Is life meaningless? And other absurd questions - Nina Medvinskaya
Albert Camus grew up surrounded
by violence.
His homeland of Algeria was mired
in conflict between native Algerians
and colonizing French Europeans.
He lost his father in the First World War,
and was deemed unfit
to fight in the second.
Battling tuberculosis in France
and confronting the war's devastation
as a resistance journalist,
Camus grew despondent.
He couldn’t fathom any meaning behind
all this endless bloodshed and suffering.
He asked: if the world was meaningless,
could our individual lives
still hold value?
Many of Camus’ contemporaries
were exploring similar questions
under the banner of a new philosophy
called existentialism.
Existentialists believed people
were born as blank slates,
each responsible for creating their life’s
meaning amidst a chaotic world.
But Camus rejected
their school of thought.
He argued all people were born
with a shared human nature
that bonded them toward common goals.
One such goal was to seek out meaning
despite the world’s arbitrary cruelty.
Camus viewed humanity’s desire for meaning
and the universe’s silent indifference
as two incompatible puzzle pieces,
and considered trying to fit them
together to be fundamentally absurd.
This tension became the heart
of Camus’ Philosophy of the Absurd,
which argued that life
is inherently futile.
Exploring how to live without meaning
became the guiding question
behind Camus’ early work,
which he called
his “cycle of the absurd.”
The star of this cycle,
and Camus’ first published novel,
offers a rather bleak response.
"The Stranger" follows Meursault,
an emotionally detached young man
who doesn’t attribute much
meaning to anything.
He doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral,
he supports his neighbor’s scheme
to humiliate a woman,
he even commits a violent crime —
but Meaursault feels no remorse.
For him the world is pointless
and moral judgment has no place in it.
This attitude creates hostility
between Meursault
and the orderly society he inhabits,
slowly increasing his alienation
until the novel’s explosive climax.
Unlike his spurned protagonist, Camus
was celebrated for his honest philosophy.
"The Stranger" catapulted him to fame,
and Camus continued producing works
that explored the value of life
amidst absurdity
many of which circled back
to the same philosophical question:
if life is truly meaningless,
is committing suicide
the only rational response?
Camus’ answer was an emphatic “no.”
There may not be any explanation
for our unjust world,
but choosing to live regardless
is the deepest expression
of our genuine freedom.
Camus explains this in one
of his most famous essays
which centers on the Greek myth
of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus was a king
who cheated the gods,
and was condemned to endlessly
roll a boulder up a hill.
The cruelty of his punishment
lies in its singular futility,
but Camus argues all of humanity
is in the same position.
And only when we accept
the meaninglessness of our lives
can we face the absurd
with our heads held high.
As Camus says, when the king chooses
to begin his relentless task once more,
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Camus’ contemporaries
weren’t so accepting of futility.
Many existentialists advocated
for violent revolution
to upend systems they believed were
depriving people of agency and purpose.
Camus responded with his second
set of work: the cycle of revolt.
In "The Rebel," he explored rebellion
as a creative act,
rather than a destructive one.
Camus believed that inverting
power dynamics
only led to an endless cycle of violence.
Instead, the way to avoid
needless bloodshed
is to establish a public understanding
of our shared human nature.
Ironically, it was this cycle
of relatively peaceful ideas
that triggered his fallout with many
fellow writers and philosophers.
Despite the controversy,
Camus began work on his most lengthy
and personal novel yet:
an autobiographical work
entitled "The First Man."
The novel was intended to be the first
piece in a hopeful new direction:
the cycle of love.
But in 1960, Camus suddenly died
in a car accident
that can only be described
as meaningless and absurd.
While the world never saw
his cycle of love,
his cycles of revolt and absurdity
continue to resonate with readers today.
His concept of absurdity has become
a part of world literature,
20th century philosophy,
and even pop culture.
Today, Camus remains a trusted guide
for moments of uncertainty;
his ideas defiantly imbuing
a senseless world with inspiration
rather than defeat.
