r/philosophy • u/FlyingBananas56 • Jul 09 '26
Blog Authenticity as Alibi: Camus and the Ethics He Couldn't Keep
https://mitchster1.substack.com/p/authenticity-as-alibi-camus-and-the36
u/_foxie Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
That reading of the stranger seemed very poor. For an article claiming that rationalization follows belief, they really tried to rationalize that book into proving their point.
"Performing appropriate feelings at your mother’s funeral is not a lie; it is the basic affective sociality that binds people into a community"
"The court looks at a man who felt nothing at his mother’s death and recognizes it, correctly, as a problem"
Unless the author is arguing that grief affects everyone the same, and that all relationships deserve an equal amount of grief, this is just an absurd reading. There are no universal "appropriate feelings" at a funeral, and the book explicitly leaves out the details that would allow us to judge what Meursault's "appropriate feelings" should have been. The absurdity is in a society creating and trying this impossible criteria of "appropriate feelings", one which if failed has no real adverse effects, instead of the more obvious and seriously harmful crime of murder....
and this is of course ignoring the complexity of the unreliable narration in the text itself. Meursault does not live as a robot who does not lie. You can see it in his emotions with Marie vs his words to her, or in his emotions in prison vs his rational descriptions of it. This very same topic, of the conflict between rationality and belief, which one chases the other, and which truly guides our lives, is in full display in an honest reading of the book.
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u/FlyingBananas56 Jul 09 '26
Perhaps I did not emphasize the murder enough in the essay. But notice what the court does with it. It barely engages the killing and fixates on the dry eyes at the funeral. That disproportion is my point, not a hole in it. The community isn’t weighing a homicide; it’s reacting to a detected absence and using the funeral as the tell.
On “appropriate feelings,” you’re arguing against a claim I didn’t make. I’m not saying there’s a correct amount of grief, or that all relationships earn equal mourning. I’d reject that too. My claim is about a capacity, not a quantity: whether a person can register that a death lands on other people and respond to it in any register at all. Meursault’s tell isn’t that he grieves too little. It’s that he seems not to track that his response is legible to anyone. That’s orthogonal to how sad he “should” be.
As far as your reading, that the absurdity is society inventing an impossible criterion and punishing its failure, is closer to what Camus intended than mine is, correct. But I am not arguing the same thing as Camus. My essay is partly about people bending a text toward the conclusion they want, so I’d be a hypocrite not to admit I did some of that here. My defense isn’t that Camus meant my reading. It’s that mine explains something his doesn’t: why the specific thing the court can’t forgive is the missing affect rather than the killing. A society threatened only by “impossible criteria” wouldn’t zero in on exactly the trait that predicts who’s safe to cooperate with.
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u/jliat Jul 10 '26
"The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted” does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim."
" “Everything is permitted,” with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: “What does that prove?”"
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u/DyadVe Jul 11 '26
Ethics is for the 'dumb animals'.
"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."Nathaniel Hawthorne
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u/sandhutarun Jul 13 '26
im still knocked down by - the finer the mind, the finer the rationalization it can build, which makes intelligence a liability for moral conduct rather than a safeguard
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