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firasd 9 hours ago [-]
His Sisyphus essay is famous for its closing line but I find it interesting how for several pages it closes with a thump, thump, thump and metaphor fusion (the essay is ending, the rock is rolling, the gods are watching, the choice is being made...) Even the second-last line is underrated:
"There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. [...] His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. [...] The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. [...] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
chistev 2 hours ago [-]
1. "we build our life on the hope for tomorrow, yet tomorrow brings us closer to death and is the ultimate enemy; people live their lives as if they were not aware of the certainty of death."
2. "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."
3. "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end."
4. "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Shared my thoughts on the myth in my blog post below if interested.
Edit:I don't think the second last line is underrated.
otekengineering 7 hours ago [-]
> One must imagine Sisyphus happy
Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you?
I imagine that he's happy because he takes pride in the quality of his work pushing the stone.
firasd 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know if Camus and/or people who're very familiar with his essay would approve but maybe the Pixar movie Soul (2020) has something similar to what he was gesturing at. The protagonist finally gets a big break as a performer and says: "It's just I've been waiting on this day for... my entire life. I thought I'd feel different." The woman replies: "I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, 'I'm trying to find this thing they call the ocean.' 'The ocean?' says the older fish. 'That's what you're in right now.' 'This?' says the young fish. 'This is water. What I want is the ocean.'"
Basically embracing life with full knowledge that there isn't some final transcendent epiphany or rapturous endpoint
steve_adams_86 4 hours ago [-]
It's so strange in that I recognize that I'm in the ocean and by all means, this is pretty incredible, even when it's not. It's so strange and amazing to be anything at all.
And yet the homonculus presses me forward and I want this, need that, think about this, touch that, stare at those, wonder, get frustrated, click my teeth and tap my desk, build this, build that, not good enough, start over...
I'm well aware that meditation and just calming the fuck down now and then are salves for the insanity, it's just wholly and completely weird that I can be aware of these things and still, reliably, also something resembling crazy.
sigbottle 7 hours ago [-]
I don't directly interpret Camus, but I think to my interpretation of Dostoevsky's underground man. He knows he's irrational, can "rationally prove" he's irrational, yet still lives on anyways.
There's a sort of pride in fully knowing, accepting, and disengaging with some rational proof, and still "living your life anyways". In some sense, even though that might be irrational, it's one of the deepest forms of satisfaction.
oliculipolicula 7 hours ago [-]
As a sort of dessert to that main course, one could imagine Camus happy. (For example, while playing Aunt Agony.) Or appetizer.
I personally think that this kind of behavior is necessary, unavoidable, and actually good for society, precisely because no one has access to this thing called "rationality", if it even exists. The alternative is variants of authoritarian nightmares where one can't even begin to speak in opposition, because of course they're not rational.
But you're right, it can also be easily used to justify horrible things. And in this case, you can still lead to authoritarian nightmares, or worse.
Maybe bad people are bad, and no matter what philosophy you adopt, one can twist it to be bad.
ynac 2 hours ago [-]
Sisyphus was a stone carver. I use that idea in my game Bouldering. The joy of wearing out these stones until they are small enough to carry in a pouch - the size of marbles. Only to be given another boulder. For free. And, he gets to live forever! Meh. There are worse fates in the myths.
onesandofgrain 1 hours ago [-]
He did mention a thing or two about coffee heheheh
A_D_E_P_T 10 hours ago [-]
As it happens, I recently re-read The Stranger -- the last time was in 2006, so it was essentially fresh.
The first half of the short book is easily on-par with any of the great masterpieces of literature. It was written in a direct, vivid, gripping, and yet somehow languorous style -- something almost paradoxical. It was also very attuned to the aesthetics and flow of the outside world, but inattentive to the narrator's inner life -- insensitive and, in a sense, essentially masculine in a non-performative way. As a purely aesthetic work, it is truly excellent.
