1 - Making Sense of Life

Summary

1. Signs of Jealousy

a) … to be undermined

Early in his essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Camus offers the example of an apartment manager who committed suicide five years after his daughter’s death. It was said that since her death ‘he had changed greatly … and that that experience had “undermined” him’. For Camus, ‘A more exact word cannot be imagined’ than ‘undermined’. ‘Beginning to think’, he adds, ‘is beginning to be undermined’ (Camus 1955, 4). We can imagine, in part, what the apartment manager’s thinking must have entailed and why it became undermining. He no doubt tried to think through his situation and make sense of it – why did this happen? how have things changed? what will I do now?, among many other questions. As we can also imagine, the apartment manager would not have been satisfied with a simple causal explanation of the event, or with reassurances from others that his affairs were in order. Camus does not tell us how the daughter died. The apartment manager most likely did know, and yet this is not what he wants to know when he wants to know why it happened. What he wants to know goes beyond the concrete details, the specific facts that might fill the pages of a police report or news story. This is why Camus stresses that suicide is a philosophical problem rather than a ‘social phenomenon’, and why the efforts of the apartment manager to make sense of his situation could not be accomplished through the kind of objective reporting and fact gathering that may be appropriate for those who see suicide as a social problem. Camus thus claims that ‘we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide’ (4). No matter what one might have said to the apartment manager, it would not have been what he was looking for. It was this disparity between his thinking, his efforts to make sense of the situation, and the inadequacy of anything to respond to this thinking, which undermined him.

It is not hard for us to empathise with the plight of the apartment manager.