what is the meaning of life this is the quintessential philosophical question Alber kamu takes one look at it throws back his head and says of course life has no meaning but what does that matter whereas philosophers like n satra and kard either ran from or fought against nihilism and asked how we can find meaning in life despite everything and nihilists and pessimists argued that life was not worth living and that we must fall into despair kamu asked that we push past nihilism to discover what is on the other side in his words we must ask
is it possible to live without appeal can we look at the meaninglessness of the universe in the face and stand there unflinching laughing at it kamu says the answer to this is yes and he calls this philosophy absurdism most people stop their analysis there but I think there's a real depth and radicalism to C's philosophy that goes Untouched by a lot of popular conceptions of it and I would like to explore those aspects here before we get started remember that this is just my interpretation of Camu and it's not the definitive word on the issue
my aim is not to end a conversation but to start one but first of of all his philosophy is called absurdism so what's so absurd one the Absurd C's entire philosophy rests on this one idea the absurd but what exactly is absurd is it us is it the world itself kamu says that it's neither of these things in isolation but that they come together to form the Absurd the absurdity in question arises from Humanity's Eternal search for meaning we searched for it in God we searched for it in objective moral theories and we search for
it in the twinkling Promises of the Enlightenment but at each juncture fully satisfactory objective meaning was not granted to us in many parts of Europe belief in God gave way to atheism morality was philosophically undermined by thinkers like David Hume and ner and while Enlightenment thinking provided many brilliant things it could not answer the human call for meaning this is because according to kamu there just is no meaning in the world no matter how hard we search it will never be found how would we even know if we'd found it when we look for meaning
we're searching for something intangible yet Universal something that is everywhere and nowhere imperceptible yet somehow discoverable the very concept of meaning bars us from finding it this tension between man search for meaning and the universe's stubborn refusal to cough up the goods is the great absurdity of life and this is what kamu means when he talks about the Absurd the Absurd is when you keep asking why until there are no more answers but the urge to ask remains if you want more on philosophy and the art of learning subscribe to my email list the link
is in the description kamu talks about the Absurd as a driving force behind much of human behavior he says it is behind religion and morality and implies in many of his fictional works that Society is in an eternal state of running away from the Absurd in his novel The Stranger much of the action takes place around a man on trial for a murder despite early assurances that he'll probably get off pretty much scot-free he is eventually condemned to death the court passes this lofty sentence not because of the severity of his crimes but because of
the attitude he shows to them he just will not play ball with the Court's idea of morality or what is proper to do he displays No Remorse not in a malicious way way nor in a psychopathic way but simply because there is no objective ethic in his mind to condemn him he does not even hate the people that have sent him to Die the only thing he resents is the idea that he should condemn himself or bow to a higher power and his radical honesty about his view of the world is what causes the judge
and jury to send him to the guillotin for kamu society is deeply fearful of the Absurd and they will do anything to run from it including executing people they would have otherwise spared kamu likewise sees the hand of the Absurd in religious faith using the example of kard he says the religious answer to the Absurd has always been to throw reason to the side for a moment and to embrace something beyond rationality that is to embrace God kard argues that the solution to existential angst is to use God to answer the questions of meaning that
reason cannot but kamu is fundamentally dissatisfied here after all what if you cannot throw aside reason even for a moment it is all well and good to ask people to take a leap of faith but what about those that cannot bear to jump he levels the same charge at n who attempts to solve the problem of nihilism with the drive to improve and to love one's fate to forge new values in the fires of the old religious ones I have a whole video on this which I'll link in the corner but kamu points out that
again this will not solve the Absurd after all what do you base these new values upon many people want an objective metaphysical answer to these questions and N is not interested in providing one of course nature would also probably call you a wimp for expecting such a grand metaphysical answer so there is that the point kamu is trying to demonstrate here is that neither religion nor philosophy y actually solves the problem of the Absurd and this is because he thinks they begin from a misguided premise we should not be looking to answer the question of
meaning in the world but learn to let go of that question entirely two dissolving questions the Austrian philosopher Ludy Vicken Stein used to say that the only sensible answer to some questions was to stop asking them kamu says this is what we must do with our question of meaning the world will not give us the answers we so desperately seek so the only way to alleviate our suffering is to stop seeking those answers so say you're a person in the middle of making a cup of tea when all of a sudden you realize that life
is meaningless and fleeting and the universe is a cold uncaring place devoid of objective values kamu says you have three options ahead of you the first is to run for God's sake run what are you doing making tea you have a dire philosophical issue in front of you and no time to solve it so you leap into the arms of a meaning-giving idea and then try not to question it too much you appeal to something greater than yourself that requires some degree of faith it might be a belief in God or a political ideology or
a set of moral values kamu calls this philosophical suicide while he does respect it as a human approach he sees it as giving up on the philosophical project altogether the second route is to run in a physical sense that is to end your life please do not do this kamu frames his work the myth of Copus as addressing this fundamental issue if life has no meaning why not just end it all kamu considers this answer to the absurd but ultimately dismisses it and I inclined to agree it is less solving a philosophical problem than just