The second half falls apart catastrophically. The key scenario, the book's turning point, is contrived almost beyond belief. The trial is a farce on several distinct levels -- you can criticize it from almost any perspective, and you'd be right. (There's a well-known Orientalist critique which is just the tip of the iceberg.) And the close of the book brings with it a number of unreliable narrator problems, which make the book as difficult to resolve as time-travel fiction.
My impression was that it worked wonderfully as pure prose, and that Camus should probably have written travel journals a la Gerard Nerval. As philosophy, though, it was hopelessly muddled, badly contrived, and confused.
halperter 9 hours ago [-]
At least from my perspective, the trial is meant to be contrived and a farce. From Meursault's perspective (which I agree that he can be an unreliable narrator) everything happening around him is inconsequential; he reflects that death-even of someone so "close" to him as his mother-doesn't matter as the end would always come. Meursault is on trial for his disposition, rather than the actual murder. The prosecution argues that Meursault is guilty due to his aloofness rather than any discussion of the murder (the defense openly questions whether Meursault is on trial for the murder of the arab or the murder of his mother!). At least for me, this difference was what _The Stranger_ was about; this inherent clash between indifference and the human rejection of the "gentle indifference of the universe". The fact that Meursault's unreliable narrator aspect comes about of the confrontation between the priest(?) and himself makes me think that Meursault too was hiding under this coating of lucidity, where he (and others who pretend to be stoics in the face of the absurd) will eventually break down. I reccomend reading _The Myth of Sisyphus_, especially the third and fourth parts, for Camus' explanation of the absurd hero.
Also, could you link the critiques? They sound interesting and I'd like to read them.
A_D_E_P_T 8 hours ago [-]
The problem as I see it is in the fact that the book describes the world very naturalistically. The first half of the book is basically Proust, if Proust were less introspective and didn't care to inflate his word count. It's actually rare to find a book where the events of day-to-day life -- running to catch a tram, or spending a lazy Sunday afternoon on one's balcony -- are relayed with such clarity and directness.
Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.
Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.
But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your mom's funeral. What kind of monster are you?" The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.
Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.) The book, which is written something like a memoir, ends with his appeal still pending, and the prison chaplain "sure of its success."
As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online. As I recall, it basically concerned point (e) above, and noted that the trial would not have happened -- so the notion of the trial may be a sort of cope.
halperter 6 hours ago [-]
Your analogy of divine justice struck me as rather fitting! Before the trial, the magistrate brandishes the cross to Meursault and demands that Meursault believe that he will be forgiven, lest the magistrate's life lack meaning. Meursault, although "forced" into saying that such a god exists, denies that such a god, a divine judgment, could give life meaning. His position reflects Camus' as Camus believes that hope of finding meaning (god) is ultimately just a way to postpone nihilism, not to overcome it. The point of the trial wasn't to be logical or make sense, as the irrational instinctual human response to the absurd is what characterizes the trial. There's a shift in the jury when Meursault states that he shot the attacker a few times, then a few times again when they were on the ground. Again, Meursault's trial is a reflection of the human struggle against the absurd. Some bring god, others bring human ethics and emotions, but it is ultimately humans dealing with the absurd irrationally. For the execution point, I find that it actually doesn't matter whether the execution has gone through or not. Meursault already denies any sense of hope (reflecting his position as the absurd hero), rather, embracing the absurd. It is a bit weird if there would be a focus on the end result, which I don't really think matters, to the reader nor Meursault. Addressing the juxtoposition of the first and second parts, I think the first part was an exploration of the absurd hero's life, and the second part was more of the reaction to the absurd hero by society. I'm not the smartest, so I find it hard to fit the distinction. At least, I enjoyed reading the novel :D
Again, maybe this is just cope for bad writing but the fundamental absurdity of the trial, which you have clearly shown, is one of the points of the novel. It's more a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel really. The prose is supposed to reflect someone who is a stranger to us, and the plot is supposed to evoke feelings of incredulity into the reader!
