Living Beyond Meaning: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Absurdism

Albert Camus is one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century. But also one of the most misunderstood

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“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable”

There are few philosophers I get asked to cover on this channel more than the French absurdist Albert Camus. The phrase “Imagine Sisyphus happy” pops up in comment sections all across the internet, and an enormous number of people consider Camus’ philosophy of absurdism as the final answer to questions of meaning and personal value.

But, despite this, I notice many people, myself included, often caricature or oversimplify his views, so today I thought I would do something different. I want to present Camus’ ideas with a particular focus on what people tend to miss out. Specifically, I want to explore the differences between his early philosophy, which most of you will probably already be familiar with, with his later ideas, which are far less appreciated, but represent the culmination of those earlier themes. By the end of this video, I hope you’ll have a deeper appreciation for the nuances of absurdist thought, and have some popular myths about Camus dispelled for good.

As always, I cannot cover every part of Camus’ thought here, and I’ll be specifically prioritising those areas which I think often get skimmed over. I also want to acknowledge the influence of John Foley’s book Albert Camus: From The Absurd to Revolt as it has been critical to my own understanding of absurdism.

So let’s start with the cornerstone of both Camus’ earlier and later thought: the concept of The Absurd.

1. The Absurd: A Brief Introduction

Out of all the confusions about Camus’ philosophy, a large amount stem from a misunderstanding of what he means when he says “Absurd”. And, to be fair, this confusion does not come from nowhere, because Camus references “The Absurd” and sometimes talks about the awareness of The Absurd as a kind of distinct state we can be in, and these are very easy to conflate.

The thing that marks Camus out from many of his predecessors is that the meaninglessness of the world is not his conclusion, but his starting point. Rather than his characters or his essays culminating in the realisation that the world is empty and uncaring, the awareness is there from the beginning, and his work focuses instead on how to deal with this. Importantly, the realisation of life’s pointlessness is not a mistake, but a genuine leap forward in someone’s thinking. Before Camus, a lot of existential philosophy tacitly assumed that life did, in fact, have meaning, and when someone had an existential crisis, they had temporarily failed to see that meaning in some way. This arguably culminates in the work of Lev Shestov, who says that if clinging to reason brings with it the notion that life is meaningless, then so much the worse for reason. Hence his phrase “what does Athens (i.e., logic) have to do with Jerusalem (i.e., faith)?”. In Camus’ view, existentialism before him was largely concerned with dispelling life’s meaninglessness. There would be some way to re-imbue the world with value. This is often done via a leap of faith, normally into believing in some kind of God. But Camus was totally dissatisfied with this approach. He called it “philosophical suicide” because he saw it as throwing away your reason in order to believe something that you know is not true. Likewise, he saw Sartre’s Marxist-tinged existentialism as simply turning a particular view of history into a sort of God, and following that. Personally, I have some reservations about these interpretations, but this was how Camus saw things.

And so we come to The Absurd. Camus defines The Absurd not as the fact life is meaningless, but rather the conflict between life’s lack of intrinsic meaning, and our human need for the universe to have some meaning. This conflict is most clear at the moment of an existential crisis, or what Camus calls the sudden awareness of The Absurd.

For Camus, the feeling of The Absurd can strike us at almost any moment, but there are a few things that often bring it on: the death of a loved one, the repetition of an insignificant routine for years on end, or some sudden change, but the feeling is pretty consistent. Nothing about your external life may change: you will still act in almost exactly the same way, do the same things, see the same people, but your attitude to them would have changed. Rather than being enmeshed in your life, you will be alienated from it. You will feel like a stranger in the world. The old routine that seemed so significant no longer feels like it matters. Your entire life almost seems like a play. People are mouthing the words and performing the actions, but it’s all vaguely “pretend”. Above all, the little dishonesties of life are revealed. Camus draws particular attention to how strange social conventions now seem. Most of his absurd heroes, though they differ in many respects, share a bewilderment at the mores of the societies in which they live. Mersault in The Stranger is even doomed by this inability to pay respects to the conventions of French society. When he is put on trial for murder, it is ultimately not this that condemns him to execution. It is rather the character witnesses who note that he did not show emotion at his mother’s funeral, and his lack of respect for religion.

