Albert Camus described the absurd as a tension between our desire for meaning and the world’s silence. In this article, I consider how living “without appeal” can help us stop asking others for permission to be ourselves.

There is a question beneath almost every form of people-pleasing.

Who has the authority to tell me that my life is mine?

For many of us, that authority seems to belong to somebody else. A parent. A partner. A religious community. A social group. The imagined audience in our own mind. We wait for some person or system to assure us that our desires are legitimate, our choices are good, and our way of being will not cost us love.

We may call this kindness, loyalty, responsibility or spiritual maturity. But beneath it there can be a quieter transaction: I will become who you need me to be, and in return you will grant me the right to belong.

Albert Camus gives us a powerful way to understand this transaction. He called for a life lived without appeal. He was writing about the human search for ultimate meaning in a silent universe, not about people-pleasing. But his thought carries an unexpected psychological force. People-pleasing is also a life of appeal. It is an appeal to somebody else to tell us who we may be.

What would happen if we stopped appealing?

Who Camus Was

Albert Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913. His father died in the First World War, leaving Camus to grow up in poverty with his mother, who was partially deaf and spoke very little. Tuberculosis interrupted his education when he was young and kept death close to him throughout his life.

Camus was a novelist, playwright, journalist, actor, political essayist and member of the French Resistance. He edited the underground newspaper Combat during the Nazi occupation. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident three years later, at the age of forty-six.

He resisted being called a philosopher. He distrusted philosophical systems and thought through images, stories and immediate experience. Sunlight. The sea. The body. Poverty. Injustice. Love. Death. The ordinary routines that normally keep us from noticing how strange existence is.

His influences included the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Pascal, Kierkegaard and the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl. Yet several of these thinkers also became his opponents. Camus often accepted their starting point and rejected the destination they chose.

The Greeks taught him about tragedy, proportion and human limits. Nietzsche taught him to distrust consoling metaphysics and to affirm earthly life after the death of God. Dostoevsky forced the question of whether life remains worth living without God or immortality. Kierkegaard confronted the absurd but answered it through faith. Husserl returned philosophy to lived experience but, in Camus’s judgment, later reached beyond experience toward timeless essences.

Camus wanted to know whether we could remain faithful to this life without turning it into evidence for another world or resolving it through an intellectual system.

The Absurd

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with a startling claim: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

He is not being theatrical. He is asking whether life is worth living if it comes with no final explanation. Before we debate truth, morality or politics, we have to decide whether we are willing to participate in existence at all.

The absurd is often misunderstood as the belief that life is meaningless or ridiculous. For Camus, the absurd is neither a property of the universe nor merely a feeling inside the individual. It arises in the collision between them.

Human beings hunger for clarity. We want life to form a coherent story. We want suffering to have a reason, goodness to be rewarded, love to endure and death to fit into some larger pattern. We ask the universe to explain what all this is for.

And the universe does not answer.

The absurd is the confrontation between our longing for meaning and the silence we meet. It is a relationship, a tension that cannot be solved without eliminating one of its two sides.

Physical suicide eliminates the person who asks the question. Camus rejects that response. But he also rejects what he calls philosophical suicide. This occurs when a thinker begins with uncertainty and then escapes it by making a leap into a final answer that cannot be justified.

Kierkegaard makes the leap into God. Other thinkers make the leap into history, reason, an absolute idea or a promised future. Each one begins by recognizing the limits of human understanding, then uses those limits as a doorway into certainty.

Camus refuses the doorway. He asks whether we can live without resolving the tension: fully conscious of our longing, fully conscious of the world’s silence, and unwilling to falsify either one.

Why Camus Rejected Existentialism

Camus is routinely described as an existentialist, and understandably so. He asks the central existential questions. How should I live? What does freedom mean? Can life be affirmed in the face of death? But he repeatedly rejected the label.

He differed from religious existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Lev Shestov because they answered absurdity with faith. Camus thought they had discovered the wound honestly and then covered it with transcendence.

He also differed from Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre begins with a godless and contingent existence, then gives human freedom an enormous creative role. There is no predetermined essence that defines us. Through our choices, we make ourselves and confer meaning upon the world.