P.S. -> thanks for the critiques!
ludicrousdispla 4 hours ago [-]
I've only read it once, which was last year, and I thought Meursalt's indifference to his life and those around him was then directed back on to him through the trial (which I didn't consider absurd at all.)
In that way he is more representative of the society that has placed him on trial than anyone else in it.
rectang 9 hours ago [-]
It’s been a while, but I recall finding The Plague more compelling than The Stranger.
While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning. Taking action to address the suffering caused by an epidemic is meaningful. So are the deaths of an Arab or one’s mother, and the premise that a human would be so alienated that they would feel nothing at them is unconvincing, even if the universe doesn’t care.
> It’s been a while, but I recall finding The Plague more compelling than The Stranger.
> While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning.
I'm pretty sure later-life (relatively, since he died pretty young) Camus would agree with you. The way I view it, The Stranger was him diagnosing the problem of existential absurdism and The Plague was his answer to what you do about it after he discovered it himself as part of the French resistance.
The Stranger is, IMO, mostly interesting to see how his own views changed over those ~5 years and shouldn't really be an introduction to his philosophy.
firasd 9 hours ago [-]
When Martin Shkreli first burst onto the scene it reminded me of the trial a bit. Like I really believe a lot of the negative polarization he received was due to his smirk rather than due to his drug pricing per se
esikich 8 hours ago [-]
Nah, he was a scapegoat so the rest of big pharma could continue to do the exact same shit he did. He was just too noisy about it. "Justice served, we got all the bad guys!"
I heard of Camus around 1985 when I started listening to the Cure. For several years, I collected Cure records, saw the Cure live, and the Cure was near the top of my obsessions. I heard all about the controversy of their single, "Killing An Arab", how it had been introduced on the radio, and how it gained a disclaimer sticker.
I eventually read the first 3 pages of The Stranger and then I stopped. I also never read any Baudelaire or Charlotte Sometimes. I am probably in the majority of Cure fans in the United States.
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
FWiW you couldn't go to an Australian pub in the 1980s without running into a band drawing on French philosophy / poetry.
eg: Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls at the Hopetoun Hotel in '86 riffing on lines from Arthur Rimbaud
Hm, Absurdity is an interesting concept, M. Camus. Thank you for posting it to HN, I have looked through the docs and I got curious.
How does it compare with Buddhism of Siddharta Guatama and the preceding buddhas, or Stoicism by Zeno? I have been a big fan of Stoicism 2.0 by Marcus Aurelius. Why should one continue to download and install Absurdity? Can anyone who’s been running Absurdity in production do a comparison of its features vs the existing philosophies ..
PyWoody 10 hours ago [-]
The SEP article on Camus will answer most questions wrt Camus, absurdity[0].
Camus would call Buddhism, and other religions, "philosophical suicide", because you're basically believing in a made-up justification for your existence and what its purpose is.
Stoicism is a guide on how you should live your life: stay in the place that was given to you at birth, and be satisfied from it. So Camus would call it "philosophical suicide" too.
Camus commands you to accept fully that your life has no purpose despite how bad you would like the Universe to give you one, and then choose to continue living on anyway. This desire for meaning vs the lack of answer from the Universe is what Camus labels "absurd".
Viability1936 7 hours ago [-]
Camus saw the problem (or got close to it) but kept it. He noticed the craving for meaning, noticed the world won't answer it, and then chose to hold on to the craving anyway and call that defiance freedom. That's just suffering with extra steps and rationalizing it.
The buddha didn't offer a "justification for existence." He pointed out that the demand for one is the problem (part of it anyway). You crave meaning, the craving hurts, so abandon the craving (not just for meaning and not by an act of will). Camus couldn't conceive of that, so he made a virtue out of carrying the boulder
halperter 6 hours ago [-]
At least for me, the idea of giving up the craving for _everything_ seems to be rather...undesireable. I'd argue that a futile existence, with full knowledge that it is futile but living anyways, is much more "life-affirming" than giving up all desire. I want to feel, to touch, to yearn. Even if those don't mean anything, I think it's much better to do rather than to not do. And I think that humans, more than anything, want to feel alive. That's why we can never abandon that craving, why we must live with it and surpass it rather than retreating from it.
throwaway17_17 5 hours ago [-]
I wrote the following and then realized it sounds a little pretentious, but I think it get my point across regardless. Also, I’m not a scholar of Buddhism or a practicing Buddhist, so I could be grossly generalizing or misunderstanding what I have read, but I believe I’m not to far off base.
