The Absurd
I dipped my toes into the water of Albert Camus and absurdism—the water turned out to be quite acidic.
As I skimmed through The Stranger, my jaw literally dropped. The absurdist man was passive, seeming uninterested in life. He married a woman he explicitly told he didn’t love, showed no ambition when offered a job in Paris, explaining how his life wouldn’t be changed either way. I like Camus’ writing. I’m just intrigued by this man and how he breaks societal norms.
Camus said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Interesting thought. The idea of an unfree world seems a little depressing to me. But let’s keep going.
Then I read The Myth of Sisyphus and understood. Maybe not agreed with, but understood. Camus discusses a story from Greek mythology: The man in Hell is forced to roll a rock to the top of a hill, but when he gets to the top, the rock falls back down, and he then has to walk down the hill so he can start his climb back up. It’s an incessant cycle for all of this hellish eternity. Camus thinks life in our world is like this Hell; absurdism speaks to liberate one from this mindless, absurd task that is finding meaning in life.
Freedom from rolling the rock up the hill—that is the “meaningless” things in life like love and work and hope—to just to have it roll back up again once it rolls down, will achieve true happiness, according to this philosophy.
But what is life like without ever tasting the glory of reaching the top?
It seems a little bizarre and outlandish to not take part in the joys of life just because one doesn’t believe it “means anything.” Maybe it doesn’t. But living a passive life does not sound liberating to me. What gets me out of bed each morning is the people I love; without them and their love, my life would be empty. Even if human connection means nothing, it gives me purpose. Camus is saying their is no purpose and we shouldn’t try to find it. I don’t know. But what I do know is the joy of making it to the top of the hill is unmatchable.
But I also see what he’s saying.
Actually, Camus said we don’t need to lead a dull life. We can create our own meaning through the beauty we encounter in our lives, but we have to maintain a distance between this invented meaning with the knowledge of the absurd. So it’s absurd that we have to make this fake meaning?
The human mind can’t make sense of the unknown universe. The Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the the universe and the human mind existing simultaneously. So no God exists because that would try to connect the two and make meaning when there isn’t any? That’s what I thought, but Camus doesn’t claim their isn’t a God.
In a world without meaning or afterlife, human nature becomes as close to free as possible.
Hope deters freedom. No hope = no disappointment.
Camus said, “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
I don’t embody this philosophy. I want to learn more about it I guess. And Albert Camus is an incredible author nonetheless.
Did I get this semi-correct? If not, let’s have a chat about it.
