Relation to oneself· Existence
Absurdism
Axis: The meaning of life — How should we respond to the enigma of life's meaning?
No meaning to discover, and no substitute for it: the absurd arises from the clash between our thirst for meaning and the silence of the world, and no answer will come. Faced with the enigma, the point is to hold out without cheating: to live lucidly in revolt, without hope or resignation.
Philosophers 1
Camusexplicit
Two terms are equally certain for Camus: the human mind demands unity and meaning, and the world stays silent before that demand. lodges in neither term but in their divorce, in the confrontation itself: it is therefore neither a property of the world nor a defect in man, but a relation that cannot be dissolved without suppressing one of its terms. So meaning is neither given in advance nor purely absent: no transcendent meaning fills the divorce, yet the man who holds it without fleeing forges values in the present, hence a share of constructed meaning.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) · The Rebel (1951)
Characters 1
Meursaultexplicit
Faced with every major choice, Meursault answers that at bottom it does not matter: to marry Marie or not, to take the Paris post or stay, one can say yes without anything really weighing in the balance. This is not a calculated indifference but a lived self-evidence: no life seems to him justified by a higher aim or by any , so that all are worth the same and no end comes to order them.
Part I, chapter 5: his answers to Marie about marriage and to his boss about Paris · Part II, chapter 5: his reaffirmed indifference to any higher aim
Argument
- Our reason demands a meaning, a reason to be; the world, for its part, stays silent. From this confrontation between our demand and the muteness of things arises the .
- Two escapes present themselves, equally dishonest: hope, which invents a hidden meaning so as not to see the silence; and renunciation, up to suicide, which removes the demand so as to suffer the silence no longer.
- There remains a third path, the only lucid one: to hold both terms without reconciling them, to keep the demand for meaning while looking the silence in the face. This is , paid for by neither illusion nor abdication.
Therefore So a life can be fully worth living without a meaning beyond it: its worth lies in the lucidity and intensity of the revolt, not in an answer that will not come.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- The absurd arises, we are told, from the world's silence before our thirst for meaning; and the right response would be lucid revolt, without hope or resignation.
- But why 'revolt' rather than indifference, or renunciation? If nothing really has value, the rebel's lucidity and pride have no more of it: to set them up as the right response is already to hold something better, and so to reintroduce a meaning.
- The absurdist is thus caught between two terms: either these values hold, and the world is not the desert of meaning he claimed; or they do not, and his revolt is as futile as what it claims to defy.
Therefore So absurdism contradicts itself: it proclaims the absence of meaning while making revolt a meaning. One must either recognize values, and leave the absurd, or renounce even revolt itself.
See the pageArgument Thought experiment
- Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock forever to the summit, from which it at once falls back: effort with no end and no result, an image of our lives when no meaning comes to crown them.
- He has neither hope of ending nor illusion about his task; and yet, says , he can face it without bitterness: 'the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart'.
- Neither hope of a hidden meaning nor flight into renunciation: to recognize the absurdity of his toil and make it his own is to take his fate back into his own hands, in awareness and .
Therefore So one can live fully without given meaning: 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy', for the worth of a life lies in the lucidity of the one who owns it, not in a meaning that would surpass it.
See the page- Descriptive Thought experimentSisyphus and his rock
When our thirst for meaning meets the silence of the world, where can an answer lie: in an end that surpasses us, in the meaning we give ourselves, or in the lucid revolt of a life with no answer?
an existence - DescriptiveMust it last?
If everything ends, through death and then the erasure of every trace, is what we do in vain, or can something have full meaning without lasting forever?
the span of a life - DescriptiveWhat if nothing meant anything?
When the frameworks that gave meaning fall away, God, History, progress, does any meaning remain possible, or does the vertigo open in which nothing is worth anything?
the frameworks of meaning