Camus Tattoo

May 9, 2007 12:53 PM

[LiteratureFilter] Help me make sure my tattoo means what I think it means. Your opinion counts!

I was making my way (slowly) through Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus' and came across a line that stuck with me, to the point of considering getting a tattoo of it. I'm going to leave to context out, since this is exactly what I'm thinking of getting:

If one could only say just once: “This is clear,” all would be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.

More out of curiosity than anything else, how do you interpret this?

posted by allthingsfixable to Religion & Philosophy (43 answers total)

Taken without context, it sure sounds like a condemnation of Postmodernism to me.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:57 PM on May 9, 2007

To me it seems to be saying that people tend to make up their own morals and rules, and that anything can be rationalized. I know it's not from the Bible, but the way the text reads it sounds kind of Biblical to me.

No matter what, it could certainly start some interesting conversations.
posted by christinetheslp at 1:01 PM on May 9, 2007

It is saying that there is an objective truth/reality/morality, and that realizing that will "save" us from all those proclaiming that the world is unknowable. Like christinetheslp says, it seems very religious/evangelical.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:06 PM on May 9, 2007

Great title, BTW.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:06 PM on May 9, 2007

Seconding the critique of postmodernism.
posted by monkeymadness at 1:07 PM on May 9, 2007

I feel that in this sense "saying something" is an extension of thought. Therefore, saying "This is clear" would mean that one is expressing a moment of clarity, of clear thought. If were were actually capable of doing that, of having a clear and perfect moment (omniscience) we would be saved (from anything and everything that could possibly harm us or others - we would be perfect). But we're human, and we spend our time confirming and arguing about the exact shade of "muddiness" we experience, thereby negating the possibility of clear thought, and encouraging chaos (in our minds and lives). This is what we are designed to do. And the closest we can get to that omniscience is to be clear about our constraints and exist within them, chaos and all.

That's what I gathered.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:09 PM on May 9, 2007

It's been a long time since I read Camus, but I recall that the essay is a struggle to find alternatives to despair/suicide in the face of the seeming chaos and futility of life, and this line sort of seems like a thesis statement for wanting to do that (i.e., find the "clarity").

(SCDB: lovely gratuitous jab at teh dread Postmodrenism.)
posted by aught at 1:12 PM on May 9, 2007

(Other translations of the passage from the original French may help illuminate the meaning.)
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 1:13 PM on May 9, 2007

I take it as recognizing the tragedy that is at the core of "postmodernism": all would be easier if we had rules, but we do not.
posted by dame at 1:14 PM on May 9, 2007

It sounds to me like the writer/author/character is wishing—and s/he knows/believes it to be in vain—that there were something in this world one or perhaps even everyone could take as an absolute, such that people would hearken unto that inescapable reality and no longer waste their lives arguing about the extent to which everything is relative and the extent to which things can at all be known in any concrete, unassailable way.

'Cause wouldn't that be nice, to have an ultimate, inescapable truth or reality to hearken unto?

That's how I'd interpret it—much the way iamkimiam does—unless we were to find out that the this in "This is clear" in fact referred to something specific. If this referred to something specific, that would of necessity tint the meaning contained therein.
posted by limeonaire at 1:15 PM on May 9, 2007

This isn't what you asked, but my first thought is that it's way too long for a tattoo: it's either going to be so tiny that no one can read it, or, if it's in a readable size, it's going to be huge.
posted by fogster at 1:18 PM on May 9, 2007

Have you thought about having the tattoo done in the original French? Additionally, the core idea of the passage seems expressed in the first sentence:

If one could only say just once: “This is clear,” all would be saved.

A concise tattoo might be a better tattoo.
posted by kosem at 1:19 PM on May 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

It echoes Plato's Allegory of the Cave to me, the notion that we are too distracted by the illusions of the "real" world at the expense of a higher objective truth.
posted by lekvar at 1:21 PM on May 9, 2007

To elaborate: I don't think the speaker is positing that such an unassailable "one clear thing" necessarily does exist. Nor is the speaker barring the possibility that such a thing already exists. I think the speaker is merely wishing that such a thing were in existence—or, if already in existence, that such a thing would be recognizable to us/knowable by us humans.
posted by limeonaire at 1:22 PM on May 9, 2007

If you subscribe to George Lakoff's theory of modern metaphor, some (but not all) of the metaphors/constructs in the above quote could be:

EXISTENCE IS VISIBILITY
UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING
MIND/BODY/SELF AS A CONTAINER/OBJECT/STRUCTURE
CONDUIT METAPHOR
(caps necessary)

It's pretty fascinating stuff, if you want to get into picking apart quotes. Start with any of his books and you can talk about your new tattoo infinitely!
posted by iamkimiam at 1:22 PM on May 9, 2007

Alternately, this could be talking about the futility of expression within a particular society or segment of that society.