Camus is more restrained. He is not convinced that we can answer the absence of ultimate meaning simply by declaring ourselves its creators. Humanly created meanings may be beautiful and necessary. They do not become cosmic guarantees merely because we choose them.

For Sartre, absurdity is closely connected to the contingency of existence itself. For Camus, the absurd lives in the relationship between consciousness and the world. We cannot stop wanting clarity, and the world will not supply the final clarity we seek. Camus insists that we preserve this tension rather than constructing a system that claims to overcome it.

This is what he means by living without appeal. We stop appealing to God, history, ideology or some final explanation that will eventually certify our existence as meaningful.

Camus and Husserl

Camus’s response to phenomenology makes this clearer. Phenomenology begins with a disciplined return to experience. Instead of immediately explaining the world through a theory, it attends to what appears and how it appears in consciousness.

Camus appreciates the early Husserlian idea of intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. We are not minds sealed inside ourselves. Consciousness reaches toward a world. Camus also admires the modesty of a method that describes experience without pretending to explain ultimate reality.

But he believes Husserl eventually exceeds those limits by moving from particular experiences toward timeless essences. As Camus reads him, Husserl begins with description and ends by giving consciousness access to truths beyond the changing particulars of experience.

Camus sees another leap. The richness of immediate experience becomes a route to something eternal.

This matters because Camus himself is intensely devoted to presence. His early essays overflow with sunlight, sea, flesh, stone and the physical beauty of Algeria. But the present moment does not need to disclose a transcendent realm. The sea is not evidence for an eternal essence. The sunlight does not need to become a symbol of something higher.

The sun and the sea are enough.

That is Camus’s radical immanence. This body. This world. This moment. The experience does not have to point beyond itself to be worthy of our love.

Revolt

Camus draws three consequences from the absurd: revolt, freedom and passion.

Revolt is the first. If the absurd cannot be resolved, then revolt means refusing both escape and resignation. It is the continuing decision to remain awake inside the contradiction.

Revolt is not necessarily a dramatic act of rebellion. It is the refusal to surrender consciousness. I know that death will come. I know that no final explanation is guaranteed. I will live anyway, without pretending that the contradiction has disappeared.

For the people-pleaser, revolt has an intimate meaning. It is the refusal to abandon one’s experience simply to remove the discomfort of another person’s disappointment.

I will not disappear so that you can remain comfortable.

That does not mean I stop caring about you. It means that your reaction can no longer decide whether my experience is real. I may listen to you, reconsider my position, admit that I am wrong and accept responsibility for my effects. But I will not falsify what is happening within me merely to preserve my role as the good one.

People-pleasing was usually intelligent when it began. A child recognizes that attachment depends upon adaptation. The child’s preferences, anger, sexuality, exuberance or refusal may threaten connection. So the child learns to become acceptable.

The adaptation outlives the conditions that created it. Years later, a partner’s displeasure can feel like a verdict on our right to exist. Revolt begins when we feel that old danger and refuse the old conclusion.

Freedom

The second consequence is freedom. When there is no final script, we lose certainty, but we also loosen the authority of the roles that claim to define us.

The people-pleaser often lives inside an essence: the Good Husband, the Good Wife, the Responsible One, the Spiritual Person, the Healer, the One Who Never Needs Too Much.

These identities can contain genuine virtues. The problem begins when the identity becomes more authoritative than experience. I no longer ask what love requires here. I ask what a good husband is supposed to do. I no longer encounter the living person before me. I perform the role that keeps me safe from shame.

In this sense, people-pleasing is its own kind of transcendence. The living particular is sacrificed to an abstract ideal. What I feel, want and know is overruled by the person I believe I must be.

Camusian freedom means relinquishing the fantasy that there is a perfect identity that can make life safe. Freedom does not give us certainty that our choices are correct. It returns the choices to us.

What becomes possible when I stop treating my adaptation as my destiny?

Freedom includes the possibility of disappointing someone. It includes acting before the internal court has declared us innocent. It includes discovering that the self we protected through goodness may have become a prison.

Passion

The third consequence is passion. Camus does not simply mean emotional intensity or romantic excitement. He means living the finite life that is actually available to us rather than postponing it for a promised resolution.

