Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff: Happiness in a Challenging World

1 Introduction

Artist and philosopher, Albert Camus (1913–60) had a strong impact on twentieth-century existential courants of thought. His philosophy is grounded in Nietzsche’s anti-religious philosophy and in other existentialists, such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Shestov.^[2] Though he rejected Sartre’s existentialism for political and ethical reasons, Camus’s philosophy became associated with this courant, as the thinker confronted similar difficulties: the anxiety and capability of human existence in face of death and suffering. Written after having witnessed the horrors of war in his early years, his works open our eyes to the “meaning” of life: such meaning does not lie in the hope for some greater realm, but in the acceptance of the undesigned condition of existence and in the enjoyment of quietude. In the first part of this article, I intend to present the notion of happiness consequent on Camus’s “absurd”: the claim that the search for a deeper meaning than life is an illusion, since the world itself is irreducible to human comprehension. On this point, it seems that Camus outreached Nietzsche’s nihilism by arguing that beyond despair in this meaninglessness, one can perceive the beauty and value of life.^[3] I will attempt to show that according to Camus, in our contingency, there is still something to seek for – human happiness – despite the sufferings to bear. Through his writings, the author engaged with peace and advocated for the awe and wonder that human beings are able to feel, finding in those a genuine source of happiness. In the second part of this article, I will propose an analysis of those works from an ethical perspective, showing how Camus’s philosophy unveils the problematics of happiness in a world harassed by violence. That is, how can we be happy in the awareness of the world’s meaninglessness, and is it moral to be happy despite the suffering of others? I suggest that Camus’s demonstration of the absurd in The Stranger and Caligula points to the precarity of an ethical political system based on the acknowledgment of the meaninglessness of the universe alone. In the third part of this article, I will present a reading of Rachel Bespaloff’s (1895–1949) works that highlights her contribution to the understanding of happiness. Bespaloff has been influential among the existential thinkers, together with Benjamin Fondane, Jean Wahl, and Gabriel Marcel.^[4] Her thought, as Monique Jutrin highlights, interrogates freedom and seeks for happiness in the instant. ^[5] She both rejected Sartre’s existentialism, which “destroyed the instant” and Camus’s, which similarly does not allow any transcendence of the world into the eternal. I will construct a dialogue between the ideas of Camus and Bespaloff, especially looking at silence and music, to show that despite Camus confronting Bespaloff’s thought in his anti-religious approach to the world, the two thinkers reached a similar understanding of happiness, found in contemplation. Through this dialogue, I wish to show that Bespaloff and Camus unfold the idea of happiness emerging in the twentieth-century French Philosophy, in a world challenged by unprecedented conflicts.

2 Is there Happiness in a Meaningless World?

In Camus’s works, happiness can be observed as the subjective perception of existence of human beings on earth, despite the metaphysical meaninglessness of the world. The search for any deeper meaning to life is hopeless and takes us away from the awe and wonder we can feel as we respect life and admire existence: it is “the essential impulse for the human drama.”^[6]

In Camus’s philosophy as in his novels, happiness is the way of life rather than its aim, since life has no metaphysical depth. In order to feel it, one needs simply to realize that there is nothing more to search for than the experience of life itself. Human nature, if there is such nature, is confined to this appreciation of life as all there is. This realization of life comes from itself, as we only know from our experience of ourselves and our experience of the world: “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.”^[7] The absurd is the condition in which the human mind is trapped: to seek rational explanations in an irrational world.^[8] Camus agreed with the Phenomenology of Husserl on the importance of a return to human perception: “Thinking is learning all over again to see… What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness.”^[9] Though, he rejected the outcome of Husserl’s method: that it eventually states a depth and meaning in existence (what he calls “philosophical suicide”).^[10] Yet, there is still a remarkable sensibility and appeal to perception in his writings. I suggest that this nonetheless phenomenological approach has an emotional dimension which, for Camus, is linked to happiness. That is to say, human beings must perceive the world to become aware of their condition and accept it, since it is the only good that they can find, though it is not a “consolation” for the absence of a deeper meaning.^[11] Although he denied any answer to the fundamental question of the meaning of life, such answer seems to lie in the feeling of happiness itself.

