Absurdism | Albert Camus
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- Опубликовано: 10 фев 2025
- We are mortal, momentary specks of dust on a rock adrift in a vast ocean of trillions of galaxies, stars and empty space. Yet our hearts hunger for meaning. How to square these things? Albert Camus with his philosophy of Absurdism explores the question and proposes an answer.
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📚 Further Reading:
Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus, Albert, The Outsider
Camus, Albert, The Rebel
Camus, Albert, Caligula
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🎼 Media Used:
1. Cessura - Ever So Blue
2. Refreshing - Megan Wofford
3. Nova Scotia - Synthetic Tides
4. Save You from the Death - Ruiqi Zhao
5. By Night - Hushed
6. Common Language - Vendla
All music courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
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⌛ Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
4:07 1. Suicide
5:41 2.Philosophical Suicide
7:36 3. Absurdism
12:57 The living philosophy of Absurdism
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⌛ Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
4:07 1. Suicide
5:41 2.Philosophical Suicide
7:36 3. Absurdism
12:57 4. The living philosophy of Absurdism
One must imagine sisyphus distracted by endless social media feed.
😹😹😹👏
Does sisyphus stop working because he felt for ragebait?
@@greatexpectations6577 😂😂😂👍
@greatexpectations6577 Actually, social media makes things lots less boring now. For billions, worldwide. Especially the youth. Imagine, prior to smartphones they had to listen to their elders droning on..
@@oneoflokis lol
When you spend every day of your life wedged in, shoulder to shoulder with the common man, doing a menial labor job, then find someone who explains life the way you've been turning it around in your head since you knew you could think, it's difficult not to regret the path your life has taken. It's moments like this that I think I should have sought out a life that would have put me in the midst of others of the same mind.
maybe it isn't too late to start to make that change?
I dont know, maybe you should feel vindicated. I'm a lawyer, surrounded by highly educated folks, they aren't all talking about Albert Camus I can tell you.
This is the wake up call, start seeking those people and that life. Both are out there and attainable, you just have to find them.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
I get what you are saying, but personally regardless of how much " easier " it would be to acquiesce and join the ranks of career attainment motivated people and ponder the superficial spoils of that wilfully ignorant war , I just can't take it seriously. I can't look at the human construct of career and employment hierarchicy as how life should be lived and attended .
Look how chaotic it all is .
Like a scene from Odessey, this system is the alluring voice of a siren beckoning from the muddy banks of a confluence of aspirational leaders at the pivotal moment and zenith of their respective incompetence . Into a tangled shipwreck of the Peter's principle.
Audios Huxley once wrote ..
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.....
Of course my concurrence with that may simply be confirmation bias and unwillingness to accept my own insanity. So ultimately in knowing this it creates a paradox and Spite.
The deliberate uncomfortable choice necessary to exercise real freedom .
To only eat what’s pleasant is not true freedom of choice - that would be a choicelessness , a preordained mechanism which has always a bias to exercise our will to pleasure ….my spite is a vivid illustration of the paranoia , resentment and suffering which inexorably arises in an overly reflective life structured in a paradigm of hierarchical quasi moralistic judgmentalism .
But what do I know , I'm a cleaner in a school on the regulated minimum ( fair ) wage in a world which doesn't have a maximum ( fair ) wage
I've attempted to read the myth of Sisyphus multiple times, but could never get very far.
Thank you for breaking down this philosophy so well.
Its almost like absurdism is just the stages of grief for life in its totality.
Valid take
'These few lines have provided me some great insight.....
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David M. Eagleman
I always loved how closely related the smiling Sisyphus is to Nietzsche’s Amor Fati.
A world view that not just accepts what comes your way, but loving embrace it. Don’t expect a specific structure, but flow knowing that you can’t control what comes your way, but you can control how you deal with it - with positivity and vitality
This is one of my favorites over the few years I’ve been watching. My particular set of references and mental patterns found a reference in my mind to the American tale of Brer Rabbit, more clever than the fox.
When caught, he begged “Oh please! Don’t throw me into that briar patch.” Which was, of course, exactly where he wanted to go, rather than into the stew pot.
I can imagine a clever Sisyphus tricking the jealous, conniving gods to throw him right into eternal satisfaction.