If this life is not a waiting room for another existence, then its immediacy matters. We love, create, work, grieve, touch, risk and participate while knowing that none of it can be made permanent.

People-pleasing is often a life of postponement. I will speak when I am certain you will understand. I will rest when nobody needs me. I will create when I know I will not fail. I will tell the truth when the truth no longer threatens the relationship. I will become myself after everybody has approved the change.

But that day never arrives. Approval cannot remove the vulnerability of being a person among other persons. There is no way to live visibly without becoming available for misunderstanding, disapproval and loss.

Passion begins when I stop performing the life that preserves belonging and start inhabiting the life that feels alive. It means giving myself to what I love while knowing that love offers no guarantee against grief.

This is where Camus comes close to the Heart Self. The Heart Self is not an ideal identity we achieve. It is the living centre from which we participate when we are no longer organizing our existence entirely around protection. Passion is the movement from performance into participation.

The Psychological Life of Appeal

Camus primarily means living without appeal to a transcendent guarantee. I want to extend his phrase psychologically.

The people-pleaser lives in continual appeal to other people. Am I good? Am I acceptable? Am I allowed to want this? May I say no? Will you still love me if I become visible?

A partner, parent, community or audience becomes the court of final appeal. We hand that court jurisdiction over our existence. We may rebel outwardly, but inwardly we are still waiting for acquittal.

This can even happen through therapeutic and spiritual ideals. We appeal to the belief that a healed person would not feel anger, that a spiritual person would transcend desire, or that a loving person would have no need to protect a boundary. We replace direct contact with life by measuring ourselves against an abstraction.

Living without appeal means reclaiming jurisdiction. It does not mean becoming unaccountable. Camus’s later work makes solidarity and moral limits increasingly important. My freedom does not make other people unreal.

I still need relationship. I still need correction. I still have obligations. But another person’s approval is no longer the source of my existence. Relationship becomes an encounter between two lives rather than a tribunal in which one person petitions the other for permission to be.

Sisyphus

Camus ends his essay with the myth of Sisyphus. The gods condemn Sisyphus to push a stone up a mountain, watch it roll back down, descend after it and begin again forever.

Camus is most interested in the descent. Sisyphus walks back toward the stone with full knowledge of his condition. Nothing has changed externally. The rock will fall again. His consciousness, however, alters his relationship to the punishment. He no longer participates in the gods’ illusion. His fate belongs to him.

This is not cheerful positive thinking. Sisyphus does not pretend that the stone will remain at the summit if he believes strongly enough. His dignity comes from lucidity. He knows, and he continues.

The people-pleaser has a stone as well. The old shame may return. The body may still register disapproval as danger. We may catch ourselves performing goodness, explaining too much, apologizing for a preference or withholding the truth to preserve connection.

Freedom does not require the stone to vanish. It may begin in the moment we recognize it as our stone. We notice the adaptation without confusing it with our essence. Then we choose again.

Camus closes with the words, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” His happiness lies neither in escape nor victory. It lies in conscious participation in the life that is his.

Your Life Is Not an Appeal

So what would it mean to live your own life without appeal?

It would mean acknowledging that nobody can guarantee you a life without regret. Nobody can certify in advance that your choices will preserve every relationship. Nobody can transform you into an essence called the Good Person and remove the risk of living.

Revolt says: I will not abandon what I know merely to eliminate disapproval.

Freedom says: I am more than the role I learned to perform.

Passion says: I will inhabit this life before it is over.

Living your own life does not mean discovering the perfect identity. It means relinquishing the identity that protects you from the risk of being alive.

You can love others without asking them to authorize your existence. You can receive correction without making another person the judge of your legitimacy. You can belong without disappearing.

The world may never answer the question of what your life ultimately means. But your life is here. Your body is here. The people you love are here. The work that calls you is here. The preference you keep dismissing is here.

Camus invites us to stop waiting for a final verdict and to meet this life consciously: in revolt, in freedom and in passion.

You only get one life. Let it be yours.

Further reading

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien.
• Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, including Nuptials at Tipasa.
• Albert Camus, The Rebel.
• Ronald Aronson, Albert Camus, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.