Maybe the speaker believes that there is no way—without social penalty—to make known or express his/her belief that such a "one clear thing" exists, given the prevailing climate of doubt.
posted by limeonaire at 1:27 PM on May 9, 2007

I dig it!
Here's Sophocles' take in "Philoctetes":

"Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
convinced he's in the right,
all of them glad to repeat themselves
and their very last mistake.
No matter what."

Too long.
Yes.
posted by Dizzy at 1:29 PM on May 9, 2007 [4 favorites]

never read it, but it seems like a condemnation of philosophy, beginning with descartes' proposal that the beginning of all knowledge is "I think therefore I am" as the only thing we can know innately. He seems to be saying that conventional philosophy is a trap to muddy our perception of the world around us and to doubt whatever isn't immediately apparent to us.
posted by shmegegge at 1:30 PM on May 9, 2007

This quote speaks to the core message of absurdism: that our existence is defined by our inability to know anything with certainty, that our inability to know anything with certainty is the closest thing we have to a certainty, but that even it is uncertain.

A connected idea is our inability to communicate with absolute knowledge that our message is getting through.
posted by alms at 1:33 PM on May 9, 2007

It brings to my mind a pair of lines I'm fond of from Yeats' "The Second Coming"

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

On further reflection, I think the Camus quote brings it to mind because Camus is saying the opposite of what Yeats is saying.

Which, together, bring to mind the physicist Niels Bohr:

There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth, because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

So get the Camus quote on one arm, and the Yeats on the other. :)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:36 PM on May 9, 2007 [3 favorites]

Slow down, there, SCDB. Camus, and Sisyphus in particular, predate what we would consider today postmodern thought. Camus was something of a precursor to the existentialists,

In Sisyphus, Camus grapples with the absurdity of life - how can anything we do mean anything when in the end we all die? At one point, he says something like 'if the world were clear, there would be no art" or something. But art is a creative act, an act of engaging the world and the human condition. If, in your quote, all would be saved by bringing clarity to the world, then were would only be saved by destroying that which is fundamental to the human condition.

Thus, the quote is something of a philosophical cry of rebellion against life - curse these 'walls', curse my humanity, just give me understanding of just one thing. But of course that understanding can never come - there is no hope that we will ever be more than we are.

just my opinion...
posted by Pastabagel at 1:48 PM on May 9, 2007

My comment is less than clear, sorry. Because art is a creative act, a human act, to want clarity is to also want to deny humanity, and yet we still want both clarity and our humanity. Camus is saying (a) you can't have both, (b) you definitely can't have clarity, thanks to all we know being a product of our perceptions, and (c) stop asking for this duality to be resolved (but he knows we can't because the revolt against the absurdity is part of the human condition).

Postwar France kicked ass.
posted by Pastabagel at 1:52 PM on May 9, 2007

I haven't read the book, but it reads to me as more of a paean to modernism. Whether Camus was a part of the actual movement or not is irrelevant, but clarity is a huge modernist concept. Just note the many posters here who set up the opposition to post-modernism as a rebuke of a desired clarity.

I also see that there seem to be some canonical/traditional interpretations of the work as well, so "...grain of salt" and all that.
posted by rhizome at 1:58 PM on May 9, 2007

Note that I said, "Taken without context..."

The OP asked how a random person would interpret it, under the assumption that they would not recognize the source, or know when it was written, etc.

I'm about as random as they come, and that's how I would interpret it.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:00 PM on May 9, 2007

My take (without getting into a debate about the truth of the statement), informed by a bit of existentialism philosophy courses would be that life would be easier if there were absolute truth, but that there isn't one.
posted by drezdn at 2:06 PM on May 9, 2007

I think the quote speaks to the human desire for a clear meaning, even in the face of the mounting evidence to the contrary -- particularly in the context of the mounting horrors of WWII and the German occupation of France, which of course was occuring when Camus was writing Sisyphus (published in 1942) in the first place.
posted by scody at 2:08 PM on May 9, 2007

Sorry to keep posting, but I just read the wikipedia article on absurdity, and I wanted to point out something in light of the references to postmodernism upthread.

At the turn of the century, philosophy was colliding headlong with psychology/psychoanalysis and theology, or I should say they all started to overlap. The fundamental problem in all of these disciplines was death. What is death? What does it mean? How does death re-frame the context of life?