At this point, many simply fall into despair, or choose to end their own lives. Even more take the route of “philosophical suicide” and leap into faith. But Camus wanted to explore if we could live, as he puts it “without hope” and “without appeal”. Now, this is where many people, myself included, are guilty of over-simplifying Camus’ position. When I have talked about his philosophy previously, I have described his preferred reaction to The Absurd as letting go of that human need for meaning that causes The Absurd to have its distressing impact on us. If we can unlearn this desire for meaning, then we would be happy with life’s meaninglessness. But on reflection, I don’t think this quite does Camus’ philosophy justice. After all, many before Camus have talked about lessening our desires to achieve peace and happiness. If Schopenhauer, the Stoics, or The Buddha approached the problem of The Absurd, then they would probably recommend this “lessening of desire” path. But looking at the actual text of The Myth of Sisyphus we see something slightly different. To quote directly from the text:

“One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.”

To me, this does not read as a passive letting go of a need for meaning, though it does involve recognising that there is no ultimate purpose to life. Camus talks a lot about holding The Absurd in our awareness as we live, and calls this “lucidity”. But if The Absurd is the contradiction between our wish for meaning and the universe’s emptiness, then this awareness cannot simply consist in being aware of the meaninglessness of life, but the meaninglessness of life COUPLED WITH THE HUMAN DESIRE FOR TRANSCENDENT MEANING. It is thus not just recognising the emptiness of the world, but also the suffering this brings not just to us, but to all those who become aware of this emptiness. I want to point this out because this suffering component is much more prominent in Camus’ later works, where he emphasises human solidarity. We’ll discuss that in more detail later in the video, but I want to just lay a bit of foreshadowing here. The idea of “making peace” with life’s meaninglessness makes it sound like Camus’ philosophy is a matter of passive acceptance, when little could be further from the truth. In fact, the notions of “Revolt” and “Rebellion” are a huge, often overlooked component of his thought. But, I am getting ahead of myself again.

The important thing to note is that Camus’ entire philosophy rests on this cornerstone. That we must live our lives in full knowledge of The Absurd. For him, this is the only honest way to live. It means we neither end our own lives, nor embrace faith, but find ways to live that keep this eternal contradiction of human existence forever in our view.

But again, much of the popular writings on Camus end here. We must live aware of the emptiness of our own lives. This is incredibly easy to say, and much harder to do. It is also quite light on detail. But both in The Myth of Sisyphus and in his literary works, Camus outlines a number of ways the “absurd hero” might manifest. And some of them are surprisingly dark. So let’s explore this now.

2. The Absurd Hero - Solitary Beginnings

Though we now think of Camus as a philosopher, in his own time he was probably more well known as a novelist and a playwright. And it is through this fiction that we get some idea of what “living in awareness of The Absurd” actually looks like. And we can also dispel some real caricatures of absurdism that have emerged over the years.

The first thing Camus notes about the Absurd hero is that they must not, in itself, value one situation or experience over another. If their chosen task is to exist and live in full knowledge of life’s meaninglessness, then they must value not the quality of life, but the quantity of it. Camus’ definition of “quantity” here encompasses both the sheer length of time someone lives, but also the extent to which they remain aware of The Absurd. Or, in Camus’ terms, how “lucid” they are.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus outlines a number of different archetypes of an absurd hero. But he also explicitly refuses to endorse them. He wanted them to be illustrations of what living for the quantity of life looked like, rather than role models. He talks of a particular Don Juan, who lives this life without any hope of another one, and extends his love to all who will have it, eventually ending his life in contemplation and asceticism, all the time rebelling against pointlessness by committing to action despite it. The Actor, who lives many lives upon the stage, in full consciousness that they are simply performing, yet extends that performance to their own existence - living their life as if it were a play. And The Conqueror, who both acknowledges that their conquering is meaningless, but nonetheless decides to conquer both the world and themselves, to act “as if” it matters, while fully aware that it does not. For both Don Juan and the Conqueror, they arguably commit quite destructive actions, and I am not sure Camus would like them, but they are still living in accordance with the Absurd. Camus says they are just good examples because their extreme commitment to actions in the world contrasts with their total awareness of the meaninglessness of those actions. At this point, Camus’ absurd man is not necessarily someone we would call kind and admirable. They simply live in lucidity of the Absurd.

In Camus’ early work, the absurd hero is also characterised by solitude, and alienation from those around them. This is clearest in The Stranger, where Meursault is set apart from the rest of society by his refusal to lie, and to see the meaning in all of their social games, even to the point of murdering someone. His indifference to the quality of life estranges him from others. We see it in Camus’ first novel A Happy Death, where the protagonist eventually finds the happy death he seeks at the very moment he feels most isolated from everyone else, physically, emotionally, and philosophically. At this point in Camus’ writings, he emphasises the distaste he feels for the unwillingness of society to acknowledge The Absurd, and so his absurd heroes must be by themselves, either literally, as in A Happy Death, or simply psychologically, as in The Stranger.