I can indeed imagine Sisyphus happy.
I read Camus around 3-4 years ago now, at the time I thought I understood what he meant but looking back at it now I dont think I felt it deeply. over the next 3 years I went through big changes in my life, from my relationships, to the meaning I centered my life around, and given all that change I had an existential crisis where I felt constant tension between my interpretation of the world and the reality of living in it, I felt like I was going crazy for a while. I dont think I ever reconciled the two but listening to Camus once again speak of the absurdity of life and the three responses we can take sort of reminds me that I am not alone in this confusion, and that the great existentialist thinkers from Kierkegaard up to Camus all had a unique understanding of how to make peace with this absurdity. I would like to figure out for myself the mixture of philosophical suicide and full acceptance of the absurd that I want to live with but im glad that I have the privilege of standing on the shoulders of giants when making this decision.
Thank you for posting this video
I've been wrestling with this for decades. And we're at, I believe, a pivotal point in the world. Considering that we can see man-made atrocity around every turn, accessible right in our pockets, the question of "should mankind exist?" pops up in my mind more and more frequently. Just as there is so much evil, there can be so much good. I see a way forward, even in the chaos of a world dominated by men who prey on other men. It is a weakness. A system designed to reward the pleasures of only a mere handful of men, not a commensurate distribution considering value created by the whole. Some people, like ourselves, see this from the outside in almost every situation. The majority don't. I learn what's right in knowing what's wrong. But does the average man possess enough fortitude to be honest in all that he does? And not just honest with others. Honest with himself. So that he can reflect on what his path forward should be. Oddly enough, I've found peace in Schopenhauer and the idea of unity consciousness. The idea that consciousness is a field we perceive and receive versus something generated locally. A shared field. If nothing else, it's a fun thought experiment. The 'me' of 20 years ago would scoff at this idea and put my face back into a Richard Dawkins book. But as I become more experienced in this world and realize I'm on top of the hill looking back down, I started seeing 'me' in everything. It's all very abstract and woo-woo, but it also intuitively meshes with my human experience. An unlikely bedfellow, you could say. Mankind needs to come together, somehow, so that our science can live on and serve our human needs. NOT artificially create human needs.
Human needs are simple and yet the majority haven't even latched on to that. It feels like time is running out for the human race and it's up to those of us who can see it to do something. But what is that thing?
When I saw your video "Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism - Explanation and Comparison" 3 years ago, I started reading Camus's work. Now that I have read all of his work, I watch this video moved.
The passage quoted in the first chapter of the video (in its completeness) falls perfectly across two pages in the old mass market Vintage edition. I first noticed it maybe 35 years ago, only to see it a few years later, photocopied and handed out in a philosophy class. The perfect handout.
Fascinating ; I had already bought "le mythe de Sisyphe"(I'm french speaking originally) and now you have made me enthusiastic to read it !
its been too long! very happy with another video!
0:01 This is a fine explanation of the people I find attractive and have surrounded myself with.
They just keep pushing that stone
Yes, this place is weird
But the food is good
The women beautiful
Dogs, Horses and sunshine!
All of us smiling
It's obviously some sort of contest
Whoever loves anything the most wins
Whoever loves butterflies the most...
Whoever loves geometry the most...
Who loves his wife the most...
Who loves his children the most..
Who loves himself the most...
All winners
Find something to love
Bedankt
One of the most important video in RUclips which everyone should watch .
As an ordained Discordian Pope, I feel compelled to direct anyone interested in absurdism to check out Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism. 🌭
For me personally, I saw my nihilism to be a doorway that opened into the possibility, even the necessity, to choose for myself that which is true for myself. To imagine Sysyphus as happy is to reject the beliefs and perspectives which condemn him to eternal suffering.
This was a great video, thank you for sharing. I especially appreciate that you faced the potential of suicide head on, as it can be a difficult subject to even acknowledge.
*_Imagine a world where a lack of meaning is the worst of your maladies._* 🌍
One might say an absurd one
What a wonderful review, so intelligently done, on Camus...You ve done a great job and a great service. We all need to look at these questions...All the best...
That was a superb presentation! Thank you!
