The Uncontrollability of the World

by Hartmut Rosa

On the borderline between philosophy and literature, Albert Camus defines the basic experience of modernity as one of constitutive hostility between human beings and the world, in and from which is born the absurd. This hostility bordering on hatred rests on our inability to either know or reach the world—and thus on a fundamental lack of control. For Camus, perceiving the absurd means “perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. […] The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.”11 The absurd here lies neither in the attitude of the subject nor in the constitution of the world alone, but rather in the relationship between the two. “[T]hat absurdity that determines my relationship with life,” Camus writes, “depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together.”