The gap that exists between human’s yearning for understanding and the lack of meaning the world has had humans attempt to give meaning to the world. However, these meanings that we attempt to explain the world are “merely a description of actual experience.” The meaning we are trying to assign the world are us trying to use our rationalism to obtain meaning when there is no meaning in the first place. As Camus reiterates, “there is no truth, but merely truths.”
The many truths we come up with then start to conflict with each other. One truth we find will contradict the other truth. As with Newtonian physics, we were able to understand the world well until things started to move at fast speeds–there things broke apart. This is the theme of the irrational, which is “reason becoming confused and escaping by negating itself.” For Newtonian physics, we negated the theory by saying it doesn’t work at fast speed and it’s a good approximation. Now we have the theory of relativity, but what about when someone comes and breaks this theory? Eventually, this may become a chain of theories that work for only specific cases. These theories, thus, are many truths and it would be madness to find the singular truth.
Perhaps the one comforting thing that comes all from this is that because the world has no meaning to it, we can give our own individual meaning to the world that we live in. But this absurd freedom, as Camus calls it, as comforting as this may sound, can be terrifying. Becoming aware and experiencing freedom is the same as losing the “third leg” and the comfort of “holding someone’s hand” as Lispector writes in The Passion. We lose structure by holding onto hope and prescribing our purpose in life to be some societal construct someone else invented. As Camus puts it in his own words, “he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty.”
But then what of Aristotle, Kant, and other ethical theorists who wrote on how we ought to live a life? Must we throw away virtue theory? Deontology? Utilitarianism? The only conflict I have, and my own fear, is choosing the life I ought to choose, and it is my decision alone. If we are to accept the plurality of truths, we must choose truths to follow and our own purpose. Reading it is easy but choosing a purpose for ourselves is beyond difficult. For now I can only contemplate the purpose of my own life, listening to my own reason and my heart.
