PART III
    Five Versions of Authentic Existence

    Chapter 15
    Albert Camus:
    Rebelling Against the Absurd

     If human life is absurd, empty, meaningless, leading only to death,
can anything of value be rescued from it?
If we are thrown into a completely desolate and forlorn existence,
why do anything?  Why not kill ourselves now
instead of waiting for the final absurdity of death to take us?

     Albert Camus (1913-1960) maintained in his own life
a tension between this awareness of the futility of human existence
and his own defiant, rebellious self-affirmation.
His writings (philosophy and fiction) reflect and illustrate this paradox:
Altho ultimate and lasting meaning is impossible,
we can still create our own dignity as persons by challenging the absurd.
A strange love of life emerges from a devastating encounter with despair,
as John Cruickshank explains in his book on Camus:

         His inquiry, which set out to discover
    how the absurd paradox might either be solved or destroyed
    ends by making this paradox itself the basis for positive action....
    Camus derives meaning for his existence
    from an original denial of the possibility of meaning....
    Camus takes as his key to existence
    the very fact of not having a key.

    [John Cruickshank Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt
    (New York: Oxford UP, 1960) p. 62-63]

     Cruickshank distinguishes four ways in which we notice the absurd:

     1. We might feel the absurd when something interrupts our daily routine,
when our comfortable, automatic, habitual ways of life suddenly fall apart
and we are forced to ask the deepest possible why?

     2. The absurd might intrude into our smooth-flowing consciousness
when we become acutely aware of the passage of time:
Life becomes transparent to its end, and we see that it adds up to zero.

     3. Sometimes familiar objects become radically alien and strange.
We discover ourselves exiled in an accidental world that makes no sense.

     4. Our separation from other people, our estrangement from ordinary life,
might open us to the deep clash and disharmony of existence.
We see normal human behavior as shallow, empty, mechanical, senseless.

60  BECOMING MORE AUTHENTIC: THE POSITIVE SIDE OF EXISTENTIALISM by JAMES PARK

How to cite the above page from Becoming More Authentic

    Students and scholars are invited to quote
anything from the above page. 
Here is the proper form for the footnote or other reference: 

James Park  Becoming More Authentic:
The Positive Side of Existentialism
(Minneapolis, MN: Existential Books, 2007—5th edition)
p. 60  

Return to the table of contents for
Becoming More Authentic: The Positive Side of Existentialism.
The contents shows the outline for this chapter on Camus.

Created September 11, 2008; revised 3-3-2017;

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