I think the Buddhist reply would be that living without craving and without yearning leads to truly being ‘alive’ and enables one to feel, to touch, and to experience the world as it is and in the immeasurably short time a person is alive within it. An existence where the present is experienced and cherished in the moment of having it, while knowing and accepting the inevitability of this moments ending. Such a life, in the Buddhist tradition, embodies the knowing and accepting of the ultimate emptiness of reality and then proceed to live, not in spite of the emptiness, but in the full appreciation of the act of living.
halperter 5 hours ago [-]
Huh, haven't looked at it that way. I'm just not sure about the leap from a lack of craving allows us to truly experience the world. As a general rule, I think humans want more. We usually aren't satisfied with "okay enough" and is what led us to do basically everything we have done. Nobody does something if they don't have a motivation to do it. I think that desire is so fundamental to life that to lead life without desire is empty, but I can definitely see how chasing your desires can blind yourself to everything else.
throwaway17_17 5 hours ago [-]
The way you phrased your second block, particularly your last sentence is exceptional. I’m not sure if I agree with the substance (I’m pretty sure I’m about 90% there), but the phrasing is very emphatic.
A lot of discussions I’ve seen, and taken part in, when focusing on Camus and his cadre of fellows lead to a comparison between Buddhist thought and existentialist thought. I tend to side closer to the Buddhist outlook and acceptance of the ground truth of sunyata (often translated ‘emptiness’) versus the more modern tendency toward western Nihilism as a response to the Absurd. The depths of response in people and their dealings with these thoughts and feelings interest me, but I also like to watch people choosing between descriptions of Absurdity to try and make it a completely different concept to the Buddhist ideas.
I’m not sure I agree that ‘Camus couldn’t conceive of’ the Buddhist response to the inherent tension arising from craving ultimate meaning where none is possible; however, he and the other existentialists certainly went to great written lengths to seemingly avoid finding the Buddha’s answer.
albert-camus 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
whalesalad 10 hours ago [-]
I quite enjoyed The Stranger
LurkandComment 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think there is a Sienfeld without The Stranger
ex-aws-dude 10 hours ago [-]
I read it but I didn't really get why its so hyped/mindblowing
It may just be a Seinfeld Effect for me though
I get that in the context of literature its quite a unique story/take but I just felt like the concept of life being meaningless/absurd is kind of a tired trope for younger generations
Especially if you are someone who grew up on the internet, depression/meaninglessness was like a mainstream meme in the last decade
leoqa 9 hours ago [-]
It is quite accessible and is read by teenagers during their angst. It appeals to people become it is a simple premise that gives simple choices to the reader.
reindeer2 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zuzululu 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
crypto137 10 hours ago [-]
This might be the worst take on Camus I've ever seen, wow.
ofjcihen 8 hours ago [-]
Did you just Google Camus, see Renaud Camus and think that was Albert Camus’ nickname?
Or are you just trolling?
par1970 10 hours ago [-]
That’s fucking sick.
par1970 9 hours ago [-]
edit: racism is bad
rayiner 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 7 hours ago [-]
Please don't shitpost. This is beneath you, or ought to be.
oliculipolicula 4 hours ago [-]
Center-right (for France) philosophers: exist. Not surprising that they are underrated?
I wish I could give more up votes for this comment. These made my Friday night. Thanks for the links.
trouve_search 8 hours ago [-]
I love these, thanks!
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
This is great.
thrance 9 hours ago [-]
Camus, for one.
