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.