Absurdity as an inconsistently conducted reduction

Ponomareva Anastasiia Lecturer, Department of General Education and Humanitarian Disciplines, Voronezh Industrial College of Humanities named after Vasily Mikhailovich Peskov 394063, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, Revolution Ave., 20 As-ponomareva@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Currently, the concept of the absurd has several formulations, and the scientific community for the most part is inclined to the definition of Camus, who saw the absurdity in the unreasonable silence of the world. Moreover, Camus sees in the absurd the only connection between man and the world, designating human existence in advance as a crisis. And although in his later works the philosopher is engaged in working out the answer to the absurd silence of the world, providing rebellion or humility as an answer, one way or another these two varieties represent a dry statement of patterns of reaction to the absurd (as he notes in the essay, the lyricism of Don Quixote and the pragmatism of La Palisse).

A well-known fact is the connection between existentialism and positivism, and researchers often emphasize that existentialism became for its time, as it were, the antipode of the positive sciences, which challenged them. Already "The Myth of Sisyphus. The Essay on Suicide" by Albert Camus contains theses designed to present a deep difference between positivism and existentialism both in method and in the subject of cognition. "Suicide has always been regarded as a social phenomenon," says Camus, ^{[1, p.25]} referring to Durkheim's sociological study, which saw prevention from the absurd in professional socialization. And although Durkheim devotes a lot of space to thinking about meaning, this is not yet a work where you can find the underside of meaning, the absurd as a factor of existence. Noting that suicide is being prepared in the depths of the human heart, Camus treads on shaky ground of uncertainty, sometimes claiming that "suicide is the outcome of the absurd", then stating that, "on the contrary, suicides are often sure that life has meaning" ^{[1, p. 26]}. The first, and in fact, the only condition of his research, Camus calls "consistent observance of all that is considered absurd" ^{[1, p.40]}. Thus, despite the French philosopher's repeated remarks about the three-part structure of the absurd: man-the world-man's attachment to the world, the absurd is clearly interpreted by Camus as an attitude of consciousness, and in this regard it seems fruitful to consider not Durkheim's arguments, which are the object of Camus' criticism, but phenomenology, the interest of which is the discovery of meaning in the world through successive cogitations.

The genetic relationship of the absurd with phenomenology

The epistemological side of the absurd, as a rule, attracts less attention of researchers than its connection with logic or aesthetics. Meanwhile, philosophers and writers often clothe their ideas about the knowledge of the world in absurdist forms. Moreover, as O.L. Chernoritskaya correctly notes, "The poetics of the absurd, as an epistemological phenomenon, is concerned with the correct, "true" vision of the world" ^[2]. Literary works of the absurd are characterized by markers in the form of epistemological obstacles, which include: forgetting names, temporary paradoxes, blurring of identity, proteism of details and characters. These epistemological obstacles have an emphatic meaning, are specially highlighted by the authors and represent nodal points indicating the vector of meaning.  Resorting to more or less explicit moralizing, the authors balance on the fine line of the sublime (asking questions about the ultimate foundations of consciousness, the world) and the ugly (focusing on the physiological aspects of existence, illness, insanity, dying).

The problem of the meaning of life is closely related to the science of values, but the thinker as the herald of morality always has an established value paradigm as a background. That is, the absurdity is a statement of such a situation when human consciousness deals with non?systematized experience, addressing it with a pre-given value setting. In favor of the fact that the absurd entirely belongs to the category of consciousness, it says that the same action can be recognized as both absurd and completely rational. For example, standing in a corner can be considered completely meaningless if we know that the person standing is a lunatic, and this is his unconscious action, and standing in a corner can be considered as a measure of educational influence, in which case it acquires a marker of rationality. "The Plague" by Albert Camus is read as a documentary investigation of the causes of the epidemic, if you do not approach the work with prior knowledge about the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. The same subject is perceived differently, and the connection of value orientations and cognitive attitudes is more than obvious here.