despairing in the face of it and I think any philosophical Outlook that just says well die then leaves something to be desired at the very least as a philosophy of life it is self-refuting finally kamu offers his solution which is not to run away from the meaninglessness of life but towards it to recognize that the question of meaning has no answer and then just move on with your life he encourages us to live without meaning and without appeal to a higher power but at the same time to not fall into the despair of nihilism instead
he wants us to push niis into its breaking point and come out the other side with a smile on our faces we are to learn to live without meaning and somehow do this without that lack of meaning getting us down it is something of a tall order and I will say later how I think substantially more work can be done on how exactly we are to achieve this but kamu solution does two things very well first it does not shy away from life's meaninglessness whether you have managed to find your own meaning in the world
the question of how to live without meaning at all is a substantial one and Kimo's philosophy does allow a way to theoretically do this secondly it is ultimately life affirming it does not argue that ending Our Lives is the answer some might call this the bare minimum that a philosophical Theory must have to be worthy of the name but it is still a strength and not one that all philosophical theories live up to but what are the immediate benefits of the absurdest position well that is our next move three Liberation think about the number of
things that you don't do because of either societal pressure values ethics judgment from your peers or a feeling of guilt kamu offers freedom from all of these constraints and more he astutely points out that almost by definition with objective meaning comes some form of restraint on your actions if you're a firm believer in the Christian God at the bare minimum you cannot go around nicking people's stuff and murdering people and at a maximum you must abstain from sex before marriage conduct yourself in a certain manner refrain from judging others and Obey all sorts of other
behavioral rules according to kamu this restriction is not besides the point it is the point all systems of objective meaning must prescribe and proscribe behavior in some way because the question of life's meaning is an ex L tied up with how to live that life if an answer to the meaning of life does not guide your actions in any way it just would not be a satisfying Theory so Camu here is raising an objection not just to religion but to any philosophy which attempts to give the world objective meaning rather than move past the whole
messy business altoe but embodying the French ideal of Liberty kamu is willing to trade meaning for Freedom after all according to kamu with the giving up of meaning Comes The Giving Up of values C's absurd agent is fundamentally indifferent to what is right or wrong good or bad pro-social or antisocial productive or counterproductive this goes a step further than nature ever did whereas n asks us to question and reconstruct our values in light of a Godless world kamu seems to want us to move past the whole concept of values altogether and this is an aspect
of his philosophy that I rarely see talked about online probably because it is difficult to overstate just how radical of a philosophical development this is it is not just replace objective values with subjective ones but move past values all together at least as we currently conceive of them think of some of the classic ethical problems in philosophy how do we live a good life what is the right thing to do how can we be good people kamu dispenses of all these questions with a shrug and just says what does it matter in his own words
being aware of one's life one's Revolt one's freedom is living where Lucidity dominates the scale of values becomes useless it is no wonder that the protagonist of the stranger was sent to the executioners block this sort of extreme Freedom goes beyond moral relativism and straight to the heart of moral absurdity it is no doubt deeply dangerous from a societal point of view however that does not mean we cannot learn from it in some way we can take on some aspect of C's liberatory message without falling into total value neutrality we can say on the one
hand that we have our values but on the other recognize that we are in fact free to disregard them whenever we so choose they are values freely selected not imposed by the world in one of my favorite scientific demonstrations an acquaintance of mine who's a biology teacher once took a pet ant of his and placed it down on a piece of paper before drawing a large Circle around the ant in black ink pen the ants would go right up to the edge of this line but would not cross it it seemed to believe the line
of the pen formed a physical boundary however once my friend forced the ant to cross the line with his hand the illusion was dispelled and the Ant roamed wherever it pleased on one interpretation of Camu he wants us to rub out the line entirely but a more moderate idea would be to become the knowing ant to recognize that the line is just pen yet choose to stay within its boundaries conscious that this is a choice here we have freely chosen restriction which I would suggest May grant us the best of both worlds but it is
in Freedom from other constraints that C's philosophy really shines after all most of the time our actions are not restricted by moral values but by some other force it might be that we are concerned with the opinions of others or are embarrassed at ourselves as I touched upon in my video on sra's no exit a lot of the time we lose freedom and agency because we're too busy caring what others think about us and seeing ourselves through their eyes for SRA this was to some extent an unsolvable part of the human condition and in that
video I suggested we might draw upon some Buddhist philosophy to help us out but kamu approach is characteristically even more radical he just says who cares it is as simple and as profound as it sounds in response to us saying I care when people judge me and it hurts he just raises an eyebrow and says well stop caring then I think this sort of radical view is why some people claim kamu is simplifying existential issues but kamu would reply that the issues really are that simple and it is others that have made them seem more
complicated than they need to be I will touch upon on this later but I think this sort of tension really brings out the strengths and weaknesses of C's approach some people consider it to be obviously right and others consider it to be obviously wrong and perhaps there is no way of resolving this dispute perhaps the disagreement occurs at the base level of existential intuition but at the very least kamu can make us take stock of just how free we truly are and we can decide how extreme we want to take this freedom from simply not