Happiness seems to be of first importance for this thinker deeply concerned about suicide. Just as the deceitful hope for a realm beyond human existence, suicide is an escape from the condition of life, the absurd, that annihilates happiness and is ethically deplorable, since it opposes the view that life ought to be preserved. While concrete events in the life of an individual can be linked with suicide, it appears that the absence of a reason to live, perceived as the isolation from others and the world, what Camus calls a “silence” within the individual is what leads to suicide. The “feeling of absurdity” is what results from the disconnection between the individual and his existence. Camus claims: “I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument… On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living.” The emotional attachment of the individual to others and to the world is suggested as what gives value to life: to value life is to value this connection. This leads Camus to ask “Does the Absurd dictate death?” For him, individuals ought to consider the absurd, without clinging at hopes that extend beyond existence, nor pursuing it to the point of death.^[12] To realize the value of existence, although it means living in awareness of the intellectual conflict between us and the world, seems to be the only way to surpass the difficulty of this condition. This realization seems to be achieved through the revolt: the “lucid acceptance of all aspects of existence,”^[13] that is, of the condition of human beings in the absurd with all its sufferings, and by which morality arises from the absurd. This concept refers to the inner feeling that leads to acts of revolution and rebellion; a deep feeling, like the absurd, but which arises in reaction to the consciousness of oppression.^[14] Now, an individual able to bear this suffering and be happy is called “absurd hero.” While such character is an extreme representation and seems immoral at first, their inwardness points to a life in acceptance of their condition, what Camus defends in The Myth of Sisyphus. ^[15]

For the absurd hero, happiness does not depend on our condition – rather, we should learn to see it in whatever condition in which we find ourselves. Happiness, in that sense, is related to the revolt. Camus uses the example of Sisyphus: in “His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life,” Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of meaningless suffering, rolling a rock up a hill again and again. What Camus denotes is the state of mind of the character: his conscious awareness of his suffering, yet without knowing its end, makes him an absurd hero.^[16] Only in such an existence, in complete awareness and acceptance of suffering, can we encounter happiness:

Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.^[17]

However, this happiness must be understood within the condition of the absurd, it has no meaning beyond the lucidity from which it emerges; for the thinker, it is in no way a transcendence of this state. David Carroll remarks that the “nothing” achieved by the activity of Sisyphus can be identified as the “‘something’ of an art.” Is art producing something, or is it produced by its activity? For Camus artistic creation, too, is contained within the condition of the absurd: We cannot attribute a deeper meaning to it, it is only a reflection of human beings at their lives.^[18] Yet, it seems that the idea of Sisyphus’s activity as an art together with his being “happy” point to a profound relation between art and happiness, even if this state of mind is contained within existence.

Perhaps is it because art examines life itself that it is often found alongside existential philosophy. Hermann Broch points at the existentialist novels as “parables,” used to “illustrate and concretize their philosophical theories.”^[19] When Camus wrote a philosophical treatise, a novel, and a play in his cycle of the absurd, I suggest that he had in mind the ability of art to show by means of situations what no science can abstract, such as the feeling of happiness. In order to comprehend more fully what happiness signifies in regard to life, we shall now turn to the concrete depictions of the absurd hero in the thinker’s artistic works.

Let us look more closely at the form of happiness. While The Myth of Sisyphus is claiming the possibility of happiness in awareness of the absurd condition of life, in Camus’s artistic works, we find a concrete glance at happiness in such existence. The artist approached the experience of happiness by human beings, complementing the treatise in which he organized his concepts. Through the mediation of his characters, he was allowed to plunge the reader into sensations that refer to human experience. In those “situations,” and through the insight of the characters upon the world they evolve in, I suggest that we can recompose the broad shape of happiness in the thought of Camus.

