Episode #228 ... Albert Camus - Kafka and The Fall

Today we talk about Camus' book The Fall and what the main character represents in his larger project. We also talk about someone Camus deeply admired, Franz Kafka, and how to think of the images he created in his work. We talk about the experience of the modern individual in relation to politics. We also talk about what Camus and Kafka disagreed on. Hope you love it. :) Sponsor: Better Help: https://www. BetterHelp.com/PHILTHIS Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis Social: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So this whole series so far has been about this project that Camus dedicated his life to, where he wants to affirm the kinds of creatures that we are, without falling into the trap of system building. If in the Mythos Sisyphus, Camus shows us the importance of lucidity in the face of the absurd, if in the Plague he shows us how, when we take seriously the kinds of creatures we are, it leads to solidarity with our fellow people, if in The Rebel he shows us how, as creatures, we have certain lines that can't be crossed, and that by saying no to something, we affirm the lines that cannot be crossed in the human dignity of others.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  If these are all uncontroversial statements to make about what it is to be a human being, then in Camus' next book, The Fall, he's going to extend this line of reasoning to the concepts of judgment and human error, or our fallenness, you could say, if you want to put it in more religious terms. That nobody out there is beyond judgment, or beyond making mistakes, but man, isn't it so common for people to rationalize their behavior, or create elaborate systems in their life, all in an attempt to avoid both of these things? Do you know anybody like that in your life? Should be said, we've already talked about the plot points of The Fall on this podcast. It was episode 170, it was part of the Creation of Meaning series. Just saying, I'm focusing less on the plot here, and more on what the characters and story mean within the larger project of Camus.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Because if you listened to that episode, then you know that the main character of the book, Clamence, starts the book talking about what he used to be like, where in his stories, he looks like the perfect example of what Camus laid out in his essay, The Rebel, we just talked about. Clamence is the picture of solidarity with others through lucid rebellion. He's a lawyer, he takes on only cases where he helps the downtrodden of society. In his spare time, he likes to help old ladies cross the street, does balloon animals for the kids at a party, this is a man who is very visibly, on the surface at least, a morally good person, someone who seems to sacrifice a lot in his life in the name of helping others. But he goes through what I called on that episode, a reverse baptism. It's a reverse baptism, because instead of there being a moment where he's dunked in water, and it- morally purifies him.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  He has a series of moments in his life that reveal to him just how much of a morally questionable person he truly is. There's the image Camus paints of him in the book, getting punched in the face and humbled during a road rage incident. There's the image of him crossing the bridge at night and hearing someone laugh behind his back. There's most notably, famous scene from this book, the moment of the woman on the bridge, who when she falls off the bridge into the water, Clamontz could choose to jump in after into the water and save her, but instead he does nothing and just continues on with his night like nothing happened. In other words, Clamontz on the surface could sure put on an act of being the rebel that Camus writes about, but if you forced him to look at himself with the same degree of lucidity we've been talking about looking at the world with, he'd be forced to acknowledge

• 2:53Speaker 00

  certain limitations that he has that are rather uncomfortable to admit. He'd be forced to admit that a lot of this morality of his is performative, or half-hearted, as Camus writes, and that this reverse baptism has placed him in a feeling of exile, like we talked about last time. But rather than sit in it, where the illusion of how great of a guy he is would be shown to be what it is, he instead reacts to exile in a very predictable way. He creates tactics and rationalizations out of abstractions that allow him to continue on living, not having to consider his full limitations. The one we see in the book is his strategy of what he calls being a judge-penitent, where once he realizes how morally shallow he is, he spends the rest of the book sitting in a bar in the deepest circle of hell in Amsterdam, symbolically, where he acts as both judge

