>Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, French Algeria, to a working-class pied-noir family. His father, Lucien Camus, was killed in action during World War I when Albert was an infant, leaving him to be raised by his illiterate and partially deaf mother, Catherine Helene, in extreme poverty in Algiers. >Despite these hardships, Camus received educational scholarships that allowed him to attend the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and developed a passion for theater and sports. His youth was significantly marked by a diagnosis of tuberculosis at age 17, which ended his football ambitions and forced him into solitude, deeply influencing his later philosophical views on the absurdity of existence and human mortality. >Camus became a prominent figure in the French Resistance during World War II, serving as editor-in-chief for the underground newspaper Combat. He is best known for developing the philosophy of absurdism and authored seminal works such as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus. In 1957, at age 44, he became the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dying tragically in a car accident in 1960 at age 46. what are you thoughts on camus? do you think existentialism/absurdism is a good tool for handling the meaninglessness of life?
>>85085319I don't understand why you necessarily need to rebel, find god or kill yourself if you think life is meaningless. Can't you just acknowledge it and move on? It isn't that big of a deal. Not that I never think about
>>85085399*about itOrigiocorrection
>>85085399his whole project in the myth of sisyphus was essentially: the absence of inherent meaning is real, the human need for meaning is also real, and the collision between those two things is what he called the absurd. his argument was that you have three options when you encounter it. philosophical suicide, adopting a belief system that papers over the gap (religion, ideology, any totalizing framework that pretends the question is answered). literal suicide, which he thought was the wrong answer because it lets the absurd win by treating it as a reason to stop rather than a condition to live within. or the third option, which is what you're describing: acknowledge it and keep going anyway.he called that third option revolt, which sounds dramatic but just means a conscious refusal to let the meaninglessness have the final word, not by denying it but by continuing to engage with life in full awareness of it. sisyphus pushing the boulder back up the hill knowing it will roll back down, and camus famously concluding, as you probably know, that we must imagine sisyphus happy.where it get applicable in a specific way is for people who are too honest to accept the comforting frameworks and too grounded to be destroyed by the void. the absurd hero isn't someone who found meaning necessary, but it's someone who stopped needing the question to be answered before they could show up to life.
>>85085493I'm still not 100% sure there is a difference between ignoring existencial question through for example hedonism or a debauched life etc. or acknowledging it and doing nothing.Because in both cases one seems to be ignoring the supposed human need for meaning which seems equally dehumanising
>>85085630okay, so, the distinction camus would draw is less about what you're doing and more about the quality of consciousness you're bringing to it.hedonism as philosophical suicide in his framework isn't the pleasure, itself, really, but using the pleasure to avoid the question. the debauched life he's critiquing isn't debauched because it involves excess specifically, but rather because it's running away from something rather than moving through it. the person who drinks to not think about the void and the person who drinks because they genuinely love wine and company are doing something structurally different even if the behavior looks identical from outside.acknowledging it and doing nothing has the same ambiguity. there's a version of that which is genuine equanimity: you've looked at the question, found it unanswerable, and returned to your life without needing it resolved. there's also a version that's just paralysis which acts as acceptance, where "i've acknowledged it" is another way of not having to engage with anything.the difference is mostly internal and therefore hard to verify, which is part of why camus is, admittedly, sometimes frustrating as a philosopher. he's pointing at a quality of engagement with existence that doesn't go precisely onto any specific behavior or lifestyle. a monk and a hedonist could both be living the absurd honestly or both be running from it, depending on what's actually happening underneath of their behaviors. i think what seems dehumanizing to camus isn't the ignoring of the need for meaning but pretending the need isn't there. you can live without answering the question. you can't really live well while pretending the question doesn't exist.does this make sense?
