Nietzsche said “Give me more eyes”. Here are two sets of eyes: Those of the artist Joseph Beuys, and those of the philosopher Albert Camus. Two visions of the world. Which would you say has less need of an optician?

Joseph Beuys’ vision is connected with his experience of WWII. He had been a gunner in the Nazi air force. He had been wounded more than five times, and had come close to death in a plane crash on 16 March 1944 (in which his pilot died), and was later racked with the guilt of having been part of the military machine responsible for the holocaust.

To illustrate the world according to Beuys let me recall his performance: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The performance took place inside a small gallery in Dusseldorf in the mid 1960s – a performance seen through the gallery window by people standing outside in the street. Beuys could be seen sitting in the far corner of the gallery with his face covered with gold leaf (stuck on with honey). To the sole of his right foot was tied a heavy iron plate. In his arms he tenderly cradled a dead hare and was seen whispering to it. Then he got up, walked around the gallery, showed the paintings one by one to the hare, explaining them and letting the hare feel them with its paws.

At this point readers of Camus are likely to recall the famous phone booth cameo near the beginning of “The Myth of Sisyphus”. It throws into stark relief the difference between the two visions. Let me quote Camus:

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of [people’s] gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is … the absurd.

As in Beuys’ performance, here we have someone seen through a glass partition. Because we can’t hear the conversation the person’s gestures are said to appear meaningless, silly and inhuman. For Camus this is not just a fleeting impression, rather it is a privileged moment in which the essential truth about things is revealed – the truth about the essential meaninglessness of reality (human life included). We imagine that things have a meaning, and we habitually talk about them as if they do, but in truth they have no intrinsic meaning. We might feel nauseous at this thought, but after reading “The Myth of Sisyphus” our stomach is supposed to have settled and we henceforth feel at ease living in what Camus calls the desert – a desert where the comforting illusions of meaning have withered and been blown away.

Beuys, of course, would have been appalled if his spectators out in the Dusseldorf street had reacted in the way Camus describes. The honey, the gold, the iron, the window, the dead hare and the other elements of the performance were intended to create layers of meaning, however ambiguous and contentious they may have been. They were meant to prompt a search for meaning and for a deeper engagement with things – not to stress the futility of any such search or the lack of any such depth. The dead hare, for instance, works on a number of levels, one of which comes out in a comment Beuys later made. Talking about our powers of intuition – our sensitivity to how meaningful the world around us can be – he said that hares were probably more gifted than humans, who too often see the world through the narrow slits left by a terrible hypertrophy of the intellect. Beuys had a sense of humour. One of the messages of the performance was that it would be easier to explain art to a dead hare than to most humans, who therefore probably deserved to stay on the pavement outside the gallery.

Camus and Beuys move in opposite directions. Camus is the philosopher – an unrepentant intellectual, and lover of the Truth. Admittedly he turns the intellect against itself, but he insists on keeping the intellect pure and clean and hard. No layer of meaning can stand up to the merciless scrutiny of the intellect. They fall away, revealing reality to be a meaningless alterity – like the shifting, shapeless sand of Camus’ desert. The desert is an inhospitable place, and it takes us away from the comforts of society, but during the cold nights we can warm ourselves with the thought that we haven’t let ourselves be deceived.

According to Beuys’ vision, that insistence upon the priority of the intellect, and that construal of reality as a dumb, inhuman other is the very thing that needs to be addressed, and it needs to be addressed not just for aesthetic reasons but for wider ethical, political and historical reasons. (Let’s not forget that Beuys was also one of the founding members of the Green Party in Germany.) That idea of reality as meaningless objectivity is not unrelated to man’s inhumanity to man. Truth and war and ecological rape have gone hand in hand. If there is to be hope for humanity, that hypertrophy of the intellect needs to be undone somehow – the grip of the intellect needs to be loosened, allowing a deeper engagement with our world – a world that can start to appear meaningful in a myriad ways – ways that involve feeling, intuition and the imagination just as much as the intellect.

To end this juxtaposition of the two visions, it is not entirely ridiculous to say that the difference between Camus and Beuys is seen most starkly in their answer to the question: Do we have anything to learn from the hare?