much more. So I return to the very beginning, realizing that with the help of science it is possible to capture and enumerate phenomena, thereby not at all approaching an understanding of the world. My knowledge of the world will not increase, even if I manage to probe all its hidden convolutions. And you offer a choice between a description that is reliable but does not teach anything, and a hypothesis that claims to be omniscient, but is unreliable. Alienated from myself and from the world, armed for every occasion with thinking that denies itself at the very moment of its own affirmation—what kind of lot is this if I can reconcile myself to it only by renouncing knowledge and life, if my desire always comes up against impenetrable wall? To wish is to bring to life paradoxes. Everything is arranged in such a way that this poisoned peace is born, giving us carelessness, sleep of the heart or renunciation of death.

In its own way, the intellect also speaks to me about the absurdity of the world. His opponent, which is the blind mind, can claim to be completely clear as much as he likes - I am waiting for proof and would be glad to receive it. But in spite of age-old claims, in spite of so many people who are eloquent and ready to convince me of anything, I know that all the evidence is false. There is no happiness for me if I do not know about it. This universal reason, practical or moral, this determinism, these all-explaining categories - there is something for an honest person to laugh at. All this has nothing to do with the mind, it denies its deepest essence, which consists in the fact that it is enslaved by the world. Man's destiny now makes sense in this incomprehensible and limited universe. It rises above him, he is surrounded by the irrational - and so on until the end of his days. But when the clarity of vision returns to him, the sense of the absurd is highlighted and refined.

I said that the world is absurd, but this is said too hastily. The world itself is simply unreasonable, and that is all that can be said about it. Absurd is the clash between irrationality and the frenzied desire for clarity, the call of which resounds in the very depths of the human soul. Absurdity equally depends on the person and on the world. For now, he's the only link between them. The absurd holds them together as firmly as only hatred can chain one living being to another. This is all that I can discern in that immense universe where I was destined to live. Let's dwell on this in more detail. If it is true that my relationship with life is regulated by absurdity, if I am imbued with this feeling when I look at the world spectacle, if I am established in the thought that makes it necessary for me to seek knowledge, then I must sacrifice everything except certainty. And in order to keep it, I must always have it before my eyes. First of all, I must subordinate my behavior to certainty and follow it in everything. I'm talking about honesty here. But first I would like to know: can thought live in this desert?

I already know that thought sometimes visited this desert. There she found her bread, admitting that she had previously fed on ghosts. Thus arose the occasion for several pressing themes of human reflection.

Absurdity becomes a painful passion from the moment it is realized. But is it possible to live with such passions, is it possible to adopt a fundamental law that says that the heart burns at the very moment when these passions awaken in it? We do not yet raise this question, although it occupies a central place in our essay. We'll get back to him.

Let us first get acquainted with the themes and impulses born in the desert. Enough to list them, today they are well known. There have always been defenders of the rights of the irrational. The tradition of so-called "lower thinking" has never been broken. Criticism of rationalism has been carried out so many times that there seems to be nothing more to add to it. However, our era witnesses the rebirth of paradoxical systems, all the ingenuity of which is aimed at setting traps for the mind. Thus, as it were, the primacy of reason is recognized. But this is not so much proof of the effectiveness of reason as evidence of the vitality of its hopes. In historical terms, the constancy of these two attitudes shows that a person is torn apart by two aspirations: on the one hand, he strives for unity, and on the other, he clearly sees those walls that he is not able to go beyond.

The attacks on the mind have perhaps never been as violent as they are at the present time. After the great cry of Zarathustra: "Chance is the oldest to know the world, which I restored to all things ... when I taught that neither above them nor through them, no eternal will - does not want" , after Kierkegaard's illness and death, "that illness, in which the last is death, and the death in which there is the last," other significant and painful themes of absurd thought followed. Or, at least - this nuance is important - the themes of irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from Kierkegaard to Shestov, from phenomenologists to Scheler, logically and morally, a whole family of minds related in their nostalgia, opposing each other in goals and methods, furiously blocks the royal path of reason and tries to find some true path of truth. I proceed here from the fact that the main ideas of this circle are known and experienced. Whatever their claims were (or could not be), they all started from an ineffable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anxiety or impotence reign. The topics listed above are also common to them. It is worth noting that for them, first of all, the consequences of the truths they discovered are important. This is so important that it deserves special attention.

But for now, we will only talk about their discoveries and initial experience. We will consider only those provisions on which they fully agree with each other. It would be presumptuous to analyze their philosophical teachings, but it is quite possible, and indeed sufficient, to give a sense of the general atmosphere for them.

Heidegger coolly considers the human condition and declares that existence is insignificant. "Care" becomes the only reality at all levels of existence. For a person lost in the world and its entertainments, care appears as a brief moment of fear. But as soon as this fear reaches self-consciousness, it becomes anxiety, that constant atmosphere of a clearly thinking person, "in which existence reveals itself." This professor of philosophy writes without any hesitation and in the most abstract language in the world: "The finite and limited character of human existence is more primary than man himself." He shows interest in Kant, but only to show the limitations of "pure reason". Conclusion in terms of Heidegger's analysis: "the world has nothing more to offer a person who is in anxiety." As it seems to him, care so surpasses all categories of reason in relation to truth that he thinks only about it, only he talks about it. He lists all its guises: boredom, when a banal person is looking for how to depersonalize and forget himself; horror when the mind is given over to the contemplation of death. Heidegger does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of care, and "existence then turns to itself in its own call through consciousness." It is the voice of anxiety itself, conjuring existence "to return to itself from being lost in an anonymous existence." Heidegger also believes that one must not sleep, but stay awake to the very end. He clings to this absurd world, curses it for its frailty, and seeks a path among the ruins.

Jaspers renounces any ontology: he wants us to stop being "naive". He knows that we cannot go beyond the mortal game of appearances. He knows that in the end reason is defeated, and he dwells for a long time on the vicissitudes of the history of the spirit in order to ruthlessly expose the bankruptcy of any system, any all-saving illusion, any sermon. In this devastated world, where the impossibility of knowledge has been proven, where nothing seems to be the only reality, and hopeless despair is the only possible setting. Jaspers is busy searching for Ariadne's thread leading to the divine mysteries.

In turn, Shestov, throughout his amazingly monotonous work, inseparably turned to the same truths, endlessly proves that even the most closed system, the most universal rationalism, always stumbles over the irrationality of human thinking. All those ironic evidences and the most insignificant contradictions that devalue reason do not escape him. And in the history of the human heart, and in the history of the spirit, he is interested in one single, exceptional subject. In the experience of Dostoyevsky sentenced to death, in the bitter adventures of Nietzscheism, in the curses of Hamlet, or in the bitter aristocracy of Ibsen, he tracks down, highlights and exalts man's rebellion against inevitability. He denies reasons to reason, he will not budge until he finds himself in the middle of a faded desert with petrified certainties.

Perhaps the most attractive of all these thinkers, Kierkegaard, during at least part of his existence, not only searched for the absurd, but also lived it. The man who exclaims: "True dumbness is not in silence, but in conversation," asserts from the very beginning that no truth is absolute and cannot make existence satisfactory. Don Juan from cognition, he multiplied pseudonyms and contradictions, wrote at the same time "Instructive Speeches" and "Diary of a Seducer", a textbook of cynical spiritualism. He rejects consolation, morality, any principles of comfort. He exposes for all to see the torments and unsleeping pain of his heart in the hopeless joy of being crucified, contented with his cross, creating himself in clarity of mind, denial, comedy, a kind of demonism. This face, tender and mocking at the same time, these pirouettes, followed by a cry from the depths of the soul - such is the very spirit of the absurd in the struggle with the reality that overcomes it. The adventure of the spirit, leading Kierkegaard to scandals dear to his heart, also begins in the chaos of an experience devoid of scenery, transmitted by him in all its primordial incoherence.

On a completely different plane, namely from the point of view of method, with all the extremes of such a position, Husserl and the phenomenologists restored the world in its diversity and rejected the transcendent power of reason. The universe of spirit has thus been unheard of enriched. A rose petal, a boundary post, or a human hand has taken on the same significance as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Now thinking does not mean unifying, reducing phenomena to some great principle. To think means to learn to see again, to become attentive; it means to control one's own consciousness, to give, in the manner of Proust, a privileged position to every idea and every image. Paradoxically, everything is privileged. Every thought is justified by ultimate awareness. Although more positive than that of Kierkegaard and Shestov, Husserl's approach nevertheless from the very beginning denies the classical method of rationalism, puts an end to unrealizable hopes, opens to intuition and heart the whole field of phenomena, in the richness of which there is something inhuman. This path leads to all sciences and at the same time to none. In other words, the means here is more important than the end. This is simply a "cognitive attitude" and not a consolation. At least at first.

How not to feel the deep kinship of all these minds? How not to see that they are attracted by the same place that is not accessible to everyone and bitter, where there is no more hope? I want everything to be explained to me, or nothing to be explained. The mind is powerless before the cry of the heart. The search for the mind awakened by this demand does not lead to anything but contradictions and irrationality. What I cannot understand is unreasonable. The world is full of such irrationalities. I do not understand the unique meaning of the world, and therefore it is immensely irrational for me. If it were possible to say at least once: "This is clear," then everything would be saved. But these thinkers with enviable persistence proclaim that nothing is clear, chaos is everywhere, that a person is able to see and know only the walls surrounding him.

Here all these points of view converge and intersect. Having reached its limits, the mind must pass judgment and choose the consequences. Such may be suicide and objection. But I propose to reverse the order of the investigation and begin with the misadventures of the intellect, and then return to everyday activities. To do this, we do not need to leave the desert in which this experience is born. We must know where it leads. Man is faced with the irrationality of the world. He feels that he desires happiness and intelligence. Absurdity is born in this clash between the vocation of man and the unreasonable silence of the world. We must keep this in mind all the time, not lose sight of it, since conclusions important for life are connected with it. Irrationality, human nostalgia and the absurdity generated by their meeting - these are the three characters of the drama, which must be traced from beginning to end with all the logic that existence is capable of.

philosophical suicide

The feeling of the absurd is not the same as the concept of the absurd. Feeling lies at the base, it is the fulcrum. It is not reducible to a concept, except for that brief moment when feeling passes judgment on the universe. Then the feeling either dies or persists. We have combined all these topics. But here, too, I am not interested in the works that the thinkers who did not create them - criticism would require a different form and a different place - but in the general that is contained in their conclusions. Perhaps there is an abyss of differences between them, but we have every reason to believe that the spiritual landscape they created is the same. The cry that ends all these scientific researches, which are so different from each other, sounds the same. The aforementioned thinkers have a common spiritual climate. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is a murderous atmosphere. Living under this suffocating sky means either leaving or staying. You need to know how they leave and why they stay. This is how I define the problem of suicide, and my interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy is connected with this.

But I would like to deviate from the direct path for a while. Until now, the absurdity has been described by us from the outside. However, we can ask how clear this concept is, analyze its meaning, on the one hand, and its consequences, on the other.

If I accuse an innocent person of a terrible crime, if I declare to a respectable person that he lusts for his own sister, then they will answer me that this is absurd. There is something comical in this outrage, but there is also a deep reason for it. The good man points out the antinomy between the act I attribute to him and the principles of his whole life. "It's absurd" means "it's impossible", and besides, "it's contradictory". If a man armed with a knife attacks a group of machine gunners, I consider his action absurd. But it is such only because of the disproportion between intention and reality, because of the contradiction between real forces and the goal set. In the same way, we will regard it as an absurd verdict, opposing it with another one, at least outwardly corresponding to the facts. The proof from the absurd is also carried out by comparing the consequences of a given reasoning with the logical reality that is sought to be established. In all cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the greater the gap between the terms of comparison, the greater the absurdity. There are absurd marriages, challenges to fate, rancor, silences, absurd wars and absurd truces. In each case, absurdity is generated by comparison. Therefore, I have every reason to say that the feeling of absurdity is not born from a simple examination of a fact or impression, but breaks in along with a comparison of the actual state of affairs with some kind of reality, a comparison of an action with a world lying outside this action. Essentially, absurdity is a split. It is not present in any of the compared elements. It is born in their collision.

Therefore, from the point of view of the intellect, I can say that the absurdity is not in man (if such a metaphor makes sense at all) and not in the world, but in their joint presence. So far, this is the only connection between them. If we stick to the obvious, then I know what a person wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can also say what unites them. There is no need for further excavation. For the one who seeks, one single certainty is enough. The point is to deduce all the consequences from it.

The immediate consequence is at the same time the rule of the method. The appearance of this peculiar triad does not represent an unexpected discovery of America. But it has something in common with the data of experience, that it is both infinitely simple and infinitely complex. The first characteristic in this respect is indivisibility: to destroy one of the terms of the triad means to destroy it entirely. Apart from the human mind, there is no absurdity. Therefore, with death, the absurd disappears, like everything else. But there is no absurdity outside the world either. On the basis of this elementary criterion, I can consider the concept of absurdity to be essentially

important and consider it as the first truth. Thus arises the first rule of the aforementioned method: if I hold something to be true, I must keep it. If I intend to solve a problem, then my solution must not destroy one of its sides. The absurdity is the only given for me. The problem is how to get out of it, and also whether suicide is necessarily deduced from the absurdity. The first and, in fact, the only condition of my research is the preservation of what destroys me, the consistent everything that I consider to be the essence of the absurd I would define it as opposition and continuous struggle.

Following the absurd logic to the end, I must admit that this struggle involves a complete lack of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), constant rejection (not to be confused with renunciation), and conscious dissatisfaction (which should not be likened to youthful anxiety). Everything that destroys, hides these demands or runs counter to them (above all, this split-destroying agreement), destroys the absurdity and devalues ​​the proposed attitude of consciousness. Absurdity makes sense when it is disagreed with.

It is an obvious fact of the moral order that man is the eternal victim of his own truths. Once he recognizes them, he is no longer able to get rid of them. Everything has to be paid for somehow. A person who has realized the absurd is now bound to it forever. A man without hope, having realized himself as such, no longer belongs to the future. It's okay. But he equally belongs to the attempts to escape from the universe, the creator of which he is. Everything that precedes makes sense only in the light of this paradox. It is also instructive to look at the method of deducing consequences, which, based on the criticism of rationalism, was resorted to by thinkers who recognized the atmosphere of the absurd.

If you take the existentialist philosophers, I see that they all offer an escape. Their arguments are rather idiosyncratic; having found absurdity among the ruins of the mind, being in the closed, limited universe of man, they deify that which crushes them, finding a basis for hope in that which deprives them of all hope. This forced hope has a religious meaning for them. This needs to be stopped.

As an example, I will analyze here several themes characteristic of Shestov and Kierkegaard. Jaspers gives us a typical example of the same attitude, but turned into a caricature. I will explain this later. We have seen that Jaspers is powerless to effect transcendence, unable to probe the depths of experience - he realized that the universe was shaken to its very foundations. Does he go further, does he at least deduce all the consequences from this upheaval of the foundations? He doesn't say anything new. In experience, he found nothing but the recognition of his own impotence. It lacks the slightest pretext for introducing any acceptable principle. And yet, without citing any arguments (which he himself says), Jaspers at once affirms the transcendent being of experience and the superhuman meaning of life when he writes: “Does not this collapse show us that beyond any explanation and any possible interpretation there is not nothing but the being of transcendence." Suddenly, in one blind act of human faith, everything finds its explanation in this being. It is defined by Jaspers as "an incomprehensible unity of the general and the particular." So the absurd becomes a god (in the broadest sense of the word), and the inability to understand turns into an all-illuminating being. This argument is completely illogical. You can call it a jump. Paradoxical as all this may seem, it is quite possible to understand why Jaspers so insistently, with such boundless patience, makes the experience of the transcendent impossible. For the farther he is from this experience, the more empty, the more real is the transcendent, since the passion with which it is affirmed is in direct proportion to the gulf that opens between his ability to explain and the irrationality of the world. It even seems that Jaspers attacks the prejudices of the mind the more violently, the more radically the mind explains the world. This apostle of humiliated thought seeks the means of reviving the entire fullness of being in the most extreme self-abasement.

Such methods are familiar to us from mysticism. They are no less legitimate than any other attitudes of consciousness. But now I act as if I took a certain problem seriously. I have no prejudices about the significance of this installation or its instructiveness. I would only like to check how it meets the conditions set by me, whether it is worthy of the conflict that interests me. Therefore, I return to Shestov. One commentator conveys a noteworthy statement of this thinker: "The only way out is where there is no way out for the human mind. Otherwise, why do we need God? God is turned to for the impossible. For the possible, people are enough." If Shestov has a philosophy, then it is summarized in these words. Because, having discovered at the end of his passionate quest the fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say:

"Here is absurdity," but declares, "Here is God, he must be addressed, even if he does not fit into any of our categories." To avoid misunderstandings, the Russian philosopher even adds that this God can be malicious and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory. But the uglier his face, the stronger his omnipotence. The greatness of God is in his inconsistency. His inhumanity turns out to be proof of his existence. It is necessary to rush into God, and with this jump to get rid of rational illusions. Therefore, for Shestov, the acceptance of the absurd and the absurd itself are simultaneous. To state the absurd means to accept it, and Shestov's whole logic is aimed at revealing the absurd, clearing the way for the boundless hope that follows from it. Once again, I note that this approach is legitimate. But I stubbornly address here only one problem with all its consequences. It is not my task to investigate pathetic thinking or an act of faith. I can devote the rest of my life to this. I know that a rationalist will be annoyed by Shestov's approach, I also feel that Shestov has his own reasons for rebelling against rationalism. But I want to know only one thing: is Shestov faithful to the precepts of the absurd.

So, if we admit that absurdity is the opposite of hope, then we see that for Shestov, although existential thinking presupposes absurdity, it demonstrates it only in order to immediately dispel it. All the refinement of thought here turns out to be pathetic trickery. On the other hand, when Shestov contrasts the absurd with ordinary morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. The foundation of such a definition of absurdity is, therefore, Shestov's expressed approval. If we admit that all the power of the concept of the absurd is rooted in its ability to shatter our original hopes, if we feel that in order to maintain the absurdity it requires disagreement, then it is clear that in this case the absurdity has lost its real face, its humanly relative character, so that merge with the incomprehensible, but at the same time bringing peace eternity. If absurdity exists, it is only in the human universe. The moment the concept of the absurd becomes a springboard to eternity, it loses touch with the clarity of the human mind. The absurd ceases to be the evidence that a person states without agreeing with it. The fight stops. Absurdity is integrated by man, and in this unity its essence is lost: confrontation, rupture, split. This jump is a dodge. Shestov quotes Hamlet: The time is out of joint, passionately hoping that these words were uttered especially for him. But Hamlet said them, and Shakespeare wrote for a completely different reason. Irrational intoxication and ecstatic vocation deprive the absurd of clarity of vision. For Shestov, reason is vanity, but there is also something beyond reason. For the absurd mind, reason is also futile, but there is nothing beyond reason.

This leap, however, allows us to better understand the true nature of the absurd. We know that the absurd presupposes equilibrium, that it is in the comparison itself, and not in one of the terms of the comparison. Transferring all the weight to one of the terms. Shestov upsets the balance. Our desire to understand, our nostalgia for the absolute is explicable only to the extent that we are able to understand and explain the whole variety of things. Absolute denials of reason are in vain. The mind has its own order, in it it is quite effective. This is the order of human experience. That's why we want complete clarity. If we are unable to make everything clear, if the absurdity is born from this, then this happens precisely when an effective but limited reason meets a constantly reborn irrational one. Indignant at Hegel's statements such as "the movement of the solar system is carried out according to immutable laws, the laws of reason", violently taking up arms against Spinoza's rationalism, Shestov draws a legitimate conclusion about the futility of reason. From this follows a natural, albeit unjustified, turn towards the assertion of the superiority of the irrational (3). But the transition is not obvious, since the concepts of limit and plan are applicable to this case. The laws of nature are significant within certain limits, beyond which they turn against themselves and give rise to absurdity. On a descriptive level, regardless of the assessment of their truth as explanations, they are also quite legitimate. Shestov sacrifices all this to the irrational. The elimination of the requirement of clarity leads to the disappearance of absurdity - along with one of the terms of comparison. The absurd person, on the contrary, does not resort to such equations. He recognizes the struggle, does not feel the slightest contempt for reason and admits the irrational. His gaze embraces all the data of experience, and he is not inclined to make a leap without knowing in advance its direction. He knows one thing: there is no more room for hope in his mind.

What is palpable in Lev Shestov is even more characteristic of Kierkegaard. Of course, it is not easy to find clear definitions in such a writer. But, despite the outward inconsistency of his writings, behind pseudonyms, play, mockery, a certain premonition (and at the same time fear) of the truth passes through all his works, which ends with an explosion in his last works: Kierkegaard also makes a leap. Christianity, with which he was so intimidated in childhood, returns in the end in the most severe form. And for Kierkegaard, antinomy and paradox turn out to be the criteria of religion. What once led to despair now gives truth and clarity to life. Christianity is a scandal; Kierkegaard simply demands the third sacrifice of Ignacy Loyola, the one most pleasing to God: the "sacrifice of the intellect" (4). The results of the jump are peculiar, but this should not surprise us. Kierkegaard makes a criterion of the other world out of absurdity, while he is simply a remnant of the experience of this world. "In his fall," says Kierkegaard, "the believer will find triumph."