>>85085749Yeah that's a good explanation, it is an interesting distinction to make. One could say that if life is meaningless then the way you live your life shouldn't matter and philosophically engaging with these question shouldn't make ones life morally (if that is relevant, if he is critiquing a certain way of living I assume he is making a moral judgement) better than living a debauched life. Ofcourse the quality of life might improveI don't know if one really can observe about themselves if they are living the avoiding or the accepting life, because people tend to make narratives about themselves and can lie to themselves.The consequences of drinking a lot of alcohol can be dire in either way regardless of the thoughts behind it
>>85085904*When I say he's critiquing something I meant avoiding the question, not living a debauched life
>>85085904>>85085904fair. if meaning is genuinely absent, then the framework he's using to evaluate ways of living (revolt is better than escape, consciousness is better than avoidance) is itself a value judgment that requires some grounding he doesn't fully provide. he is making an aesthetic and ethical case for a certain quality of engagement with existence while simultaneously denying the metaphysical foundation that would make that case binding. it's a tension he never fully resolves and critics have been pointing at it since the book came out. i don't think that it is a reason to fully dismiss his work or anything, but definitely a fair criticism.and you're right that the distinction between genuine acceptance and sophisticated avoidance is almost impossible to verify from inside your own head. people are extremely good at constructing narratives that make whatever they're doing look like the more conscious choice. the person running from the void through alcohol can tell themselves a story about dionysian embrace of life just as easily as the person doing genuine absurd revolt. the internal phenomenology might feel identical.camus can't tell you whether your relationship to meaninglessness is honest or evasive, but your liver, your relationships, your capacity to show up for things you care about, those give you feedback that's harder to narrativize away. not as a moral judgment but as information about whether the way you're living is actually sustainable and whether it's producing anything you'd recognize as yours. the behavior and its consequences are real even when the philosophy behind it is ambiguous.(1/2)
>>85085904>>85085986i keep shilling jung to this board, but i'm going to do it again kek, but i think his work can help sort of fill in the gap of not knowing which side of camus' coin you're on. camus doesn't give you tools for distinguishing genuine revolt from sophisticated avoidance because he's working at the level of conscious philosophy. jung's work is specifically designed to surface the parts of the psyche that are operating outside conscious awareness and therefore outside the reach of your own self-narrative. dream work, shadow work, attention to what produces disproportionate emotional reactions, these are methods for getting feedback from the parts of yourself that aren't subject to the same self-deception the conscious mind is capable of. you can lie to yourself about why you drink. it's harder to lie to yourself about what you're dreaming, what you can't stop thinking about, what you're avoiding so consistently it's become invisible.(2/2)
>>85085993Ok you might have convinced me to read into Jung now kek>he is making an aesthetic and ethical case for a certain quality of engagement with existence while simultaneously denying the metaphysical foundation that would make that case binding. it's a tension he never fully resolves and critics have been pointing at it since the book came out.Reminds me of a similar criticism being vested against Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations where he writes against a lot of metaphysical concepts but thereby undermines his own work. Which is hard to argue against but I still really like his thoughts
>>85086196plenty, if not all, of philosophies and psychological frameworks have holes, but that doesn't make them not worth investigating. anytime anybody writes about anything on this level, it is very individual to the author themselves and reality is not simple and there are so many competing factors that it is pretty much impossible to make something like this perfectly. jung practically turned my life around and flipped reality as i knew it in its head. even if you end up not agreeing or compatible with all of what he says, he's worth at least reading and considering. most people never consider their unconscious and i think it is very much worth doing, even if just for that fact.
>Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
>>85086776>"the absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. he can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation."probably ones of my favorites.
>>85085319picrel> There is always a part in man that refuses love. It's the part who wants to die. It's the one who asks to be forgiven.Carnets (II), cahier 4. (between 1942 and 1945)
>>85087311the guy was a philosophy teacher in public schools. He only left his job because he was making more money with his passion.The guys has not known real hardships, like unemployment or being disowned.I've earnestly tried to read his books, but it has not moved me.In France we call those guys professional philosophers, alias career philosophers.I much prefer Bukowski.Are you a college student ?
>>85085319That's weird, I don't remember entering a middle school history class. I could've sworn I was on r9k a second ago
Starting from a blank slate, i would frame it as: existence is inherently meaningless, therefore it's up to you to find your own meaning in life. Even if your meaning is a lack of meaning, that's fine. You do you. No wrong ways to live and die.
no. existentialism sunk the moment free will became moot. the only relevant philosophical avenues for the 21st century will be logic, computing, and philosophy of mind. analytic won