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
trouve_search 8 hours ago [-]
Everyone has to find an answer to the meaning if life. For the non religious/escapist, you have to stare into the void and find an answer at some point.
Existentialism (Sartre) says you have to find your own meaning. Camus says there cannot be meaning; life is inherently "absurd".
Any of the existentialist philosophies will be adjacent to angsty teenager stuff; they dance closely with nihilism and cynicism.
rogerthis 8 hours ago [-]
Raymond Aron
behole 9 hours ago [-]
Foucault
Avicebron 9 hours ago [-]
For some definition of good. He's probably done more harm than good considering how people have interpreted him.
"There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. [...] His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. [...] The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. [...] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
2. "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."
3. "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end."
4. "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Shared my thoughts on the myth in my blog post below if interested.
https://www.rxjourney.net/one-must-imagine-sisyphus-happy
Edit:I don't think the second last line is underrated.
Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you?
I imagine that he's happy because he takes pride in the quality of his work pushing the stone.
Basically embracing life with full knowledge that there isn't some final transcendent epiphany or rapturous endpoint
And yet the homonculus presses me forward and I want this, need that, think about this, touch that, stare at those, wonder, get frustrated, click my teeth and tap my desk, build this, build that, not good enough, start over...
I'm well aware that meditation and just calming the fuck down now and then are salves for the insanity, it's just wholly and completely weird that I can be aware of these things and still, reliably, also something resembling crazy.
There's a sort of pride in fully knowing, accepting, and disengaging with some rational proof, and still "living your life anyways". In some sense, even though that might be irrational, it's one of the deepest forms of satisfaction.
Personally, this helped https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/03/14/camuss-new-yo...
https://archive.ph/JEuoa
>Forty-eight hours of pleasant euphoria
Such an epicure? So Epicurean?
(As well as the rest of the diary)
But you're right, it can also be easily used to justify horrible things. And in this case, you can still lead to authoritarian nightmares, or worse.
Maybe bad people are bad, and no matter what philosophy you adopt, one can twist it to be bad.
The first half of the short book is easily on-par with any of the great masterpieces of literature. It was written in a direct, vivid, gripping, and yet somehow languorous style -- something almost paradoxical. It was also very attuned to the aesthetics and flow of the outside world, but inattentive to the narrator's inner life -- insensitive and, in a sense, essentially masculine in a non-performative way. As a purely aesthetic work, it is truly excellent.
The second half falls apart catastrophically. The key scenario, the book's turning point, is contrived almost beyond belief. The trial is a farce on several distinct levels -- you can criticize it from almost any perspective, and you'd be right. (There's a well-known Orientalist critique which is just the tip of the iceberg.) And the close of the book brings with it a number of unreliable narrator problems, which make the book as difficult to resolve as time-travel fiction.
My impression was that it worked wonderfully as pure prose, and that Camus should probably have written travel journals a la Gerard Nerval. As philosophy, though, it was hopelessly muddled, badly contrived, and confused.
Also, could you link the critiques? They sound interesting and I'd like to read them.
Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.
Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.
But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your mom's funeral. What kind of monster are you?" The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.
Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.) The book, which is written something like a memoir, ends with his appeal still pending, and the prison chaplain "sure of its success."
As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online. As I recall, it basically concerned point (e) above, and noted that the trial would not have happened -- so the notion of the trial may be a sort of cope.
Again, maybe this is just cope for bad writing but the fundamental absurdity of the trial, which you have clearly shown, is one of the points of the novel. It's more a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel really. The prose is supposed to reflect someone who is a stranger to us, and the plot is supposed to evoke feelings of incredulity into the reader!
P.S. -> thanks for the critiques!
In that way he is more representative of the society that has placed him on trial than anyone else in it.
While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning. Taking action to address the suffering caused by an epidemic is meaningful. So are the deaths of an Arab or one’s mother, and the premise that a human would be so alienated that they would feel nothing at them is unconvincing, even if the universe doesn’t care.