At this point, it is easy to think Camus straightforwardly endorses all of these heroes, including their ability to kill without remorse or thought. However, as John Foley has pointed out, Camus is well aware of the darker potential of Absurdism, and this comes out most clearly in his play Caligula. Here we follow the Roman emperor Caligula as he descends into tyranny after the death of his sister, Drusilla. Caligula has an absurd realization - that life truly is pointless, there are no values, and everyone is going to die. But rather than the indifference of Meursault, this prompts him to kill in large numbers with total impunity. If life is pointless, then nothing is forbidden and every action is available, even up to and including massacres. So Caligula has no problem becoming a tyrant and a monster. He embraces freedom and power as his own rebellion against the world’s emptiness. In turn, he is assassinated by a group of conspirators led by their own semi-absurd hero, who says that he will kill Caligula, even though he is not sure whether he can morally condemn him.

I wanted to talk about this because it is easy to view Camus as celebrating the absurd hero for their own sake, but I think it is more complex than that. In Caligula we see someone who lives in full knowledge of The Absurd, and yet they are indisputably the villain of the piece. Caligula is not presented as misunderstood like Meursault, but rather as someone whose absurdism has raged out of control. Here we see Camus battling with a potential contradiction at the heart of his philosophy. We might call it an absurdist problem of evil. Camus wants to find a way to live in full knowledge of The Absurd, and yet knows this abolishes all transcendental morality. If there is no meaning to anything, and, to quote Camus himself “all consequences are equivalent”, then on what basis do we say one thing is desirable and another undesirable? How do we stand against someone like Caligula, who commits atrocities, yet in no way contradicts his realisation that life is meaningless? How can Camus have absurdism without it devolving into psychopathy?

We notice this even more in how he treats solitary heroes in his later works. In The Fall, we meet Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who had an existential crisis, and retreated from the world, becoming a “judge-penitent” - judging other people while admitting that he too is guilty in a world that cannot be redeemed. But rather than the defiant tone of Meursault or the triumphant notes of the absurd heroes in The Myth of Sisyphus, Clamence comes across as simply despondent. Clamence’s solitary approach has not let him live actively in spite of The Absurd, but has rather stripped his life of any subjective joy, and makes him fragile in the face of suffering. I think this perfectly illustrates Camus’ changing attitude towards how to approach the Absurd. Whereas in his early writings he endorsed a solitary approach to the absurdist life, he eventually became convinced this was insufficient. In Caligula he saw a solitary absurdist who nonetheless came to spite his own life and those of others, and later in Clamence he saw how solitude did not bring him freedom and clarity, but rather despair and a hatred of his own life.

Camus’ eventual critique of a solitary absurd life did not come from morality, but rather from practicality. It is not that he abandoned his prior conviction that there were no universal values in an absurd world, but that certain courses of action simply brought misery to the actor, and living in hostility or total separation from our fellow human beings is one of them.

But then, what was Camus’ later conception of absurd heroism? Well, that is just what we will look at next.

3. Absurdism and Community

In Schopenhauer’s famous essay “On the Sufferings of The World”, he discusses his conviction that humanity is doomed to be miserable and frustrated in the long term. Much more than Camus, he thinks that we are condemned to a specifically unhappy fate. And yet he has a consolation for us: that we are ultimately in it together. He suggests that if we must suffer, it is far better to recognise that suffering is shared by all, and to greet one another not as “sir” or “madam” but as “fellow sufferer”. It is not that Schopenhauer thought this was an inalienable moral duty on our part, but it was one of the ways he thought we could cope with our situation.

If we look at some of Camus’ later works, we can see how he came to a similar conclusion about the way to confront The Absurd. In The Plague and The Rebel, Camus begins to turn away from the solitary absurd hero, and towards an idea of solidarity with the rest of humanity. I’ll begin by outlining Camus’ logic for asserting this, and then move onto his more fleshed out examples.

The basis of Camus’ argument for human solidarity is rather simple: it is that we are all in the same boat. The universe is no more meaningless for you than it is for me, and so Camus infers there is a natural sense of solidarity between us. He also becomes increasingly sceptical of the ability of a solitary agent to withstand the difficulties and sufferings of The Absurd by themselves. As we have already seen with Clamence, the later Camus often sees absurdity as something that can easily crush an individual, but may have a harder time with a group of people standing with one another. Lastly, as illustrated with characters like Caligula, Camus increasingly thought that open hostility to other people is likely to transform what could be a joyful rebellion against The Absurd into rage and spite. It is not that he thinks this is objectively wrong, but rather that it will simply make the person miserable. They will remain an absurd hero, in a minimal sense, since they will have fully recognised the existence of The Absurd, and hold it forever in their consciousness, but they have an unsuccessful strategy.