In view of the fact that absurdism always puts the category of value in the first place when thematizing the meanings of a work of art, it seems appropriate to investigate absurdist texts in their connection with phenomenological discoveries. Phenomenology poses problems of the formation of meanings, which is the starting point of reasoning about the absurd, no matter how Camus tried to dissociate himself from this. "Being more positive than Kierkegaard's and Shestov's, Husserl's approach nevertheless denies the classical method of rationalism from the very beginning, puts an end to unrealistic hopes, opens the whole field of phenomena to intuition and the heart, in the richness of which there is something inhuman. This is the path leading to all sciences and at the same time to none. In other words, the means here are more important than the goal. It's just about a "cognitive attitude", not about consolation" ^{[1, p.37]}. Let us remember two main thoughts: first, Camus designates Husserl as an enemy of classical rationality, classifying himself among the followers of the irrational camp, second, the epistemological side is opposed to the axiological side here, and Camus' sympathies are clearly on the side of the latter.

Despite the criticism from Camus, it is impossible not to note the importance of the Husserl approach for the attempt to interpret the absurd. Repeatedly declaring the spiritual kinship of existentialism and nihilism, researchers often forget that the closest "relative" of absurdism is phenomenology, which Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were engaged in at the dawn of their philosophizing. Firstly, the connection lies in the fact that these two philosophical trends are united by an interest in the nature of human existence and experience. Both phenomenology and absurdism focus on a person's subjective perception and experience of reality. Secondly, they explore the world through the prism of human consciousness. Thirdly, both directions criticize attempts to reduce reality to rational schemes and objective facts, although in the case of phenomenology this often turns against itself. Both phenomenology and absurdism assert the priority of subjective interpretation of the world, and in phenomenology subjective interpretation is the main method of philosophical research. In addition, phenomenology and absurdism are united by the desire to reveal the true nature of things beyond the constructions imposed by culture and language. Both phenomenology and absurdism address existential issues of human existence, such as freedom, responsibility, and the meaning of life.

As you know, Husserl does not pretend to know things as they are. In a natural attitude, a person contemplates, or perceives, an object.

He is aware of which category of reality the object belongs to, "grasps" its predicates, "imprints" it in memory, but contemplates it directly in living contemplation, with reference to place and time. The mechanism of absurdist perception includes a categorical grid of reality, but works with it almost the same way as in a dream. Just as in a dream consciousness deals with a subjective accumulation of images fixed in a concept, so an absurd experience is based on the designation of objects of the world, labeling evil and good, right and wrong, sacred and profane, but the connection between the self and the non-self becomes bizarre, reversed.

One should immediately dismiss Camus' premise that the absurd is the only connection, since the connection with the world lies in the subject itself, is derived from the concept of the subject.  There are no subjects outside the world, the life world begins with the consciousness of an individual subject, is constituted by it.

Absurd thinking categorizes objects, conducts thematization and classification even where this belonging to the community called by the perceiving subject is absent. Don Quixote, as a fighter against the absurd, symbolizes precisely this discord of perception and reality. It is no coincidence that its inherent characteristic – the fight against windmills, is actually dictated by epistemological confusion. Only an absurd character is consistent and rational in his reasoning. At the sight of the mills, Don Quixote not only does not hesitate to attribute them to monstrous giants, but also rationalizes his actions, referring to the concept of a just war. The variability of objects in works of the absurd does not belong to the poetics of a literary text alone, it is directly rooted in the sphere of absurd thinking, ontologically taken. The distribution of objects within their nominations is a rational pattern of a person nominating things that do not even have a valid substrate. According to Husserl, the phenomena of transcendental phenomenology should be considered unreal. Therefore, phenomenology should become a teaching not about real, but about transcendentally reduced phenomena ^[3].

The fundamentally important point here is that the Husserlian connection of intentional experience and its subject is not a causal factual connection that takes place in the world. Moreover, the world is constituted only in the consciousness of the subject, it depends on him. Thus, pure consciousness appears outside of space, time and causality ^{[4, p. 152]}. At the same time, Husserl identifies the intentional, space-time world with nothing, due to the fact that, according to him, it is derived from consciousness.