I don't question the thrilling sermons associated with this setup. It suffices for me to ask: do the spectacle of the absurd and its inherent character justify such an attitude? I know they don't. If we turn again to the absurd, Kierkegaard's inspirational method becomes more understandable. He does not maintain a balance between the irrationality of the world and the rebellious nostalgia of the absurd. That ratio is not respected, without which, in fact, it makes no sense to talk about a sense of absurdity. Convinced of the inevitability of the irrational, Kierkegaard thus tries to save himself at least from desperate nostalgia, which seems to him fruitless and inaccessible to understanding. Perhaps his reasoning on this matter is not without foundation. But there is no reason to deny the absurd. Replacing the cry of rebellion with the fury of consent, he comes to oblivion of the absurdity, which previously illuminated his path to the deification from now on of the only certainty of the irrational. It is important, as Abbé Galiani said to Madame d'Epine, not to be healed, but to learn to live with one's illnesses. Kierkegaard wants to be healed - this frantic desire permeates his entire diary. All the efforts of the mind are aimed at avoiding the antinomy of human destiny. The effort is all the more desperate that at times he understands all his vanity: for example, when he speaks of himself as if neither the fear of God nor piety can rest his soul. That is why it took painful tricks to give the irrational guise, and God - the attributes of the absurd. God is unjust , inconsistent, incomprehensible. The intellect cannot quench the ardent claims of the human heart. Since nothing has been proved, anything can be proven.

Kierkegaard himself indicates the path he followed. I don't want to speculate here, but how can I resist not seeing in his works signs of an almost voluntary mutilation of the soul, along with consent to absurdity? Such is the leitmotif of the Diary. "I lack an animal, which is also part of what is ordained for man... But then give me a body." And further: "What would I not give, especially in my youth, to be a real man, at least for six months ... I so lack the body and physical conditions of existence." And the same person picks up the great cry of hope that goes through the centuries and inspires so many hearts - except the heart of an absurd person. "But for a Christian, death is by no means the end of everything; there is infinitely more hope in it than in any life, even one full of health and strength." Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation.

Perhaps this reconciliation makes it possible to bring hope out of its opposite, out of death. But even if such an attitude can cause sympathy, its excessiveness does not confirm anything. It will be said that it is incommensurable with a man and, therefore, must be superhuman. But what kind of "hence" can we talk about if there is no logical certainty here. Experimental confirmation is also incredible. All I can say is that it is incommensurable with me. Even if I cannot deduce negatives from this, there is no way to take the incomprehensible as a basis. I want to know if I can live with the comprehensible, and only with it. I may also be told that the intellect must sacrifice its pride, the mind must bow down. But my acknowledgment of the limits of reason does not imply its denial. I acknowledge its relative power. I want to keep to that middle path where the clarity of the intellect is preserved. If this is his pride, then I do not see sufficient grounds to renounce it. How thoughtful is Kierkegaard's remark that despair is not a fact, but a state: even the state of sin, for sin is that which separates from God. Absurdity, being the metaphysical state of a conscious person, does not lead to God." Perhaps the concept of absurdity will become clearer if I decide on such an excess: absurdity is sin without God.

You have to live in this state of absurdity. I know what its foundation is: the mind and the world propping each other up but unable to connect. I ask about the rules of life in such a state, and what is offered to me in response leaves its foundation without attention, is a denial of one of the terms of painful confrontation, requires me to resign. I ask what are the consequences of the state which I recognize as my own; I know that it presupposes darkness and ignorance, and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything, that this night is light. But this is not the answer, and the exalted lyrics cannot hide the paradox from me. Therefore, a different path is needed.

Kierkegaard can exclaim and warn: “If man did not have eternal consciousness, if at the basis of all things there was nothing but the boiling of wild forces that produce all things, be they great or small, in the cycle of dark passions; if behind everything there was hidden only a bottomless, unfillable emptiness, then what would life be if not despair? This cry will not leave the absurd man. The search for truth is not the search for what is desirable. If, in order to avoid the alarming question: "What then will life be?" - one should not only put up with deceit, but also become like a donkey chewing roses of illusions, then the absurd mind intrepidly accepts Kierkegaard's answer: "despair". For the brave in spirit, this is enough.

I dare to call the existential approach philosophical suicide. This is not a final judgment, but merely a convenient way of referring to the movement of thought by which it denies itself and seeks to overcome itself by means of that which denies it. Negation is the God of the existentialist. More precisely, the only support of this God is the denial of human reason (5). But, like types of suicide, gods change with people. There are many varieties of the jump - the main thing is that it is made. Redemptive denials, final contradictions that remove all obstacles (although they have not yet been overcome) - all this can be the result of both religious inspiration and, paradoxically, rationality. It's all about claiming eternity, hence the leap.

Once again, we note that the reasoning undertaken in this essay is completely alien to the most common attitude of the spirit in our enlightened age: the one that is based on the principle of universal reasonableness and is aimed at explaining the world. It is not difficult to explain the world if it is known in advance that it is explainable. This setting is legitimate in itself, but is of no interest to our discussion. We consider the logic of consciousness, which comes from a philosophy that considers the world meaningless, but in the end reveals in the world both meaning and foundation. There is more pathos when we are dealing with a religious approach:

this can be seen at least in terms of the importance for the last theme of the irrational. But the most paradoxical and significant is the approach that gives rational grounds to a world that at first was considered devoid of a guiding principle. Before turning to the consequences that interest us, it is impossible not to mention this latest acquisition of the spirit of nostalgia.

I will only dwell on the topic of "intentionality" launched into circulation by Husserl and the phenomenologists, which I have already mentioned. Initially, the Husserlian method rejects classical rationalism. Let us repeat: to think does not mean to unify, it does not mean to explain a phenomenon by reducing it to a higher principle. To think means to learn to look again, to direct your consciousness, not losing sight of the inherent value of each image. In other words, phenomenology refuses to explain the world, it wants to be only a description of experiences. Phenomenology adjoins absurd thinking in its original statement: there is no Truth, there are only truths. Evening breeze, this hand on my shoulder - each thing has its own truth. It is illuminated by the attention of consciousness directed at it. Consciousness does not form a cognizable object, it only fixes it, being an act of attention. If we use the Bergsonian image, then consciousness is like a projection apparatus that suddenly fixes the image. The difference from Bergson is that in fact there is no script, consciousness consistently highlights what is devoid of internal consistency. In this magic lantern, all images are valuable in themselves. Consciousness brackets the objects to which it is directed, and they are miraculously isolated, being beyond all judgments. It is this "intentionality" that characterizes consciousness. But this word does not contain any idea of ​​the final goal. It is understood in the sense of "direction", it has only a topographical meaning.

At first glance, nothing here contradicts the absurd mind. The seeming modesty of thought, which is limited to description, the rejection of explanation, the voluntarily accepted discipline, paradoxically leading to the enrichment of experience and the revival of the entire multi-colored world - this is the essence of the absurd approach. At least at first glance, since the method of thinking, both in this case and in all others, always has two aspects: one psychological, the other metaphysical. "Thus, the method contains two truths. If the topic of intentionality is needed only for clarification a psychological attitude that exhausts the real instead of explaining it, then this topic really coincides with the absurd mind. finds joy in describing and understanding each image given in experience.In this case, the truth of any of these images is psychological in nature, it testifies only to the "interest" that reality can represent for us.Truth turns out to be a way of awakening a dormant world, it comes to life for mind, but if a given concept of truth extends beyond its limits, if for it there is a rational basis, if in this way one wishes to find the "essence" of each cognizable object, then a certain "depth" is again revealed behind the experience. To an absurd mind, this is something incomprehensible. In the phenomenological attitude, one can feel the fluctuations between modesty and self-confidence, and these mutual reflections of phenomenological thinking are the best illustrations of absurd reasoning.

Since Husserl speaks of intentionally revealed "timeless entities," we begin to feel as though we are listening to Plato. Everything is explained not by one thing, but everything is explained by everyone. I don't see the difference. Of course, the ideas or entities that are "realized" by consciousness after each description are not declared to be perfect models. But it is asserted that they are given directly in perception. There is no single idea that explains everything, there are an infinite number of entities that give meaning to the infinity of objects. The world becomes still, but it lights up. Platonic realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard plunges into his God, Parmenides overthrows thought and the One. Phenomenological thinking falls into abstract polytheism. Moreover, even hallucinations and fictions become "timeless entities." In the new world of ideas, the category "centaur" coexists with the more modest category "metropolitan".

For an absurd person, in a purely psychological approach, in which all images are valuable in themselves, there is both truth and bitterness. If everything is valuable in itself, then everything is equal. However, the metaphysical aspect of this truth leads so far that the absurd person immediately feels that he is being drawn to Plato. Indeed, he is told that each image is supposed to have an intrinsic value. In this ideal world, devoid of hierarchy, only generals serve in this army of forms. Yes, transcendence has been eliminated. But by an unexpected turn of thinking, a certain fragmentary immanence is introduced, restoring the deepest dimension of the universe.

Have I gone too far in interpreting phenomenology - after all, its creators are much more cautious? In response, I will cite only one statement of Husserl, outwardly paradoxical, but strictly logical, given all the premises: "What is true is absolutely true in itself; truth is identically one, whether it is perceived in judgments by people or monsters, angels or gods" . Here the triumph of Reason is indisputably proclaimed. But what can such a statement mean in the world of the absurd? The perception of an angel or a god is meaningless to me. For me, the geometric space in which the divine mind establishes the laws of my mind will forever remain incomprehensible. Here I find the same jump. Even if it is carried out with the help of abstractions, it still means for me the forgetting of precisely that which I do not want to forget. Further, Husserl exclaims: "Even if all the masses subject to attraction disappeared, the law of attraction would not thereby be destroyed, but simply remained beyond the limits of possible application." And it becomes clear to me that I am dealing with a metaphysics of consolation. If, however, I take it into my head to find the turning point where thinking leaves the path of evidence, then it is enough to reread Husserl's parallel reasoning regarding consciousness: "If we could clearly contemplate the exact laws of mental phenomena, they would seem to us just as eternal and unchanging as fundamental laws of theoretical natural science. Therefore, they would be significant even if there were no psychic phenomena." Even if there is no consciousness, its laws exist! Now I understand that Husserl wants to turn psychological truth into a rational rule: rejecting the integrating power of the human mind, he makes a detour into the realm of eternal Reason.

Therefore, I am not at all surprised by the appearance in Husserl of the theme of the "concrete universe". Talk about the fact that not all entities are formal, that there are material ones among them, that the former are the object of logic, and the latter are the object of specific sciences, for me all this is nothing more than a definition. I am assured that the abstractions themselves are only a substantive part of the concrete universe. But even these fluctuations show that there has been a substitution of terms. On the one hand, this may be a statement that my attention is directed to a specific object, to the sky or to a raindrop that has fallen on my raincoat. Behind them is the reality discernible in the act of my attention. This is undeniable. But the same statement can mean that the cloak itself is a kind of universal, belonging, together with its unique and self-sufficient essence, to the world of forms. Here I begin to understand that not only the order of following has changed. The world has ceased to be a reflection of the higher universe, but in the images inhabiting this earth, the sky full of forms is still displayed. Then I don't care, and it has nothing to do with the search for the meaning of the human condition, because there is no interest in the concrete. This is intellectualism, and quite frankly striving to turn the concrete into abstractions.

This apparent paradox, it turns out, is not surprising: thinking can go to self-denial in different ways - the path of both humiliated and triumphant reason. The distance between Husserl's abstract god and Kierkegaard's god of thunder is not so great. Both reason and the irrational lead to the same sermon. It is not so important which path is chosen: if there is a desire to reach the goal, this is the main thing. Abstract philosophy and religious philosophy alike start from a state of confusion and live in the same anxiety. But the crux of the matter lies in the explanation: nostalgia is stronger than science here. It is significant that the thinking of the modern age is permeated simultaneously with a philosophy that denies the world its significance, and a philosophy full of the most heartbreaking conclusions. Thinking constantly oscillates between the ultimate rationalization of the real, which breaks reality into rationalized fragments, and the ultimate irrationalization, which leads to its deification. But this is only the appearance of a split. A leap is enough for reconciliation. The concept of "mind" was erroneously endowed with a single meaning. In fact, despite all claims to rigor. it is no less changeable than all other concepts. The mind either appears in a completely human form, or skillfully turns into a divine face. Since the time of Plotinus, who accustomed the mind to the spirit of eternity, the mind has learned to turn away even from its dearest of its principles - non-contradiction, in order to include the most alien to it, the completely magical principle of participation (6). The mind is the instrument of thought, not the mind itself. Man's thinking is, first of all, his nostalgia.

Reason managed to quench the melancholy of Plotinus; it also serves as a sedative for modern anxiety, erecting the same scenery of eternity. The absurd mind does not require so much. For him, the world is neither too rational nor so irrational. He is simply unintelligent. With Husserl, reason eventually becomes limitless. The absurd, on the contrary, clearly sets its limits, since the mind is powerless to calm its anxiety. Kierkegaard, for his part, maintains that a single limit is enough to reject reason. The absurd does not go so far: for it, only the illegitimate claims of reason moderate the limits. The irrational, in the view of the existentialists, is the mind in discord with itself. He frees himself from strife by denying himself. The absurd is a clear mind, aware of its limits.

At the end of this difficult path, the absurd man finds his true foundations. Comparing his deepest demands with what has been offered to him so far, he suddenly feels that the meaning of his demands has been distorted. In Husserl's universe, the world has become so clear that the inherent human desire to understand it has become useless. In Kierkegaard's apocalypse, the satisfaction of this longing requires self-denial. The sin is not so much in knowledge (according to this account the whole world is innocent), but in the desire to know. This is the only sin about which the absurd person feels guilty and innocent at the same time. He is offered the resolution of all past contradictions, which are declared to be simply polemical games. But the absurd person feels something quite different, he needs to keep the truth of these contradictions. And it is such that contradictions persist. An absurd person does not need sermons.

The reasoning I have undertaken is true to the evidence that brought it to life. This evidence is the absurd, the split between the desire-filled mind and the deceptive world, between my nostalgia for unity and the uncountable shards of the universe, the contradiction that unites them. Kierkegaard abolishes my nostalgia, Husserl recreates the universe. I wasn't expecting this at all. It was about living and thinking, despite all the torments, in order to decide the question: accept them or refuse. Here you can't disguise the obvious, you can't abolish the absurd by denying one of its constituent terms. It is necessary to know whether it is possible to live in absurdity, or whether this logic requires death. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but in suicide as such. I intend to cleanse this act of its emotional content, to appreciate its sincerity and logic. Any other position appears to the absurd mind as trickery, a retreat of the mind in front of what it itself has revealed. Husserl intended to avoid "the inveterate habit of living and thinking in accordance with the conditions of existence, which are well known to us and convenient for us." But the final leap brought us back to eternity - with all its comforts. There is no extreme danger in the jump, as it seemed to Kierkegaard. On the contrary, the danger lurks in that elusive moment that precedes the leap. To be able to stay on this dizzying crest of a wave - that's what honesty consists of, and everything else is just tricks. I also know that impotence in no one has uttered such piercing chords as are found in Kierkegaard. In indifferent historical descriptions there is a place for impotence, but it is out of place in the reasoning, the urgent need for which is felt today.

absurd freedom

The main thing is done. There are several obvious truths that I cannot disown. What is taken into account is what I know, what I am sure of, what I cannot deny, cannot discard. I can tear away from the living indefinite longing part of my "I" everything except the desire for unity, the attraction to determination, the demand for clarity and coherence. In a world that surrounds, touches, pushes me, I can deny everything except this chaos, this royal occasion, this divine balance born from anarchy. I don't know if this world has a meaning that surpasses it. I only know that he is unknown to me, that in this moment he is incomprehensible to me. What can mean for me a meaning that lies beyond my lot? I am capable of understanding only in human terms. I understand what I touch, what resists me. I also understand two certainties - my desire for the absolute and unity, on the one hand, and the irreducibility of this world to a rational and reasonable principle, on the other. And I know that I cannot reconcile these two opposite certainties. What other truth could I recognize without falling into deceit, without mixing in hope, which I do not have and which is meaningless within the boundaries of my lot?

If I were a tree or an animal, life would have meaning for me. Or rather, the problem of meaning would disappear altogether, since I would become a part of this world. I would be this world, which I now oppose with all my consciousness, my demand for liberty. An insignificant mind has set me against everything created, and I cannot reject it with the stroke of a pen. I must hold on to what I believe to be true, what seems obvious to me, even against my own will. What else underlies this conflict, this discord between the world and consciousness, if not the very consciousness of the conflict? Therefore, in order to maintain conflict, I need an unceasing, ever-renewing and ever-tense consciousness. I need to keep myself in it. Together with him, an absurdity so obvious and at the same time so difficult to achieve invades human life - and finds a fatherland in it. But at the same moment, the mind can stray from this withering and fruitless path of clarity in order to return to everyday life, into a world of anonymous impersonality. But from now on, man enters this world with his rebellion, his clarity of vision. He has learned to hope. The hell of the present became at last his kingdom. All problems again appear before him in all their sharpness. The abstract evidence is replaced by the poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts are embodied and find their refuge - majestic or pathetic - in the human heart. None of them are allowed, but they have all been transformed. Should we die, escape from conflict with the help of a leap, or rebuild the edifice of ideas and forms in our own way? Or, on the contrary, to make a painful and wonderful bet of the absurd? One more effort in this direction - and we will be able to deduce all the consequences. The voice of the flesh, tenderness, creativity, activity, human nobility will again take their places in this crazy world. Man will find in him the wine of absurdity and the bread of indifference that feed his greatness.

I insist that this is a method of perseverance. At some point along the way, the absurd person must persevere. History is full of religions and prophecies, even godless ones. And from an absurd person they are required to make something completely different - a leap. In response, he can only say that he does not understand the requirement very well, that it is not obvious. He only wants to do what he understands well. He is assured that this is a sin of pride, and the very concept of "sin" is not clear to him; perhaps hell awaits him in the end, but he lacks the imagination to imagine such a strange future. Let him lose his immortal life, no great loss. He is forced to confess his guilt, but he feels innocent. In truth, he feels irredeemably innocent. It is by virtue of innocence that everything is allowed to him. From himself, he requires only one thing: to live exclusively by what he knows, to make do with what is, and not to allow anything unreliable. He is told that nothing is certain. But this is a certainty. That's what he's dealing with: he wants to know if it's possible to live an unappealable life.

Now the time has come again to turn to the concept of suicide, considering it from a different angle. Previously it was about knowledge; Does life have to have meaning in order to be worth living? Now, on the contrary, it seems that the less sense it has, the more reason to live it. Surviving the test of fate means fully accepting life. Therefore, knowing about the absurdity of fate, one can live it only if the absurdity is always before one's eyes, is obvious to consciousness. To reject one of the terms of the contradiction by which the absurd lives is to get rid of it. To abolish conscious rebellion is to circumvent the problem. The theme of the permanent revolution is thus carried over into individual experience. To live is to bring the absurd to life. To awaken him to life means not to take your eyes off him. Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies when it is turned away. One of the few consistent philosophical positions is rebellion, the continuous confrontation of man with the darkness lurking in him. Rebellion is a demand for transparency, in an instant it puts the whole world into question. Just as danger provides a person with an indispensable opportunity to comprehend himself, so the metaphysical booth provides consciousness with the entire field of experience. Rebellion is a constant given of man to himself. It is not aspiration, for rebellion is hopeless. Rebellion is confidence in the overwhelming power of fate, but without the humility that usually accompanies it.

We now see how far the experience of the absurd is from suicide. It is a mistake to think that suicide follows a riot is its logical conclusion. Suicide is the complete opposite of rebellion, for it presupposes consent. Like a leap, suicide is acceptance of one's own limits. Everything is finished, the man surrenders himself to the history prescribed for him; seeing a terrible future ahead, he plunges into it. In its own way, suicide is also a resolution of the absurd; it makes even death itself absurd. But I know that the condition for the existence of the absurd is its undecidability. Being both the consciousness of death and the renunciation of it, the absurd eludes suicide. Absurd is the rope that the condemned man perceives before his dizzying fall. No matter what, she was here, two steps away from him. A person sentenced to death is the exact opposite of a suicide.

This rebellion gives value to life. Becoming equal in duration to all existence, rebellion restores its greatness. For a person without blinders, there is no more beautiful sight than the struggle of the intellect with a reality that surpasses it. The spectacle of human pride is incomparable to anything; all self-abasement can do nothing here. There is something uniquely powerful in the discipline that the mind has dictated to itself, in the strongly forged will, in this confrontation. To impoverish reality, which by its inhumanity emphasizes the greatness of man, means to impoverish man himself. It is understandable why all-explaining doctrines weaken me. They take the burden of my own life off me; but I have to carry it all alone. And I can no longer imagine how a skeptical metaphysics can enter into an alliance with the morality of renunciation.