Ja, ja... "Wozu? Die Frage des Nihilismus..." 😱🧠🥳
Hello again from Croatia, back to your beautiful and smart channel. 👍
My father, who was present in Paris around 1968, and later died from cancer
at the age of 31, left me 'Collected Works'
of A. Camus... (plus, also the first yugoslavian translation of G. Orwell's '1984'. Well, no wonder that he didn't last very long, with a combination of worries that strong, I must admit that. 🙃😔)
So, these were the ways on which
I was - raised. And my mother was also often telling, to me as a kid, one legendary statement, which I later, when I grew up, recognized also as one radicaly Existentialist stance - "Listen: one doesn't
- must - to do - anything. Only to die." 🥳
But, at the end of such great Intellectual family line, when my good old - grandmother - tried to commit suicide,
at the age of 87, with a dawn, or twilight,
of this new millenium, in the year 2000,
I wasn't thinking that much anymore as before - I simply saved her life. And somehow 😎, she didn't try that again, but changed her vorldview substantialy, yes, at that old age, and lived pretty happily for
7 more years and died naturaly. And I am also happy, even now, in this year of 2024, despite all hardships of life, or death, which are still present, don't worry about that, or all those invocations of, and so many people's desperate desire for the Apocalypse Now 😸, all around us in recent years, all over again. Infact, I am proud to be still alive. Because someone has to do that also, isn't it?? ❤️🙏👍
I will just add one other - litterary recommendation (although I really don't know if - American - readers of today would be able to understand that one 🤔): my personal favorite book of the litterature of the Absurd, or about it, wasn't Camus, nor Beckett, Ionesco, Cioran etc., nor even Gogoll or Bulgakov from further East, but one other Russian guy from the era of the Russian Avantgarde litterature - Daniil Ivanovich Harms. Which is absolutely hilariously funny, on one hand, but also, on the other hand, unlike those Western gentle-men, actualy was imprisoned for his writings, and later even actualy died a horrific death in Stallinist mental asylum, from hunger during the siege of Leningrad in 1942.
D. I. Harms, 'Cases'. 🤓😇
That book I consider the very end of the road of, or the road into - the Absurd.
I bought it right on time, in year 1990, and it was of immense use, as one very - practical manual 😎 - for living (/surviving) in subsequent years of that new absurdity in the living flesh again in my own lifetime, the wartime years here in my country of (Ex-)Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and also later, to this day. 🐾🐾🐾🎵🎶🎵🎶👋
superbly put
Another group of writings that this video has prompted me to review is the work of Charles Bukowski. My first read through some of his material impressed me as a very earthy, everyman approach to engaging those who could identify with alcohol use, gritty relationship experiences (perhaps quite transactional) and an unrefined experience of life. With Camus' comments about Sisyphus in mind, I wonder if there was more to Bukowski than I originally could absorb. I'd be interested to hear you thoughts on Bukowski in light of Camus, granted that there is a wide gap in the refinement of their presentation of ideas.
Life is so very fascinating.
That was brilliant 👏 👌 thanks for that
Ironic how he is my favorite philosopher, still my depression drove me to try to take my life on the railroads.
Clearly it didnt went how i wanted and i survived.
Ive lost some limbs, broken about every bone in my body including my back on 3 places.
But the funny part is after a year in the hospital and walking with a prosthetic leg and a hand less i feel happier then i was before.
I have a son now, i married and i found purpose in writing.
Im now in the process of releasing my first book.
Its a biographic creative non fiction book that describes my own life, psychology and philosophy.
Im relativally certain i wont try to end it again.
The setting is magnificent.
“The thing is, I mean, there's times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?”- Terry Pratchett
The next perhaps even harder question to answer is this,: Why pray tell must one imagine that sissyphus is happy. Either he is or he isn't. Seems to me that's entirely on Sisyphus alone and if he's not well one can certainly imagine why he wouldn't be, soo...... I hope I understand that Camu is using the story as a metaphor for life not necessarily to be taken at it's literal interpretation at least so far as the actual rolling up the hill of the boulder kind of thing and the whole attitude of saying yes to life. One can certainly think of the unbelievable sufferings that literally hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people have had to endure in this passion play called life. Some with better attitudes than others. I don't entirely agree with Nietzsche maxim that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You may not be physically dead but internally on and emotional, spiritual level you may be all but gone. Blessings
1:15 "Your existence is simply an accident the world does not care about."