It is important to note that all literary experiments of the second half of the 19th-early 20th century took place under the banner of psychological manifestation of the content of consciousness. The literature of the absurd, as predominantly modernist, deals with the depiction of phenomena, but these are not the phenomena of waking consciousness that everyday life encounters. In this connection, the question arises what exactly is highlighted from the epistemological side in the poetics of the literature of the absurd.

Signs of phenomenological reduction in works of the absurd

In the philosophical tradition of Husserl, consciousness in itself is endowed with its own special being, which in its absolute essence is not affected by the phenomenological "bracketing". A kind of "phenomenological residue" is found when performing the operation of transcendental reduction, which, according to Husserl, reveals "the infinite sphere of being of a new kind as the sphere of transcendental experience of a new kind" ^{[4, p.43]}. Works of the absurd have repeatedly illustrated these states, one way or another trying to describe them from the consciousness of the subject. In Musil, for example, this is described as a feeling of the extension of the "I" in space.

"...the feeling that...he stretched out like a big, shining water-he had it almost all the time now, although he didn't have the words for it. His words were like this: hm-hm, so-so. The table was a Moosbrugger. The chair was a Moosbrugger. The window with bars and the locked door were himself" ^{[5, p. 485]}.

We see here an attempt to show a transcendental state of consciousness, the existence of which was hotly defended by another representative of atheistic existentialism, who began as a phenomenologist, Jean-Paul Sartre: "... at the unreflected level, no I {Je} exists. When I run after a tram, when I look at the clock, when I immerse myself in contemplation of a portrait – there is no I {Je}. There is only the consciousness that the tram needs to catch up, etc. plus the non-positional consciousness of consciousness. Then I actually find myself immersed in the world of objects, and it is they who constitute the unity of my acts of consciousness, act as carriers of values, attractive and repulsive qualities, whereas I myself have disappeared here, turned into nothing. There is no place for me at this level, and this situation is by no means accidental, it is not a consequence of some momentary turning off of attention, but is part of the very structure of consciousness" ^{[6, p. 94]}.

About the difficulty of grasping transcendental consciousness, Sartre, in particular, says that "... intuition always grasps it in the background of the abstracted consciousness in an inadequate way."  ^{[6, p. 96]} The problem of phenomenology is the constant movement between natural and phenomenological attitudes and the inability to take a "pure" transcendental position. Of Husserl's students, Eugen Fink probably came closest to the problem of the absurd, for whom phenomenological work was a phenomenon balancing between two tendencies: on the one hand, it was necessary to free oneself from the world that sends phenomena and imprisons values, on the other hand, phenomena should be considered as necessarily generated by consciousness, not existing outside of it. Criticizing the teacher, Fink, in particular, notes the danger of "curtailing the cathartic sketch" in case of refusal to believe in the materiality of things, when the human "I" is lost among things. For example, he talks about the impossibility of regressive reduction (transition from the transcendental stage to the eidetic stage) ^[7].

In this regard, it seems relevant to turn again to the literature of the absurd and compare the intentional attitudes of two characters acting in the opposite way. Don Quixote of La Mancha is obsessed with phenomena, constitutes phenomena for himself and functions in the work as a kind of factory of meanings. Mersault, an "outsider" to this world, perceives it not from the point of view of value loading, but as a set of biological stimuli. Light, danger, sexual desire, hunger – all these are descriptions of situations where the "I" appears as largely impersonal. Mersault consciously strives to "avoid assumptions" and the only thing that, in his opinion, makes sense is the death penalty. Two ultimate ontological situations are illustrated by antagonistic states of consciousness. Don Quixote is represented in the mode of quasi—positionality, about which Husserl will note: "The contemplation that precedes the visual image in this confirming realization does not give the evidence in which the actual being is embodied, but, perhaps, the evidence of the possibility of being of the corresponding content" ^{[3, p.79]}. Here consciousness remains as if in a natural setting, does not go through the procedures of reduction. Meursault acts as a metaphor for eidetic reduction, understood by Camus as freedom from inner life, the flow of mental experiences. It is no coincidence that in the finale of the novel he refuses to take communion three times ? to allow consciousness to let in a swarm of phenomena of religious thought. The hero remains in the realm of absolute self-evidence.

