The Robotic Man by Habit: An Existential Analysis of Albert Camus’ The Misunderstanding

Abstract

Human existence is essentially characterised by habit. It is habit that
 carries us most of the times, from one day to another as our daily activities
 are mostly routine in nature. As Albert Camus (1942) notes, most of our
 daily activities are commanded by habit. This is why Camus compares the
 human condition to that of Sisyphus. Camus submits that like Sisyphus, the
 same rhythm carries us from one day to another and this makes our actions
 automatic, if not robotic. Furthermore, Camus notes that habit usually
 leads to monotony, boredom and meaninglessness of our actions. This is
 what he refers to as the absurdity of human existence; a feeling of futility we
 may experience when we become aware of the repetitiveness of our routines
 and rituals (Craig, 2005); grosso modo, a lack of fundamental meaning
 in life. In this paper, our analysis of Camus’ play, ‘The Misunderstanding’
 (1943) is hinged upon Sartre’s existentialism, which has close affinities with
 Camus’ philosophical concept of the absurd. In ‘Being and Nothingness’
 (1943), Sartre submits that the problem of being is the most important
 phenomenological problem. According to Sartre, there are essentially, two
 modes of existence; Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. Being-in-itself is
 the type of being that objects in this world have; for example, Being-foritself is the being of human beings. In this article, we have submitted that
 habit robotises the characters in Camus’ play in that it (habit) transforms
 them into Being-in-itself whose existence is passive and absurd.