Consciousness and rebellion, both of these forms of renunciation, are the opposite of renunciation. On the contrary, they are filled with all the passions of the human heart. We are talking about death without renunciation, and not about a voluntary departure from life. Suicide mistake. The absurd man exhausts everything and exhausts himself; absurdity is the ultimate tension, maintained by all its forces in complete solitude. The absurd man knows that consciousness and everyday rebellion are evidence of the only truth that is the challenge he is given. This is the first consequence.

In keeping with the position taken earlier, namely, to derive all the consequences (and nothing but them) from the established concept, I am faced with a second paradox. To be faithful to the method, I do not need to address the metaphysical problem of freedom. I am not interested in whether a person is free at all, I can only feel my own freedom. I have no general ideas about freedom, but only a few distinct ideas. The problem of "freedom in general" does not make sense, because it is connected in one way or another with the problem of God. To know if a person is free, it is enough to know if he has a master. What makes this problem particularly absurd is that the same concept both poses the problem of freedom and at the same time deprives it of any meaning, since in the presence of God this is no longer so much a problem of freedom as a problem of evil. The alternative is known: either we are not free and the responsibility for evil lies with an omnipotent God, or we are free and responsible, and God is not omnipotent. All the subtleties of the various schools have added nothing to the sharpness of this paradox.

That is why exaltation is alien to me, and I do not waste time defining a concept that eludes me and loses its meaning, going beyond the scope of individual experience. I am not able to understand what the freedom given to me from above could be. I have lost the sense of hierarchy. Regarding freedom, I have no other concepts than those that a prisoner or a modern individual in the bosom of the state has. The only freedom available to my knowledge is freedom of mind and action. So if absurdity destroys the chances of eternal freedom, then it gives me freedom of action and even increases it. The absence of freedom and the future is tantamount to an increase in the available forces of man.

Before meeting with the absurd, an ordinary person lives with his goals, concern for the future or justification (it doesn’t matter to whom or to what). He evaluates the chances, counts on the future, on retirement or on his sons, he believes that much will still improve in his life. He acts, in fact, as if he is free, even if the actual circumstances refute this freedom. All this is shaken by absurdity. The idea "I am," my way of acting as if everything makes sense (even if I sometimes say that there is no sense), is all belied in the most dizzying way by the absurdity of death. To think about tomorrow, to set goals, to have preferences - all this implies a belief in freedom, even if assurances are often heard that it is not felt. But from now on I know that there is no higher freedom, freedom to be, which alone could serve as the foundation of truth. Death becomes the only reality, this is the end of all games. I have no freedom to prolong my existence, I am a slave, and my slavery is not brightened up either by the hope of a revolution coming somewhere in eternity, or even by contempt. But who can remain a slave if there is neither revolution nor contempt? What freedom in the full sense of the word can be without eternity?

But the absurd man understands that he was bound to this postulate of freedom by the illusions by which he lived. In a way, it bothered him. As long as he dreamed of the purpose of life, he conformed to the requirements suggested by the goal set, and was a slave to his own freedom. As a matter of fact, I cannot act otherwise than in the role of the father of the family (or engineer, leader of the people, freelance railroad worker), which I intend to become. I suppose I can choose one rather than the other. True, my belief in this is unconscious. But this postulate is supported both by the beliefs of my environment and the prejudices of the environment (after all, others are so sure of their freedom, their optimism is so contagious!). No matter how much we fence ourselves off from all moral and social prejudices, we are still partially influenced by them and even conform our lives to the best of them (there are good and bad prejudices). Thus, the absurd man comes to understand that he is not really free. As long as I hope, as long as I am concerned about the truths that belong to me or about how I can live and create, until I finally order my life and thereby recognize that it has meaning, I create barriers to my life, becoming like all those functionaries of the mind and heart, who inspire me only with disgust, because, as I now well understand, they take the notorious human freedom seriously all their lives.

The absurd dispelled my illusions: there is no tomorrow. And from now on it became the basis of my freedom. I will give two comparisons here. Mystics begin by finding freedom in selflessness. Having plunged into their god, obeying his rules, they receive in exchange a certain mysterious freedom. Deep independence is revealed in this voluntary consent to slavery. But what does such freedom mean? It can be said that mystics feel free, and not so much free as liberated. But after all, the man of the absurd, face to face with death (taken as the most obvious absurdity), also feels freed from everything except that passionate attention that crystallizes in him. In relation to all general rules, he is completely free. So, that the original theme of existential philosophy retains all its significance. Awakening of consciousness, escape from dreams

everyday life - these are the first steps of absurd freedom. But there the goal is an existential sermon, and behind it is that spiritual leap, which, by its very essence, is incomprehensible to consciousness. In the same way (this is my second comparison) ancient slaves did not belong to themselves. They were familiar with freedom, which consists in the absence of a sense of responsibility (7). The hand of death is like the hand of a patrician, crushing, but also granting liberation.

To plunge into this bottomless certainty, to feel alienated enough from one's own life - to exalt it and walk on it, getting rid of the short-sightedness of a lover - such is the principle of liberation. Like any freedom of action, this new independence is finite, it has no guarantee of eternity. But then freedom of action replaces illusory freedom, and illusions disappear in the face of death. The principles of the only reasonable freedom here are the divine detachment of the condemned to death, before whom the doors of prison will open one fine morning, incredible indifference to everything except the pure flame of life, death and absurdity. These are principles that are accessible to the human heart. This is the second consequence. The universe of the absurd man is a universe of ice and fire, as transparent as it is limited, where nothing is possible, but everything is given. In the end, it will crash and non-existence. He may choose to live in such a universe. From this determination he draws strength, hence his abandonment of hope and persistence in a life without consolation.

But what does it mean to live in such a universe? Nothing but indifference to the future and the desire to exhaust everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, choice, preference. Belief in the absurd, by definition, teaches us exactly the opposite. But it deserves special consideration.

All I care about is the question: Is an unappealable life possible? I don't want to leave this soil. I have been given such a way of life - can I adapt to it? Belief in the absurd responds to this concern by replacing the quality of experiences with their quantity. If I am convinced that life is absurd, that the balance of life is the result of a continuous rebellion of my consciousness against the darkness surrounding it; if I accept that my freedom has meaning only within the limits set by fate, then I am forced to say: it is not the best, but a long life that counts. And I don't care if this life is vulgar or disgusting, elegant or pitiable. Such value judgments are once and for all eliminated, giving way to factual judgments. I have to deduce consequences from what I see, and do not risk putting forward any hypotheses. Such a life is considered inconsistent with the rules of honor, but true honesty requires dishonor from me.

To live as long as possible - in a broad sense, this rule is completely insignificant. It needs clarification. At first it seems that the concept of quantity is not sufficiently disclosed in it. After all, with its help you can express a significant part of the human experience. Morality and the scale of values ​​make sense only in connection with the quantity and variety of accumulated experience. Modern life imposes on most people the same amount of experience, which is, moreover, essentially the same. Of course, it is also necessary to take into account the spontaneous contribution of the individual, all that he himself "accomplished". But this is not for me to judge, and the rule of my method says: conform to immediately given evidence. Therefore, I believe that public morality has less to do with the ideal validity of the principles that inspire it than with a measurable standard of experience. It's a bit of a stretch to say that the Greeks had a morality of leisure, just as we have a morality of an eight-hour day. But many personalities, including the most tragic ones, already evoke in us a premonition of an impending change in the hierarchy of values ​​along with a change in experience. They become something like conquistadors of everyday life, who, by the amount of experience, break all records (I deliberately use sports terminology) and win their own morality(8). Let us ask ourselves without any romanticism: what can this setting mean for a person who decides to bet, strictly observing the rules of the game that he himself has established?

Breaking all records means coming face to face with the world as often as possible. Is it possible without contradictions and reservations? On the one hand, the absurdity teaches that it does not matter what kind of experience it is, and on the other hand, it encourages the maximum amount of experience. Am I not here like all those whom I criticized when it comes to choosing a form of life that will bring as much of this human material as possible, and it will again lead to the same scale of values ​​that we wanted to reject?

The absurd and its contradictory existence again give us a lesson. For it is a mistake to think that the amount of experience depends on the circumstances of life. It depends only on ourselves. Here it is necessary to argue simply. To two people who have lived an equal number of years, the world always provides the same amount of experience. You just need to be aware of it. Experience your life. one's rebellion, one's freedom as fully as possible means to live, and to the fullest extent. Where clarity reigns, a scale of values ​​is useless. Let's be simple again. Let's say that the only "invincible" obstacle is premature death. The universe of the absurd exists only because of its opposition to such a permanent exception as death. Therefore, no deep thinking, no emotions, passions and sacrifices can equate in the eyes of an absurd person (even if he wanted to) forty years of conscious life and clarity, stretching for sixty years (9). Madness and death are irreparable. Man has no choice. Absurdity and the increment of life it brings, therefore, depend not on the will of man, but on its opposite, on death (10). Having carefully weighed the words, we can say that this is a matter of chance. You should understand this and agree. Twenty years of life and experience cannot be replaced by anything.

By strange inconsistency for such a sophisticated people, the Greeks believed that those who died young become favorites of the gods. This is true if we recognize that entry into the deceitful world of the gods means deprivation of joy in the purest form of our feelings, our earthly feelings. The present - such is the ideal of the absurd man: the successive passage of the moments of the present before the gaze of the relentlessly conscious soul. The word "ideal", however, sounds false. After all, this is not even a human vocation, but simply the third consequence of the reasoning of an absurd person. Reflections on the absurd begin with a disturbing realization of inhumanity and return in the end to the passionate flame of human rebellion (11).

So I deduce from the absurdity three consequences, which are my rebellion, my freedom and my passion. With a mere play of consciousness, I turn into a rule of life what was an invitation to death, and reject suicide. Of course, I understand what will be a dull echo of this decision throughout the next days of my life. But I can only say one thing: it is inevitable. When Nietzsche writes: "It becomes clear that the most important thing on earth and in heaven is a long and one-pointed submission, its result is something for which it is worth living on this earth, namely courage, art, music, dance, reason, spirit - -something transformative, something refined, insane or divine", he illustrates the rule of great morality. But he also points to the path of the absurd man. Submitting to the flame is both the easiest and the most difficult. And yet I bury that a person, measuring his strength with difficulties, sometimes passes judgment on himself. He alone has the right to do so.

"Supplication," says Alain, is like the night descending upon thought. "But the mind must face the night," answer the mystics and existentialists. Certainly. But not with that night, which is generated by centuries adjoining of its own free will, not with the gloomy and deep night, which the mind creates only in order to get lost in it. If the mind is destined to meet the night, it will be rather a night of despair, but a clear, polar night. This is the night of the waking mind, it gives rise to that flawless white radiance in which every object appears in the light of consciousness. Indifference is coupled here with passionate comprehension, and then all questions about the existential leap fall away. It takes its place among other installations on the age-old fresco of human consciousness. For the sensible observer, this jump is also a kind of absurdity. To the extent that the leaper believes in the resolution of this paradox, he restores this paradox in its entirety. That is why this jump is so exciting. That is why everything falls into place and the absurd world is reborn in all its splendor and diversity.

But we must not dwell on this alone, for it is difficult to be satisfied with one way of seeing, depriving oneself of contradiction, which is probably the finest form of the spirit. So far, we have defined only the way of thinking. Now let's talk about life.

(1) I have heard of one of Peregrine's rivals, a post-war writer who, after completing his first book, committed suicide to gain attention. He attracted attention, but the book was weak.

(2) But not in the true sense of the word. This is not a definition, but a listing of those feelings that lead to absurdity. After completing the enumeration. we have not yet exhausted the absurdity.

(3) Namely, and connections with the law of the excluded middle, and in particular against Aristotle.

(4) One might think that I am neglecting here the most essential problem. that is, the problem of faith. But it is not my aim] to study the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Shestov or Husserl (this would require a different work and a different approach). I take a line, one topic. in order to investigate the question of the consequences deduced from it, in accordance with previously established rules. It's all about perseverance.

(6) A. At that time, the mind had to either adapt or perish. He adapted. Starting with Plotinus, reason turns from logic into aesthetics. Metaphor replaces syllogism.

However, this is not Plotinus's only contribution to phenomenology. The phenomenological attitude is entirely contained in the idea so dear to the Alexandrian thinker: he has not only the idea of ​​man, but also the idea of ​​Socrates.

(7) This is a mere comparison, not an apology for self-abasement. An absurd person is the opposite of a humble person.

(8) Quantity sometimes creates quality. If we take on faith the latest discoveries of science, all matter is composed of centers of energy. More or less of them leads to specific differences. A billion ions and one ion are different not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. From here it is easy to conduct; analogy with human experience.

(9) In a similar way, the argument unfolds about a completely different concept - the idea of ​​Nothing. It adds nothing to the real and takes nothing away from it. In the psychological experience of nothingness, our own nothingness makes sense when we start to think about what will happen in two thousand years.

(11) It is important to be consistent. Our starting point is agreement with the world. But Eastern thought teaches that the same logic can be turned against the world. This fully justified position gives our essay its breadth and at the same time delineates its limits. When the negation of the world is carried out with the same rigor, one often comes (as in some schools of Vedanta) to similar results. For example, in what concerns the question of the indifference of acts. In Jean Grenier's highly informative book Choice, the true "philosophy of indifference" is thus substantiated.

A. Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus (Essay on the Absurd). Absurd reasoning Soul, do not strive for eternal life, But try to exhaust what is possible. Pindar. Pythian Songs (III, 62-63) On the following pages we will talk about the feeling of the absurd, which is found everywhere in our age - about the feeling, and not about the philosophy of the absurd, in fact, unknown to our time. Elementary honesty requires from the outset to recognize what these pages owe to some modern thinkers. There is no point in hiding that I will be quoting and discussing them throughout this work. It is worth noting at the same time that the absurdity, which has hitherto been taken as a conclusion, is taken here as a starting point. In this sense, my reflections are preliminary: it is impossible to say what position they will lead to. Here you will find only a pure description of the disease of the spirit, to which neither metaphysics nor faith have yet been mixed. Such are the limits of the book, such is its only bias. Absurdity and Suicide There is only one really serious philosophical problem - the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories is secondary. These are the conditions of the game: first of all, you need to give an answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche wanted it to be, that a respectable philosopher should serve as an example, then the significance of the answer is understandable - certain actions will follow it. This evidence is felt by the heart, but it is necessary to delve into it in order to make it clear to the mind. How to determine the greater urgency of one issue compared to another? Judging should be by the actions that follow the decision. I have never seen anyone die for an ontological argument. Galileo paid tribute to scientific truth, but with extraordinary ease he renounced it as soon as it became dangerous for his life. In a sense, he was right. Such a truth was not worth the fire. Does the earth revolve around the sun, does the sun revolve around the earth - is it all the same? In a word, the question is empty. And at the same time, I see a lot of people dying, because, in their opinion, life is not worth living. I also know those who, strangely enough, are ready to commit suicide for the sake of ideas or illusions that serve as the basis of their life (what is called the cause of life is at the same time an excellent cause of death). Therefore, I consider the question of the meaning of life the most

urgent of all questions. How to answer it? There seem to be only two methods of understanding all essential problems - and I consider as such only those that threaten death or increase tenfold the passionate desire to live - the methods of La Palissa and Don Quixote. It is only when evidence and delight balance each other that we gain access to both emotion and clarity. In dealing with a subject so modest and at the same time so charged with pathos, classical dialectical learning must give way to a more unpretentious attitude of mind, based both on common sense and on sympathy. Suicide has always been considered exclusively as a social phenomenon. We, on the contrary, from the very beginning raise the question of the connection between suicide and the thinking of the individual. Suicide is prepared in the silence of the heart, like the Great Deed of the alchemists. The man himself knows nothing about him, but one fine day he shoots himself or drowns himself. About one suicidal housekeeper, I was told that he had changed a lot after losing his daughter five years ago, that this story "undermined" him. It's hard to find a more precise word. As soon as thinking begins, it already undermines. At first, the role of society here is not great. The worm sits in the heart of a person, and there it must be sought. It is necessary to understand that deadly game that leads from clarity in relation to one's own existence to escape from this world. There are many reasons for suicide, and the most obvious of them, as a rule, are not the most effective. Suicide is rarely the result of reflection (such a hypothesis, however, is not excluded). The denouement comes almost always unconsciously. Newspapers report on "intimate sorrows" or "incurable disease". Such explanations are perfectly acceptable. But it would be worthwhile to find out whether the friend of the despairing one was not indifferent that day - then he is guilty. For even this smallness could be enough for the bitterness and boredom that had accumulated in the heart of a suicide to burst out. Let us take this opportunity to note the relativity of the reasoning carried out in this essay: suicide can be associated with much more valid reasons. An example is the political suicides that were committed "out of protest" during the Chinese revolution. But if it is difficult to accurately fix the moment, the elusive movement in which the death lot is chosen, then it is much easier to draw conclusions from the act itself. In a certain sense, just like in melodrama, suicide is tantamount to confession. To commit suicide means to admit that life is over, that it has become incomprehensible. Let's not, however, draw distant analogies, let's return to ordinary language. It simply admits that "life is not worth living." Naturally, life is never easy. We continue to perform the actions required of us, but for a variety of reasons, primarily the force of habit. Voluntary death presupposes, albeit instinctively, the recognition of the insignificance of this habit, the realization of the absence of any reason for the continuation of life, the understanding of the meaninglessness of everyday fuss, the futility of suffering. What is this vague feeling that deprives the mind of the dreams necessary for life?

A world that lends itself to explanation, even the worst one, this world is familiar to us. But if the universe is suddenly deprived of both illusions and knowledge, man becomes an outsider in it. A person is banished forever, because he is deprived of both the memory of the lost fatherland and the hope of the promised land. Strictly speaking, the feeling of absurdity is this discord between a person and his life, the actor and the scenery. All people who have ever thought about suicide immediately recognize the existence of a direct connection between this feeling and the craving for non-existence. The subject of my essay is precisely this connection between the absurd and suicide, the elucidation of the extent to which suicide is the outcome of the absurd. In principle, for a person who does not cheat with himself, actions are governed by what he considers to be true. In this case, belief in the absurdity of existence should be a guide to action. The question, posed clearly and without false pathos, is legitimate: does not such a conclusion lead to the fastest way out of this vague state? Of course, we are talking about people who are able to live in harmony with themselves. In such a clear formulation, the problem seems simple and at the same time unsolvable. It would be a mistake to think that simple questions evoke equally simple answers, and that one evidence easily entails another. Looking at the problem from the other side, regardless of whether people commit suicide or not, it seems a priori clear that there can be only two philosophical solutions: "yes" and "no". But it's too easy. There are also those who incessantly ask questions without coming to an unambiguous decision. I am far from ironic: we are talking about the majority. It is also understandable that many who answer "no" act as if they said "yes". If one accepts the Nietzschean criterion, they say "yes" one way or another. Conversely, suicidal people often believe that life has meaning. We are constantly confronted with such contradictions. One might even say that the contradictions are especially acute just at the moment when logic is so desired. Philosophical theories are often compared with the behavior of those who profess them. Among the thinkers who denied meaning to life, no one, except Kirillov, who was born of literature, who arose from the legend of Peregrine (1) and tested the hypothesis of Jules Lequier, was in such agreement with his own logic as to renounce life itself. Jokingly, they often refer to Schopenhauer, who glorified suicide at a sumptuous meal. But there is no time for jokes. It doesn't really matter that the tragedy isn't taken seriously; such frivolity in the end passes judgment on the person himself. So, faced with these contradictions and this darkness, is it worth it to believe that there is no connection between the possible opinion about life and the deed done to leave it? Let's not exaggerate. There is something stronger in man's attachment to the world than all the troubles of the world. The body takes part in the decision no less than the mind, and it retreats before non-existence. We get used to living long before we get used to thinking. The body maintains this lead in the race of days, which gradually brings our death hour closer. Finally, the essence of the contradiction lies in what I would call

an "evasion" that is both more and less than Pascal's "entertainment". Death Evasion - The third theme of my essay is hope. Hope for a different life, which must be "earned", or the tricks of those who live not for life itself, but for the sake of some great idea that surpasses and elevates life, endows it with meaning and betrays it. Everything here confuses us cards. It has been subtly asserted that looking at life as nonsense is tantamount to saying that it is not worth living. In fact, there is no necessary connection between these judgments. It simply must not succumb to confusion, discord and inconsistency, but go straight to the real problems. Suicide is committed because life is not worth living - of course, this is the truth, but the truth is fruitless, a truism. Is this the curse of existence, this exposure of life as a lie, the consequence of the fact that life has no meaning? Does the absurdity of life demand that they run from it - to hope or to suicide? That's what we need to find out, trace, understand, discarding everything else. Does absurdity lead to death? This problem is the first among all others, whether it be the methods of thinking or the impassive games of the spirit. Nuances, contradictions, an all-explaining psychology, skillfully introduced by the "spirit of objectivity" - all this has nothing to do with this passionate search. He needs wrong, that is, logical, thinking. It doesn't come easily. It is always easy to be logical, but it is almost impossible to be logical to the very end. As logical as suicidal people who follow the path of their feelings to the end. Thinking about suicide allows me to pose the only problem that interests me: is there a logic that is acceptable up to death? I can know this only with the help of reasoning, free from the chaos of passion and filled with the light of evidence. This marks the beginning of a reasoning that I call absurd. Many started it, but I don't know yet if they went to the end. When Karl Jaspers, having shown the impossibility of mentally constituting the unity of the world, exclaims: “This limit leads me to myself, where I no longer hide behind an objective point of view, reduced to the totality of my ideas; to where neither I myself nor the existence of another cannot become objects for me", he, like many others, reminds me of those waterless deserts where thinking approaches its limits. Of course, he speaks after others, but how hastily he seeks to leave these limits! This last turn, which shakes the foundations of thought, is reached by many people, including the most obscure ones. They renounce everything that is dear to them, that was their life. Others, aristocrats of the spirit, also renounce, but go to the suicide of thinking, openly rebelling against thought. Just the opposite requires effort: to maintain, as far as possible, the clarity of thought, to try to examine closely the bizarre forms that have formed on the outskirts of thinking. Perseverance and insight are the privileged spectators of this absurd and inhuman drama, where hope and death exchange lines. The mind can now begin to analyze the figures of this elementary and at the same time sophisticated dance before enlivening them with its own life.