• 3:36Speaker 00

  and penitent, or prisoner, both at the same time. See, by telling random people that sit next to him at a bar about how bad of a person he is, through this twisted little confession booth of his, he judges himself before anybody else can bring that judgment upon him against his will. It's what you could call the eight-mile defense, or what B. Rabbit does to Papa Doc at the end of that movie. The idea is, screw everybody, right? Me, you, Papa Doc, a clock, a trailer, Santa Claus, screw everybody. If I just cut myself down enough and I tell you all the bad things about me, then you don't have anything left that you can judge me for. In other words, this is a strategy that's going on here from Clamontz, and more than that, it's a strategy that comes with several other benefits for him as well.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  See, if I judge myself really bad, if I'm the lowest, scummiest person in this room in everyone's eyes, then everything that I judge people for after that is officially swinging up at that point. Like, you ever known somebody that'll want to criticize people? And they'll start by saying, "No, no, no, no, look, I'm the first to admit I'm a total piece of crap myself. But look, can we just talk about this other person over there? This group of people we both don't like?" This is the Judge Penitent Strategy. Now, sprinkled throughout this book are a lot of other common strategies in the modern world that people use to avoid guilt or avoid admitting their own mistakes. Again, to avoid this truly lucid confrontation with their life as it is. There's the strategy of not really doing much of anything in your life, so that at least if you're not doing anything, you're not doing much that people could judge you for.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  But, of course, this whole strategy is centered on the idea that just by not doing bad things, you somehow default into being a good person. As we know, it's not the case for Camus. This is actually a very life-denying way of mostly avoiding judgment or the discomfort of facing yourself. We also see the common strategy in the book of surrounding yourself only with people who agree with you on everything, or people where you all enable each other's behavior all the time and thus never judge each other for anything. These people will say things like, "Look, these are the coolest people I know. These are the people that really love me, because they never tell me things that would make me have to confront my own limitations as a person." You know, Camus said at one point that he wrote this book, The Fall, in part as an indictment on his own generation and the strategies that they were using.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  But an important detail about Camus to recognize is that he also brought a good amount of compassion to people who were acting in these ways in the modern world, because he understood it's not like people are using these sorts of strategies in a vacuum. He thought there was something about modern life that we need to understand that leads people to these sorts of strategies in the first place. And that maybe compassion, he thinks, is the only lucid response we have sometimes that makes sense in a kind of world that's filled with guilt and judgment like this. We'll talk a lot more about this point here in a few minutes, but first, I think we need to talk about that modern condition that leads to this whole situation we're talking about. And for Camus, there are few voices better in the history of literature at depicting what it is to be a modern person than what you'll find in the work of the author Franz Kafka.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Camus writes in an appendix to the Mythos Sisyphus early in his career, where he lays out most of the reason why Kafka was so inspiring to him when he was writing his work. That said, for whatever it's worth, he also lays out some of the big things he disagrees with Kafka on that make them very different in terms of what they were going for as artists. We'll talk about all of it, but maybe the first thing to do when introducing Kafka here on this show is just to place his work in the context of some of the recent episodes we've done. Kafka is someone who's inspired by Dostoevsky, loved his writing, where he's living almost a full generation after he did his work. But then Kafka is doing his work almost a full generation before Camus, who would then go on to be inspired by the work of Kafka when he writes his first book, The Stranger. So in terms of the time period here, if it's helpful to you, you can kind of think of Kafka

• 7:16Speaker 00

  as a bridge between the work of Dostoevsky and Camus. The similarities and differences between them can be useful for understanding their respective projects. But it's also important to start by saying what Kafka is not, I guess, because Kafka, like Camus, is also a person who's more of an artist than he is a philosopher. It would be misleading to call Kafka a philosopher. His writing is not meant to be a philosophical system that he's developing. It's not meant to prescribe a worldview to people, but it absolutely is intended to get people to see their reality differently on the other side of having read it. And for whatever it's worth, in the history of the world, I can't think of many other non-philosophers that have been more inspiring to philosophers in their work than Franz Kafka. I mean, the list is pretty short.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  There's one author that compares the impact that Kafka has had on modern thought to the impact that Shakespeare or Dante had during their times. Because the list of philosophers he's inspired with, these images he paints in his fiction, is incredible. And there's dozens of completely different interpretations that his work has produced when inspiring them. This is why, if you wanted a comparison from me of who Kafka most resembles from the world of philosophy, I might compare Kafka to someone like Zeno from ancient Greece. See, Zeno was someone way back then that was famous for his paradoxes. The paradox of the runner, right? That can never reach the finish line if they always got to travel half the distance. How does he do it? There's the paradox of the arrow that seems to prove, when Zeno explains it at least,

• 8:43Speaker 00

  that motion must be an illusion, that our senses must be tricking us somehow. How is this possible? These are powerful images that Zeno created during his time that point out something important about the limitations of the way we rationally try to make sense of our world. And while Zeno, as far as we know, never tried to create any philosophical system, these images inspired countless philosophers that came after him that dedicated their entire work to examining what these paradoxes could mean. What I mean is, Zeno, no doubt helped move philosophy forward indirectly. And well, this is how I think of Kafka's place in modernity as well. So what this means is, one thing to know about Kafka, is that if anybody ever tells you they, you know, they read Kafka one weekend, and they're pretty sure they know exactly