In contrast with the silence of the world linked with suicide, quietness appears to be one element of happiness. The recurrence of Camus’s allusions to silence seems to indicate its importance within existence. More precisely, as Hiroshi Mino observed, silence in Camus’s work is manifold, and linked to feelings, such as terror.^[20] It is a certain kind of silence that is associated with happiness: the quietness of nature, as if peace was floating in the air. This awareness of the silence of peace should not surprise us from the thinker, who witnessed the horrors of war early in his life. Bespaloff remarks the climate in which the author wrote: “Il ne nous reste que la mort nue, dans un orage de violence froide” [only bare death remains to us, in a storm of cold violence].^[21] Throughout his writings, he highlights peace as a feature of contemporary societies too often forgotten: many people have the chance to experience it, yet do not appreciate it. This silence seems to be as the soil on which happiness grows in human minds – Camus is suggestive of the enjoyment of such moments, when one feels connected to the world. Among his novels, A Happy Death stands as a first investigation of happiness. In this writing, the concept is already established as a sensation within existence, and Camus confronts it to the condition of the absurd:

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity—happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.^[22]

Though this novel is a good introduction to happiness in Camus’s thought, it is only with the cycles of the absurd and of the revolt that the thinker will fully explore the concept. Throughout his later novels and short stories, he regularly refers to the way human beings trouble the silence of nature with conflict. Happiness, or peace, seems closely linked to the undisturbed nature: “la pierre chauffée par le soleil, ou le cyprès que le ciel découvert agrandit, limitent le seul univers où ‘avoir raison’ prend un sens: la nature sans les hommes” [the stone heated by the sun, or the cypress extended by the open sky, limit the only universe where « to be right » makes sense: nature without men].^[23] While we can easily imagine that there would be peace in the world without humanity, in this case, there would be no happiness. The difficulty of human happiness seems to lie in the rediscovery of this peace offered by nature in a world shaken by wars. Though, the acceptance of the absurd, that allows this contemplation of the world and of life, is not ethically viable because it implies a conscious passivity in regard to the suffering and death of others, thus opposing the inherent value of life vigorously supported by Camus.

In The Stranger, we find further depictions of such peacefulness. Silence, I suggest, fills the atmosphere of this novel and in a way that reveals the story to come: it is omnipresent throughout the book and is accentuated around the interactions of the characters, dialogues that seem to trouble Meursault. At the climax of the story, the main character breaks the silence when he uses his revolver, breaking peace with crime, and on the same token, causing his happiness to vanish for the moment.

My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy.^[24]

Though, as we saw in The Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd hero is happy despite his condition. What shocks us the most is perhaps the consistently quiet lucidity of the character. He accepts his existence entirely, and, abandoning himself to it, is able to feel content in every moment of peace. This is the revolt of Meursault, the will for happiness.^[25] We read at the end of The Stranger:

With him gone, I was able to calm down again… I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me.^[26]

Those elements of the world that Meursault perceives during the last night before his execution only show his eagerness to feel immediate happiness in the quietness of the moment. The attitude of the character remains the same along the pages, and the situation in which we end the story is analogous to the scene of the murder: his quiet lucidity brings Meursault back to happiness despite the gravity of the events. The “wondrous peace” here described seems to be more important to him than his condemnation, just as the displeasure of the burning sun was more important than the life of a man.^[27] Once more, the sirens break the silence, announcing the end of Meursault’s peace, replaced by crime, and with it the end of his happiness. Noticeably, the term “blasted”^[28] is aggressive. It interrupts abruptly the appreciation of the moment; as if the noise itself murdered Meursault and not only announced the coming of his death. As Nietzsche wrote “After all, you know that noise murders thought.”^[29]

The silence of terror contrasts with the quietude of happiness. This silence, in a way, betrays the shock of the individuals facing the meaninglessness of the universe. Though it is better represented in The Plague, ^[30] in The Stranger, we read at the moment of the judgment “When the bell rang again,… what rose to meet me was the silence in the courtroom, silence.”^[31] This silence catching Meursault in a way betrays the tension of the moment, as the announced death penalty of the character means that his happiness will end soon.^[32] Nevertheless, he does not let this apprehension of death trouble his happiness, as the absurd hero accepts his fate.

Moreover, his interaction with the priest reinforces the view of happiness as contained in life, as Meursault shows the greatest disinterest for the man’s beliefs.^[33] Camus often refers to the silence of “the sky” as a reason for man’s unhappiness and conflicts. Silence, thus, can bring happiness as it can take it away, when one searches for answers in an answerless world instead of appreciating the value of immediate existence.

Though Camus denies meaning in the sky, as a metaphor for the religious, he plays on the words to show that nevertheless there is beauty in this same sky that is silent to human thoughts. He places the sky back to the world in which we encounter it and highlights its aspects, arousing a feeling of admiration in his readers.