Absurd Walls Like great works of art, deep feelings always mean more than what consciousness puts into them. In habitual actions and thoughts, the unchanging sympathies or antipathies of the soul are found, they are traced in conclusions about which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings conceal a whole universe, which can be majestic or miserable; they highlight a world endowed with its own affective atmosphere. There are whole universes of jealousy, ambition, selfishness or generosity. The universe presupposes the presence of a metaphysical system or mindset. What is true of individual feelings is all the more true of the underlying emotions. They are indefinite and vague, but at the same time "reliable"; as remote as "presences" - like emotions that give us the experience of beauty or awaken a sense of the absurd. A sense of absurdity awaits us at every corner. This feeling is elusive in its mournful nakedness, in the dim light of its atmosphere. This elusiveness itself deserves attention. Apparently, the other person always remains unknown to us, there is always something in him that cannot be reduced to our knowledge, eluding him. But in practice, I know people and recognize them as such by their behavior, the totality of their actions, by the consequences that are generated in life by their actions. All irrational feelings inaccessible to analysis can also be practically determined, practically evaluated, combined according to their consequences in the order of intellect. I can catch and mark the weight of their faces, give the outlines of the universe of each feeling. Even after seeing one actor for the hundredth time, I will not claim to know him personally. And yet, when I say that I know him a little better, having seen him for the hundredth time and trying to sum up what he played, there is some truth in my words. This is a paradox, and at the same time a parable. Its moral is that a person is determined by the comedies he plays no less than by sincere impulses of the soul. We are talking about feelings that are inaccessible to us in all their depth; but they are partly reflected in actions, in attitudes of consciousness necessary for this or that feeling. It is clear that by doing so I set the method. But this is a method of analysis, not of knowledge. The method of cognition presupposes a metaphysical doctrine that determines the conclusions in advance, despite all the assurances that the method is unpremeditated. From the first pages of the book, we know the content of the latter, and their connection is inevitable. The method defined here conveys a sense of the impossibility of any true knowledge whatsoever. It makes it possible to enumerate the appearances, to feel the spiritual climate. Perhaps we will be able to uncover the elusive sense of absurdity in the different, but still kindred worlds of intellect, the art of life and art as such. We start with an atmosphere of absurdity. The ultimate goal is to comprehend the universe of absurdity and that attitude of consciousness that illuminates this inexorable face in the world. The beginning of all great actions and thoughts is insignificant. Great deeds are often born at a street intersection or at the entrance to a restaurant. So it is with absurdity.

The bloodline of the absurd world goes back to a beggarly birth. The answer "about nothing" to the question of what we think, in some situations there is a pretense. This is well known to lovers. But if the answer is sincere, if it conveys that state of mind when emptiness becomes eloquent, when the chain of everyday actions breaks and the heart searches in vain for the lost link, then the first sign of absurdity appears here. It happens that the usual decorations collapse. Rise, trams, four hours in the office or at the factory, lunch. tram, four hours of work, dinner, sleep; monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, all in the same rhythm - this is the path that is easy to follow day after day. But one day the question arises "why?". It all starts with this bewilderment-tinged boredom. "Beginning" is what matters. Boredom is the result of a mechanical life, but it also sets consciousness in motion. Boredom awakens him and provokes further: either an unconscious return to the usual track, or a final awakening. And sooner or later, awakening is followed by consequences: either suicide or the restoration of the course of life. Boredom itself is disgusting, but here I must admit that it is beneficial. For everything begins with consciousness, and nothing apart from it matters. The observation is not too original, but we are talking about the self-evident. For now, this is enough for a cursory review of the origins of the absurd. At the very beginning lies simply "care". From day to day we are carried by the time of a bleak life, but there comes a moment when we have to shoulder its burden on our own shoulders. We live in the future: "tomorrow", "later", "when you have a position", "with age you will understand". This inconsistency is delightful, because in the end death comes. The day comes and the man notices that he is thirty years old. Thus, he declares his youth. But at the same time, he relates himself to time, takes a place in it, recognizes that he is at a certain point on the graph. He belongs to time and is horrified to realize that time is his worst enemy. He dreamed of tomorrow, and now he knows that he should be renounced. This rebellion of the flesh is absurdity (2). It is worth going down one step lower - and we find ourselves in a world alien to us. We notice its "density", we see how alien in its independence from us is the stone, with what intensity nature denies us, the most ordinary landscape. The basis of any beauty is something inhuman. It is worth understanding this, and the surrounding hills, the peaceful sky, the crowns of trees immediately lose the illusory meaning that we gave them. From now on, they will be removed, turning into a kind of lost paradise. Through the millennia, the primitive hostility of the world ascends to us. It becomes incomprehensible, because for centuries we understood in it only those figures and images. who themselves invested in it, and now we no longer have the strength for these tricks. Becoming itself, the world eludes us. Colored by habit, the scenery becomes what it has always been. They are moving away from us. Just as behind an ordinary woman's face we suddenly discover a stranger whom we have loved for months and years, perhaps the time will come when we will begin to strive for that which is unexpected.

makes us so lonely. But the time has not yet come, and so far we have only this density and this alienation of the world - this absurdity. Humans are also the source of the non-human. In a few hours of mental clarity, the mechanical actions of people, their meaningless pantomime, are clear in all their stupidity. The man is talking on the phone behind a glass partition; it is not audible, but meaningless facial expressions are visible. The question arises: why does he live? The repulsion caused by the inhumanity of man himself, the abyss into which we fall when we look at ourselves, this "nausea", as one modern author says, is also absurd. In the same way, we are disturbed by a familiar stranger, reflected for a moment in the mirror or found in our own photograph - this is also absurd ... Finally, I come to death and the feelings that arise in us about it. Everything has already been said about death, and decency requires us to maintain a pathetic tone here. But what is surprising: everyone lives as if they "know nothing." The thing is, we don't have the experience of death. Experienced, in the full sense of the word, is only what is experienced, realized. We have the experience of the death of others, but this is just a surrogate, it is superficial and does not convince us too much. The melancholy conventions are unconvincing. The mathematics of what is happening is appalling. Time frightens us with its evidence, the inexorability of its calculations. In response to all the beautiful arguments about the soul, we received from him convincing evidence to the contrary. In a motionless body that does not respond even to a slap, there is no soul. The elementarity and certainty of what is happening constitute the content of the absurd feeling. In the deathly light of fate, the futility of any effort becomes apparent. In the face of bloody mathematics that determines the conditions of our existence, no morality, no effort is justified a priori. All this has already been said more than once. I will confine myself to the simplest classification and point out only the topics that go without saying. They run through all literature and philosophy, fill everyday conversations. There is no need to reinvent anything. But it is necessary to ascertain their evidence in order to be able to raise the fundamental question. I repeat once again, I am not so much interested in the manifestations of the absurd as in the consequences. If we are convinced of the facts, then what should be the consequences, where should we go? To die voluntarily, or, in spite of everything, to hope? But first of all, it is necessary to at least briefly consider how this situation was understood in the past. The first business of the mind is to distinguish the true from the false. However, as soon as thinking engages in reflection, a contradiction is immediately revealed. No amount of persuasion will help here. In the clarity and elegance of evidence, no one has surpassed Aristotle for so many centuries: “As a result, with all such views, what everyone knows must necessarily happen - they refute themselves. Indeed, the one who claims that everything is true makes the statement true the opposite of his own, and thereby makes his statement untrue (for the contrary statement denies its truth), and he who says that everything is false, makes his statement also false. If they make an exception -

in the first case, for the opposite assertion, declaring that it alone is not true, and in the second case, for one's own assertion, declaring that it alone is not false, one has to assume an innumerable number of true and false assertions, for the assertion that the true statement is true, itself true, and this can be continued indefinitely. " This vicious circle is only the first in a series that leads the mind immersed in itself to a dizzying whirlpool. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them inevitable. No matter how verbal games and "we have not indulged in logical acrobatics, to understand is first of all to unify. Even in its most developed forms, the mind is connected with an unconscious feeling, a desire for clarity. To understand the world, a person must reduce it to a human one, put his stamp on it. The cat's universe is different from the universe the truism "all thought is anthropomorphic" has no other meaning. the mind is satisfied with reality only when it succeeds in reducing it to thinking. If a person could admit that the universe is also capable of loving him and suffering, he would be humbled. If thought were to discover in the changing contours of phenomena eternal relations to which the phenomena themselves were reduced, and the relations themselves were summarized by some single principle, then reason would be happy. In comparison with such happiness, the myth of bliss would seem a pathetic fake. Nostalgia for the One, the desire for the Absolute express the essence of the human drama. But it does not follow from the actual presence of this nostalgia that the thirst will be quenched. As soon as we cross the abyss separating desire from goal and affirm, together with Parmenides, the reality of the One (whatever it may be), we fall into absurd contradictions. Reason affirms unity, but by this assertion it proves the existence of difference and diversity, which it tried to overcome. Thus a second vicious circle begins. It is quite enough to extinguish our hopes. Again, we are talking about the obvious. I repeat once again that they interest me not in themselves, but from the point of view of the consequences that are derived from them. I also know another evidence: a man of deaths. But you can count on the fingers of those thinkers who have drawn all the conclusions from this. The starting point of this essay can be considered this gap between our imaginary knowledge and real knowledge, between practical agreement and stimulated ignorance, because of which we quietly get along with ideas that would turn our whole life upside down if we experienced them in all their truth. In the hopeless inconsistency of the mind, we catch the split that separates us from our own creations. While the mind is silent, immersed in the motionless world of hopes, weight is reflected and ordered in the unity of its nostalgia. But at the very first movement, this world cracks and falls apart: knowledge remains in front of an infinite number of brilliant fragments. It can be frustrating trying to reassemble them, restoring the original unity that brought peace to our hearts. So many centuries of research, so much self-denial of thinkers, and in the end everything

our knowledge is in vain. Except professional rationalists, everyone knows today that true knowledge is hopelessly lost. The only meaningful history of human thought is the history of successive repentances and confessions of one's own impotence. Indeed, about what, on what occasion, could I say: "I know it!" About my heart - after all, I feel its beating and claim that it exists. About this world - after all, I can touch it and again consider it to exist. This is where all my science ends, everything else is mental constructions. As soon as I try to grasp this "I", whose existence is certain for me, to define it and summarize it, it slips away like water between my fingers. I can describe one by one the images in which it appears, add those given from outside: education, origin, ardor or silence, greatness or meanness, etc. But these images do not add up to a single whole. Outside all definitions, the heart itself always remains. Nothing can fill the gap between the certainty of my existence and the content I am trying to give it. I am forever alienated from myself. In psychology, as in logic, there are numerous truths, but there is no Truth. "Know thyself" of Socrates is no better than "be virtuous" of our preachers: in both cases only our anguish and ignorance are revealed. These are fruitless games with great objects, justified only insofar as our ideas about them are approximate. The roughness of trees, the taste of water - all this is also familiar to me. The smell of grass and stars, other nights and evenings from which the heart stops - can I deny this world, the omnipotence of which I constantly feel? But all earthly sciences cannot convince me that this is my world. You can give it a detailed description, you can teach me how to classify it. You enumerate its laws, and in my thirst for knowledge I agree that they are all true. You disassemble the mechanism of the world - and my hopes grow stronger. Finally, you teach me how to reduce this wonderful and multi-colored universe to an atom, and then to an electron. All this is great, I'm all in anticipation. But you are talking about an invisible planetary system where electrons revolve around the nucleus, you want to explain the world with a single image. I am ready to admit that this is poetry inaccessible to my mind. But is it worth it to resent your own stupidity? After all, you have already managed to replace one theory with another. So science, which was supposed to give me omniscience, turns into a hypothesis, clarity is obscured by metaphors, uncertainty is resolved by a work of art. Why then my efforts? The soft lines of the hills, the evening calm will teach me much more. So I return to the very beginning, realizing that with the help of science it is possible to capture and enumerate phenomena, thereby not at all approaching an understanding of the world. My knowledge of the world will not increase, even if I manage to probe all its hidden convolutions. And you offer a choice between a description that is reliable but does not teach anything, and a hypothesis that claims to be omniscient, but is unreliable. Alienated from himself and from the world, armed with

any case of thinking that denies itself at the very moment of its own affirmation - what kind of fate is this if I can reconcile myself to it only by renouncing knowledge and life, if my desire always runs into an insurmountable wall? To wish is to bring to life paradoxes. Everything is arranged in such a way that this poisoned peace is born, giving us carelessness, sleep of the heart or renunciation of death. In its own way, the intellect also speaks to me about the absurdity of the world. His opponent, which is the blind mind, can claim to be completely clear as much as he likes - I am waiting for proof and would be glad to receive it. But in spite of age-old claims, in spite of so many people who are eloquent and ready to convince me of anything, I know that all the evidence is false. There is no happiness for me if I do not know about it. This universal reason, practical or moral, this determinism, these all-explaining categories - there is something for an honest person to laugh at. All this has nothing to do with the mind, it denies its deepest essence, which consists in the fact that it is enslaved by the world. Man's destiny now makes sense in this incomprehensible and limited universe. It rises above him, he is surrounded by the irrational - and so on until the end of his days. But when the clarity of vision returns to him, the sense of the absurd is highlighted and refined. I said that the world is absurd, but this is said too hastily. The world itself is simply unreasonable, and that is all that can be said about it. Absurd is the clash between irrationality and the frenzied desire for clarity, the call of which resounds in the very depths of the human soul. Absurdity equally depends on the person and on the world. For now, he's the only link between them. The absurd holds them together as firmly as only hatred can chain one living being to another. This is all that I can discern in that immense universe where I was destined to live. Let's dwell on this in more detail. If it is true that my relationship with life is regulated by absurdity, if I am imbued with this feeling when I look at the world spectacle, if I am established in the thought that makes it necessary for me to seek knowledge, then I must sacrifice everything except certainty. And in order to keep it, I must always have it before my eyes. First of all, I must subordinate my behavior to certainty and follow it in everything. I'm talking about honesty here. But first I would like to know: can thought live in this desert? I already know that thought sometimes visited this desert. There she found her bread, admitting that she had previously fed on ghosts. Thus arose the occasion for several pressing themes of human reflection. Absurdity becomes a painful passion from the moment it is realized. But is it possible to live with such passions, is it possible to adopt a fundamental law that says that the heart burns at the very moment when these passions awaken in it? We do not yet raise this question, although it occupies a central place in our essay. We'll get back to him. Let us first get acquainted with the themes and impulses born in the desert. Enough to list them, today they are well known. There have always been defenders of the rights of the irrational. The tradition of so-called "lower thinking" has never been broken. Criticism of rationalism was carried out

so many times that there seems to be nothing more to add to it. However, our era witnesses the rebirth of paradoxical systems, all the ingenuity of which is aimed at setting traps for the mind. Thus, as it were, the primacy of reason is recognized. But this is not so much proof of the effectiveness of reason as evidence of the vitality of its hopes. In historical terms, the constancy of these two attitudes shows that a person is torn apart by two aspirations: on the one hand, he strives for unity, and on the other, he clearly sees those walls that he is not able to go beyond. The attacks on the mind have perhaps never been as violent as they are at the present time. After the great cry of Zarathustra: “Chance is the oldest know of the world, which I restored to all things ... when I taught that neither above them nor through them no eternal will wants”, after Kierkegaard’s illness and death, “that illness, in which the last is death, and the death in which there is the last," followed other, significant and painful, themes of absurd thought. Or, at least - this nuance is important - the themes of irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from Kierkegaard to Shestov, from phenomenologists to Scheler, logically and morally, a whole family of minds related in their nostalgia, opposing each other in goals and methods, furiously blocks the royal path of reason and tries to find some true path of truth. I proceed here from the fact that the main ideas of this circle are known and experienced. Whatever their claims were (or could not be), they all started from an ineffable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anxiety or impotence reign. The topics listed above are also common to them. It is worth noting that for them, first of all, the consequences of the truths they discovered are important. This is so important that it deserves special attention. But for now, we will only talk about their discoveries and initial experience. We will consider only those provisions on which they fully agree with each other. It would be presumptuous to analyze their philosophical teachings, but it is quite possible, and indeed sufficient, to give a sense of the general atmosphere for them. Heidegger coolly considers the human condition and declares that existence is insignificant. "Care" becomes the only reality at all levels of existence. For a person lost in the world and its entertainments, care appears as a brief moment of fear. But as soon as this fear reaches self-consciousness, it becomes anxiety, that constant atmosphere of a clearly thinking person, "in which existence reveals itself." This professor of philosophy writes without any hesitation and in the most abstract language in the world: "The finite and limited character of human existence is more primary than man himself." He shows interest in Kant, but only to show the limitations of "pure reason". Conclusion in terms of Heidegger's analysis: "the world has nothing more to offer a person who is in anxiety." As it seems to him, care so surpasses all categories of reason in relation to truth that he thinks only about it, only he talks about it. He lists all its guises: boredom, when a banal person is looking for how to depersonalize and forget himself; horror,

when the mind is given over to the contemplation of death. Heidegger does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of care, and "existence then turns to itself in its own call through consciousness." It is the voice of anxiety itself, conjuring existence "to return to itself from being lost in an anonymous existence." Heidegger also believes that one must not sleep, but stay awake to the very end. He clings to this absurd world, curses it for its frailty, and seeks a path among the ruins. Jaspers renounces any ontology: he wants us to stop being "naive". He knows that we cannot go beyond the mortal game of appearances. He knows that in the end reason is defeated, and he dwells for a long time on the vicissitudes of the history of the spirit in order to ruthlessly expose the bankruptcy of any system, any all-saving illusion, any sermon. In this devastated world, where the impossibility of knowledge has been proven, where nothing seems to be the only reality, and hopeless despair is the only possible setting. Jaspers is busy searching for Ariadne's thread leading to the divine mysteries. In turn, Shestov, throughout his amazingly monotonous work, inseparably turned to the same truths, endlessly proves that even the most closed system, the most universal rationalism, always stumbles over the irrationality of human thinking. All those ironic evidences and the most insignificant contradictions that devalue reason do not escape him. And in the history of the human heart, and in the history of the spirit, he is interested in one single, exceptional subject. In the experience of Dostoyevsky sentenced to death, in the bitter adventures of Nietzscheism, in the curses of Hamlet, or in the bitter aristocracy of Ibsen, he tracks down, highlights and exalts man's rebellion against inevitability. He denies reasons to reason, he will not budge until he finds himself in the middle of a faded desert with petrified certainties. Perhaps the most attractive of all these thinkers, Kierkegaard, during at least part of his existence, not only searched for the absurd, but also lived it. The man who exclaims: "True dumbness is not in silence, but in conversation," asserts from the very beginning that no truth is absolute and cannot make existence satisfactory. Don Juan from cognition, he multiplied pseudonyms and contradictions, wrote at the same time "Instructive Speeches" and "Diary of a Seducer", a textbook of cynical spiritualism. He rejects consolation, morality, any principles of comfort. He exposes for all to see the torments and unsleeping pain of his heart in the hopeless joy of being crucified, contented with his cross, creating himself in clarity of mind, denial, comedy, a kind of demonism. This face, tender and mocking at the same time, these pirouettes, followed by a cry from the depths of the soul - such is the very spirit of the absurd in the struggle with the reality that overcomes it. The adventure of the spirit, leading Kierkegaard to scandals dear to his heart, also begins in the chaos of an experience devoid of scenery, transmitted by him in all its primordial incoherence. In a completely different plane, namely from the point of view of method, with all