letting others get under our skin to completely disregarding morality and values anything is on offer the barbecue of life when Camu who is Manning the grill four indifference the stoic said it is not things in themselves that hurt you but your judgments of them n said the key to a joyful life is to love your fate no matter what happened to you but Kam's philosophy is even more extreme he just says who cares what happens to you why worry about it if we do not value people's judgments of us how can they hurt us if
we do not value our comfort how can discomfort cause suffering this is almost a form of stoicism but even more radical whereas stoics tell us that what befalls us can only hurt us if we assign those things significance and so we must be wise about what we assign significance to kamu asks what would happen if we just got rid of significance altogether we would be free from all types of suffering apart from our base physical ones like being too hot or having our arm chopped off and freedom from suffering entails more freedom in actions after
all what normally deters us from action is the negative consequences of that action perceived or real and what better way to ward off those negative consequences than by refusing to Value anything and to settle into a sort of calm indifference this principle is again illustrated by the titular character in The Stranger he is indifferent to almost everything that happens to him he shows no sadness at his mother's death every time his girlfriend asks him if he loves her he says not that it matters but probably not even when he is led to the Executioner's block
he still does not seem bothered by it only remarking that he hopes lots of hateful people will be there this is a man completely indifferent to his own fate and the fate of the people around him he is an extreme version of the sort of Life kamu philosophy theoretically makes possible and here is my question to you how much of this lesson do you really want to take on board I think a lot of people have things that they just don't want to be indifferent to they want to care about the people around them they
want to care about their desires and dreams while there are certain things they'd like to be indifferent about they're also some things they'd like to be deeply passionate about to love to hate even to suffer for and I don't think kamu would deny this either I think that the figure of the stranger and others like it that he outlines in the myth of Copus are instead illustrations of what can be achieved you may not want to be indifferent to everything but kamu points out that it is possible to be indifferent to everything but in spite
of this indifference towards the quality of experiences kamu is an enormous fan of the quantity of experiences he talks at length about his absurd men as he calls them rushing around trying to get to as much of life as possible all while being indifferent to the quality of the experiences on offer I must confess I'm not fully able to resolve this tension in Cam's philosophy but to have a go I think he is saying that the person who moves past the Absurd and who has embraced life's meaninglessness has more room in their minds for the
fullness of every passing moment free from existential angst they're able to experience the present for its own sake without being distracted by higher principles or judgments we again see this Illustrated in the stranger once our protagonist has fully accepted that he's going to die he paradoxically gains a whole new lease on life he Savers every moment he has left to live and talks about how if he had 20 more years he would experience them all in full flavor he says this all the while also arguing that it does not matter that he's about to die
since everyone dies at some point anyway this for me Cuts up both the tension and the resolution in Kam's ideas of being indifferent to the quality of life while fully appreciating the quantity of life but whatever your interpretation I think one key takeaway for us is this it is always in our power to be indifferent to something be it social condemnation a bad day or a true tragedy kamu says it's always within our power to shrug our shoulders Proclaim that it does not matter either way and go and make some toast five but what do
we actually do kamu himself is remarkably quiet on actually how to move past the Absurd into his new enlightened age and he openly admits this in the myth of cisus he says knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me I do not want to get out of my depth this aspect of life being given to me can I adapt myself to it I think this perfectly illustrates where kamu stops in the myth of Copus he is very interested in the possibility of moving past the meaninglessness of life into a
philosophically enlightened Promised Land but he does not have one answer for how to get there perhaps this is what he was referring to when he said he did not not want to get out of his depth but I think it remains a somewhat open question to what extent we can actually learn to live like Camu absurd agents what would we have to do to remain indifferent to everything to be unswayed by societal pressures to fully embrace our radical Freedom sometimes kamu seems to think that it is as simple as no longer caring and to a
certain extent I guess it is but I also think that this does not do justice to just how difficult it would be to not care about anything to genuinely look at the empty meaninglessness of life and not either disp or try to construct some meaning out of the leftover pieces in the closing chapter of the myth of Copus kamu talks about the tragedy of Copus an ancient Greek king who for his crimes in life was forced to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity only to see it roll back down to the bottom
of the hill as soon as he'd finished meaning that he had to push it all the way up again kamu says it will be possible over time for cisus to find meaning in the pushing itself to stop aiming for the boulder to stay at the top of the hill but to make his struggle self-justifying he is not pushing in service of anything he is just pushing and that is enough so perhaps this is his most powerful piece of advice to us to recognize that our lives are ultimately in service of nothing but to continue pushing
and to make our journey through life self-justifying if life is Justified already we don't need a higher meaning everything we need is already in life itself just as it is nonsensical to ask what is north of the North Pole it is nonsensical to ask what gives our lives meaning the life itself is the whole point the pushing is all there is to it and that I think is how we can imagine sisifus happy I hope you enjoyed the video and subscribe to both my channel and my email list for more on thinking to improve your
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