For psychoanalysis, the inevitable nothingness is a source of neuroses - attempts to escape the inevitable. Much is made of Freud, but his conclusions viewed metaphorically are a staggering insight - neuroses are an attempt to refocus your mind on the present and away from the void you will eventually reach no matter what you do or believe.

Religion at this time is struggling. The growing middle class and the advancing modern world again focused everyone on the present and not on the afterlife, or the mystery of God, which is where religion draws its strength.

Into this environment, Camus arrives to point out that we are so imperfect in fact that it renders life absurd, and there's no escaping this, so you should engage the absurdity head on even though you know it will get you nowhere. But Camus is focus a bit on death here, because he's engaging the insurmountable inevitability - recall that Sisyphus is condemned to his fate in the afterlife for all eternity - but you aren't. You are only condemned to life until you die.

Paul Tillich in the 60's writes a book called the eternal now where he recasts god as beyond existence, and calls the "faithful" to abandon religion and psychoanalysis and philosophy and engage the ultimate mystery head on - What is Death? You cannot know God/death but you must struggle to know him because the struggle is what makes you human (but not what brings you closer to god, because you can't get closer, again there's no hope, like Camus says over and over. Hope is an opiate, respite from the struggle).

Of course, these are my opinions on these things only as they relate to this thread, and the thought is quite complex, but a good yardstick to have with 20th century philosophers/theologians/intellectuals is to notice how they address death.
posted by Pastabagel at 2:12 PM on May 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm probably egregiously wrong, but it sounds like it contradicts itself:
nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity

If nothing is clear, how can man have lucidity?
posted by juv3nal at 2:13 PM on May 9, 2007

Response by poster: juv3nal: Although similar, in this context I would think of lucidity more as 'awareness', for example a lucid dream, or being aware that you are in a dream.

Everyone else: Thank you for the wonderful feedback and interesting debate. I don't have time at the moment to respond thoroughly, but this has been more than helpful and enlightening. Thanks again.
posted by allthingsfixable at 2:33 PM on May 9, 2007

I just want you to know, if you are thinking of getting this tattoo in order to join a motorcycle gang, it may not work. A tattoo this long says a lot of things. One of them is "nerd."

That being said, it is a pretty cool tattoo.
posted by Deathalicious at 2:35 PM on May 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

Taken without context, it sure sounds like a condemnation of Postmodernism to me.

Camus published Le Mythe de Sisyphe in 1942.

The term "postmodernism" was coined in 1949 (at that time, to describe a genre of poetry). It became a common academic word by the end of the 1950s, generally as a modifier (p. poetry, p. architecture) but did not become an academic discipline unto itself until the 1970s, largely after the work of Derrida and Foucault.

This may reveal to yourself, Steven (and others), more about your own prejudices than anything.

The struggle of the existentialist, which is what Camus is concerned with (the struggle with existence), is essentially a Modern condition. As such it is very much the foundation of postmodernism. Camus is not damning those who deconstruct the world, he is damning those who despair at the world (and fairly honestly including himself). Existentialism (the modern era) is the process of coming to terms with despair. Deconstruction (the postmodern era) is a process of gaining power over despair.

What concerned Camus was not an academic discipline, but the world and life itself. The essay in question is a refutation of the choice for suicide as a response to the realization that life is meaningless.

allthingsfixable (wait a minute -- is this post anti-eponysterical?), lucidity in this context almost certainly means "sanity".
posted by dhartung at 3:12 PM on May 9, 2007

The relevant excerpt, to parse as thou wilt. Translated by Justin O'Brien from the original French, provided for educational purposes. In my opinion the translation is not that great.



[...]
On quite a different plane, that of method, Husserl
and the phenomenologists, by their very extravagances,
reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the tran-
scendent power of the reason. The spiritual universe be-
comes incalculably enriched through them. The rose
petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as im-
portant as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking
ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in
the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all
over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness;
it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner
of Proust, into a privileged moment. What justifies
thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more posi-
tive than Kierkegaard's or Chestov's, Husserl's manner
of proceeding, in the beginning, nevertheless negates
the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope, opens
to intuition and to the heart a whole proliferation of
phenomena, the wealth of which has about it something
inhuman. These paths lead to all sciences or to none.
This amounts to saying that in this case the means are
more important than the end. All that is involved is "an
attitude for understanding" and not a consolation. Let
me repeat: in the beginning, at very least.

How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of
these minds! How can one fail to see that they take their
stand around a privileged and bitter moment in which
hope has no further place? I want everything to be ex-
plained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent
when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused
by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradic-
tions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is non-
sense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The
world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand,
is but a vast irrational. If one could only say just once:
"This is clear," all would be saved. But these men vie
with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear,
all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his
definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.

