Albert Camus On Happiness

Albert Camus brings a brilliant twist to the philosophy of happiness: inevitability.

Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting startups up, but there’s a thread of a goal here for me: I’m passionate about solving hard problems and understanding the world around me. Oddly, I’m doing both right now, as I write this short essay.

In the past, my main squeeze in philosophy has always been Aristotle — his work is simple and elegant, but incredibly powerful. In the Aristotelian view of human behavior, we train ourselves to do certain things so that we develop the right character. Once we’ve accomplished our goals, we can engage in this activity of happiness and simply just enjoy life.

As part of the Existentialist Book Club, I recently began to get involved with the philosophy of Albert Camus, who says something entirely different about happiness. Namely, that it is inevitable. Is it time to start picking sides, or is there some way to reconcile Camus’ view with that put forward by Aristotle 2500 years ago?

The Greek Concept Of Happiness

For Camus, the very concept of life is absurd. To understand why, we need to have a quick look at the character Sisyphus, who has been doomed to roll a massive boulder up a mountain to the peak each day for all time. When the rock gets to the top of the mountain, gravity takes over, and it falls down the other side. Sisyphus has to go and get the rock and push it up the mountain again.

Camus says that famous line, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy,” in an attempt to explain what he refers to as the “inevitability” of happiness. There is more to this concept than initially meets the eye. After all, in the study of Aristotle, we find that happiness is an activity we are able to partake in when things reach certain conditions. See my book, Bring Back Satire, for a more in-depth look at the concept of eudaimonia, which is Aristotle’s conception of the activity of happiness.

The ancient Greek notion that happiness is not random has led to interesting and generally rather conservative fruit. Epicurus based his school on Aristotle to some extent, positing his minimization of pleasure as a way to minimize pain and seize control of life. There have been others, of course, but the Epicurean school is particularly germane to the Aristotelian concepts that have been turned upon their heads in Camus. For Aristotle, happiness is something we work toward throughout our lives. Only a few of us really reach it, and even for them it is subject to chance.

Have you ever noticed that you feel happier when you receive some unexpected, if trivial, good? Say a bet you won in a casino. The feeling can be… fleeting, to say the least.

This temporary blip of pleasure is not happiness for Aristotle. Neither is the pleasant sensation you have when you smell a nice flower on an outdoor walk. Nor is the feeling when it’s just a good day and you found an extra $20 in your jeans pocket. These are all pleasures, only a few of the many.

For Aristotle, happiness is a thing which comes from somewhere else. Happiness develops over a period of time, so these temporary pleasures are mere distractions if they aren’t pushing us toward our ultimate goal. Many things have to go right for us to even reach the ability to experience eudaimonia, and it seems a substantial amount of humanity may reach the end of life without ever having experienced the feeling Aristotle thought was so central to the human experience. The bliss, at having our world just right and getting a chance to enjoy what that feels like.

Perhaps this conception of happiness as this sort of mechanistic quality we can work to bring about is flawed. Perhaps an extremely compelling bit of (retrospectively) obvious evidence was lurking, just out of reach, until Albert Camus plucked it from the ether and breathed it to life — all by the simplest of phrases: “Happiness is inevitable.”

The Catch, For The Greeks

As anyone reasonably acquainted with neuroscience can tell you, the brain is a complex machine. In fact, the brain is the most complex thing we’ve discovered to date, aside from systems of brains working together (or at odds with one another). So when we look at Aristotle in the light of Camus and see the gaping, glaring flaw in the Aristotelian notion of happiness, whether it has been cast into the light by the years or by something else, which I will explain shortly, we should forgive the ancient philosopher for oversimplifying nature’s machinery. After all, when attempting to judge happiness, what in particular should we look at?

The Camus position is far more relatable. In fact, I daresay it is infallible. It precedes notions that are becoming more and more commonplace about the adaptability of human beings. Granted, happiness and ethical behavior are two separate things, now that we’ve moved away from the Aristotelian concept. For Aristotle, the goal of the city was to improve the citizens; the goal of the citizens was to improve the city — and there is nothing wrong with either of these statements except that now we have come to a complexity which breaks down the thesis.

