Personal
- Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His father was killed a year later in WWI, and Camus was brought up by this mother in extreme poverty.
- He won the nobel prize of literature
- He joined the Communist party in 1935
- He died at age of 46, having discarded a train ticket to acept a lift back to Paris with a friend, which exemplifies the absurdity of life
- [MYTAKE] KKKKKKKKKKKKK, what a perfect way for the founderm of absurdism to die. It's incredibly ironic that he died in a such a very absurd way
The BIG question
There is one truly philosophical problem of philosophy: Whether to suicide or not
- [MYTAKE] The reason why this is such a relevenat philosphical quesion is because before you attempt to answer any other question such as what is right or wrong, you have to choose to stay alive
There are three answers for this problem:
-
Suicide
-
Philosophical suicide
- there are many types of philosophical suicides, but they will all be related to believing that the universe as a whole has some meaning
- The absurd, for Camus, is the feeling that we have when we recognize that the meanings we give to life do not exist beyond our own consciouness
-
- IMPORTANT: I love this about Camus because he doesn't run from the main question, that got me into studying philosophy in the first place. Because in the end of the day Nietzsche commits philosophical suicide, when we talks about the will to power, as well as Satre also commits philosophical suicide when talks about living an authenthic life
- 99.99999999999999999% of people choose this option, including myself
- Absurdism
- In embracing the absurd (the lack of meaning in the world, even when we are constantly looking for meaning), we constantly try to find value, or subjective meaning in life, even when there isn't an objective meaning, which is absurd, that's why it's called embracing the absurd
Why I love Camus
- [MYTAKE] I think many philsophers such as Sartre are full of bullshit, because they kinda pretend that the fact that the word has no objective meaning is just something irrelevant, and that having a subjective meaning to our lives is good enough. This is ridiculous in my opinion. Obviously subjective meanings to our lives are useless since it's just random shit we made up. Camus at least gives the proper importance of the despair of life with no objactive meaning
Myth of sysiphus
For Camus this myth encapsualtes well our big question, because Sysiphus is forced to do a task even though he is fully aware it's meaningless, but still he has to do it, which epitomizes the absurdity of our lives