...

In my opinion, the passage is about the rational paucity of philosophy provoked by gut instinct -- the problem being that cri d'coeur leads down dead-end analytic paths. But the original work requires deep background knowledge of contemporary philosophical works and the usual custom French philosophical vocabulary, so it's still a little imponderable.
posted by felix at 3:17 PM on May 9, 2007

It's really pretty tacky. Damn existentialists. But the quote isn't totally without hope. There is a strong element of yearning and desire in the quote (and in Camus in general) that suggests an escape from nihilism. So even if there's no escape one can still dream.
posted by nixerman at 3:32 PM on May 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm probably egregiously wrong, but it sounds like it contradicts itself:
nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity

If nothing is clear, how can man have lucidity?

That's the core paradox of absurdism. That's why Camus believes, in the end, that Sisyphus is happy. Because he recognizes that to be happy would be absurd, just like believing that you have clarity would be absurd.
posted by alms at 3:41 PM on May 9, 2007

Let's try this one more time:

If I read that line, and if I don't know who wrote it, when he wrote it, or what else he wrote at the same time -- in other words, that brief passage hanging all alone without any other context at all -- then it sounds like a criticism of things like "deconstruction" and all the other violence that the French have done to philosophy and literature studies.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:27 PM on May 9, 2007

Oh, and I laughed so hard I literally cried tears at my desk over the idea it was a criticism of postmodernism.

Mein Gott in Himmel! The question was:

"More out of curiosity than anything else, how do you interpret this?"

Not:

"What is the correct interpretation of this?"

As a tattoo, the text must stand alone. People reading it, it must be assumed, will not know who wrote it or why. Give SCDB a break—I thought the exact same thing as him, that without context it sounds like a criticism of postmodernism or some other overly-complex philosophical/literary framework.
posted by Khalad at 4:27 PM on May 9, 2007

Shorter version?
posted by washburn at 4:34 PM on May 9, 2007

iamkimiam, alms, Pastabagel and many others are giving you the interpretation that Camus himself most likely had (I just taught some Camus this semester, though not this particular piece.) Camus is not Schopenhauer and despite the fact that the world resists our attempts to understand and live with it, we can still rebel and invest it with value created by ourselves.

Personally, I think it would make an interesting tattoo even if you don't subscribe to Camus' existentialism. I don't. I think there are things that we can know clearly even if not everyone agrees with us. So getting a tattoo of "This is clear." (probably "C'est clair." in the French, but I haven't looked it up) could also be a nice little invocation of and "fuck you" to Camus. Adds an extra layer of depth.
posted by ontic at 5:13 PM on May 9, 2007

Without being philisophical, but just going with the actual words there, it seems to say that everybody’s reality is objective. There is no absolute truth. How people interpret and act on things is always influenced by there own personal perspective. We only know what is within our immediate experience. Or perhaps, that is all we choose to know.
posted by catatethebird at 5:51 PM on May 9, 2007

(um, I mean THEIR own personal perspective...i am slow and bad at proofreading)
posted by catatethebird at 5:53 PM on May 9, 2007

then it sounds like a criticism of things like "deconstruction" and all the other violence that the French have done to philosophy and literature studies.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:27 PM on May 9

Only because you're sensitive to postmodern philosophy. If this was 1989 and you read that quote, you'd be smashing the existentialists, because knowledge of postmodernism hadn't filtered down into the general educated public. It not a criticism of you, just an observation. The thing that reveals it isn't postmodernism is the tone of internal conflict in the quote. Postmodernists tend not to be conflicted about their conclusions (or at least not to put that conflict on the page).
posted by Pastabagel at 7:30 PM on May 9, 2007

Completely ignoring the context (including the identity of the author), I read it as a philosophical statement. The writer hopes that he might a starting point from which to build a philosophy (something along the lines of Descartes cogito), but finds his project thwarted by some philosophical mob or other (take your pick, really). Of course, that is only ignoring the fact that it was written by Camus.

catatethebird: I think you were being philosophical.
posted by ssg at 10:28 PM on May 9, 2007

Kalad: As a tattoo, the text must stand alone. People reading it, it must be assumed, will not know who wrote it or why.

Sure, but I can't help thinking that wanting to present something subtle like this "stand-alone" with no context is the reason a lot of tattoos, bumper stickers, quotes in sigs, etc. miserably fail to impress -- or even communicate -- to others.
posted by aught at 9:24 AM on May 10, 2007