In a silence violated only by the silky sounds of the sky, the night lay like milk upon the world. Mersault walked along the cliff, sharing the night’s deep concentration… Sitting on a rock he let his fingers explore its crannies as he watched the sea swell in silence under the moon… Motionless now, Mersault felt how close happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exultation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life.^[34]

The perception of happiness as “close to tears” invites us to understand it as an inner feeling linked to awe and wonder, in front of the beauty of the world intertwined with tragic conflicts. It is the appreciation of the experience of human life in the natural world that allows the individual to be aware of its remarkable intrinsic value. It seems to be a feeling of fascination, almost mystical though not religious. It is to be human to be happy, and feeling the intensity of emotions only reveals our ability to experience happiness in the world.

As we saw in those passages, silence is “peuplé, il n’est pas l’absence de bruit, ni d’émotion” [populated, it is not the absence of noises, nor emotions].^[35] If happiness occurs within the individual as he feels peace, awe, and wonder, naturally there is an emotional dimension to its concept. Since Camus recognizes that states of mind such as grief, despair, or boredom can lead to suicide,^[36] one can imagine that their absence and possibly the presence of other states of mind bring about the experience of happiness, such as joy, or relief. Though, happiness seems to be indifferent to any human condition: the absurd hero will be happy despite the situation. Is silence taking the form of our state of mind, or is it the contrary? Upon our reading of Camus’s works, the appreciation of silence seems to reveal a state of happiness and enhance the awareness of the world linked with it, rather than provoking its feeling.

3 The Ethical and Political Outcomes of the Absurd

After having killed Zagreus, “Mersault realized… that henceforth all his efforts would be to submit to this happiness and to confront its terrible truth.”^[37] Does this “terrible truth” refer to the unethical actions of Mersault in his search for happiness, or to the condition of happiness with no other purpose than itself? Eventually, he succumbs to death in a peaceful state of mind because he has accomplished “man’s one duty, which is only to be happy.”^[38] Although the absurd exhibits characters indifferent to violence and death, it does not aim at defending such indifference, but instead highlights the dangers of the alienation of the character to himself and to the other.^[39] What is happiness, in the awareness of a violent world? The absurd alone does not provide us with a constructive solution to this ethical matter. As John Foley remarks:

Camus’s investigation of the problem of political violence begins with this realization that the absurd condition is the human condition… This recognition permits an important reorientation of the absurd premise, a reworking that permits the emergence of the ethics of revolt.^[40]

What is the ethical cost of such an approach to existence as is depicted in The Stranger, limited to the logic of the absurd? Herbert Hochberg referred to Camus’s ethic of absurdity as a “hollow argument” because Camus does not justify why, from the fact that the condition of human beings in the universe is absurd, this state should be preserved. Moreover, the absurd poses a real nihilistic threat to Camus, who is advocating for the value of life despite the absence of value in the universe; a contradiction that he seems to cover with the concept of revolt in his attempt to build an ethic.^[41] Emile Cioran (1911–95), later thinker of the Absurdist courant, said in an interview “I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”^[42] It seems to be a natural consequence of the absurd to lift ethical values and privilege the feelings of personal enjoyment in life, an “ethic of quantity.”^[43] Rachel Bespaloff also comments on Camus’s novel that the “indifference and gratuitous murder” seem overlooked by the appeals to the lucidity of the character, and eventually his “heroic” conduct as he defies the traditions and violates peace leads the character to death penalty.^[44] How ethical is Meursault’s conduct, and how moral is the system which puts him to death? As we said, the position of the absurd is not ethically viable by itself since it causes death and suffering. Surely, Camus was aware of such tensions, and in his novel, he shows the impossibility of a complete absurd hero, as it eventually leads him to annihilation.