Yes, but I would really like it to be a Bob Ross happy accident.
This life isn’t one and done. We are here many times, with each life being a cumulative learning and growing (or not).
Beautiful work
The only answer, truly, is to take Nietzsche’s advice and say, “Amor fati.”
Wonderful! Thank you!
One of your best, and I'm only half way through!
Thank you sir! Music to my ears! Been thinking of you recently. Picked up a few Le Guin books last week and loving them (couple from Hainish cycle and the lathe of heaven). Loving it. Gonna have a read of Earthsea and looking forward to another watch of your essay on her
Yes!!! I've missed your pure art. 🙏🏼
To me, we ARE important! It's just that we can never know exactly how. 😂
A Dutch philosopher wrote an essay with the title “you should be glad that life has no meaning”.
I love your videos ❤
beautiful ending of the video. question, wouldnt the existentialist call to making meaning and values not be inspite of the absurd? not as an antidote to it. so to say that it is not denying the absurd, more so deeming the journey of value creating and meaning finding to be enough to still the absurd.
Suicide cannot be a scapegoat to this nihilistic world as we may perceive it.
Schopenhauer and Camus are my fave’s
Been waiting an age for this one. Thank you kindly. One little bit of feedback. The background sounds and music at different parts I found really distracting and I had to keep going back to try refocus on your words and tune out the sounds. That's probably a "me" issue and how my brain works.
Thanks again
like the jazz backing mate
The beauty of life is it's absurdity!
Reflection is key.
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
"Before I start, I must see my end. Destination known, my mind's journey now begins. Upon my chariot, heart and soul's fate revealed. In time, all points converge; hope's strength, resteeled. But to earn final peace at the universe's endless refrain, we must see all in nothingness... before we start again."
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
--Diamond Dragons (series)
I sat down to have a snack and watch a video. Oh well
Any chance you can tell me where the quote "the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion" comes from? I couldn't find it in myth of Sisyphus when I read it. Not sure if its from another of his works.
Thank you. I loved it. A great explanation to Camus' absurdism. Thank you.
Only issue I've ever had with this idea is when does embracing the absurd overlap with complacency
If i was sisyphus, i would have let that stone kill me after 3 time pushing it up
"A the perfect video to chow down a meal... 0:01 Nevermind"
😆
The absurdity is that the public is hostage to liberty because of private ownership of assets.
Are you paraphrasing Carl Sagans Pale Blue Dot in the beginning?
Some more 'practical' reading suggestions?
ok i hate that starting footage at a visceral level
Absurdism has always resonated with me, but I'm still not convinced this idea of making your existence itself into an act of rebellion is anything other than another form of philosophical suicide.
Like, what is this rebellion against? In the senses that "the absurd" doe impose itself upon you outside of just your inner experience, there can be no negation in absurdism, but also there can be no change or scape - so no rebellion -, and in the senses that it doesn't, well, then there's no imposition - so also no rebellion. There just isn't any rebellion. I really don't get how can your existence itself be any rebellion against the absurd when the whole point is that there is nothing there to care - other then as another form of philosophical suicide, that is.
That being said, it's not like I've studied this deeply, so I am really just throwing my impressions out there.
Maybe this information can help you to sort that out:
One great cat-lover 😸🙃 of the 20th century, Dr. Erwin Schroedinger, has published one book, not much known but at just the right time of that era, in 1944, in which he boldely stated that - "Life [itself, Life here on Earth, and we didn't found any other in the meantime], is nothing else but the Resistance Movement against the Entropy of the Universe."
❤️
@@ZecZli I really can't see that as a rebellion. Also, solar panels and power plants and reforestation, let alone sci-fi stuff like dyson spheres, would then become much larger rebellions than being alive.
In fact, net effect, anything which isn't a primary producer in a food chain is probably by default hindering the overall process of locally lowering entropy - which anyway is only local and leads to a rise in entropy globally.
It feels really forced to put this kind of weight on this and, frankly, another kind of philosophical suicide, just with extra steps : p
I guess maybe I'm being to strict, but oh well.
