Answer to Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “The Stranger”
Summary. Life is absurd! We want reasons and meaning, but we get an endlessly chaotic universe — this paradox is the Absurd. If life has no universal meaning, should you kill yourself? No, Camus argues in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, we must revolt against death and construct our own meaning. We must enjoy the precious little time left to do whatever we please — or, carpe diem. Without universal nature, human rules are not moral punishments to blame but consequences to accept. Sisyphus is not miserable. His pointless struggle to push a rock up a hill is really his happy defiance against God — his very own choice of meaning.
Existentialism may be obvious to us if only because, unlike Camus, we don’t have 1000 years of Christian political dogma in Europe to reject. Searching for a better answer to the Absurd than denial or suicide, he responds to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. According to Camus, all philosophers before him wasted hundreds of pages dissecting a Christian’s ‘eternal meaning after life’ with logic, before they ask for a magical ‘leap of faith’ to restore universal order. He seeks a more logical answer.
Unfortunately, too many philosophers are too fond of post-facto logic. Camus wants to be free, so he does logical somersaults to deduce the assumptions that yield a conclusion of freedom. His logic moves backward, but written to look like the logic moves forward.
“Anchored abruptly in the world … [a scientist] is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.” — Richard Rhodes, The Making of The Atomic Bomb
Camus downplays meaning-making and argues to wander around to absorb the most of life. His examples of absurd men—those who accept the futility of life yet want to live to its max—enjoy sex, acting, and conquest. But if we build human-constructed systems of meaning so large, orderly and reasonable, couldn’t a person born in that system rarely grasp the absurdity outside that system at all? The timeless story of humanity is doggedly resisting the entropy of the inevitable heat-death of the universe. Why not broaden ‘human meaning’ to include noble immortality projects like saving for a house, raising children, and researching inventions—so long as we are lucidly aware it’ll all turn to dust? Don’t assume the mere existence of the absurd leaves no option to defeat it.