This theme of solidarity perhaps comes out most strongly in The Plague, where a vicious disease hits the town of Oran in Algeria. The tale follows Doctor Rieux and a series of volunteers as they attempt to keep the ravages of the plague at bay, largely unsuccessfully. This novel has been read as an allegory for the German occupation of France, or as an analysis of life’s sufferings. But the plague also represents the difficulties brought by a recognition of The Absurd, and the volunteers are in a fruitless battle against this meaninglessness of existence. When the characters are separated, either physically or emotionally, they often fall into despair. They wonder what the point of carrying on is, and are sceptical that they will have any impact on the plague’s advance. But when they are together, and perceive themselves as part of a wider battle with The Absurd, they begin to find some joy and some peace, even though they are no closer to victory. In one poignant scene, Doctor Rieux spends an evening with a friend and fellow volunteer, Jean Tarrou. They share some drinks, talk, open up to one another, and generally feel this sense of unity - that they are on the same side against the plague. It is possibly the happiest chapter in the novel, and it offers a glimmer of hope. For Camus, it is in companionship and solidarity that we can not only become absurd heroes, but avoid the kind of self-destructive absurdism of someone like Caligula.

This theme is expanded upon in The Rebel, where Camus asks how we can have a sense of justice in an absurd world? How is it that we can rediscover our willingness to help others, and save them from harm, if there is no real transcendent good in doing so. Again Camus wants us to start with the idea we are all facing the same problem. We are all people crying out for objective meaning from a cold and uncaring universe. But that also immediately gives us one thing we all definitely have in common: the simple fact of our absurdity. From here Camus says that the natural way to deal with The Absurd is not to divide ourselves, but unite around this truth. This not only entails a sort of empathy with every human being, since we are all in the same predicament, but also a wish to preserve and protect one another. Again this is not from any transcendent moral law, but rather the simple emotion that arises from realising how similar we all are, existentially speaking. This is one reason Camus is so sceptical of any course of action which seeks to treat someone as less than human. This would undermine the very foundations upon which he thinks we can resist despair.

It is also here that Camus builds upon his earlier idea of revolting against The Absurd. Especially for the later Camus, to be an absurdist was not just to ACCEPT The Absurd, but also to rebel against the suffering it causes both to yourself and to others. This theme is definitely there in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. After all, Meursault does not just sit there and allow a priest to lecture him before his execution, he accuses the priest of lying and throws him out of the cell. He recognises that the way the court approaches his case is unjustified, and that the people there are hypocrites, even if he does not call this wrong in an objective sense. There has always been this component of resistance in absurdism. But now it extends beyond simply pointing out deception and hypocrisy to embracing all humanity as your fellow absurdists. It is a very universalist philosophy, and heavily contrasts with Camus’ earlier solitary absurd heroes.

And in some way this is a very natural progression in his philosophy, and a resolution of the tensions that arose in Caligula. Camus realised that if all he wanted people to do was be actively aware and conscious of The Absurd, yet continue to live, this would lay the groundwork for Caligulas to arise. This is something that is often skimmed over in popular presentations of Camus. If there are no values, there are no moral values either. And Camus was well aware of this - there is a reason that his early protagonists are killers. So his later works answer a question set up by his earlier ones. If The Stranger asked “how would someone, in isolation, act if they were fully conscious of The Absurd”, The Plague and The Rebel ask “how would people, as a whole, act if they became fully conscious of The Absurd”. And far from devolving into chaos and a war of all-against-all, Camus recommended a universal solidarity that is, ironically, reminiscent of many world religions. If Christianity thought we were all children of God, Camus thought we were all victims of The Absurd, and this lent us the natural alliance that any people resisting a common enemy would have.

But lastly, I want to make a more general point about Camus’ philosophy, and the way in which many people, including myself, have oversimplified it.

4. The Trivialisation of Albert Camus

In some ways, every great thinker in history is caricatured and over-simplified in presentations like mine. We can see this in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and even the incompleteness proofs of Godel. And yet I do think it is particularly egregious in the case of Camus because it often completely trivialises his observations. An awful lot of the time, his philosophy is boiled down to “life is meaningless, but just like, don’t care man”. And I have certainly been guilty of this myself. The nugget of truth in this is that Camus thought the meaninglessness of life was not a reason to despair. To paraphrase Camus himself, just because existence is absurd does not mean it is tragic. But this also empties his work of an awful lot of its content. It gets the gist of things, but I think we do Camus a real disservice if we stop there.