By the extremes of such a position, Husserl and the phenomenologists restored the world in its diversity and rejected the transcendent power of reason. The universe of spirit has thus been unheard of enriched. A rose petal, a boundary post, or a human hand has taken on the same significance as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Now thinking does not mean unifying, reducing phenomena to some great principle. To think means to learn to see again, to become attentive; it means to control one's own consciousness, to give, in the manner of Proust, a privileged position to every idea and every image. Paradoxically, everything is privileged. Every thought is justified by ultimate awareness. Although more positive than that of Kierkegaard and Shestov, Husserl's approach nevertheless from the very beginning denies the classical method of rationalism, puts an end to unrealizable hopes, opens to intuition and heart the whole field of phenomena, in the richness of which there is something inhuman. This path leads to all sciences and at the same time to none. In other words, the means here is more important than the end. This is simply a "cognitive attitude" and not a consolation. At least at first. How not to feel the deep kinship of all these minds? How not to see that they are attracted by the same place that is not accessible to everyone and bitter, where there is no more hope? I want everything to be explained to me, or nothing to be explained. The mind is powerless before the cry of the heart. The search for the mind awakened by this demand does not lead to anything but contradictions and irrationality. What I cannot understand is unreasonable. The world is full of such irrationalities. I do not understand the unique meaning of the world, and therefore it is immensely irrational for me. If it were possible to say at least once: "This is clear," then everything would be saved. But these thinkers with enviable persistence proclaim that nothing is clear, chaos is everywhere, that a person is able to see and know only the walls surrounding him. Here all these points of view converge and intersect. Having reached its limits, the mind must pass judgment and choose the consequences. Such may be suicide and objection. But I propose to reverse the order of the investigation and begin with the misadventures of the intellect, and then return to everyday activities. To do this, we do not need to leave the desert in which this experience is born. We must know where it leads. Man is faced with the irrationality of the world. He feels that he desires happiness and intelligence. Absurdity is born in this clash between the vocation of man and the unreasonable silence of the world. We must keep this in mind all the time, not lose sight of it, since conclusions important for life are connected with it. Irrationality, human nostalgia and the absurdity generated by their meeting - these are the three characters of the drama, which must be traced from beginning to end with all the logic that existence is capable of. Philosophical suicide The feeling of the absurd is not the same as the concept of the absurd. Feeling lies at the base, it is the fulcrum. It is not reducible to a concept, except for that brief moment when feeling passes judgment on the universe. Then feeling either

dies or survives. We have combined all these topics. But here, too, I am not interested in the works that the thinkers did not create - criticism would require a different form and a different place - but in the general that is contained in their conclusions. Perhaps there is an abyss of differences between them, but we have every reason to believe that the spiritual landscape they created is the same. The cry that ends all these scientific researches, which are so different from each other, sounds the same. The aforementioned thinkers have a common spiritual climate. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is a murderous atmosphere. Living under this suffocating sky means either leaving or staying. You need to know how they leave and why they stay. This is how I define the problem of suicide, and my interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy is connected with this. But I would like to deviate from the direct path for a while. Until now, the absurdity has been described by us from the outside. However, we can ask how clear this concept is, analyze its meaning, on the one hand, and its consequences, on the other. If I accuse an innocent person of a terrible crime, if I declare to a respectable person that he lusts for his own sister, then they will answer me that this is absurd. There is something comical in this outrage, but there is also a deep reason for it. The good man points out the antinomy between the act I attribute to him and the principles of his whole life. "It's absurd" means "it's impossible", and besides, "it's contradictory". If a man armed with a knife attacks a group of machine gunners, I consider his action absurd. But it is such only because of the disproportion between intention and reality, because of the contradiction between real forces and the goal set. In the same way, we will regard it as an absurd verdict, opposing it with another one, at least outwardly corresponding to the facts. The proof from the absurd is also carried out by comparing the consequences of a given reasoning with the logical reality that is sought to be established. In all cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the greater the gap between the terms of comparison, the greater the absurdity. There are absurd marriages, challenges to fate, rancor, silences, absurd wars and absurd truces. In each case, absurdity is generated by comparison. Therefore, I have every reason to say that the feeling of absurdity is not born from a simple examination of a fact or impression, but breaks in along with a comparison of the actual state of affairs with some kind of reality, a comparison of an action with a world lying outside this action. Essentially, absurdity is a split. It is not present in any of the compared elements. It is born in their collision. Therefore, from the point of view of the intellect, I can say that the absurdity is not in man (if such a metaphor makes sense at all) and not in the world, but in their joint presence. So far, this is the only connection between them. If we stick to the obvious, then I know what a person wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can also say what unites them. There is no need for further excavation. For those who seek, one is enough

reliability. The point is to deduce all the consequences from it. The immediate consequence is at the same time the rule of the method. The appearance of this peculiar triad does not represent an unexpected discovery of America. But it has something in common with the data of experience, that it is both infinitely simple and infinitely complex. The first characteristic in this respect is indivisibility: to destroy one of the terms of the triad means to destroy it entirely. Apart from the human mind, there is no absurdity. Therefore, with death, the absurd disappears, like everything else. But there is no absurdity outside the world either. On the basis of this elementary criterion, I can consider the concept of absurdity to be essential and to posit it as the first truth. Thus arises the first rule of the aforementioned method: if I hold something to be true, I must keep it. If I intend to solve a problem, then my solution must not destroy one of its sides. The absurdity is the only given for me. The problem is how to get out of it, and also whether suicide is necessarily deduced from the absurdity. The first and, in fact, the only condition of my research is the preservation of what destroys me, the consistent everything that I consider to be the essence of the absurd. I would define it as a confrontation and a continuous struggle. Carrying out the absurd logic to the end, I must admit that this struggle implies a complete lack of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), an unchanging refusal (his should not be confused with renunciation) and conscious dissatisfaction (which should not be likened to youthful anxiety). Everything that destroys, hides these demands or goes against them (above all this split-destroying consent), destroys the absurdity and devalues ​​the proposed attitude of consciousness. Absurdity has meaning when disagreed with It is an obvious fact of the moral order that man is the eternal victim of his own tin. Once he recognizes them, he is no longer able to get rid of them. Everything has to be paid for somehow. A person who has realized the absurd is now bound to it forever. A man without hope, having realized himself as such, no longer belongs to the future. It's okay. But he equally belongs to the attempts to escape from the universe, the creator of which he is. Everything that precedes makes sense only in the light of this paradox. It is also instructive to look at the method of deducing consequences, which, based on the criticism of rationalism, was resorted to by thinkers who recognized the atmosphere of the absurd. If you take the existentialist philosophers, I see that they all offer an escape. Their arguments are rather idiosyncratic; having found absurdity among the ruins of the mind, being in the closed, limited universe of man, they deify that which crushes them, finding a basis for hope in that which deprives them of all hope. This forced hope has a religious meaning for them. This needs to be stopped. As an example, I will analyze here several themes characteristic of Shestov and Kierkegaard. Jaspers gives us a typical example of the same attitude, but turned into a caricature. I will explain this later. We have seen that

Jaspers is powerless to realize transcendence, unable to probe the depths of experience - he realized that the universe is shaken to its very foundations. Does he go further, does he at least deduce all the consequences from this upheaval of the foundations? He doesn't say anything new. In experience, he found nothing but the recognition of his own impotence. It lacks the slightest pretext for introducing any acceptable principle. And yet, without citing any arguments (which he himself says), Jaspers at once affirms the transcendent being of experience and the superhuman meaning of life when he writes: “Does not this collapse show us that beyond any explanation and any possible interpretation there is not nothing but the being of transcendence." Suddenly, in one blind act of human faith, everything finds its explanation in this being. It is defined by Jaspers as "an incomprehensible unity of the general and the particular." So the absurd becomes a god (in the broadest sense of the word), and the inability to understand turns into an all-illuminating being. This argument is completely illogical. You can call it a jump. Paradoxical as all this may seem, it is quite possible to understand why Jaspers so insistently, with such boundless patience, makes the experience of the transcendent impossible. For the further he is from this experience, the more empty, the more real is the transcendent, since the passion with which it is affirmed is in direct proportion to the gulf that opens between his ability to explain and the irrationality of the world. It even seems that Jaspers attacks the prejudices of the mind the more violently, the more radically the mind explains the world. This apostle of humiliated thought seeks the means of reviving the entire fullness of being in the most extreme self-abasement. Such methods are familiar to us from mysticism. They are no less legitimate than any other attitudes of consciousness. But now I act as if I took a certain problem seriously. I have no prejudices about the significance of this installation or its instructiveness. I would only like to check how it meets the conditions set by me, whether it is worthy of the conflict that interests me. Therefore, I return to Shestov. One commentator conveys a noteworthy statement of this thinker: "The only way out is where there is no way out for the human mind. Otherwise, why do we need God? God is turned to for the impossible. For the possible, people are enough." If Shestov has a philosophy, then it is summarized in these words. Because, having discovered at the end of his passionate search the fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say: "This is absurd", but declares: "Here is God, he should be addressed, even if he does not fit into any of our categories." To avoid misunderstandings, the Russian philosopher even adds that this God can be malicious and hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory. But the uglier his face, the stronger his omnipotence. The greatness of God is in his inconsistency. His inhumanity turns out to be proof of his existence. It is necessary to rush into God, and with this jump to get rid of rational illusions. Therefore, for Shestov, the acceptance of the absurd and the absurd itself are simultaneous. To state absurdity means to accept it, and Shestov's entire logic is aimed at revealing absurdity, clearing the way for

the boundless hope that follows from it. Once again, I note that this approach is legitimate. But I stubbornly address here only one problem with all its consequences. It is not my task to investigate pathetic thinking or an act of faith. I can devote the rest of my life to this. I know that a rationalist will be annoyed by Shestov's approach, I also feel that Shestov has his own reasons for rebelling against rationalism. But I want to know only one thing: is Shestov faithful to the precepts of the absurd. So, if we admit that absurdity is the opposite of hope, then we see that for Shestov, although existential thinking presupposes absurdity, it demonstrates it only in order to immediately dispel it. All the refinement of thought here turns out to be pathetic trickery. On the other hand, when Shestov contrasts the absurd with ordinary morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. The foundation of such a definition of absurdity is, therefore, Shestov's expressed approval. If we admit that all the power of the concept of the absurd is rooted in its ability to shatter our original hopes, if we feel that in order to maintain the absurdity it requires disagreement, then it is clear that in this case the absurdity has lost its real face, its humanly relative character, so that merge with the incomprehensible, but at the same time bringing peace eternity. If absurdity exists, it is only in the human universe. The moment the concept of the absurd becomes a springboard to eternity, it loses touch with the clarity of the human mind. The absurd ceases to be the evidence that a person states without agreeing with it. The fight stops. Absurdity is integrated by man, and in this unity its essence is lost: confrontation, rupture, split. This jump is a dodge. Shestov quotes Hamlet: The time is out of joint, passionately hoping that these words were uttered especially for him. But Hamlet said them, and Shakespeare wrote for a completely different reason. Irrational intoxication and ecstatic vocation deprive the absurd of clarity of vision. For Shestov, reason is vanity, but there is also something beyond reason. For the absurd mind, reason is also futile, but there is nothing beyond reason. This leap, however, allows us to better understand the true nature of the absurd. We know that the absurd presupposes equilibrium, that it is in the comparison itself, and not in one of the terms of the comparison. Transferring all the weight to one of the terms. Shestov upsets the balance. Our desire to understand, our nostalgia for the absolute is explicable only to the extent that we are able to understand and explain the whole variety of things. Absolute denials of reason are in vain. The mind has its own order, in it it is quite effective. This is the order of human experience. That's why we want complete clarity. If we are unable to make everything clear, if the absurdity is born from this, then this happens precisely when an effective but limited reason meets a constantly reborn irrational one. Indignant at Hegel's statements such as "the movement of the solar system is carried out according to immutable laws, the laws of reason", violently taking up arms against Spinoza's rationalism, Shestov draws a legitimate conclusion about the futility of reason. From this follows a natural, though unjustified, turn to the assertion

superiority of the irrational (3). But the transition is not obvious, since the concepts of limit and plan are applicable to this case. The laws of nature are significant within certain limits, beyond which they turn against themselves and give rise to absurdity. On a descriptive level, regardless of the assessment of their truth as explanations, they are also quite legitimate. Shestov sacrifices all this to the irrational. The elimination of the requirement of clarity leads to the disappearance of absurdity - along with one of the terms of comparison. The absurd person, on the contrary, does not resort to such equations. He recognizes the struggle, does not feel the slightest contempt for reason and admits the irrational. His gaze embraces all the data of experience, and he is not inclined to make a leap without knowing in advance its direction. He knows one thing: there is no more room for hope in his mind. What is palpable in Lev Shestov is even more characteristic of Kierkegaard. Of course, it is not easy to find clear definitions in such a writer. But, despite the outward inconsistency of his writings, behind pseudonyms, play, mockery, a certain premonition (and at the same time fear) of the truth passes through all his works, which ends with an explosion in his last works: Kierkegaard also makes a leap. Christianity, with which he was so intimidated in childhood, returns in the end in the most severe form. And for Kierkegaard, antinomy and paradox turn out to be the criteria of religion. What once led to despair now gives truth and clarity to life. Christianity is a scandal; Kierkegaard simply demands the third sacrifice of Ignacy Loyola, the one most pleasing to God: the "sacrifice of the intellect" (4). The results of the jump are peculiar, but this should not surprise us. Kierkegaard makes a criterion of the other world out of absurdity, while he is simply a remnant of the experience of this world. "In his fall," says Kierkegaard, "the believer will find triumph." I don't question the thrilling sermons associated with this setup. It suffices for me to ask: do the spectacle of the absurd and its inherent character justify such an attitude? I know they don't. If we turn again to the absurd, Kierkegaard's inspirational method becomes more understandable. He does not maintain a balance between the irrationality of the world and the rebellious nostalgia of the absurd. That ratio is not respected, without which, in fact, it makes no sense to talk about a sense of absurdity. Convinced of the inevitability of the irrational, Kierkegaard thus tries to save himself at least from desperate nostalgia, which seems to him fruitless and inaccessible to understanding. Perhaps his reasoning on this matter is not without foundation. But there is no reason to deny the absurd. Replacing the cry of rebellion with the fury of consent, he comes to oblivion of the absurdity, which previously illuminated his path to the deification from now on of the only certainty - the irrational. It is important, as Abbé Galiani said to Madame d'Epine, not to be healed, but to learn to live with one's illnesses. Kierkegaard wants to be healed - this frantic desire permeates his entire diary. All the efforts of the mind are aimed at avoiding the antinomy of human destiny. The effort is all the more desperate that at times he understands all his vanity: for example, when he talks about himself as if no fear

the Lord, nor piety can give rest to his soul. That is why painful tricks have been required to give the irrational guise and God the trappings of the absurd. God is unjust, inconsistent, incomprehensible. The intellect cannot extinguish the ardent claims of the human heart. Since nothing is proven, anything can be proved. Kierkegaard himself indicates the path he followed. I don't want to speculate here, but how can I resist not seeing in his works signs of an almost voluntary mutilation of the soul, along with consent to absurdity? Such is the leitmotif of the Diary. "I lack an animal, which is also part of what is ordained for man... But then give me a body." And further: "What would I not give, especially in my youth, to be a real man, at least for six months ... I so lack the body and physical conditions of existence." And the same person picks up the great cry of hope that goes through the centuries and inspires so many hearts - except the heart of an absurd person. "But for a Christian, death is by no means the end of everything; there is infinitely more hope in it than in any life, even one full of health and strength." Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. Perhaps this reconciliation makes it possible to bring hope out of its opposite, out of death. But even if such an attitude can cause sympathy, its excessiveness does not confirm anything. It will be said that it is incommensurable with a man and, therefore, must be superhuman. But what kind of "hence" can we talk about if there is no logical certainty here. Experimental confirmation is also incredible. All I can say is that it is incommensurable with me. Even if I cannot deduce negatives from this, there is no way to take the incomprehensible as a basis. I want to know if I can live with the comprehensible, and only with it. I may also be told that the intellect must sacrifice its pride, the mind must bow down. But my acknowledgment of the limits of reason does not imply its denial. I acknowledge its relative power. I want to keep to that middle path where the clarity of the intellect is preserved. If this is his pride, then I do not see sufficient grounds to renounce it. How thoughtful is Kierkegaard's remark that despair is not a fact, but a state: even the state of sin, for sin is that which separates from God. Absurdity, being the metaphysical state of a conscious person, does not lead to God." Perhaps the concept of absurdity will become clearer if I decide on such an excess: absurdity is sin without God. You have to live in this state of absurdity. I know what its foundation is: the mind and the world propping each other up but unable to connect. I ask about the rules of life in such a state, and what is offered to me in response leaves its foundation without attention, is a denial of one of the terms of painful confrontation, requires me to resign. I ask what are the consequences of the state which I recognize as my own; I know that it presupposes darkness and ignorance, and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything, that this night is light. But that's not the answer, and

exalted lyrics cannot hide the paradox from me. Therefore, a different path is needed. Kierkegaard can exclaim and warn: “If man did not have eternal consciousness, if at the basis of all things there was nothing but the boiling of wild forces that produce all things, be they great or small, in the cycle of dark passions; if behind everything there was hidden only a bottomless, unfillable emptiness, then what would life be if not despair? This cry will not leave the absurd man. The search for truth is not the search for what is desirable. If, in order to avoid the alarming question: "What then will life be?" - one should not only put up with deceit, but also become like a donkey chewing roses of illusions, then the absurd mind intrepidly accepts Kierkegaard's answer: "despair". For the brave in spirit, this is enough. I dare to call the existential approach philosophical suicide. This is not a final judgment, but merely a convenient way of referring to the movement of thought by which it denies itself and seeks to overcome itself by means of that which denies it. Negation is the God of the existentialist. More precisely, the only support of this God is the denial of human reason (5). But, like types of suicide, gods change with people. There are many varieties of the jump - the main thing is that it is made. Redemptive denials, final contradictions that remove all obstacles (although they have not yet been overcome) - all this can be the result of both religious inspiration and, paradoxically, rationality. It's all about claiming eternity, hence the leap. Once again, we note that the reasoning undertaken in this essay is completely alien to the most common attitude of the spirit in our enlightened age: the one that is based on the principle of universal reasonableness and is aimed at explaining the world. It is not difficult to explain the world if it is known in advance that it is explainable. This setting is legitimate in itself, but is of no interest to our discussion. We consider the logic of consciousness, which comes from a philosophy that considers the world meaningless, but in the end reveals in the world both meaning and foundation. There is more pathos when we are dealing with a religious approach: this can be seen at least in terms of the significance of the irrational theme for the latter. But the most paradoxical and significant is the approach that gives rational grounds to a world that at first was considered devoid of a guiding principle. Before turning to the consequences that interest us, it is impossible not to mention this latest acquisition of the spirit of nostalgia. I will only dwell on the topic of "intentionality" launched into circulation by Husserl and the phenomenologists, which I have already mentioned. Initially, the Husserlian method rejects classical rationalism. Let us repeat: to think does not mean to unify, it does not mean to explain a phenomenon by reducing it to a higher principle. To think means to learn to look again, to direct your consciousness, not losing sight of the inherent value of each image. In other words, phenomenology refuses to explain the world, it wants to be only a description of experiences. Phenomenology adjoins absurd thinking in its original statement: there is no Truth, there is only

truth. Evening breeze, this hand on my shoulder - each thing has its own truth. It is illuminated by the attention of consciousness directed at it. Consciousness does not form a cognizable object, it only fixes it, being an act of attention. If we use the Bergsonian image, then consciousness is like a projection apparatus that suddenly fixes the image. The difference from Bergson is that in fact there is no script, consciousness consistently highlights what is devoid of internal consistency. In this magic lantern, all images are valuable in themselves. Consciousness brackets the objects to which it is directed, and they are miraculously isolated, being beyond all judgments. It is this "intentionality" that characterizes consciousness. But this word does not contain any idea of ​​the final goal. It is understood in the sense of "direction", it has only a topographical meaning. At first glance, nothing here contradicts the absurd mind. The seeming modesty of thought, which is limited to description, the rejection of explanation, the voluntarily accepted discipline, paradoxically leading to the enrichment of experience and the revival of the entire multi-colored world - this is the essence of the absurd approach. At least at first glance, since the method of thinking, both in this case and in all others, always has two aspects: one psychological, the other metaphysical. "Thus, the method contains two truths. If the topic of intentionality is needed only for clarification a psychological attitude that exhausts the real instead of explaining it, then this topic really coincides with the absurd mind. joy in the description and understanding of each image given in experience.In this case, the truth of any of these images is psychological in nature, it testifies only to the "interest" that reality can represent for us.Truth turns out to be a way to awaken the dormant world, it comes to life for the mind But if a given concept of truth extends beyond its limits, if for it a search there is a rational basis, if in this way one wishes to find the "essence" of each cognizable object, then a certain "depth" is again revealed behind the experience. To an absurd mind, this is something incomprehensible. In the phenomenological attitude, one can feel the fluctuations between modesty and self-confidence, and these mutual reflections of phenomenological thinking are the best illustrations of absurd reasoning. Since Husserl speaks of intentionally revealed "timeless entities," we begin to feel as though we are listening to Plato. Everything is explained not by one thing, but everything is explained by everyone. I don't see the difference. Of course, ideas or essences that are "realized" by consciousness after each description are not declared perfect Stavrogin, if he believes, then he does not believe that he believes. If he does not believe, then he does not believe that he does not believe.