Camus further questions the value of life and the impossibility of the absurd hero in his play Caligula, enriching his life work with historical accounts of tyranny.^[45] In this work, we find an analogous opposition, in which Camus interrogates more directly violence and rejects more clearly the idea of the meaning of the universe. In the negation of the value of human life, we observe the decadence of the character into violence. In contrast with Mersault in A Happy Death, Caligula is aware of the absurd: “Les hommes meurent et ils ne sont pas heureux” [Men die and they are not happy].^[46] At the end of the play, Caligula says “Je n’ai pas pris la voie qu’il fallait, je n’aboutis à rien. Ma liberté n’est pas la bonne” [I didn’t take the path that I should have, I accomplish nothing. My freedom is not the good one].^[47] The path that leads Caligula nowhere is the pursuit of the logic of the absurd, making it somewhat an “absolute.” It is here linked to the path of cruelty, as Caligula says in an earlier passage “J’ai simplement compris qu’il n’y a qu’une façon de s’égaler aux dieux: il suffit d’être aussi cruel qu’eux” [I simply understood that there is only one way to equal the gods; to be as cruel as them].^[48] The freedom of Caligula, exercised in tyranny in order to reach the absolute power signified by the gods, recalls Meursault’s freedom to commit murder in his indifference to the value of life – and this use of freedom leads Caligula to death, as it did for the Stranger. In showing us this extreme freedom and indifference to violence, in which murder is answered by murder, Camus acknowledges the impossible reconciliation of an ethics based on the inherent value of life with the complete acceptance of the absurd.^[49] The author shows the need for an awareness of such value, in an understanding of happiness closer to peace than to freedom, the latter being limited by the value of life; but the absurd as such is not ethically sufficient if one respects human life. And while Camus did not object it clearly in his texts dedicated to the absurd, his later abandon of the concept points to his own understanding of its impossibility from this ethical perspective.^[50] Foley adds:

Despite his protestations to the contrary, it seems that consequent on the absurd the task of the lucid individual, free of ‘all feeling of responsibility’, ‘is not to live well in a moral sense – for the absence of moral values renders this meaningless – but vivre à plus, replacing the quality of experience by their quantity’.^[51]

Bespaloff, too, criticizes the absurd as a sterile concept, the “obsession” of Camus, though she comprehended his concerns for the incomprehensible sufferings of the world.^[52]

Upon the whole cycle of the absurd of Camus, it seems that the depictions of the absurd hero rather banish the acceptance of the meaninglessness of the world as a sufficient realization for any ethical or political system, eventually annihilating itself. The turn of his thought to the revolt only makes more sense if we acknowledge the life of the absurd hero as unreasonable, what Camus highlights in the political rebellion at the end of Caligula and clarifies at the beginning of The Rebel: “the absurd, considered as a rule of life is… Contradictory,”^[53] and in its nihilism becomes a clear ground to consider political and ethical solutions to the problems arising from it when one turns to the revolt. Though, Camus maintained that such matters could be addressed within the absurd, since such awareness brings revolt and solidarity.^[54] Bespaloff comments on The Plague that Camus emphasizes individual happiness in opposition to abnegation, but stresses the sacrifice of solidarity over happiness and does not confront the “real” political problem with this unstable view.^[55] The step forward in the quest for an ethical political system embodied by the rebel is perhaps to set order in a world where injustice and violence naturally arise, by reason of its meaninglessness.

The rebel affirms the existence of a value… and a limit to the absolute freedom… ‘If men cannot refer to a common value, recognised by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man’.^[56]

Once more, for Camus, it seems that happiness – at the scale of the society, not only within the individual – is contained within the boundaries of an acknowledged human value, the respect for life, and is achievable only by limiting freedom. This is, I think, where Camus’s philosophy becomes most existentialist: the world is meaningless, and human beings are born in this meaninglessness, but create their own values. But does revolt necessarily have a good end? In this regard, Bespaloff highlights the goods achieved by revolt, such as the equality aimed at by the will for justice and the consideration of art aside philosophy leading to a deepened ethics by the questioning of morals, despite a history of “failing” revolts.^[57] Though, if happiness can arise from the feeling of revolt, it can also disappear in the process of rebellion:

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself – a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. Rebellious thought cannot therefore dispense with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension. In studying its actions and its results, we shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude.^[58]

Bespaloff, too, raises the possibility of a corrupted rebellion; injustice can arise from the same means that oppose it. If happiness can be achieved through revolt, it is nonetheless a fragile balance between chaos and order, which ought to be preserved – or fought for, as an example is found in the mythological character of Hector. As we shall see, Bespaloff considered this character as the “hero of resistance” and admired his “will for happiness.”^[59]