In favor of our hypothesis about the connection between the absurd and phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty's remark also speaks: "I can be in a state of absurdity only if I suspend all judgments or, like Montaigne or a schizophrenic, I am in a state of questioning in which I am not even obliged to formulate a question, since any particular the question should imply an answer. In other words, if I am not face to face with the truth or with its denial, but am outside the truth or in a state of ambiguity, then I am faced with the actual obscurity of my existence" ^{[8, p.380]}.

The watershed on the border of the absurd and the meaningful is the transition from the personal Ego to the transcendent, and in the transcendental reduction itself neither the reality nor the possibility of a sphere that includes Others is assumed ^{[3, p.95]}.

A textbook example of a torn reduction and the absurdist nightmare that it turns into is Kafka's "Transformation" (written in 1912, published in 1915). Being one of the first, if not the first work in the genre of the absurd, "Transformation" demonstrates openness to a variety of interpretations. It can be read as a drama about social exclusion, and you can see in it the problems of religion, feminism, anti-Semitism. However, the reading from the standpoint of phenomenological analysis remains insufficiently elaborated, in our opinion. A contemporary of Husserl, Kafka is interested in the same problem: how a subject (who does not always have to be a person) can comprehend the world. The plot role of Gregor Zamza from the novella "Transformation" is an attempt to present the phenomenological experience of the non-human "I" in an eidetic setting, since this world as pre-given in the presence of a non-human body by Gregor Zamza can no longer be perceived. His world is constituted by the transcendental Ego, but this will not represent a consistent epoch. The most insightful of recent studies has been conducted by O.N. Turysheva, who notes here the "plot of transition" and connects the artistic world of "Transformation" with the cultural anthropology of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner ^[9]. The objection to this is the fact that the research task of these ethnographers was obviously to describe the social transition from one rank structure to another within human society, and the transition process was controlled by the initiator himself. The chronological and geographical framework of contact between Kafka and anthropologists also seems doubtful: "Transformation" was written in 1912, by 1909 van Gennep was creating "Rites of Passage", but they are published in French, and their mass popularization begins no earlier than 1960 (as for Turner, his concept of liminality will also see the light no earlier than 1960).x, i.e. after Kafka's death). We also note that the transformation of Gregor Zamza in a narrow sense does not quite fit the description of van Gennep: for example, social norms do not cease to operate for the character, he is always under the control of society, having already found himself in a zoomorphic state, worried about a late alarm clock, potential dissatisfaction with the doctor, and the like. At the same time, van Gennep notes that "Initiates are outside of society, society has no power over them, and nevertheless it is important that their persons are, in essence, sacred and sacred, therefore, they are inviolable, dangerous, probably, just like the gods. Thus, on the one hand, taboos, as negative rituals, erect a barrier between initiates and society as a whole, and on the other hand, society has no protection from the actions of initiates" ^{[10, p.107]}. It is well known that Samsa, on the contrary, is one of the most famous literary outcasts, but what makes him such?

In the lengthy description of the salesman's attempts to turn over from the shell to the paws, many commentators miss Kafka's deliberately made emphasis on the fear of his character: "... he became afraid to move in this way. After all, if he had finally fallen, it would have been a miracle that he would not have hurt his head. And he should not have lost consciousness right now in any case; it was better to stay in bed" ^[11].  But Gregor no longer has a head in the human sense of the word, and his interaction with the outside world is based on other laws, the reality of which he refuses to accept. His insect–like body crawls on the walls, feeds on rotten fruit - in a word, is ready to accept another reality. Freed from the idea of himself as a human being, Kafka's hero, however, lives by human phenomena: family ties, guilt, shame, anxiety. He himself understands that it would be better for him to die so as not to burden his family ? he strives to continue behaving like a person, which leads him to death. Thus, the work is about the transition of consciousness to another state, but this transition, obviously, failed, turned into a trap. Kafka raises the question of what will happen when the human "I" is disidentified, its transition to another level with the remaining elements of the world constituted in a natural setting.