"Demons" "The field of my activity," said Goethe, "is time." This is a completely absurd statement. What is an absurd person? He does nothing for the sake of eternity and does not deny it. Not that nostalgia was alien to him at all. But he prioritizes his courage and his ability to judge. The first teaches him to lead a life not subject to appeal, to be content with what he has; the second gives him an idea of ​​his limits. Convinced of the finiteness of his freedom, the absence of a future for his rebellion and the frailty of consciousness, he is ready to continue his deeds in the time that life has given him. Here is his field, the place of his operations, freed from any judgment but his own. A longer life does not mean a different life for him. It wouldn't be fair. And what can we say about that illusory eternity, called the court of descendants, on which Madame Roland relied - this "recklessness is punished according to merit." Posterity willingly quotes her words, but forgets to judge her by them. After all, Madame Roland is indifferent to posterity. We are not up to scientific reasoning about morality. Evil human actions are accompanied by an abundance of moral justifications, and every day I notice that honesty does not need rules. An absurd person is ready to admit that there is only one morality that does not separate from God: it is the morality imposed on him from above. But the absurd man lives just without this god. As for other moral teachings (including immoralism), he sees in them only justifications, while he himself has nothing to justify himself. I proceed here on the principle of his innocence. Innocence is dangerous. "Everything is permitted," exclaims Ivan Karamazov. And these words are riddled with absurdity, if not interpreted vulgarly. Was attention paid to the fact that "everything is permitted" - not a cry of liberation and joy, but a bitter statement? The credibility of a god who gives meaning to life is much more attractive than the credibility of the power of evil with impunity. It is not difficult to choose between them. But there is no choice, and therefore bitterness comes. Absurdity does not free, it binds. Absurdity is not the permission of any actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden. Absurdity shows only the equivalence of the consequences of all actions. He does not recommend committing crimes (that would be childish), but reveals the futility of remorse. If all kinds of experience are of equal value, then the experience of duty is no more legitimate than any other. One can be virtuous out of a whim. All moral teachings are based on the idea that an action is justified or canceled out by its consequences. To the absurd mind, these consequences deserve only calm consideration. He is ready to pay. In other words, for him there is responsibility, but there is no guilt. Moreover, he agrees that past experience can be the basis for future actions. Time inspires another time, life serves another life. But in life itself, in this field that is both limited and littered with possibilities, everything that goes beyond clear vision seems

unforeseen. What rule can be deduced from this unreasonable order? The only truth that could seem instructive does not have a formal character: it is embodied and revealed in specific people. The result of the search for an absurd mind is not the rules of ethics, but living examples that convey to us the breath of human lives. Such are the images that we present below; they will give concreteness and warmth to the absurd reasoning. Needless to say, an example is not necessarily a role model (if there is one at all in the world of the absurd), that these illustrations are not models at all. Besides the fact that I am not inclined to put forward exemplary models, it would be as ridiculous to put forward them as to conclude from the books of Rousseau that we need to get on all fours, or to deduce from Nietzsche that we should be rude to our own mother. "It is necessary to be absurd," writes one contemporary writer, "but there is no need to be stupid." The attitudes that will be discussed become fully meaningful only if we consider the opposite attitudes. A freelance peddler of letters is equal to a conqueror, provided that their consciousness is equally clear. So it doesn't matter what kind of experience it is. The main thing is whether it serves a person or harms him. Experience serves a person when it is realized. Otherwise, it is simply meaningless: by the shortcomings of a person, we judge him, and not the circumstances of his life. I have chosen only those heroes who set as their goal the exhaustion of life (or those whom I consider as such). I don't go further than that. I'm talking about a world in which both thoughts and lives have no future. Behind everything that encourages a person to work and move, there is hope. So the only non-false thought turns out to be fruitless. In an absurd world, the value of a concept or life is measured by barrenness. Don Juanism How simple everything would be if it were enough to love. The more one loves, the more solid the absurdity becomes. Don Juan rushes from one woman to another not because he lacks love. It is ridiculous to imagine him as a fanatic, striving to find some sublime fullness of love. Precisely because he loves women equally passionately, every time with all his soul, he has to repeat himself, giving himself entirely. Therefore, each of them hopes to give him something that no woman has been able to give him so far. Each time they are deeply mistaken, succeeding only in making him feel the need for repetition. “After all,” exclaims one of them, “I gave you my love! "And is it really surprising that Don Juan laughs. "After all," he says, "no, once again." Is it necessary to love rarely in order to love strongly? Is Don Juan sad? No, it's impossible to imagine "It is hardly worth recalling the chronicle. Laughter and victorious audacity, jumping out of windows and love for the theater - all this is clear and joyful. Every healthy being strives to multiply. Don Juan is like that. In addition, there are sad for two reasons: either out of ignorance or because of unfulfilled hopes. Don Juan knows everything and does not hope for anything. He resembles those artists who, knowing

the limits of their talent, they never transcend them, but they are endowed with wonderful ease in what is released to them. Genius is a mind that knows its limits. Up to the limit set by physical death, Don Juan knows no sorrow. And at the moment when he learns about the border, his laughter is heard, for which everything is forgiven him. He would be sad if he hoped. In another moment, the lips of another woman give him a bitter and comforting taste of unique knowledge. And is he bitter? Hardly: without imperfection, happiness is imperceptible! The greatest stupidity is to see in Don Juan a man fed by Ecclesiastes. What is vanity of vanities for him if not the hope of a future life? The proof of this is the game he plays against heaven. He is unfamiliar with remorse for wasting himself in pleasures (the common place of all impotence). These repentances would rather suit Faust, who believed in God enough to give himself up to the devil. For Don Juan, everything is much simpler. "Mischievous" Molina threatens hell, and he still laughs it off: "The hour of death? It's still far away." What happens after death does not matter, but how many more long days the one who knows how to live has! Faust asked for the riches of this world: it was enough for the unfortunate man to lend a hand. He who does not know how to rejoice has already sold his soul. Don Juan, on the other hand, stands for satiety. He leaves a woman not at all because he no longer wants her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he wants another, which is not the same. He is overwhelmed with life, and there is nothing worse than losing it. This madman is, in fact, a great sage. Those who live in hope are ill-adapted to a universe where kindness gives way to generosity, tenderness to courageous silence, and belonging to lonely courage. Everyone says: "Here is a weak man, an idealist or a saint." You need to be able to get rid of such offensive greatness. How much indignation (or forced laughter, belittling what is admired) causes Don Juan's speech when he seduces all women with the same phrase. But the one who is looking for the amount of pleasure, takes into account only the efficiency. Is it worth complicating a password that has already been repeatedly tested? No one - neither women nor men - listens to the content of the words. The voice that speaks them is important. Words are needed to comply with the rules, conventions, decency. They are spoken, after which it remains to proceed to the most important thing. This is what Don Juan is preparing for. Why does he need moral problems? He is not cursed because he wanted to become a saint, like Milosh's Manyara. Hell for him is something worthy of a challenge. To the wrath of God, he has a ready answer of a man of honor. "This is about my honor," he says to the Commander, "and I will fulfill the promise, as it should be for a nobleman." But it is equally wrong to make him an immoralist. In this sense, he is "like everyone else": morality for him is his likes and dislikes. Don Juan is understandable only if one keeps in mind all the time what he is a vulgar symbol of: an ordinary seducer (1), a womanizer. Yes, he is an ordinary seducer, with the only difference that he is aware of this, and therefore is absurd. But just because a seducer thinks clearly, he does not cease to be a seducer. Temptation is his position. Only in novels

change your position or become better than you were. Here, nothing changes, but everything is transformed. Don Juan professes the ethics of quantity, as opposed to the saint, striving for quality. An absurd person is characterized by disbelief in the deep meaning of things. He runs over them, harvests hot and delicious images, and then burns them. Time is his companion, the absurd man does not separate himself from time. Don Juan is not a "collector" of women at all. He only exhausts their number, and at the same time, his life possibilities. Collecting means being able to live in the past. But he does not regret the past. Regret is a kind of hope, and he does not know how to peer into the portraits of the past. But by the same token, isn't he an egoist? In his own way, of course, an egoist. But even in this case, everything depends on what is considered egoism. There are people created for life, there are people created for love. But at least that's what Don Juan would say, from his own point of view. Because they usually talk about love, embellishing it with the illusions of eternity. All experts on passions teach us that there is no eternal love without obstacles standing in its way. Without struggle, there is no passion. But the last contradiction of love is death. You have to be Werther or not be at all. Here, too, various types of suicide are possible: one of them is complete self-giving and forgetfulness of one's own personality. Don Juan knows as well as others that this is very touching, but he is one of those few who understand that this is not so important and that those whom great love has deprived of any personal life may enrich themselves, but certainly impoverish existence their chosen ones. A mother or passionately loving woman is necessarily hard of heart because she has turned her back on the world. One feeling. one being, one face swallowed up everything else. Don Juan lives by a different love, the one that liberates. It conceals in itself all the faces of the world, it is trembling in its frailty. Don Juan chose nothing. Seeing clearly is his goal. Love is what we call that which binds us to others, in the light of the socially conditioned way of seeing that is born of books and legends. But I do not know any other love than that mixture of desire, tenderness and intelligence that binds me to this particular being. For a different creature, the composition of the mixture will be different. I have no right to use the same word for all cases, which would allow me to always act the same way. The absurd person here also multiplies what he is unable to unify. He discovers for himself a new way of being that liberates him at least as much as he liberates all those who come to him. Generous love, aware of its uniqueness and frailty at the same time. All these deaths and rebirths make up the bouquet of Don Juan's life, such is his way of giving himself to life. Judge for yourself whether it is possible to talk about selfishness here. I am thinking now of all those who wished unconditional punishment for Don Juan. Not only in another life, but also in this one. I think of all the fairy tales and legends, all the anecdotes about Don Juan in his old age. But Don Juan is already ready for it. For a conscious person, old age and everything that it portends are not a surprise. A person is conscious only to the extent that he does not hide his fear from himself. In Athens there was a temple of old age. Children were taken there. How

the more they laugh at Don Juan, the more clearly his features emerge. He refuses the appearance prepared for him by the romantics. No one will laugh at the exhausted and miserable Don Juan. Since people pity him, perhaps heaven itself will forgive his sins? But no. Don Juan provided for himself a universe in which there is a place for ridicule. He is ready to be punished, these are the rules of the game. The generosity of Don Juan is that he accepts all the rules of the game. He knows that he is right and that he cannot escape punishment. Fate is not a punishment. Such is Don Juan's crime, and it is not surprising that people cry out to eternity to punish him. He has reached knowledge without illusions, he denies everything that they profess. To love and to possess, to conquer and to squander is his method of knowing. (There is a sense in the saying of Scripture, according to which "knowledge" is called the act of love.) Don Juan is the worst enemy of illusions precisely because he ignores them. A certain chronicler claims that the real "Mischievous" was killed by the Franciscans, who wished "to put an end to the atrocities and godlessness of Don Juan, to whom his high birth ensured impunity." Such a strange punishment has not been witnessed by anyone, although no one has proven the opposite either. But even without asking how reliable it is, I could say that it is logical. I would like to linger on the word "birth" (naissance) from this chronicle and play with it: life has certified Don Juan's innocence, he received his now legendary guilt from death. And what is the stone Commander, this cold statue set in action in order to punish living blood and human courage that dared to think? The commander is the totality of all the forces of the eternal Mind, order, universal morality, filled with the wrath of divine majesty, so alien to man. A giant stone is a symbol of those forces. which Don Juan always denied. The entire mission of the Commander is reduced to this symbolic role. Thunder and lightning can return to the fictional sky from which they were called. The real tragedy is played out without their participation. No, Don Juan does not die from a stone hand. It is not difficult for me to believe in the now legendary bravado, in the reckless laughter of a sane person challenging a non-existent god. But it seems to me that on that evening when Don Juan was waiting for him at Anna's, the Commendatore did not appear, and after midnight the atheist must have felt the unbearable bitterness of his rightness. Even more willingly I accept Don Juan's biography, according to which, at the end of his life, he imprisoned himself in a monastery. The moralizing side of this story is not very plausible: what salvation could he beg from God? Rather, here looms the logical conclusion of a life completely imbued with absurdity, a harsh denouement of an existence completely devoted to joys without counting on tomorrow. Pleasure ends with asceticism. You need to understand that these are two sides of the same coin. It is difficult to find a more frightening image: a man who was betrayed by his own body. who, not dying in time, in anticipation of death, completes the comedy, turning his face to the god whom he does not worship and serves him as he previously served life. He kneels before the void, with his hands outstretched to the silent heavens, behind

which, as he knows, there is nothing. I see Don Juan in the cell of one of the Spanish monasteries lost among the hills. If he looks at anything at all, it is before his eyes at the phantoms of departed love. Through the sunburned slit, he sees the silent plain of Spain, the majestic and soulless land. In it he recognizes himself. Yes, let's dwell on this melancholic and radiant image. Death inevitable, but forever hated, deserving of contempt. Theater "A spectacle is a noose to lasso the conscience of a king," says Hamlet. Well said - "lasso", because you need to grab the conscience on the fly, at that elusive moment when it casts a cursory glance at itself. Everyday man does not like to be delayed, he is in an eternal race. But at the same time, he is not interested in anything but himself, especially when it comes to who he could become. Hence his penchant for the theater, for spectacles that offer so many destinies to choose from. He can familiarize himself with them without compassion or bitterness. It is easy to recognize in this an unconscious person, hastily striving for unknown hopes. The absurd man appears when hopes are over, when the mind no longer admires the game, but enters into it. To penetrate into all lives, to experience them in all their diversity - that's what it means to play. I do not mean to say that all actors follow this call, that they are all people of the absurd. But their fate is an absurd fate, it is full of temptation, it attracts the heart of a clearly seeing person. This clause is necessary so that there are no misunderstandings about what will be discussed. The actor reigns in the transient. It is known that his fame is one of the most ephemeral. At least that's what they say about her. But any glory is ephemeral. From the point of view of the inhabitant of Sirius, ten millennia will turn Goethe's works into dust, will consign his name to oblivion. Only a few archaeologists, perhaps, will begin to look for "evidence" of our era. There has always been something instructive about this idea. If we think through all its consequences, then all our fuss will disappear, giving way to complete nobility of indifference. It directs our cares along the most correct path, that is, to the immediately given. The least deceptive is glory, which is lived every day. So the actor chooses an incalculable glory: that which sanctifies and justifies itself. From the fact that everyone must die someday, he drew the best conclusions. The actor either took place. or not. Even an unknown writer retains hope, believing that the works he left behind will testify to him. From the actor, at best, we will have a photograph. What he was, with his gestures and pauses, stale breath and love sighs, it will not come to a pass. Not to know him means not to see his play, not to die hundreds of times along with his heroes, whom he endowed with his soul and resurrected on stage. Is it any wonder that glory, erected on a foundation of such ephemeral material, turns out to be transient? An actor has only three hours to be Iago or Alceste, Phaedra or Gloucester. In short

a period of time, on fifty square meters of stage, all these heroes are born and die at his will. It is difficult to find another equally complete and exhaustive illustration of the absurd. These wonderful lives, these unique and perfect destinies, intersecting and ending within the walls of the theater for several hours - is there an even clearer view of the absurd? Stepping off the stage, Sigismund turns into nothing. Two hours later he is sitting in a cafe. Perhaps then life is a dream. But after Sigismund comes another role. A character suffering from insecurity replaces a violent avenger. Running, thus, through centuries and lives, imitating people as they are, or as they could be, the actor merges with another absurd character - the traveler. Like a traveler, he exhausts something and hurries on. Actors are time travelers, and if you take the best of them, they travel hunting down souls. If the morality of quantity has any nourishing soil at all, it is this one-of-a-kind scene. It is difficult to say what is the use of an actor in his characters. It does not matter. The only thing to know is: to what extent does he identify himself with these unique lives? Yes, it happens that an actor carries them through his life, and they slightly protrude beyond the time and space in which they were born. They accompany the actor, it is no longer easy for him to get rid of those whom he happened to be. It happens that he takes a glass, reproducing the gesture of Hamlet raising the bowl. No, the distance between him and the characters played is not so great. Monthly and daily he illustrates the fruitful truth that there is no boundary between what a man wants to be and what he is. With his daily acting, he shows how much appearance can create being. For such is his art - pretense brought to perfection, maximum penetration into other people's lives. As a result, his vocation is clear: with all the forces of his soul, he strives to be nothing, that is, to be many. The narrower the boundaries set for him when creating the image, the more talent is needed. In three hours, he will die under the mask that has become his face today. In three hours, he must survive and embody fate in all its originality. This is what is called: losing yourself in order to find yourself. During these three hours, he will reach the end of that hopeless path, the passage of which requires the viewer to be in the stalls of his whole life. Past the transient, the actor only externally exercises and improves. Theatrical conventions are such that one can express and comprehend the anguish of the heart either with the help of a gesture, in the flesh, or through a voice that equally belongs to the soul and body. The law of this art says that everything must be condensed, become flesh. If on the stage they could love the way they love in life, listening to the inexplicable voice of the heart, watching the way lovers contemplate each other, then the language of the theater would turn into an incomprehensible cipher. In the theatre, even silence should speak. An elevated tone of voice testifies to love, even immobility should become spectacular. The theater is dominated by the body. The word “theatricality”, which has become reprehensible due to a misunderstanding, completely embraces the whole aesthetics and the whole morality of the theater. A person spends half his life in silence, turning away from everyone, saying something

taken for granted. The actor invades his soul, removes the spell from it, and uninhibited feelings flood the stage. Passions speak in every gesture, but what they say - they shout. To present them on stage, the actor seems to re-create his characters. He depicts them, sculpts them, he flows into the forms created by his imagination and gives his living blood to the ghosts. Needless to say, I'm talking about a real theater that gives the actor the opportunity to physically realize his vocation. Look at Shakespeare. From the very first appearance, we see in this theater a frantic dance of bodies. They explain everything, without them everything will collapse. King Lear will not begin his journey to madness without the brutal gesture with which he banishes Cordelia and condemns Edgar. That is why the tragedy unfolds under the sign of madness. Souls are devoted to the dance of demons. As a result - no less than four madmen (one by trade, another by his own will, two more because of torment): four unbridled bodies, four inexpressible faces of the same destiny. Even the scale of the human body is insufficient. Masks and camouflage, make-up that emphasizes facial features, a costume that exaggerates or simplifies - in this universe everything is sacrificed for appearance, everything is created for the eyes. The marvel of the absurd is bodily knowledge. I will never really understand Iago until I play him. No matter how many times I hear it, I can only comprehend it by seeing it. With the absurd character of the actor, monotony is in common: the same silhouette, alien and at the same time familiar, stubbornly shows through in all his heroes. hallmark great work of theatrical art is that in it we find this unity of tone (2). That is why the actor is contradictory: he is one and the same, and he is diverse - so many souls live in his body. But this is precisely the inconsistency of the absurd: the individual who wants to achieve everything and experience everything is contradictory: his vain efforts, his senseless stubbornness are contradictory. But what is usually in conflict finds its resolution in the actor. He is where the body converges with the mind, where they crowd each other, where the mind, tired of the crash, returns to its most faithful ally. “Blessed,” says Hamlet, in whom the blood and mind of the same composition. He was not born under the fingers of fate to sing whatever she wants. It is surprising that the church did not prohibit the actor from such a practice. The Church condemns in this art the heretical plurality of souls, the rampant passions, the scandalous pretensions of the mind, which refuses to live by one destiny and is prone to intemperance. It imposes a ban on this taste for the present, on this triumph of Proteus - because this is a denial of everything that the church teaches. Eternity is not a game. A mind so insane as to prefer comedy to eternity loses the right to salvation. There is no compromise between "everywhere" and "always". Therefore, such a low craft can lead to immeasurable spiritual conflicts. “It is not eternal life that matters,” says Nietzsche, but eternal vitality. The whole drama is really in the choice between them. Adrienne Lecouvrere, on her deathbed, wanted to confess and take communion, but refused to renounce her profession and thereby lost the right to confession. Is this not an opposition to God with all the power of feeling? In agony, this woman, with tears in her eyes, does not want to renounce her