4 Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff – Silence and Music

Recent philosophical interest has been shown to the life and works of Rachel Bespaloff, notably with the publications of Olivier Salazar-Ferrer and Laura Sanò.^[60] Bespaloff decided to become a philosopher after her encounter with Shestov^[61] and deeply contributed to the discussions of existential philosophy in her reflections on existence, religion, art, and conflict. Though, she did not adopt the position of the atheist existentialists on freedom and authenticity. For instance, she influenced Camus’s philosophy on the absurd and the revolt^[62] and criticised Sartre for his “destruction of the instant,” instant that in her thought allows the subjectivity to relate to the eternal.^[63]

As we have seen, for Camus, happiness begins with the acceptance of the absurd condition of life. Interestingly, though Bespaloff disagreed on the claim that the religious hope of a realm beyond life is deceitful, she reaches the similar conclusion that in search for an absolute, human beings either turn to “la découverte de soi-même” [the discovery of the self] through religious faith or “l’accomplissement de soi-même… dans l’appropriation de la mort” [the accomplishment of the self… in the appropriation of death].^[64]

Bespaloff, too, referred to Greek mythology in order to construct her ethics: “la pensée éthique se confond avec la pensée tragique, elle la définit comme ‘la science des moments de détresse totale où l’absence de choix dicte la décision” [the ethical thought confounds itself with tragical thought, she defines it as the science of the moments of total distress in which the absence of choice dictates the decision].^[65] I suggest that here Bespaloff and Camus agree in that the circumstances of the heroes of Greek tragedies allow us to better consider our human condition and the suffering it implies, and therefore to study its ethical or unethical consequences, such as revolt and suicide. The two thinkers bring back a mythology that is “illogical and deadly” to a “true realism” by using it to criticize their modern context.^[66] It seems especially relevant to highlight Greek tragedy in their epoch of conflict, as Bespaloff saw in Homer’s Iliad hints of “intense love and intense horror of war.”^[67] Again we find here the duality of happiness, as of the world itself. Bespaloff reaffirms this capacity of poetry to bring out contemplation from conflict by representing those contrary forces, in her Notes sur André Malraux:

[…]en dernier lieu, l’œuvre à parfaire, ce mystérieux et puissant absorbant, détourne à son usage les passions contraires qui, tour à tour, jettent le poète dans le tumulte des luttes terrestres et l’en dégagent pour le vouer à la contemplation du spectacle qu’elles composent. […ultimately, the work to complete, this mysterious and powerful absorbent, diverts to its use the contrary passions that, alternately, throw the poet in the tumult of earthly struggles and release him from them to devote him to the contemplation of the show that they compose.]^[68]

Now, while Camus depicted Sisyphus as an absurd hero because he is content with his fate despite its meaningless suffering, Bespaloff’s hero is Hector because of his will for happiness.^[69] Moreover, like the Sisyphus of Camus, “like every human in the Iliad… Hector cannot flee his fate.”^[70] It is happiness that gives meaning to life and prompts revolt in order to maintain itself: “That little bit of true happiness which is more important than anything else, because it coincides with the true meaning of life, will be worth defending even with life itself.”^[71] The two heroes, so depicted, rejoin in the idea that happiness is rooted in the acceptance of existence and in the value that one attributes to one’s own life. Though for Bespaloff, it is transcendent, as for Hector the glory “is the same thing that Christians saw in the Redemption, a promise of immortality outside and beyond history.”^[72] While for Camus religious faith is a “philosophical suicide” in the writings of Bespaloff it is presented as a heroism, following the one of the absurd.^[73]

Furthermore, Bespaloff’s sensibility for music, dance, and poetry points to a happiness that is found in human activity and perception, by revealing beauty through art.^[74] In contrast, as we have seen Camus considered art as an “absurd joy,” without significance beyond life. Camus mentions art as it contributes to the absurd quest for meaning, though it manifests the silence of science to stipulate a meaning to life: “So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.”^[75] Nevertheless, readers can find in Camus’s novels and plays a more developed appreciation of art: for instance, the descriptions of human experience and the language used by the author reveal a sensibility for the emotions that words can offer to us. Poetry, I suggest, is for Camus a means to transcend the moment of experience, in a similar way to Bespaloff’s view that “la poésie restitue la vérité de l’expérience éthique sur quoi se fondent la religion de la Bible et celle du Fatum” [poetry gives back the truth of the ethical experience on which the religion of the Bible and of the Fatum base themselves].^[76] Moreover, Camus provides us with a hint of his sensibility for music in The Rebel:

