Rieux in the city of Oran

There was a time when I was deeply mired in nihilism. When I came across the story of Sisyphus in Homer's Epic, I became intrigued by it, and his repetitive and hopeless life of pushing stones resembled a modern man in the abstract sense, which was exactly what I thought of modern man. Inevitably, I came into contact with Camus's philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and I found that the confusion in my heart had been answered by my predecessors. After reading several of Camus's absurd works one after another, I could not help but become curious about Camus, who had been a French Communist in his early years and admired Marxist-Leninist materialism, but then he broke with Sartre and stopped engaging in the cause of communism. This change made me extremely surprised and puzzled, and I had to turn my attention to the classic discourse of Marxism-Leninism, fortunately, I got some answers, and to a certain extent, I understood the before and after changes in Camus's own attitude towards life.

First of all, we must look at economic and social development from the perspective of historical materialism. Society and the state have not always existed, and the philosophical point of view is only a highly abstract summary of the attitude of human life, while all spiritual life exists on the basis of matter, which changes with the changes in the productive forces. In the primitive era, human beings took the clan as the living unit, hunting and picking and other ways to carry out the most primitive production life. At this time the productivity was extremely low, all output could only barely sustain the survival of the community, there was no surplus product for exchange, and therefore there was no division of labor, much less governmental forms of power, because there was no surplus product to support these institutions. The clan system is a system with vague boundaries of interests, an extremely simple social structure, and basically maintained by customs and traditions.

With the advancement of productivity, perhaps the improvement of hunting techniques, the emergence of preliminary summaries of farming techniques, surplus products began to appear in clans, which provided the material basis for the emergence of exchange activities, some people could obtain subsistence data by focusing on only one thing, and the division of labor also appeared, and gradually occupations other than farmers such as full-time merchants and craftsmen gradually appeared. The first great division of labor in society led to the exchange of activities and the emergence of money and commodities, and the germ of private property was born. In the process, clan chiefs used their special position to embezzle common property, each person's interests extended in different directions, sometimes even opposites, and society began to split into different classes. The different demands of interests between different classes have led to the deepening of contradictions between classes, the increasingly fierce class confrontation, and the increasingly irreconcilable contradictions. In order to simplify the complex demands of confrontation and order the situation of chaos and conflict, and the state was born as "the irreconcilable product of class contradictions", Engels had a classic saying: "The basic function of the public political institution" is to "defuse conflicts and keep conflicts within the scope of 'order'", legitimizing and fixing class rule and class oppression. That is to say, the state is not limited by higher powers within a certain geographical range, but can limit the supreme decision-making power of other groups.

The further development of the productive forces led to a further refinement of the division of labour, and the emergence of a second great social division of labour was production directly aimed at exchange, i.e., commodity production. The increase in the productivity of labour led to the extensive use of slavery and sharecroppers and the development of slavery and feudalism, so that the kinship barrier was broken, the nation was formed, and the army, permanent public institutions and public officials became indispensable parts. The clan mechanism collapsed, and the public power that enslaved the people under private ownership continued to grow.

Immediately after the arrival of the first and second industrial revolutions, which brought about an unprecedented increase in the productive forces of society, the third great division of labor it caused deepened the separation of the city and the countryside on the basis of the original, the countryside began to wither gradually, and the city eventually became a civilized representation of human life, and as a necessary supplement to this civilization, a large number of administrative organs, police, taxes, etc. independent of social production and exchange were developed. "Henceforth, the economically superior classes must, in the name of public power, use the army, the bureaucracy, the police, and a series of appendages, such as courts, prisons, and other coercive apparatus, to compel obedience, at least superficially, of those who have become emotionally, ideologically, and in action alien to the existing order." This also directly led Camus to the idea that "a most authentic man is destined to be incompatible with the personality of this world."

We have to admit that historical materialism is a profound summary of historical life, and a rational person has to believe that this is the whole truth of the world, but this reality is also too cold and unforgiving. It tells you that human beings are only the products of the objective environment, the objective environment has its own laws of operation, it will not heed the enthusiastic cries of individuals, history will be driven by the productive forces, and it has little to do with a single person. This is the fundamental source of camus's discussion of the "absurdity"—in the course of the magnificent history, the individual consciousness has lost its brilliant color, the individual has gradually lost its sense of control over the environment, the sense of strangeness is pervasive of modern human beings, and Nietzsche's philosophy of the superhuman has become an impossible fantasy under the power of history. Man is confronted only with the constant division of labour and the resulting cold reality of production and exchange—the whole meaning of the individual's life, all his own practical activities, this is the whole of life, the most simple and cold reality brought about by historical materialism, where all good prayers and wishes are invalidated, and the human heart begins to dry up.

Nietzsche said: "God is dead", so mankind needs to re-evaluate all values, and Marx said: "The place where speculation ends, that is, in the face of real life, is where the real empirical science that describes the practical activities and actual development of people begins." Empty words about consciousness will disappear, and they will be replaced by knowledge. The description of reality deprives independent philosophies of their living environment, and can replace them with nothing more than a synthesis of general results abstracted from the observation of the development of human history. These abstractions themselves have no value apart from the history of reality." Any instinctive pursuit of the individual, if not conform to the trend of history, often becomes the imagination of a madman. And in Camus's view, history has regained its place as God and become the new master of mankind, and this rise of history to the meaning pursued by the whole of mankind is intellectually correct, but emotionally difficult to accept. In order to cope with this emotionless, unbearable environmental force, he could only resist with indifference: "He said that I actually have no soul, no passionate humanity, no moral principles that occupy a sacred place in the human soul, all of which are incompatible with me and have nothing to do with me."

And myself? I can't accept taking something that will never happen in this life as my ideal in life. All I could do was recognize reality, accept it, and embrace it, and be loyal to my profession all my life, like Dr. Rieux in oran in The Plague.