There was an essay in The Guardian a couple days ago on a related topic, positing that the essence of the self is the biological body including the brain, rather than the isolated mind. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/alive-...
> While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning.
I'm pretty sure later-life (relatively, since he died pretty young) Camus would agree with you. The way I view it, The Stranger was him diagnosing the problem of existential absurdism and The Plague was his answer to what you do about it after he discovered it himself as part of the French resistance.
The Stranger is, IMO, mostly interesting to see how his own views changed over those ~5 years and shouldn't really be an introduction to his philosophy.
I eventually read the first 3 pages of The Stranger and then I stopped. I also never read any Baudelaire or Charlotte Sometimes. I am probably in the majority of Cure fans in the United States.
eg: Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls at the Hopetoun Hotel in '86 riffing on lines from Arthur Rimbaud
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrTGWrQ4YGs
* https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/the-execution/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rimbaud
How does it compare with Buddhism of Siddharta Guatama and the preceding buddhas, or Stoicism by Zeno? I have been a big fan of Stoicism 2.0 by Marcus Aurelius. Why should one continue to download and install Absurdity? Can anyone who’s been running Absurdity in production do a comparison of its features vs the existing philosophies ..
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
Stoicism is a guide on how you should live your life: stay in the place that was given to you at birth, and be satisfied from it. So Camus would call it "philosophical suicide" too.
Camus commands you to accept fully that your life has no purpose despite how bad you would like the Universe to give you one, and then choose to continue living on anyway. This desire for meaning vs the lack of answer from the Universe is what Camus labels "absurd".
The buddha didn't offer a "justification for existence." He pointed out that the demand for one is the problem (part of it anyway). You crave meaning, the craving hurts, so abandon the craving (not just for meaning and not by an act of will). Camus couldn't conceive of that, so he made a virtue out of carrying the boulder
I think the Buddhist reply would be that living without craving and without yearning leads to truly being ‘alive’ and enables one to feel, to touch, and to experience the world as it is and in the immeasurably short time a person is alive within it. An existence where the present is experienced and cherished in the moment of having it, while knowing and accepting the inevitability of this moments ending. Such a life, in the Buddhist tradition, embodies the knowing and accepting of the ultimate emptiness of reality and then proceed to live, not in spite of the emptiness, but in the full appreciation of the act of living.
A lot of discussions I’ve seen, and taken part in, when focusing on Camus and his cadre of fellows lead to a comparison between Buddhist thought and existentialist thought. I tend to side closer to the Buddhist outlook and acceptance of the ground truth of sunyata (often translated ‘emptiness’) versus the more modern tendency toward western Nihilism as a response to the Absurd. The depths of response in people and their dealings with these thoughts and feelings interest me, but I also like to watch people choosing between descriptions of Absurdity to try and make it a completely different concept to the Buddhist ideas.
I’m not sure I agree that ‘Camus couldn’t conceive of’ the Buddhist response to the inherent tension arising from craving ultimate meaning where none is possible; however, he and the other existentialists certainly went to great written lengths to seemingly avoid finding the Buddha’s answer.
It may just be a Seinfeld Effect for me though
I get that in the context of literature its quite a unique story/take but I just felt like the concept of life being meaningless/absurd is kind of a tired trope for younger generations
Especially if you are someone who grew up on the internet, depression/meaninglessness was like a mainstream meme in the last decade
Or are you just trolling?
"Embodied cognition" before it became a thing: https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Maurice_Merleau-Po...
Not enough of a rockstar, too normal (for any ethnicity), etc.
Internationally, maybe some great (apolitical-- or not) philosophers have been misdiagnosed as anthropologists?
[1] At the Existentialist Cafe, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/660
[2] The Asteroid and the Meaning of Life, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/654
[3] Camus on a Date, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/509
Existentialism (Sartre) says you have to find your own meaning. Camus says there cannot be meaning; life is inherently "absurd".
Any of the existentialist philosophies will be adjacent to angsty teenager stuff; they dance closely with nihilism and cynicism.