Camus explores the possibility of suicide in the face of these feelings. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he refers to the feeling of “absurdity” that strikes out of the blue when our need for reasons confronts the “unreasonable silence of the world” (1955, 28), destroying the comforting rhythm of our everyday lives.
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises. (13, my emphasis)
Absurdity prompts ‘the why’ because it discloses reality as it is, as contingent, meaningless, and irrational, revealing that I am “a stranger to myself and to the world” (20–21), and the only certainty is freedom and the ever-present possibility of my own death. Comparing the empty repetitiveness of modern life to the futile struggles of Sisyphus — who was condemned by the Greek gods to forever push a rock up a mountain only to watch it roll back down — Camus introduces suicide for those who are unable to bear the truth of ‘the absurd.’ The temptation to kill ourselves, then, is similar to our temptation to flee into the metaphysical comforts of religion or the tranquilizing routines of the public; they are all incarnations of flight from who we are. For Camus, suicide is a rejection or “repudiation” of one's own freedom, a freedom that defiantly and passionately affirms the absurdity of life and which alone can be “enough to fill a man's heart” (198).
Guilt is another mood that provides insight into our own existence. For existentialists like Kierkegaard and Heidegger, ‘guilt’ is not to be interpreted in the religious or moralistic sense as a feeling that we have done something wrong on the basis of some set of moral absolutes. This view creates the illusion that there are binding ethical norms that we can appeal to. Existential guilt dissolves this illusion, revealing that there is nothing — no God, no reason, no moral principle — that can legitimize or justify our choices and actions. Guilt reveals that we have been thrown into a world that we did not choose, and it is a world that has abandoned us to the extent that it lacks any objective measure that can tell us what we should or should not do. Understood this way, guilt does not represent a moral failing; it represents the structural unsettledness of being human. The fact that we are thrown into a world that offers no guidance for our lives means that guilt is invariably accompanied by anxiety. “The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety,” says Kierkegaard, “because freedom and guilt are still a possibility” (1944, 97). The human situation is one where we are faced with an indefinite range of possibilities that the world opens up for us but are provided with nothing in terms of guidance. Guilt, then, not only reveals our structural unsettledness; it also reveals that we are answerable only to ourselves.
These moods are important for the existentialists not only because they disclose basic truths about what it means to be human but because they have the power to pull us out of inauthenticity, out of our various modes of self-deception. But it is important not to confuse the transformative power that existentialists attribute to these emotions with the popular ideas of ‘getting in touch with one's feelings,’ ‘being true to one's inner self,’ or ‘finding the child within.’ These notions are largely holdovers of Romanticism, the sprawling and disjointed cultural reaction to Enlightenment rationality and the dehumanizing aspects of modern society. On the Romantic account, it is by attending to one's deepest and innermost feelings — rather than to disinterested reason — that the ‘real self’ can emerge and reclaim a primitive unity or oneness with the natural world, a unity that we once had and is still present in the simple spontaneous goodness of children (see Guignon 2004a, 49–77). This sentiment is perhaps most famously expressed in Rousseau's Emile (1762) when he writes: “To exist is to feel, our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas. … Let us be simpler and less pretentious; let us be content with the first feelings we experience in ourselves, since science always brings us back to these, unless it has led us astray” (1999, 210). This view suggests that beneath the instrumental and deforming conventions of rational society is a human nature that consists of spontaneous feelings that are fundamentally good.
Existentialists challenge this notion of innate human goodness. They, of course, do not deny the crucial role that feelings play in our lives or that humans are capable of spontaneous acts of tenderness and love, but they also acknowledge our darker side, for instance, the pleasure derived from senseless acts of violence and cruelty. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov describes the voluptuous experience of a “well-educated and intelligent” father beating his young daughter with a rod:
I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality, more and more, progressively, with each new stroke. They flog for one minute, they flog for five minutes, they flog for ten minutes — longer, harder, faster, sharper. The child is crying, the child finally cannot cry, she has no breath left: “Papa, papa, dear papa!” (1990, 241)
Dostoevsky concludes that these kinds of behaviors are not reserved for the sick and demented. They are sensual capacities that we all share, and it is naïve to think that they are not part of what it means to be human. “There is, of course, a beast hidden in every man,” writes Dostoevsky, “a beast of rage, a beast of sensual inflammability at the cries of the tormented victim, an unrestrained beast let off the chain” (241–242). And if we were to suggest that this kind of interpretation is irrational and absurd, Dostoevsky replies, “I tell you that absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities and without them perhaps nothing would happen” (243).
Nietzsche makes a similar point in acknowledging the human instinct for cruelty and violence, an aspect of our animal nature expressed most explicitly in the pleasure we derive in hurting others. Consider this passage from his On the Genealogy of Morals:
To witness suffering does one good, to inflict it even more so — that is a harsh proposition, but a fundamental one, an old-powerful human all-too-human proposition, one to which perhaps even the apes would subscribe: it is said that in devising bizarre cruelties they already to a large extent anticipate and at the same time ‘rehearse’ man. No festivity without cruelty: such is the lesson of the earliest, longest period in the history of mankind — and even in punishment there is so much that is festive. (1996, II, 6)
This interpretation suggests that the confluence of feeling that lurks below rational thought can be tender and cruel, creative and destructive and, therefore, transcends the simple binary between good and evil. In order to be true to ourselves, we have to acknowledge and accept the drives of the whole person, including those that are darkest and most dangerous. This is why, for existentialists like Nietzsche, traditional moralists get it wrong. They are not trying to sublimate or control our sensual natures; they are cultivating weakness and impotence by trying to deny them altogether. “Instead of employing the great sources of strength, those impetuous torrents of the soul that are so often dangerous and overwhelming, and economizing them, this most short-sighted and pernicious mode of thought, the moral code of thought, wants to make them dry up” (1968, 383).