• 9:25Speaker 00

  what he was trying to say in one of his books, don't believe their lies. This is someone that clearly hasn't engaged enough with him to see how deep his work really goes. It's far more exciting than that, actually. Now, we're talking about one interpretation of his work today, and that, again, is the reading that Camus writes about at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus. You know, he once said about Kafka, "The genius of him," if you had to break it down, "is the way that he writes forces you to read him, but then it also forces you to reread him and get another interpretation, and then to reread him again, each time potentially creating an entirely new insight about your world than you got before." He thinks his work does this because of a very deliberate style that Kafka had, and it's really a combination of two different things.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  One, the density of the symbolism that goes on in his books. And two, the fact that his writing is always designed to keep the person that's reading it a bit confused all the time. Like, you've ever heard people use the term Kafkaesque when they're talking? Let's just give an example of his work, actually. One of Kafka's most famous books is called The Trial, and the book starts by immediately dumping the reader into one of these classic Kafkaesque situations we're talking about here. The main character of the story, Joseph Kay, or just Kay as they call him throughout the rest of the book, he wakes up in his bed, wipes the sleep out of his eyes, and instantly realizes that he's under arrest. Two men in suits that claim to be public officials are sitting in the next room drinking

• 10:48Speaker 00

  coffee, eating food, and they tell Joseph Kay that while he's technically under arrest, there's really no need for them to detain him in this moment. It's not like he's going to get very far, even if he tries to run. So when Joseph naturally asks them what he's under arrest for, the two of them say, "Don't know. Not really our job to explain all that to you. Look, our job's just to arrest you, right? You'll find out all that information soon enough, don't worry." When he starts to complain a bit more, the two of them start to make him feel stupid for even asking. They make him feel bad for complaining to them. Like, why are you making our jobs more difficult? So Joseph eventually accepts the situation and just paces around in his room until he's told there's going to be some kind of weird initial hearing for this arrest in the front room of this house he's staying in.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  The guy leading the hearing shows up, neighbors and people passing by come into the front room to watch the hearing. The guy casually pulls up an end table and a chair as some kind of makeshift desk that he's going to sit at as he's judging him. The guy starts smoking in the front room casually, talking to Joseph like all this is very normal. He tells him he's under arrest, that he's going to face a trial at a later date, doesn't tell him when or where that's going to be, but that obviously he can keep going to work in the meantime. I mean, after all, he's just under arrest here. Doesn't mean he's got to stop going to work. Fast forward to Joseph showing up into the attic of an apartment building for his court date, you know, the one they didn't give him a time and place for. And the first thing they say to him when he gets there is, hey, good, good, you're here, finally. You're an hour and a half late.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Now, this is just one example of dozens of these slightly confusing strings of events that Kafka writes into his work. And by the way, don't get me started on some of the more bizarre examples you'll find in this book, The Trial. There's one point in the book that Joseph Kay just opens up a random closet somewhere. And inside of the closet are the two guards from the beginning of the book that arrested him. And they both have their shirts off, they're down on their knees, and they're getting whipped by a guy that's wearing an all-black suit. Now, that just sounds like a Saturday afternoon for you, just a party. How about this one? Later on in the book, when he's visiting his lawyer, he goes behind a random curtain this time. And he's all of a sudden transported into a room where there's an endless row of legal clerks that are all working on a bunch of files. Like, they branch out into