The entire structure tumbles before the simple axiomatic truism Camus brings to bear against it. In forcing us to imagine Sisyphus happy, Camus has fired perhaps the decisive shot against the old rationalistic doctrine (i.e., do smart things and make good choices and you’ll build yourself and others a better life). He simply calls our attention to the fact that many of us, who Aristotle and others might consider miserable, actually experience happiness on a regular basis.

This seems counterintuitive, but there is a key in Aristotle that breaks it wide open. For Aristotle, happiness was always rooted in a sort of reminiscent activity. And this does stack up well against the cognitive neuroscience which has mapped the dopaminergic tract in the brain and which is routinely used to study pleasure and pain.

But, according to Camus, there is an insight Aristotle has missed: happiness is part of the human condition. Perhaps never has there been a life in which no joy existed. Use your imagination to picture the worst possible day in the worst possible life you can imagine. Now think through it. If you take that day as a starting point and live the life of the person you’ve imagined, it should be relatively easy to see that the next day might be better. Or if it’s worse instead, then the first day was by comparison a good day.

Aristotle assigned happiness to the wealthy and successful men whose lives he studied. His philosophy was perhaps adversely impacted by this bias — which Camus has pointed out so eloquently. The function of a human body is, in part, contingent upon happiness.

Can We Use This Insight To Help Make Ourselves Happier?

Short answer? Maybe. What science tells us about feelings is that it’s all relative. We can go through long periods of soul-crushing lows, but we never lose the ability to experience happiness. Instead, as I read Camus, it seems as if happiness is hardwired into the machine that allows us to have experiences in the first place. We would simply say that there was a period of depression (when there was insufficient happiness) which ended (bringing back the happiness) or didn’t end (suicide).

Unfortunately for us, Camus might point out, sadness is also a fundamental part of our world. We push the boulder up the crags, working to get something about the world to be the way we want it to be. There is a brief instant when the goal is accomplished and we’re able to reflect upon our success in having achieved it — happiness! And then the boulder falls down the other side of the mountain and presumably rolls a substantial distance away. And we feel dejected, as we go to retrieve the rock and begin our work again.

Perhaps this view stacks better with the Aristotelian concept than I’ve given it credit for. After all, Aristotle is mainly focused upon how to push the rock. He wasn’t a sociologist — his clients were the nobility of ancient Athens, and his pupils included Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s philosophy is thus preoccupied with nobility, though he did study under Plato for decades after being orphaned at a young age. Camus was practically an orphan; socioeconomically speaking, he was called to look at a different part of the world and to report it on behalf of people who were interested in the lower class and not merely the upper crust of their society.

Is it possible that Aristotle’s general concepts are assembled correctly, and that we as human beings are able to “get somewhere” by attempting to hold ourselves to standards we set in pursuit of excellence? It seems reasonable enough, and yet Camus would call it absurd. The things we would need to do, the work, the school, the study. Aristotle himself maintained that a “true geometer” was someone who loved geometry and did it for the love of itself; perhaps in this sense there is a sort of alignment between the semi-mechanistic Aristotelian concept of happiness and the absurdity of life for Camus — at least, if we do what we love, there’s less need to reach the end of the process.

For Aristotle, our happiness leaks away as we lose control of our lives. We must constantly seek our own improvement, if we’re to be happy. For Camus, the absurd man is the man who embraces his flaws and accepts his punishment for them and remains happy anyway. This absurd man is arguably present, at least sometimes, in each of us.

This has been the third and final essay in this series. The second, available here, was focused upon the interplay between Sartre and Camus regarding the concept of the absurd, primarily as seen in Existentialism is a Humanism and The Myth of Sisyphus. The first, available here, deals with the concept of philosophical suicide in Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus.

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Thomas Dylan Daniel is an existential philosopher, professional ethicist, author, and biophysicist. He has written four books and started a Medium publication called Serious Philosophy. Connect via his website or facebook, or have a look at his books.