The artist reconstructs the world to his plan. The symphonies of nature know no rests. The world is never quiet; even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations that escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody. Music exists, however, in which symphonies are completed, where melody gives its form to sounds that by themselves have none, and where, finally, a particular arrangement of notes extracts from natural disorder a unity that is satisfying to the mind and the heart.^[77]

Being faithful to his philosophy, he contrasted here music with the silence of the world that we face when we question it for meaning. Art, in this case, is the activity of the artist shaping the world to fit our human appreciation, giving to it the “impression” of meaning. Though his anti-religious philosophy, built on the absurd, opposes Bespaloff’s thought on religious faith, the outcome here is nonetheless similar: that music pleases “the heart.” In art, we have the ability to awaken our sensibility to the world and reflect on ethics. One of the central notions of Bespaloff’s philosophy, inspired by her reading of Kierkegaard,^[78] is l’instant, “a moment of embodied metamorphosis… the instant is a silent pause that suspends history’s repetitive rhythm. Through our bodies, we experience that break from history as a brief moment of freedom.”^[79] Is it the same freedom that inhabits Sisyphus at his moment of consciousness? We find a similar emphasis on the present moment at the beginning of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus:

We live on the future… [Man] belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. The revolt of the flesh is the absurd.^[80]

L’instant, the authentic present, takes us out of the despair of the absurd with the profound signification of existence, which I suggest is the happiness felt in the sensation of art when it transcends reality to make us aware of the world. Eventually opposing Shestov’s “nihilism,” Bespaloff claims that “in the moment, happiness is in our reach.” It seems that on this point, she influenced Camus, as he read her work prior to the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus. ^[81] From an ethical perspective, it is only in the moment that the individuals acknowledge themselves as free to take their decisions and have the choice to give an authentic value to their existence, a value extending beyond death for Bespaloff.^[82]

The philosophies of the two thinkers overlap about the meaninglessness of suffering; Bespaloff, as Camus, experienced the anxiety, fear, and sadness of the Second World War horrors, and this is felt in her writings. In her work On the Iliad, she demonstrated her awareness of violence, and of its capacity to change our point of view on the human condition. She considered that to accept the violence of the world would be to submit oneself to the despair of existence, and she deplored the capacity of history, through war-like events, to orient individuals towards violence.^[83] In her view, in the face of suffering and death, we ought to turn ourselves towards the appreciation of existence, because it is all that is left:

‘Ni Homère, ni Tolstoï… n’essaient d’atténuer le scandale de la souffrance perdue, pas plus qu’ils ne cherchent à le fuir dans l’idée de survie individuelle’. En ce sens, la vie ne vaut alors que pour ce qu’elle est; au-delà d’elle, il ne reste que le rien. ‘La conscience n’a pas d’aile qui lui permette de survoler la mort pour s’emparer de l’éternité hors du temps ou dans l’instant… Tous les hommes vivent dans le chagrin: l’égalité véritable n’a point d’autre fondement.’ [‘Neither Homer, nor Tolstoy… try to attenuate the scandal of lost suffering, no more than they seek to flee from it in the idea of individual survival’. In that sense, life is only worth living for what it is; beyond it, only remains the nothing. ‘The consciousness has no wing that allows it to fly over death to seize eternity outside of time or in the instant… All men live in sorrow: the true equality does not have any other ground.’]^[84]

I suggest that Camus’s novel The Plague shows a similar understanding of existence: men are equal in front of the sufferings of existence and their incomprehension of it.^[85] Moreover, this understanding brings the two thinkers to claim that there is beauty in existence, despite suffering. Bespaloff particularly emphasized the “brief moments of beauty that occur in the midst of violence,” defending that even in war “there are flashing instants of generosity and grace.”^[86] In war, we meet the instant of contemplation and freedom:

The battlefield is quiet; a few steps away from each other, the two armies stand face to face awaiting the single combat that will decide the outcome of the war. Here, at the very peak of the Iliad, is one of those pauses, those moments of contemplation, when the spell of Becoming is broken, and the world of action, with all its fury, dips into peace.^[87]