• 12:55Speaker 00

  all directions. He literally can't see the end of them. The room itself that he's in is very hot. It's filled with smoke. And these legal clerks are all very sick, coughing, sweating, slowly dying from all the heat and smoke from the coals that are burning in the room. This is a scene that just happens in the middle of the book with no explanation. So all this is very weird if you compared it to a traditional story. And why would Kafka do this sort of thing? Why write a book where the readers made to feel a bit confused all the time? Camus is going to say that if you wanted to understand Kafka, pay less attention to the specific stuff he's writing about, and more attention to the way he makes the reader feel. Because the way you feel when you read a Kafka novel to Camus is the way you feel sometimes when you confront the absurdity of the universe head on. Think about it.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  When the main character K wakes up in the story and he realizes that he's under arrest, there's some stuff about that scenario that looks like situations you've seen in your life before. And if you were reading the novel, like you read all other novels, you know, following a typical plot arc, looking for things to make sense. If you did that, then every so often when you're reading Kafka, you're going to be blindsided by something that's nothing like what you expected to happen. Well, similarly, if we go throughout our lives to Camus, you know, constantly expecting the world to conform to some narrative or some set of abstractions. In other words, if we idealize or demonize people and things around us as though the world's ever going to be that simple, well, we are similarly going to be hit with moments where the limits of the ways we're simplifying things becomes obvious to us. A close relationship ends.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  We have a health scare. Maybe the thing we believed in the most turns out to be nothing like the thing we thought it was. To Camus, Kafka is a genius at putting people in this headspace. Because both to be a human being that faces the absurdity of the world and to be reading a Kafka novel, the experience of both of these is to be hit with moments that exceed our rational expectations of them. It is to face moments sometimes that feel like a nightmare, like something out of a bad dream. It's to march forward throughout that whole process, screaming at the top of your lungs, searching for some meaning that's going to make it all make sense, then only to be met with an obvious silence as we continue to turn the pages. To Camus, Kafka captures the essence of what it is to be an honest person in the modern world.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  He just puts it in dramatized form that seems ridiculous to most people. But here's the thing, it's not really any more ridiculous than our world. It's just a different world than the world most of us have found a way to normalize or to escape from all the time. Camus would want us to notice how the protagonists in many of Kafka's novels just agreeably go along with the absurdity of the world they're in, much like we do. I mean, sure, the character K from the book initially asked why he's being arrested. But look, it doesn't take much for him to forfeit any kind of freedom he might otherwise have to the set of procedures he finds himself living in the middle of. He lives in a state of guilt, accused of something, not really sure of what. And his solution is to just outsource his decision-making about what to do next, to

• 15:51Speaker 00

  outsource his morality to the officials that always tell him the next place to be, the next thing to do, and the next way he needs to be thinking. Camus thinks this is the fate of many people that are living in the modern world. Because substitute the court system in this story for something like a modern-day political party or a cause, and you essentially have the life of how many people frame their whole place in the universe. They don't know what to think until the officials tell them what to think. Moments that seem like something out of a nightmare happened right in front of them, they're confused for a second, but only until they can get the officials to tell them, "Don't worry, all this is very normal, this is all a part of the plan." To Camus, to outsource your morality and your knowledge to some set of faceless bureaucrats

• 16:32Speaker 00

  with a clear agenda, this is a recipe for living a life where there is no freedom for you really anymore. There's just compliance to a set of procedures every day, like Joseph Kay in the book. Decision-making becomes just about following the next procedure. Procedures you either follow and then get a nice pat on the head for following them that day, or you can deviate from them, and you'll very quickly realize how much control these people have over your thinking. Camus calls this move at one point, "Something that happens to people when they, quote, 'embrace the God that consumes them,' end quote." And the thinking is, whether it's a political party, or a philosophy, or even an actual god, I guess, when it comes to these things that allow us to continue to live without facing our existence head-on, better to embrace a god that consumes you for some people than

• 17:17Speaker 00

  to live in a state of true lucid revolt. You know, one of my favorite lines that Camus ever wrote that's around this same subject is something he says in a famous speech he gave after World War II called "The Crisis of Man." Some context, again, this is after World War II. And he's trying to call for his generation to take responsibility for not only what happened during that whole situation, but for rebuilding the way we think moving forward so that stuff like this doesn't happen again. Now, of course, we know at this point in the series where he's coming from with this whole project. You know, finding an alternative to system building has always been a huge part of him. And one giant area that he thought was massively overinflated during his time is how people in the modern world typically view politics, which was for him at least one small part of the rise of people like Hitler and Stalin.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  He says in the speech, if he had to give a piece of advice to his generation, he says he understands why politics is so inflated in people's lives, and maybe you could make a case that it's still necessary. But as soon as we can, he says, we need to bring the role of politics back down to its proper size. He says, quote, and this is one of my favorite lines by him, "Politics should do our housekeeping. It shouldn't settle our domestic disputes," end quote. And what he means is, politics, you know, throughout history generally, has been about certain things, about collecting taxes, building roads, maintaining the order of things. It's about doing the sort of background stuff that then allows for the actual people to go about living their lives, creating what the society is that they live in. But in today's world, it's different.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Today, politics gives you an entire worldview. Politics gives you a theory of love, he says. It gives you a way you think people should be living their lives, what freedoms you think people should be having. It gives you a picture of what you think justice should even be. But this is not traditionally something that went on in the realm of politics. In the past, this has been done wherever people are having their conversations, whether it's philosophical, religious, when people come together to discuss the world they live in. But when these things get wrapped up under the banner of politics in particular, well, the whole thing invites people to make their positions on these things antagonistic to each other. Every conversation foreshadows to some distant November off into the future, where these ideas are going to go to battle with each other in a giant Super Bowl of politics somewhere.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Where your worldview is not just a disagreement we have with each other, where if you disagreed with me, I might be grateful that you helped me develop my position, like it might work in philosophy. No, in politics, now you are my political enemy. Now you're destroying the world I want my kids to live in, in some binary competition where everyone in it has to pick one side or the other. The state of our conversations, always existing under the banner of politics, allows people to get away with bad philosophy. And you can see this and who's the most successful in political conversations. It's not people actually trying to understand the world better. It's the people best at rhetoric. It's the people who are the best at steel manning their own side, ignoring the limitations of it, and then framing the other side in the worst way they possibly can. And for Camus, when you apply this at scale,