art - this is an example of greatness, which she never achieved by the light of the footlight. This is her most beautiful and most difficult role. To choose heaven or ridiculous fidelity to the transitory, to prefer eternity or to fall in the eyes of God - this is the primordial tragedy in which everyone needs to take their place. The comedians of that era knew they were excommunicated. To choose this profession meant to choose the torments of hell. The church saw actors as its worst enemies. Some writers were indignant: "How, for the sake of Moliere, to lose eternal salvation!" But that was the question, especially for someone who, dying on the stage under the rouge, ended a life completely devoted to spraying himself. In this regard, references to genius follow, for which everything is excusable. But genius does not excuse anything precisely because it refuses to apologize. The actor knew about the punishments prepared for him. But what was the meaning of such vague threats in comparison with the last punishment prepared for him by life itself? He anticipated it in advance and fully accepted it. As for an absurd person, premature death is irreparable for an actor. Nothing can compensate for those faces and centuries that he did not have time to embody on stage. But, be that as it may, there is no escape from death. Of course, the actor is everywhere while he is alive, but he is also in his own time, which leaves an imprint on him. A little imagination is enough to feel what the fate of the actor means. In time, he creates one by one his heroes. In time he learns to dominate them. And the more different lives he has lived, the more easily he separates his own life from them. But now the time will come when he needs to die both on stage and in the world. All life is before his eyes. His vision is clear. In his fate, he feels something painful and unique. And with that knowledge, he is now ready to die. There are pensions for elderly comedians. Conquest No, do not believe that because of the love of action I had to unlearn how to think, says the conqueror. - On the contrary, I can quite define my creed, because I believe with all the powers of my soul, I see definitely and clearly. Do not trust those who say: "We know it too well, and therefore we are not able to express it." If you are not able, then either because you do not know, or because, out of laziness, you do not go beyond appearances. I don't have many opinions. By the end of life, a person realizes that he spent so many years only to be convinced of a single truth. If it is obvious, it is enough for life alone. As for me, I have something to say about the individual with all certainty. It should be spoken about without embellishment, and if necessary, with a certain contempt. What makes a man more human is what he keeps silent about than what he says. I will have to keep silent about many things. But I am unshakably convinced that all those who judged the individual had far less experience than we have to justify the verdict. Perhaps the intellect, with all its subtlety, foresaw what was to be stated. But with its ruins and blood, our era provides us with more than enough

evidence. For ancient peoples, and even up to the most recent time, before the advent of our machine age, it was possible to maintain a balance between social and individual virtues. One could indulge in research: which of them serves the other. This was possible due to the stubborn delusion of the human heart, according to which people come into the world to serve or use someone else's services. This was also possible because neither society nor the individual had yet shown what they were capable of. I know these kind souls, full of admiration for the masterpieces of Dutch artists, which gave rise to the bloody wars in Flanders, excited by the prayers of the Silesian monks, who ascended to heaven from the depths of the terrible Thirty Years' War. They are amazed that eternal values ​​have survived the upheavals of the age. But times are changing. Today's artists are deprived of their former serenity. Even if they have the heart of the creator, that is, a callous heart, it is destined to remain unused in our time, when the whole world is mobilized and even the saints have not escaped the common fate. Perhaps this is my deepest feeling. With each beautiful form prematurely born in the trenches, with each line, metaphor, prayer crushed by iron, some particle of the eternal is lost. Realizing that I could not get away from my time, I decided to become the flesh of his flesh. That's why I don't attach importance to the individual. He seems to me humiliated and insignificant. Knowing that there are no causes worth striving for victory, I have developed a taste for failed ventures. They demand all the strength of the soul, which remains the same in defeats and transient victories. Solidarity with the destinies of the world makes us worry about the clash of civilizations. I absorbed this anxiety when I decided to play my part. The choice between history and eternity ended in favor of history, because I love authenticity. The existence of history is at least beyond doubt, and how can I deny a force that is ready to crush me? Sooner or later there comes a time when you have to choose between contemplation and action. This is what is called becoming human. The torment is terrible, but for the proud of heart there is no middle ground. Either god, or time, or a cross, or a sword. Either the world is endowed the greatest sense infinitely surpassing all disturbances, or there is nothing in it but disturbances. One must live one's time and die with it, or turn away from it in the name of a higher life. I know about the possibility of a deal: you can live in your time and believe in eternity. This is called "accept". But I abhor transactions, I demand: all or nothing. If I choose action, don't think that I don't know contemplation. But it will not give me everything, and therefore, not having eternity, I make an alliance with time. Longing and bitterness are alien to me; I only want clarity of vision. I tell you: tomorrow is mobilization. For you and for me, it will be a liberation. The individual can do nothing, and yet he is capable of everything. In the light of this amazing freedom, you will understand why I simultaneously exalt and destroy the individual. The world crushes him, I give him freedom. I grant him all rights. Conquerors know that action by itself is useless. There is only

one useful action, it connects a person with the earth. I never associate him with anything. But one has to act "as if", because on the way of the struggle there is an encounter with living flesh. Even in its baseness, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only by it, my fatherland is created. That's why I chose absurd effort, that's why I'm on the side of the fight. As I said, the era is ready for it. Until now, the greatness of the conqueror was geographical, measured by the extent of the occupied territories. The meaning of this word has not changed in vain - it no longer means a victorious general. Greatness passed into another camp, became protest and sacrifice, devoid of any future. It's not about the love of defeat, victory would be desirable. But there is only one victory, which belongs to the category of eternal ones, and I will never win it. Here is my stumbling block. Revolutions have always been made against the gods, beginning with Promethene, the ancestor of modern conquerors. It is a protest of man against his fate: the demands of the poor are only an excuse. But the spirit of protest can only be caught in its historical incarnation, and only there can I reunite with this spirit. Do not think that I find pleasure in this: my human inconsistency is preserved even in the contradictions of the very essence of things. I place the clarity of my mind in the midst of that which denies it. I elevate a person above that which suppresses him; my freedom, my rebellion, my passion come together in this tension, in this clarity of vision, in this exorbitance of repetition. Yes, man is a goal in himself. And he is his only goal. If he wants to be someone, then in this life. But then I know everything else. Conquerors sometimes talk about victories and overcomings. But they always mean "getting over yourself." You know well what that means. There are moments when any person feels equal to God. At least that's what they say. But the equality of God comes when, as if in a flash of lightning, the amazing greatness of the human mind becomes tangible. Conquerors are only those who feel the strength for permanent life on these peaks, with a full consciousness of their own greatness. A question of arithmetic - more or less. Conquerors are capable of the most. But no more than the man himself, when he wants it. Therefore, they never leave the crucible of life, plunge into the very inferno of revolutions. There they find a crippled creature, but there they also discover the only values ​​\u200b\u200bthat deserve their love and admiration - a man and his silence. Here is their poverty and their wealth. The only luxury for the conquerors is human relations. Is it not clear that in this vulnerable universe everything human takes on the most burning meaning? Stern faces, endangered brotherhood, strong and chaste friendship - these are the real riches. They are authentic, because they are transient, they contain the power and limits of the mind, that is, its effectiveness. Others speak of genius. But I prefer intelligence to it, it can also be majestic. He illuminates this wilderness and rules over it. He knows his slavery and does not hide it. It dies with the body. But knowledge is his freedom. All churches are against us, we understand that. Our hearts are out of reach

eternal, and we shun churches that claim to be eternal, be they divine or political. Happiness and courage, earnings or justice are secondary to the church. It proclaims a doctrine that all must accept. But what do I care about ideas and eternity - proportionate truths I must get with my own hands. These are truths that I cannot get rid of. Therefore, you will never make me the foundation of anything: nothing remains of the conqueror, much less any teachings. Everything ends in death. We know this, and also that she puts a limit on everything. That is why the cemeteries that cover Europe are so disgusting, the shadow of which relentlessly haunts some of us. Only what we love deserves decorations, and death repels and tires. It also has to be conquered. The last Duke of Carrara, captured in Padua, devastated by the plague, besieged by the Venetians, rushed wildly through the halls of his deserted palace: he called on the devil and demanded death. This is one way to overcome death. This is one of the traits of courage congenial to the West: for it those places where death is supposed to be revered are disgusting. In a universe of rebellion, death exalts injustice. She is the supreme evil. Other opponents of the deal choose the eternal and expose the illusory nature of this world. Their cemeteries are decorated with flowers and birds. They fit the conqueror as a clear image of the one he rejected. They chose blackened steel or a nameless trench. The best of those who have chosen eternity sometimes feel a reverent and compassionate fear of those who live with a similar way of their own death. But it is precisely this image that gives the conquerors strength and justification. Our destiny is before us, and we must pass through this temptation. Not so much out of pride, but out of the consciousness of our meaningless lot. Sometimes we feel sorry for ourselves. This is the only sympathy that seems acceptable to us. You are unlikely to be able to understand this feeling, it will not seem very courageous to you. Only the bravest are capable of it. But we call in our ranks courageous and bright-minded people, and we do not need a force that would deprive us of clarity. The above images do not contain moral teachings and do not entail judgments. These are sketches, they outline a lifestyle. The lover, comedian or adventurer is playing an absurd game. But a virgin, a functionary, and the president of the republic are capable of this, if desired. It is enough to know and not hide anything from yourself. In Italian museums there are small painted screens. The priest held this before the eyes of the condemned to death, hiding the scaffold from him. The leap in all its forms, whether it be a descent into the divine or the eternal, the loss of oneself in everyday illusions or in an "idea", is a screen covering the absurd. But even functionaries can live without a screen, that's what I had in mind. I have chosen extreme cases, when the absurd is given truly royal power. True, this is the power of princes deprived of the kingdom. But their advantage over others is that they are aware of the illusory nature of all kingdoms. They know in this

their greatness, and it would be in vain to speak of some misfortune or ashes of disappointment concealed by them. Losing hope does not mean giving up. The smoke of earthly hearths is worth heavenly incense. Neither I nor anyone else can be judges here. They don't strive to be better, but they want consistency. If the word "sage" is applicable to those who live as they are, without speculating about what is not, then these people are sages. Any of them is a winner, but in the realm of the spirit; Don Juan, but from knowledge; the comedian, but on the stage of the intellect, knows this better than anyone else: "No one deserves privileges either on earth or in heaven who has brought sheep meekness almost to perfection: even if we admit that he does not burst with vanity and does not ask for a scandal with his judicial manners, he still remains a cute funny sheep who has nothing but horns. Be that as it may, absurd reasoning needed to return all the brightness of colors. The imagination can add many other guises to him - exiles chained to their time; people who, not knowing weakness, know how to live in proportion to the universe without a future. This absurd and godless world is inhabited by hopeless and clear-minded people. But I haven't yet talked about the most absurd of all characters - the creator. (1) In the fullest sense of the word and with all defects. A healthy attitude also includes disadvantages. (2) I mean Alceste by Molière. There it is not so simple, rude, visibly Alceste against Philint, Selimsna against Eliant, the whole plot is reduced to the absurd logic of a character striving for a goal set for itself. and poetry, almost as monotonous as the character. ABSURD CREATIVITY Philosophy and novel In the rarefied air of the absurd, all these lives can last only thanks to a few deep thoughts, the power of which allows them to breathe. In this case, we will talk about a special sense of loyalty. We have seen people who consciously performed their duty during the most stupid wars and did not consider that they were in conflict with themselves. The main thing for them is not to shy away from anything. The affirmation of the absurdity of the world is a kind of metaphysical happiness. Conquest or play, the incalculability of love, an absurd rebellion - these are the testimonies of human dignity in a war where a person is doomed to defeat. It is solely about loyalty to the rules of battle. This thought is enough: it has supported and supports entire civilizations. War cannot be denied. They either die in it or they live in it. So it is with absurdity: you need to breathe it, learn its lessons and embody it. In this sense, creativity is par excellence an absurd joy. "Art, and nothing but art, - says Nietzsche, art is given to us so as not to die from the truth." In the experience that I am trying to describe and make felt here in several of its modes, suffering appears with the death of the other.

Children's searches for oblivion and pleasure are now abandoned. In their place come a feverish tension with which a person confronts the world, and an orderly delirium that forces him to accept everything in this world. In this universe, the only chance to gain a foothold in consciousness, to fix one's aspirations in it, is creativity. To create means to live doubly. Proust's hesitant and anxious search, his painstaking collection of flowers, embroideries and anxieties, mean nothing else. But in these searches there is still no more sense than in the continuous creativity to which the comedian, the conqueror and all people of the absurd indulge every day. They all want to play, repeat, recreate their reality. Ultimately, we get an image of our own truths. For a person turned away from eternity, everything that exists is only an endless pantomime under the mask of absurdity. Creativity is a great pantomime. The people of the absurd know about this in advance, and therefore all their efforts are directed to the study, development and enrichment of that island without a future on which they landed. But first you need to know. For the discovery of the absurd coincides in time with the stop; then all subsequent passions are worked out and come into their own. Even people deprived of the Gospel have their Mount of Olives. You can't sleep on it either. An absurd person no longer cares about explanations, he must experience and describe what he has experienced. It all starts with impartial clarity of vision. Description is the last claim of absurd thinking. Faced with insoluble paradoxes, science also abandons its assumptions and stops at the contemplation and depiction of the eternally virgin landscape of phenomena. Looking at worldly images, we understand with our hearts that the feeling that surrounds us at the same time is not from the supposed depths of the world. but because of its diversity. It would be in vain to explain them; we are left with only sensations, and with them an uninterrupted call from the quantitatively inexhaustible universe. Thus, the place of the work of art becomes clear. It is a sign of death and at the same time an increase in experience. The work of art monotonously and passionately repeats the themes that are already orchestrated by the world: the themes of the body (an inexhaustible image on the pediments of temples), the themes of forms or colors, numbers or disasters. Therefore, we conclude the analysis of the main themes of this essay, turning to the creator’s universe full of splendor and at the same time childishness. It is a mistake to regard it as symbolic, to believe that a work of art can be regarded as a refuge from the absurd. It is itself an absurd phenomenon, and it is only a description of a work of art that cannot offer an outlet to the torments of our consciousness. On the contrary, it is one of the signs of such torment, which is displayed with its help in every human thought. But a work of art for the first time takes our mind beyond its limits and puts it face to face with another. Not in order to lose oneself in another, but in order to point out with all accuracy the hopelessness of the path that we have embarked on together. In absurd reasoning, creativity follows impartiality and reveals it. Creativity reflects the moment when reasoning stops and

absurd passions break out from the surface. This justifies the place of creativity in my essay. It is enough to find a few common themes for the creator and the thinker in order to discover in the work of art all the contradictions of absurd thinking. The affinity of their consciousness stems not so much from the identity of the conclusions drawn, but from the commonality of contradictions. They are the same for thinking and for creativity. It hardly even needs to be explained that the same torment pushes a person towards these two attitudes of consciousness. They coincide only at the starting point. Very few of the thoughts generated by the absurd have remained faithful to it, but by these deviations and betrayals it is easier for us to establish what belongs to the absurd alone. In parallel, the question arises: is an absurd work of art possible? The old opposition of art and philosophy is arbitrary enough. If we understand it in a narrow sense, then it is simply false. If by this they want to say that each of these two disciplines has its own characteristics, then this is undoubtedly true, although very indefinitely. The only acceptable argument here is to establish a contradiction between the philosopher, who is at the core of his system, and the artist, standing in front of his work. But this argument applies to forms of art and philosophy that we consider secondary. The idea of ​​art separating from its creator is not only out of fashion, but also false. It is noted that, in contrast to the artist, the philosopher never creates several systems. But this is no more true than that no artist has ever expressed more than one subject in various images. The instant improvement of art, the need for its constant renewal - all this is true only as a prejudice. A work of art is also a construction, and everyone knows how monotonous great artists can be. Like the thinker, the artist becomes involved in his work and becomes himself in it. This mutual influence of the creator and the work forms the most important problem of aesthetics. However, there is nothing more vain than all these distinctions according to methods and objects, for which a unity of purpose is sought. There are no boundaries between disciplines that are created by man for understanding and love. They penetrate each other, merging into one anxiety. This must be said from the very beginning. For an absurd work to be possible, thought must be mixed with it in its clearest form. But even thought should manifest itself only in the order given to it by the intellect. This paradox is explained by the absurdity itself. A work of art is born from the mind's refusal to explain the concrete. The work marks the triumph of the flesh. A clear thought evokes a work of art, but in so doing it denies itself. Thought resists the temptation to add some deeper meaning to the description. She knows about its illegality. The drama of consciousness is embodied in a work of art, but it is never given directly by art. An absurd work requires an artist who is clearly aware of his limits, and an art in which the concrete signifies nothing but itself. Piece of art

cannot be the goal, the meaning, the consolation of life. To create or not to create - it does not change anything. An absurd creator can refuse to be creative, and sometimes he does. He has enough of his Abyssinia. This is one of the rules of aesthetics. A genuine work of art is always proportionate to a person, and by its very nature it always “leaves the rest” of something. There is a kind of connection between the global life experience of the artist and the work that reflects it, the connection of "Wilhelm Meister" with the maturity of Goethe. This ratio is false if the experience is conveyed with the help of paper tinsel explanation. It is true when the work remains a fragment carved out of experience, a facet that conveys all the inner radiance of a diamond. In the first case, the work is overloaded with claims for eternity. In the second - it is fruitful precisely because experience is implied, and we guess about its richness. Finally, a great artist is first of all a great lover of life, it is clear that life here means not only reflection, but also experience. Thus, the intellectual drama is embodied in the work. The absurd work illustrates the refusal of thinking from prestige, the humble consent to be a consciousness that creates only an appearance, throwing a veil of images on what is devoid of a reasonable foundation. If the world were transparent, there would be no art. I am not talking here about the arts of form and color - in them the description reigns in all the splendor of its modesty (1). Expression begins where thinking ends. How, if not with expressive gestures, do those empty-eyed teenagers express their philosophy that fill temples and museums. For an absurd person, expression is more instructive than all libraries. It even becomes a kind of music. If there is art without teaching, it is music. It is too similar to mathematics not to borrow from it all its arbitrariness. The game of the spirit with itself - according to conventional and uniform laws - unfolds in the space of our hearing, beyond which vibrations meet with the non-human universe. Pure sensation simply does not exist - it is easy to give examples of this. An absurd person is ready to recognize this harmony and these forms as his own. But I intend to talk about works where the temptation to explain is especially great, where the illusion of explainability arises by itself, and conclusions of this kind are almost inevitable. I have a novel in mind and ask myself: can it contain absurdity? To think is to feel the desire to create the world (or, what is the same, to set the boundaries of one's own world). This means that it is only on the basis of the fundamental discord between man and his experience that grounds can be found for their agreement. It must match the nostalgia of the person. It is necessary to find a universe girded with reasonable grounds, enlightened by analogies. Every philosopher, even Kant, is a creator. He has his characters, his symbols, his secret action - and his denouement. In turn, the novel, despite its external features, is an attempt to maximize the intellectualization of art, most of all in comparison with poetry or essays. Of course, we are talking primarily about great novels.