The music is not absurd. What peace is that?
😅 I'm with you, sounds amazing.
But it's not necessarily a bad thing, the absurd.
Remember, Sisyphus was condmened to roll the boulder. Not condmened to feel a certain way while doing it.
He may feel at peace by embracing the task (punishment). Who knows?
One must imagine sisyphus happy 😁
Is Absurdism a solution or a reaction? A prescription for the problem or a description of the problem?
Is meaninglessness, or the intellectual, emptiness that comes from the realization of the dereliction of rationalism, not to be rationalized or solved; but just rebelled again? Rebelled how? Just through emotion not through reason? Through wanton desire undirected by rational thought: rational will?
Camus was a philosopher? Philosophy is a rational endeavour. Absurdism recognizes that beneath rationalism is the abyss. That coherentism and foundationalism are myths: stories we tell ourselves to hide from the abyss: death. What then? What follows? How to go on living?
The answer does not lie in moral philosophy: what ought to be done. It cannot lie in any rational process, can it? Instead just live. Do. Survive.
Is this what is meant by “fatalism”? Is Absurdism Fatalism disguised? Are we rebelling against meaninglessness or against rationalism, against thought?
The Buddhist rebellion against thought annihilated desire unconnected to bodily survival. What does the Absurdist rebellion against the linguistic mind leave us with? What fruit does it produce?
Or, it could be that you were born with all the tools necessary to be a co-participant in the galactic creative process-but you couldn’t be bothered to take that seriously and instead dkd off and left the world a worse place than you found it. But indeed you have that legacy.
❤
Lol after all philosophy we come to carl sagan
I have many offspring
When my lungs and heart stop, I live on
Reject Modernity
Embrace Vitality ❤
Camus is one of the most overrated philosophers. His "philosophy" is more style than substance, containing little reasoning, but much emotive posturing.
idk, kinda crapy self-help advice 😂
ps abou "must imagine happy"
how does marxism make sense in this regard? isnt it just a economic theory
depends on who you ask, but yeah, I think adding marxism in the fray is charged with a given perspective of it - it does in general go beyond an economic theory though.
Sometimes I have the feeling that a lot of philosophy craps a bit too much on political theory without ever putting the boot on the ground, so to speak.
As I understand it, the belief that humans should have a system like the one Marxism describes presupposes that humans are of value. Absurdism says the universe says they arent
..........
ABCDEFGO!
You may get reincarnated... 🙂🙂
♻️
No ones sure
We're yet to discover a mechanism that would facilitate that possibility
@truthbetold8233 Actually, years ago on the internet I read of more than one "model" that would facilitate an afterlife... And now that they're going on that consciousness is quantum.. 🙂
@@oneoflokis where is this evidence that consciousness is quantum?
All I've never seen people discuss is a disingenuous attempt to make the laws of thermodynamics relate to consciousness by doing some weird 'energy' bait and switch where they act like calories somehow transport consciousness or something.
So if you mean people have baselessly claimed things, then sure, I agree, but I'm talking about a mechanism that demonstrably exists.
Horrible narrator; unwatchable.
Jedem das Seine...
Absurd thing to say.
I don’t know if you have a child, or if you ever plan on having one, but if you do, you should say this exact same thing to them, this juvenile, sophomoric, neophyte philosophical pablum you’ve come up with, that I’m sure you think is deep and honest, and you should say this to your child, and watch their reaction as you’re telling them how meaningless they are, and listen to yourself, listen to how smart you think you are, and think about why you like to perform a kind of soul murder on other people. I used to think just like you. Then I turned 9 or 10. I forget.
How do you know about all these billions of galaxies etcetera? I'm not trolling, I'd like to know how you "know" so that i can also know with "certainty." What actual evidence do you have? I hear all these numbers and incompréhensible ideas thrown around all the time. Where is the tangible proof?
Not everyone wants to be a dung beetle. 🪲. Except for a dung beetle. All absurdism is relative. I was born to roll boulders up hill. Does there have to be meaning to anything you do? Plus a weakness is the fact you have no belief that you can’t visually prove. Reality can be metaphysical or invisible.