• 20:11Speaker 00

  when this becomes a lane that modern people can use to avoid the existential tensions they'd otherwise have to be navigating. Well, you can imagine why he thinks the protagonist of a Kafka novel, outsourcing themselves to a set of faceless bureaucrats, how that reflects something important about the condition that a modern person finds themselves born into. But here's the thing. If everything we've just said here today about living in the modern world is true, then does it really make much sense to be angry at any of the people that take one of these off-ramps as a way to get away from it? I mean, look, Camus might say, as modern people, we are not born into the Mediterranean sun that he talks about so much in his work. This life of eminence and affirmation about things that he's been singing the praises of. Yeah, this is not where most of us get started in our lives.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  We live in a world generally that is completely dominated by rational abstractions, transcendence, and ego. Those are basically your choices if you wanted to worship at the altar of something. And if someone born today, when they have that rare moment of lucidity and they find themselves living in a world that feels like they're in a Kafka novel, can you really blame people for wanting to escape that somehow? I mean, rather than think of these people as lazy, or stupid, or evil, maybe the better way to think of them might be desperate. Desperately born into a Kafka novel that they'll do anything to find a way out of. And this is where compassion is going to become such an important piece of what Camus was going for in his book The Fall. Because if you remember in The Plague, when we talked about solidarity,

• 21:36Speaker 00

  how real solidarity for Camus is only a response that starts to make sense when you consider the common existential condition that we share with other people. Well, in the same way, in The Fall, this book is Camus saying that we're all similarly capable of making big mistakes, capable of judging and being judged, and capable of losing sight of the fact that this is part of the kinds of creatures we are. Klimat as a character may be one of these modern people, trapped in a cycle of rationalizing their own behavior, all to avoid the difficult task of facing himself head on. But to Camus, a very important response when we're affirming our reality fully is going to be compassion for people like Klimat, who are in a similar state of affairs as we are.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  That maybe compassion is the equivalent of solidarity at the level of guilt and judgment. Now, Camus has a lot of love for Kafka, no doubt. But he also disagrees with him. And his disagreement with him is similar to his disagreement with most people. It's that Kafka didn't take the absurdity of the universe as seriously as he could have. And he says this because when Kafka writes in his books, he always leaves room for some kind of hope that can rescue the protagonist at the end. Camus says you can see this in his book The Trial, where he has priests that come in and talk to Joseph K. when he's about to be put to death, telling him that there's a slight hope out there, that there's some acquittal that may come in for him at the last second. Camus says you can also see this in another book he wrote called The Castle, which we'll talk about next time,

• 23:00Speaker 00

  where there's always this mysterious voice that's beckoning and calling to the main character, trying to get them to come to the castle that's going to save them somehow. Again, a kind of hope that he leaves in there for people caught in this absurd world. Now, the first thing to say probably is that Camus has a certain level of respect for this hope left in there by Kafka, certainly far more respect than he has for most of the hope that's been peddled in fiction all throughout history. I mean, most writers may as well send down Santa Claus on a golden chariot the way they're idealizing the world, he thinks. Second Santa Claus reference, by the way. Little Christmas in May for everyone. Anyway, that's not the kind of hope Kafka's offering. In Kafka's books, the people never actually get the thing they're hoping for. And this is a key detail to understanding him for Camus. Kafka has a line at one point where he says,

• 23:45Speaker 00

  "Oh, don't worry, don't worry. There's plenty of hope out there, just not for any of us." Meaning us humans. Camus loved this line, and it's why he would eventually call this kind of hope that he writes into his books "hope in a strange form." It's "hope in a strange form" from Kafka, because it always lies outside of what we as human beings could ever actually have access to. It's a kind of hope that exists in a domain that's constantly being deferred or inaccessible to our lived experience. If this is a weird thing to picture, like, have you ever been in a place in life where you're completely nihilistic? Like, no hope whatsoever for anything beyond or any sort of meaning to anything you ever do? Then have you ever gone through some kind of mind-altering experience, whatever it is,