Absurd contradictions often reveal a transition to a new state (or rather, a painful "jumping over" into it) with the remaining fragments of old values. There is no place for the human self in the insect's body.

According to Husserl, the truth can be discovered only through a consistent phenomenological reduction, for this, however, it is necessary to be a philosopher. The Kafkaesque vector implies an interest in the study of consciousness, but there is no question of academic debates with phenomenologists here. According to the American literary critic Sirena Pondrom, "Husserl argues that the essential truth can be discovered by analyzing consciousness, and Kafka similarly, but much more metaphorically, asserts that the essential truth must be sought hidden in the depths of man. The distinctive difference is that Husserl defines the essential truth achievable through the phenomenological method, while Kafka, demonstrating that he shares many phenomenological views on cognition, remains agnostic about the finality of the "essential truth" that Husserl describes" ^{[12, p.93]}. Perhaps one of the targets of criticism could be the "sequence" postulated more than once by the father of phenomenology. In fact, Husserl never departed from the cogito principle, he considered the method of doubt to be a universal operation with which to begin a philosophical search, after all, one of his books is called "Cartesian Reflections", which implies an initial installation on the rational sequence of the embodiment of certain mental operations, going back to the method of Rene Descartes. However, as around Descartes' methodology at the time, alternative opinions arise around Husserl's methodology, based on skepticism about the work of consciousness in exactly the way it is presented in Husserl. As it can be seen from the excerpts of Sartre, Fink, Merleau-Ponty, this notorious "sequence" is the ideal essence that Husserl, as a mathematician, applies to the "slender" structure of gradual "bracketing". The condition for performing reduction operations is the presence of a transparent, non–elusive, malleable consciousness. However, here we are faced with the idea of consciousness as some kind of controlled matter, which is not always (almost never) true. The absence of a direct connection between consciousness and cognitive functions allows us to speak about a certain degree of autonomy of consciousness from the will and desire of a person. This is evidenced by research in the field of psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and neuroscience data. Gregor Samsa's torments are not constituted by himself, the consciousness to which he clings so desperately produces an inconsistent bracketing of ideas about his own "I" – with a paradoxical stay in a natural attitude. Paul Valerie writes about states of nonsense when we "...we are crossing a certain "optimum" of understanding or possible connections between a person and his abilities" ^{[13, pp.178-179]}. A consistent experiment is impossible here: otherwise, a person would simply cease to exist. Fiction, however, makes it possible to look into this mode of being, without carrying out actual reduction procedures. And even if not from the position of an academic philosopher, philosophizing writers have made and continue to make a significant contribution to the existential tradition, not forgetting to point out the problems of its predecessor and companion – phenomenology.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that the absurdists have developed the ideas of phenomenology about the absence of the inner meaning of being. The world is absurd and devoid of rational grounds, the fact of which has long been interpreted from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology, including socialist, feminist, Freudian and other readings, depending on which doctrine was more popular in the academic environment. Sub specie aeternitatis the latest interpretations, however, have failed to shed light on the nature of the absurd and the connection of absurdist works with each other. Phenomenology, from the author's point of view, is an insufficiently studied source of the emergence of absurdism, answering questions about the genesis of the absurd and giving an idea of its structure. Inconsistent reduction, which focuses on the metamorphoses of the Ego, but does not really enclose in brackets the idea of the world, is an important key to reading both the programmatic work – Kafkaesque "Transformation", and to one degree or another is noted in many works of this genre. The fiction of the absurd is a kind of distracting maneuver – in fact, only it is able to point out to a person that he is doomed only to human knowledge, and an attempt to talk about ultimate reality cannot be made otherwise than through the absurd (to look where the person is no longer there). Regardless of whether an absurdist writer is a modernist or a postmodernist, he still, as a rule, presents a fragment that is part of a kind of eschatological group. The apocalypse of meaning here is coupled with the apocalypse of knowledge. In addition to the generally accepted parallel of existentialism with the philosophy of life, it seems fruitful to link the absurd with phenomenology, which will allow us to give works in the genre of the absurd more realistic interpretations that are not based on interpretations in the spirit of the times.