For one thing, it makes it look like Camus would endorse things that he was certainly opposed to. For example, he was a member of the French resistance during the German occupation of France in world war 2, and wrote against not just the actions of Hitler’s regime, but its very philosophy. He saw it as saying “if life is meaningless, then we may as well dominate one another”, but this is antithetical to how Camus wanted us to approach The Absurd. He did not want us to use life’s emptiness as an excuse to give into our hatred and our spite, but instead as the impetus to recognise that arbitrariness of the differences separating us. How the deepest truth about every single human being is that we are condemned to wrestle with The Absurd, and we can embrace the natural communal feeling that comes with this. The possibility of someone like Caligula to rightly call themselves an absurdist was not something Camus seemed to like about his earlier philosophy, but was instead a flaw that he himself pointed out, and endeavoured to fix in the rest of his work.

I think that part of the trouble is that Camus’ earlier work is much more well known than his later writings. The Stranger remains a classic and the phrase “We must imagine Sisyphus happy” appears all over the internet as both a recognition of life’s lack of inherent meaning, and our ability to find joy despite this. But this does mean the dominant image of Camus remains that of the individual absurdist, standing alone both against a meaningless world, but also against those who refuse to acknowledge that fact. I think that our popular conception of Camus leaves unsolved the very problems he devoted his later career to tackling.

On the other hand, I do not think that Camus’ later philosophy is totally at odds with his earlier thinking, as some have supposed. The key problem of The Absurd remains, all that changes is Camus’ recommended means of tackling it. Camus eventually concluded that we were better off facing it as one shared humanity, rather than as discrete individuals. And he ultimately thought that to be cruel or brutal to one another was to display a limited understanding of The Absurd and its consequences. It is to treat absurdity as if it is a unique curse, rather than something faced by all people at all times. It is not that he thought it was “wrong” in the same way a moralist might, but he thought it reflected the clouded judgement of that particular absurdist. Like the earlier version of himself, they had not yet brought their conclusion to full fruition.

Ultimately, I think that a good way to approach Camus’ philosophy is to see him as balancing two concerns that are forever kept in tension. John Foley calls these “freedom and justice”, but I would rather put it as “freedom of action and communal solidarity”, since “justice” can make it seem like Camus is posing a transcendent value. On the one hand, Camus clearly values the radical freedom that a recognition of The Absurd opens up. This freedom to create your own life and values is part of why he prefers the absurdist life to one where we believe in absolute values. But he is aware this opens up a problem, because if we allow every course of action to take place, then we are tacitly endorsing the kind of wanton destruction that Caligula enacted in Camus’ play. It would deny Camus the ability to say that the German occupation of France was worth resisting. So then he has to introduce this opposing concept: solidarity. This solidarity is a way of reconstructing mutual respect and regard between people in the absence of transcendent values. Hence his argument for a natural sense of shared humanity since we are all condemned to be forever struggling against The Absurd.

It is the balance of these two factors which leads to Camus’ signature sense of existential humility. In his works from The Rebel onwards he becomes increasingly sceptical of attempts to enforce values on other people, beyond the minimal amount required to protect this sense of solidarity. He heavily criticizes what he calls “utopian” visions for the future of society, where we are promised a perfect world at some unspecified point in the future, if only we allow for some authoritarianism now. He rejects any attempt to draw divisions between people, to view some as the enemy and some as his allies. He recognises that conflict will occur, and is sometimes necessary, but is clear that this is never something to be celebrated, but to be seen as a deep tragedy.

These opposing tensions in Camus’ philosophy also means absurdism is not a simple solution to existential dread. The appropriate balance between freedom and solidarity are going to be different in different situations. For Camus, The Absurd cannot be solved in advance. It is for each of us to figure out for ourselves. To live in full awareness of The Absurd, and yet neither despair, nor lose the sense of solidarity that Camus thinks is so essential to surviving this. That is the task Camus assigns to us. Imagining Sisyphus happy is not a single action of acceptance and resignation, but is rather maintained through a constant, active philosophy of life. That, to me, is what Camus’ absurdism represents. And I think it is a far richer idea than many of us associate with this unique French thinker.

I hope you enjoyed this video (script), and have a wonderful day.