• 24:27Speaker 00

  where for just a minute, you genuinely get the feeling like you're connected to something that's larger than you, and it makes sense to you in that rare moment that you're a part of it. Okay, but later, when you're back in your normal life, just doing routine day-to-day things, you may feel like you're pretty much the same person, but now, since you've had that experience, there's this kind of glimmer that exists there in your thoughts now that you just didn't have before. It's not that you feel like you've accessed something, or like spoken to God, but then there's also the possibility that maybe you just did. I mean, what was that, that I just experienced? And aren't I ultimately just a bipedal primate walking around on this planet like everyone else anyway? Wouldn't there be limitations to what I can possibly have access to?

• 25:10Speaker 00

  And for some people, even just having a glimmer of hope like that can be world-shifting for them. From Camus' reading of Kafka, at least, this is something that he thought he understood quite deeply. See, this is why Camus can have this kind of respect for this hope that Kafka leaves in, because to even get to this glimmer of hope that Kafka leaves room for, he had to take you through a labyrinth of absurdity and completely obliterate all other forms of hope from history that so many people get trapped in. Camus has respect for this, but still, we know Camus by this point, even this small glimmer of existential hope for him is going to be a bit too much. Remember at the beginning of this series when we said that Camus said he wanted to imagine what it would be like to live without hope? Well, this is the context that that line makes sense in.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  No matter how small, no matter how inaccessible, Camus wants to affirm everything he thinks we can know about the world, and that doesn't include a mysterious hope that we really have no reason to be believing in. As well-intentioned as this may be from Kafka, to Camus, this is still a hope that he thinks, quote, "traps people in an infinite search for grace," end quote. They cling on to this hope, and it prevents them from facing exile, or, once again, this is them embracing the God that consumes them. But here's the question to ask about this that you're probably already thinking right now. Which one of these two options is truly accepting the limitations we have as beings? Is it to accept the total silence of the universe and the limitations of meaning? Or is it to accept the limitations of my own phenomenological experience?

• 26:40Speaker 00

  And the possibilities that may lie beyond that, that I may catch weird glimpses of in strange moments? Anyway, as I've been talking about this whole series, Camus often thought of his work as being divided into five different cycles or series. And as I alluded to towards the beginning of this, it's fun to speculate about what he was planning to write about in cycle five of his work. Things we really have very little information about, only the titles of the book written in margin notes. As I said, one of the essays was going to be called Creation Corrected. Another book he planned on writing was going to be called The System. And knowing as much as we do now about Camus, it's interesting, what could these titles have meant? Both of them share some kind of an irony as to what he was going for in the rest of his project. Though, to be fair, both The Rebel and The Fall as titles

• 27:24Speaker 00

  would probably be kind of confusing too, if we didn't already know what they were about. Maybe one possibility, if I had to give one, is that Camus would have went in a more anarchist direction later in life. Though obviously not grounding any of this system of his and the rights that people have to self-organization. Obviously, he's not into rights. But maybe self-organization would have just been another of these almost universal human tendencies we've been talking about. And that maybe the system or creation being corrected is just the way this blossoms out of a society that lucidly confronts reality and the people around them. It's one possibility, right? And if this was right, wouldn't this have also served for him as a pretty great culmination to this whole project of finding a way to live that isn't constantly mediated by abstractions?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Wouldn't whatever this system looks like have to at least resemble the sort of Mediterranean lifestyle he's alluded to with the sun all throughout his work? Wouldn't he have given us a way there at the end of his career? A way to live among each other? In a way that doesn't rely on abstractions about the world as much as our current societies do? And I guess, wouldn't it be destined to sit for a while on a bookshelf? Like anarchism often gets treated. As something that, yeah, sounds great. But that can never work now. People have to change into the kinds of people that could implement a system like that. Would this have been Camus' fate? Well, again, it's one theory you could come up with. But seriously, if you made it this far into the series, you've done the work, alright? And I'm genuinely curious what you think these could have meant. And as much as it pains me that this sounds like,

• 28:53Speaker 00

  "Well, let me know what you think about bananas down in the comments." But seriously, if you have a theory, I'd love to hear about it if you made it this far. Let me know what you think if you get a chance this week. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis if you value the show in any way. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.