Living with the absurd › Passion and the difficult language of quantity

Camus names revolt, freedom and passion as three consequences of his reasoning. In developing passion, he controversially contrasts living most with living best. He speaks of substituting the quantity of experiences for their quality. This language should retain its difficulty rather than be softened into a familiar recommendation to enjoy the moment.

His discussion also resists a simple competition to collect unusual experiences. He places emphasis on consciousness of the life one has. The variety of available circumstances is not the whole point of his account. What matters to his argument is the extent to which experience is lived with awareness.

There is nevertheless a question about value here. Preferring lucid experience already seems to distinguish one way of living from another. A reader can ask how that preference is justified after Camus has challenged ultimate scales of value. Identifying this question is more useful than assuming that his preferred stance follows automatically from the description of the absurd.

The essay's figures of the absurd person help develop the proposal. Its sections on Don Juan, the actor and the conqueror present different forms of engagement with a finite life. These are philosophical portraits rather than a survey showing how actual people achieve wellbeing. Camus describes his interest as consistency, rather than proving these figures morally better than everyone else.