The quiet moment of contemplation here described seems akin to Camus’s silence, where it is related to peace, such as in Meursault’s last moments in his prison cell before his public execution.^[88] In Notes sur la Répétition de Kierkegaard, Bespaloff evokes the “moment” in which the poet is set free from the present, recomposing himself in the “plénitude du silence.”^[89] In this article, Bespaloff seems particularly appealed by the silence of contemplation, perhaps influencing Camus’s later works. For instance, she highlights the happiness depicted by Kierkegaard in his contemplative, nostalgic experience of life:

La profonde délectation du secret qu’éprouve Kierkegaard à contempler des choses cachées, préservées, soustraites à l’anonyme curiosité du monde – lueur d’aube dans une source,… lumière sans éclat d’une après-midi d’automne à l’orée des forêts – culmine dans le ressouvenir. ‘Quelle ivresse vaut celle où l’on goûte le silence?’… le ressouvenir qui a ‘couvé son object à l’écart, en cachette’, submerge l’âme comme la vérité même du bonheur. [The deep delight of the secret felt by Kierkegaard in contemplating hidden things, preserved, withdrawn from the anonymous curiosity of the world – the dawn’s glow in a spring,… the brightless light of an autumnal afternoon at the edge of the forests – culminates in the ressouvenir. ‘What drunkeness is worth the one in which we enjoy the silence?’… the ressouvenir that ‘brooded its object away, hidden’, inundates the soul as the very truth of happiness.]^[90]

However, silence is also associated with the despair of one facing the incomprehensible suffering of the world for Bespaloff, and music fills this existential void. She comments on Malraux:

Dans les dernières œuvres de Malraux, la musique surgit au terme d’une confrontation entre la pensée et les réalités de la lutte et de la mort. Elle se lève derrière le rideau de silence qui coule sur le monde épuisé [In the last works of Malraux, music emerges at the end of a confrontation between the thought and the realities of struggle and death. It rises behind the curtain of silence that flows on the exhausted world].^[91]

Bespaloff thus contrasts quietude and the silence of exhaustion with music and dance, in which we turn “movement into existential experiences,”^[92] in other words in which we find an authentic experience of our existence and relation to the world, allowing a transcendence of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. “By externalising movement, the subject of eurythmics plunges herself into an inner experience.”^[93] Interestingly, a similar association of happiness, music, and movement can be found in Camus’s A Happy Death: “Mersault slid off with Emmanuel, who was singing now… ‘You know’, he told Mersault, ‘it comes up in your chest. It comes when you feel good’… Emmanuel sang when he swam.”^[94] Now, does music rhyme with happiness for Bespaloff? I suggest that this experience of consciousness through art, which she calls “magic interiority,” is akin to the feeling of happiness. Despite being an inwardness, by it we are able to “authentically connect with one another”^[95] – thereby rejoining the concept of solidarity of Camus, though by happiness instead of suffering.

5 Conclusion

While the two thinkers show a deep contemplation in both silence and music, the emphasis on music in Bespaloff’s life and philosophy contrasts with Camus’s emphasis on quietude. Though there is a dynamic of sounds and movements in the quietness of nature as depicted in Camus’s novels, Bespaloff had an insight on musical art that her contemporary seldom mentioned. Nevertheless, they stressed the appreciation of happiness in the experience of existence, and the serenity that one achieved through the observation of silence seems akin to the one achieved by the other in music. More complex than an individual privilege, this happiness implies a reflection on the happiness of the other in order to be sustainable. Both thinkers address the challenges of the suffering they have encountered in their modern context by showing the relevancy of Greek tragedy, in which happiness and violence are intertwined, to understand the world and ourselves. Where Camus saw the religious faith as an escape from reality, Bespaloff considered his conception of the absurd as an escape from the sufferings of war.^[96] Though, together, they provide us with a deep questioning of the value and meaning of subjective happiness, in awareness of the incomprehensible suffering of the world. In contrasting their view, we find a dualistic vision of happiness that allows us to better understand it completely: it implies silence and music, peace and conflict, and the self and the other. In their investigation of the ethical and political implications of such happiness in the contemporary world, the two thinkers contributed to the search for a just and content society.