Too often the fruitfulness and greatness of a genre is judged by its dregs. The mass of bad novels, however, should not obscure the greatness of the best examples of this genre, each of which really contains a whole universe. The novel has its own logic, its own ways of reasoning, intuition and postulates. The novel also has its own demands for clarity. The aforementioned classical opposition is even less justified in this case. It was born at a time when a philosophical doctrine was easily separated from its author. Today, when thought has abandoned claims to universality, when the best story thought would be the story of her repentance, we know that the system is inseparable from its author, if it is at all significant. Already the "Ethics" was in a sense only a long and strictly logical revelation. Abstract thinking finally found support in corporeality. In addition, the games of bodies and passions in novels are increasingly ordered in accordance with the requirements of the worldview. In contrast to the mere novelists, great writers are philosophical novelists. Such are Balzac, Sade, Melville, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Malraux, Kafka, to name but a few. But it is precisely the choice they made - to write using images rather than reasoning - that is indicative of understanding the commonality of their thinking. They are convinced of the futility of any explanatory principle, that one must learn from the very appearance of the senses. The work for them is the beginning and the end of everything, the result of an often inexpressible philosophy, its illustration is the crown. But the completeness of the work is ensured only by the implied philosophical theses. The novel is a confirmation of that old saying, according to which thought moves away from life when there is little of it, and brings it closer to it when there is a lot of it. Unable to ennoble reality, thinking is limited to its image. The novel is an instrument of knowledge so much like love, relative and inexhaustible. The writing of novels is related to love by initial admiration and fruitful reflection. So from the very beginning I am ready to recognize the authority of the novel. But I am also grateful to those masters of humiliated thought, whose philosophical suicide is accessible to contemplation. What is of real interest to me here is the knowledge and description of the force that draws them along the path of illusion. Now the same method will serve me. Since I have already used it, the argument can be reduced to one exact example. I would like to know whether it is possible, having accepted a life that is not subject to appeal, to agree to work and creativity, which are also not subject to appeal; I need to know, moreover, what is the path that leads to freedom. I want to cleanse my universe of ghosts and populate it exclusively with embodied truths, the presence of which cannot be denied. I can create an absurd work, choose this or that creative setting. But an absurd attitude, in order to remain itself, must remain in consciousness in all its arbitrariness. It is exactly the same with a work of art: if the precepts of the absurd are not observed, if the work is not an illustration of the split and rebellion that it sacrifices for the sake of illusions, if the work awakens

hope, it is no longer arbitrary. I can't get rid of it, my life can find meaning in it. And this is deception. Creativity ceases to be an exercise in passionate detachment, in which human life finds its completion in all its splendor and in all its uselessness. Is it possible to overcome the temptation to explain in creativity, which is especially susceptible to it? Can I remain true to the absurd in a world of fiction endowed with the ultimate consciousness of reality without thereby sacrificing my desire for consistency? There are so many more questions waiting to be resolved - we have to make the last effort for this. But their meaning is already clear to us: such is the last doubt of consciousness, which oscillates between the knowledge gained with such difficulty and the last illusion. Creativity is only one of the many possible attitudes of a person who has realized the absurd. But the same applies to other ways of life. A conqueror or an actor, an artist or Don Juan may forget that their way of life is impossible without realizing its meaninglessness. Life too quickly becomes a habit. Do you want to earn money to live happily, and in the end all the strength. the whole color of life is spent on their extraction. Happiness is forgotten, the means is taken for the end. In the same way, the conqueror becomes the servant of his own ambition, which at first was only a means. Don Juan reconciles with fate, finds satisfaction in an existence that had meaning only as a rebellion. With the disappearance of awareness and rebellion, the absurdity also disappears. There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. Even those. who, it would seem, are completely deprived of it, often come to that. that agree to illusions. Consent with fate, generated by the craving for appeasement, is the counterpart of existentialist agreement. That's why there are bright gods and wooden idols. But the middle path leads to the human image we are looking for. So far, we have dealt with absurdity by examining deviations from its requirements. In the same way, we will be able to comprehend the ambiguity of the novel - no less than the ambiguity of other philosophical teachings. Therefore, as an illustration, I need to choose a work of art that stands entirely under the sign of the absurd, initially clear and unfolding in an atmosphere of transparency. Its consequences are instructive for us: if the requirements of the absurdity are not met in it, then we will see how, with the help of what detour, the illusion penetrated into it. It is enough for us to know how accurately the example and theme are chosen, whether the creator of the novel is true to himself. It is, therefore, an analysis of the same type that we have already carried out earlier. The subject of my research will be the favorite theme of Dostoevsky's work. I could well turn to other works. But Dostoevsky deals with the problem directly, with a clear understanding of both its greatness and the accompanying emotions, like those existentialist thinkers that have already been discussed. This parallelism will become an object for me. Kirillov All Dostoevsky's characters ask themselves the question of the meaning of life. In this respect they are our contemporaries: they are not afraid to look ridiculous.

The modern worldview differs from the classical one in that it lives on moral problems, and not on metaphysics. In Dostoevsky's novels, questions are posed with such force that only extreme solutions are acceptable. Existence is either deceptive or eternal. If Dostoevsky had been content with investigating this question, he would have been a philosopher. But he shows the consequences of these mental games for human life That's why he's an artist. From these consequences, he chooses the most radical, which in the "Diary of a Writer" is called logical suicide. In the issue of December 1876, the reasoning of the "logical suicide" is given. Convinced that human existence is absurd, that belief in immortality is impossible, a desperate person comes to the following conclusions: only the answer that I can be happy only in the harmony of the whole, which I do not understand, and is obvious to me, and I can never understand ... "Since, finally, with this order, I take upon myself in one and at the same time, the role of plaintiff and defendant, defendant and judge, and I find this comedy, from the side of nature, completely stupid, and I even consider it humiliating to endure this comedy on my part ... Then in my undoubted capacity as plaintiff and defendant, judge and defendant, I I condemn this nature, which so unceremoniously and arrogantly brought me to suffering, along with me to destruction. There is something humorous about this position. This suicide committed suicide because he was metaphysically offended. In a sense, he takes revenge, proving that "you can't fool him." It is known that the same theme, but on a much larger scale, was embodied in Kirillov, the hero of The Possessed, also a supporter of logical suicide. Engineer Kirillov declares somewhere that he wants to take his own life, because "this is his idea." This must be taken literally: for the sake of an idea, thinking prepares itself for death. This is the ultimate suicide. From scene to scene, Kirillov's mask is successively illuminated, and a deadly thought inspiring him arises before us. The engineer accepts the reasoning given in the Diary. He feels that God is necessary, and therefore must be. But he knows that he is not and cannot be. "Don't you understand," he exclaims, that only one person can shoot himself because of this? Such an attitude entails several absurd consequences. He accepts with indifference that his suicide will be used for purposes he despises. "I determined that night that I don't care." He prepares for his gesture with a mixture of rebellion and freedom. "I kill myself to show my disobedience and my new terrible freedom." Now it is not about revenge, but about rebellion. Kirillov is thus an absurd hero - with the caveat that he still commits suicide. But he himself explains this contradiction, simultaneously revealing the secret of the absurd in all its nakedness. To the deadly logic he adds an extraordinary pretension that gives this character a clarity of perspective: he wants to kill himself in order to become a god. His reasoning is classically clear. If there is no god, Kirillov is a god. If there is no god, Kirillov must kill himself. Therefore, Kirillov must kill

yourself to become a god. This is absurd logic, but it is here that it is necessary. It is not without interest, however, what is the meaning of this deity brought down to earth. This will clarify the premise: "If there is no god, then I am a god," which remains rather obscure for the time being. First of all, it is important to note that a person who makes such crazy claims is completely out of this world. Every morning he does gymnastics, maintaining his health. He rejoices that his wife has returned to Shatov. On a piece of paper that will be found after his death, he wants to draw a "face with his tongue hanging out." He is childish and angry, passionate, methodical and sensitive. From the superman he has only logic, only an obsession; from a person - the rest of the set of feelings. However, he calmly talks about his divinity. He is not insane - otherwise Dostoevsky himself would be insane. Kirillov is not driven by illusory megalomania. In this case, it is ridiculous to take his words literally. Kirillov himself helps to better understand him. To Stavrogin's question, he clarifies that he is not talking about the God-man. One might even think that he is preoccupied with making a distinction between himself and Christ. But in reality it is about appropriating the role of Christ. Kirillov imagined that after death Jesus did not find paradise. He knows that the suffering on the cross was useless. "The laws of nature," says the engineer, "made him live among lies and die for lies." It is only in this sense that the whole human drama is embodied in Jesus. He is an all-perfect man who has realized the most absurd destiny. He is not a god-man, but a man-god. Like Christ, every person can be crucified and deceived - to some extent this happens to everyone. The deity referred to here is, therefore, entirely earthly. "For three years I have been looking for the attribute of my deity and found: the attribute of my deity is self-will!" From now on, the meaning of Kirillov's premise is also clear: "If there is no god, then I am a god." To become a god means to become free on this earth, not to serve any immortal being. It means to draw all conclusions from painful self-will. If there is a God, everything depends on him, and we are powerless against his will. If not, then everything depends on us. For Kirillov, as well as for Nietzsche, to kill a god means to become a god himself, to realize on this earth that eternal life, about which the gospel speaks. But if such a metaphysical crime is sufficient for the self-realization of a person, then why commit suicide? Why kill yourself, why leave this world, barely having time to win freedom? This is contradictory. Kirillov understands this and adds: "If you realize - you are the king and you will no longer kill yourself, but you will live in the most important glory." But people do not realize, do not feel this "if". As in the days of Prometheus, they feed on blind hopes 2. They need to be shown the way, they cannot do without a sermon. So Kirillov must kill himself out of love for humanity. He must show his brethren the royal and difficult path which he first entered. This is educational suicide. Therefore, Kirillov sacrifices himself. But if he is crucified, he is not fooled. He remains a man-god; he is convinced that there is no posthumous future; he was imbued with evangelical anguish. "I am unhappy," he says, "because I am obliged to declare self-will." But with his death, the earth will be peopled with kings and illumined with human glory. A pistol shot will

the signal for the last revolution. So it is not despair, but love for one's neighbor as for oneself that pushes him to death. Before completing the unheard-of deed of the spirit with blood, Kirillov utters words as ancient as human suffering: "All is well." The theme of suicide, therefore, is for Dostoevsky the theme of absurdity. Before we go any further, we note that Kirillov appears in other characters, with whom new absurd themes enter the scene. Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov realize absurd truths in practical life. They were liberated by the death of Kirillov, they are trying to become tsars. Stavrogin leads an "ironic life", which is well known. Hatred swirls around him. And yet the key to the image is his farewell letter: "I could not hate anything." He is the king of indifference. Ivan also reigns, refusing to renounce the royal power of the mind. To those who, like his brother, argue that it is necessary to humble themselves in order to believe, he could answer that this condition is shameful. His keywords: "Everything is permitted" - pronounced with a touch of sadness. Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous deicide, he falls into madness. But such is the price of risk. In the face of a tragic end, the absurd mind has the right to ask: "What does this prove?" So, in the novels, as in the Diary, an absurd question is posed. They affirm logic, going right up to death, exaltation, "terrible" freedom, royal glory made human. Everything is good, everything is permitted, and there is nothing hated: such are the postulates of the absurd. But how amazing is the creativity that has made these creatures of ice and fire so understandable to us! The world of passions and indifference that rages in their hearts does not at all seem monstrous to us. We find everyday anxiety in this world. Undoubtedly, no one, except Dostoevsky, was able to convey all the intimacy and all the torture of the absurd world. But what conclusion does he come to? Two quotes can illustrate a complete metaphysical upheaval, leading the writer to completely different revelations. Since the reasoning of the logical suicide provoked protests from critics, in the following

Camus Albert

The myth of Sisyphus

The myth of Sisyphus. Essay on the absurd.

Absurd reasoning

Absurdity and suicide

absurd walls

philosophical suicide

absurd freedom

absurd man

Don Juanism

conquest

Absurd creativity

Philosophy and novel

Kirillov

Creativity without thinking about the future

Myth and Sisyphus

ABSURD REASONING

Soul, do not strive for eternal life, But try to exhaust what is possible.

Pindar. Pythian Songs (III, 62-63)

On the following pages we will deal with the feeling of the absurd, which is found everywhere in our age - about the feeling, and not about the philosophy of the absurd, in fact, unknown to our time. Elementary honesty requires from the outset to recognize what these pages owe to some modern thinkers. There is no point in hiding that I will be quoting and discussing them throughout this work.

It is worth noting at the same time that the absurdity, which has hitherto been taken as a conclusion, is taken here as a starting point. In this sense, my reflections are preliminary: it is impossible to say what position they will lead to. Here you will find only a pure description of the disease of the spirit, to which neither metaphysics nor faith have yet been mixed. Such are the limits of the book, such is its only bias.

Absurdity and suicide

There is only one really serious philosophical problem - the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else - whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories is secondary. These are the conditions of the game: first of all, you need to give an answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche wanted it to be, that a respectable philosopher should serve as an example, then the significance of the answer is understandable - certain actions will follow it. This evidence is felt by the heart, but it is necessary to delve into it in order to make it clear to the mind.

How to determine the greater urgency of one issue compared to another? Judging should be by the actions that follow the decision. I have never seen anyone die for an ontological argument. Galileo paid tribute to scientific truth, but with extraordinary ease he renounced it as soon as it became dangerous for his life. In a sense, he was right. Such a truth was not worth the fire. Does the earth revolve around the sun, does the sun revolve around the earth - is it all the same? In a word, the question is empty. And at the same time, I see a lot of people dying, because, in their opinion, life is not worth living. I also know those who, strangely enough, are ready to commit suicide for the sake of ideas or illusions that serve as the basis of their life (what is called the cause of life is at the same time an excellent cause of death). Therefore, the question of the meaning of life I consider the most urgent of all questions. How to answer it? There seem to be only two methods of understanding all essential problems - and I consider as such only those that threaten death or increase tenfold the passionate desire to live - the methods of La Palissa and Don Quixote. It is only when evidence and delight balance each other that we gain access to both emotion and clarity. In dealing with a subject so modest and at the same time so charged with pathos, classical dialectical learning must give way to a more unpretentious attitude of mind, based both on common sense and on sympathy.

Suicide has always been considered exclusively as a social phenomenon. We, on the contrary, from the very beginning raise the question of the connection between suicide and the thinking of the individual. Suicide is prepared in the silence of the heart, like the Great Deed of the alchemists. The man himself knows nothing about him, but one fine day he shoots himself or drowns himself. About one suicidal housekeeper, I was told that he had changed a lot after losing his daughter five years ago, that this story "undermined" him. It's hard to find a more precise word. As soon as thinking begins, it already undermines. At first, the role of society here is not great. The worm sits in the heart of a person, and there it must be sought. It is necessary to understand that deadly game that leads from clarity in relation to one's own existence to escape from this world.

There are many reasons for suicide, and the most obvious of them, as a rule, are not the most effective. Suicide is rarely the result of reflection (such a hypothesis, however, is not excluded). The denouement comes almost always unconsciously. Newspapers report on "intimate sorrows" or "incurable disease". Such explanations are perfectly acceptable. But it would be worthwhile to find out whether the friend of the despairing one was not indifferent that day - then he is guilty. For even this smallness could be enough for the bitterness and boredom that had accumulated in the heart of a suicide to burst out.

Let us take this opportunity to note the relativity of the reasoning carried out in this essay: suicide can be associated with much more valid reasons. An example is the political suicides that were committed "out of protest" during the Chinese revolution.

But if it is difficult to accurately fix the moment, the elusive movement in which the death lot is chosen, then it is much easier to draw conclusions from the act itself. In a certain sense, just like in melodrama, suicide is tantamount to confession. To commit suicide means to admit that life is over, that it has become incomprehensible. Let's not, however, draw distant analogies, let's return to ordinary language. It simply admits that "life is not worth living." Naturally, life is never easy. We continue to perform the actions required of us, but for a variety of reasons, primarily the force of habit. Voluntary death presupposes, albeit instinctively, the recognition of the insignificance of this habit, the realization of the absence of any reason for the continuation of life, the understanding of the meaninglessness of everyday fuss, the futility of suffering.

What is this vague feeling that deprives the mind of the dreams necessary for life? A world that lends itself to explanation, even the worst one, this world is familiar to us. But if the universe is suddenly deprived of both illusions and knowledge, man becomes an outsider in it. A person is banished forever, because he is deprived of both the memory of the lost fatherland and the hope of the promised land. Strictly speaking, the feeling of absurdity is this discord between a person and his life, the actor and the scenery. All people who have ever thought about suicide immediately recognize the existence of a direct connection between this feeling and the craving for non-existence.

The subject of my essay is precisely this connection between the absurd and suicide, the elucidation of the extent to which suicide is the outcome of the absurd. In principle, for a person who does not cheat with himself, actions are governed by what he considers to be true. In this case, belief in the absurdity of existence should be a guide to action. The question, posed clearly and without false pathos, is legitimate: does not such a conclusion lead to the fastest way out of this vague state? Of course, we are talking about people who are able to live in harmony with themselves.

In such a clear formulation, the problem seems simple and at the same time unsolvable. It would be a mistake to think that simple questions evoke equally simple answers, and that one evidence easily entails another. Looking at the problem from the other side, regardless of whether people commit suicide or not, it seems a priori clear that there can be only two philosophical solutions: "yes" and "no". But it's too easy. There are also those who incessantly ask questions without coming to an unambiguous decision. I am far from ironic: we are talking about the majority. It is also understandable that many who answer "no" act as if they said "yes". If one accepts the Nietzschean criterion, they say "yes" one way or another. Conversely, suicidal people often believe that life has meaning. We are constantly confronted with such contradictions. One might even say that the contradictions are especially acute just at the moment when logic is so desired. Philosophical theories are often compared with the behavior of those who profess them. Among the thinkers who denied meaning to life, no one, except Kirillov, who was born of literature, who arose from the legend of Peregrine (1) and tested the hypothesis of Jules Lequier, was in such agreement with his own logic as to renounce life itself. Jokingly, they often refer to Schopenhauer, who glorified suicide at a sumptuous meal. But there is no time for jokes. It doesn't really matter that the tragedy isn't taken seriously; such frivolity in the end passes judgment on the person himself.

The myth of Sisyphus (fr. Le Mythe de Sisyphe) is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus, written by him in 1942. It is considered a program work in the philosophy of absurdism.

This essay should be read in conjunction with other works by Camus: the novella The Outsider, the play Caligula and, especially, the essay Man Rebellious.[source?]

1.1 Reasoning about the absurd

1.2 Man of the Absurd

1.3 Absurd creativity

1.4 The myth of Sisyphus

1.5 The myth of Sisyphus (treatise on the return)

2 See also

3 notes

Summary

An essay dedicated to Pascal Pia consists of four chapters and an appendix.

Discourse on the absurd

Camus is trying to answer the only, in his opinion, the philosophical question that matters: "Is the life of work worth living?"

man of the absurd

How should a man of the absurd live? Obviously, ethical standards do not apply, since they are all based in the highest degree on self-justification. “Deceit does not need rules” “Everything is allowed”… this is not about an exclamation of liberation and joy, but about a bitter statement. Then Camus moves on to real examples of absurd life. He starts with Don Juan, a serial seducer who lived an unbridled, lean life.

The next example is an actor portraying ephemeral lives for ephemeral glory.

The third example of a man of the absurd Camus is a conqueror who forgot all the promises of eternity for the sake of influencing human history.

Absurd creativity

In this chapter, Camus explores the artist's absurd creativity.

The myth of Sisyphus

Sisyphus defied the gods. When it was time to die, he tried to escape from the underworld. For this, the Gods decided to punish him: he always had to roll a huge stone up the mountain, from where it invariably rolled down, and everything had to be started all over again. The gods believed that there was nothing worse in the world than hard and useless work. Camus considers Sisyphus an absurd hero who lives a full life, hates death and is doomed to meaningless labor. Sisyphus is most interesting to Camus when he descends to the foot of the mountain to the rolled stone. This is a truly tragic moment in which the hero realizes his hopeless situation. He has no hope, and a hard fate cannot be overcome by contempt for her. But Sisyphus has a stone, which is his property, and every reflection of the ore in it is a whole world for the hero. Camus concludes that "all is well" and that "Sisyphus should be imagined happy."

The author presents the incessant and meaningless labor of Sisyphus as a metaphor for modern life spent in useless labor in factories and offices. “Today's worker works every day of his life on the same task, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only in rare moments when it is realized.

The myth of Sisyphus (treatise on the return)

The modern philosopher Jim Fitzgerald wrote the philosophical treatise "Sysiphus: revisited", in which he presented the mental journey of a modern person of the beginning of the 21st century into the world of Sisyphus, and asking questions about the meaning of life. In essence, the treatise pays tribute to the semantic load and the specific perception of life from Camus's point of view, but at the same time, sees Sisyphus and his epistolary work through modern wars and making money. In particular, the modern man "Modernus" wonders how long the time of senseless modern wars will last, to which Sisyphus replies that wars never made sense, and any war and armed conflict are an example of chaos, "without meaning, without clear reasons and without a visible purpose", and the destruction of a person by a person is seen as a war for "making money", which will in no way have a role in his world, into which, in his opinion, all living people will fall, and each of them will push his post - a vital block uphill, which will roll down, whether they like it or not, since the absurdity of existentialism is eternal.

The work of the famous French writer and philosopher Albert Camus "The Myth of Sisyphus", written in 1942, perhaps became one of the most high-profile works of that time, affecting the problem of the philosophy of absurdism, which is still relevant today.

The essay consisted of four chapters and an appendix that touched upon the pressing philosophical questions of being, which, in his opinion, are of great importance. In his work, the author considers a person in the aspect of absurdity and asks the question "Is the life of labor worth living?". Throughout the work, he tries to answer this question, relying on ancient literature. Which suggests that these problems are relevant at all times.

As an analyzed material, Camus cites as an example ancient myth about Sisyphus, which tells of a man who challenged the gods themselves. Trying to escape from punishment, Sisyphus receives a more terrible punishment. An unbearable stone becomes his burden, which should be constantly rolled uphill for eternity, for there is nothing worse and more terrible than immortality, doomed to useless, useless work. But on the other hand, this stone is heavy and hopeless, becoming a kind of achievement, the meaning of its existence. Albert Camus concludes that Sisyphus is absurd, but at the same time, to some extent happy, because he has a goal in life, which he achieves from time to time.

Continuous and meaningless work is presented to Camus as a kind of metaphor for modern life, which people spend on useless, unloved work that does not give the slightest pleasure. The fate of such people is no less absurd than the fate of Sisyphus, rolling the unfortunate stone. Doing such work does not bring misfortune, unless you fully realize the full tragedy of this situation, which happens extremely rarely.

This is absurd. But the feeling of absurdity, which appears as a result of his full awareness, allows you to radically overestimate fate and become free.

Picture or drawing of Camus - The myth of Sisyphus

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