How to live in an absurd world and not go crazy

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

What are we taught by the reflections of the French philosopher Albert Camus about the unpredictability of life and the limitations of the mind.

In 1942, the philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay "The Myth of Sisyphus", where he talked about the most important, from his point of view, question: "Is the life of labor worth living?" After all, if you take into account all the circumstances, it turns out to be absurd. We realize this in rare moments when our ideas about the world suddenly stop working, when routine actions and efforts begin to seem meaningless.

On the one hand, we make reasonable plans for our lives, and on the other, we find ourselves face to face with an unpredictable world that does not correspond to our ideas.

This is the absurdity of our existence: it is absurd to be reasonable in an unreasonable world. This leads to the next big problem.

You can safely call your ideas about the world "eternal", but we still know that our life will end someday.

If the main components of the problem are reason and the unreasonable world, then, Camus says, you can cheat and get around it by eliminating one of the two.

The first way is to ignore the meaninglessness of existence. Contrary to the obvious evidence, one can pretend that the world is stable and live according to distant goals (retirement, afterlife, human progress). According to Camus, in this case, we cannot act freely, because our actions are tied to these goals. And they are most often smashed to smithereens on the unreasonable world.

The second way to avoid absurdity is to abandon reasonable reasoning. Some philosophers do this by declaring the mind a useless instrument (for example, Lev Shestov and Karl Jaspers). Others say that the world obeys a divine plan that people simply cannot understand (Kierkegaard).

Both of these methods Camus considers unacceptable. But suicide is not an option for a philosopher either. From his point of view, this is a desperate gesture of final acceptance of the contradiction between the human mind and the unreasonable world.

Instead, Camus proposes three things:

• Constant riot. The philosopher believes that we must all the time fight against the circumstances of our existence. Never admit defeat, not even death, even though we know it is inevitable. Camus calls constant rebellion the only way to be present in the world.
• Denial of eternal freedom. Instead of becoming slaves to eternal ideas about the world, you need to adhere to reason, but be aware of its limitations and apply it flexibly in each specific situation. That is, to seek freedom here and now, and not in eternity.
• Passion. This is the main thing. We must love everything in life and strive to make it as fulfilling as possible.

An absurd person knows about his mortality, but still does not accept it. Knows about the limitations of the mind and still values it. Feels pleasure and pain and tries to experience them as much as possible.

Let's go back to Sisyphus. In ancient Greek myth, he went against the gods and was punished for this. He is doomed to constantly push a stone uphill, which falls down again and again.

Nevertheless, Camus calls him happy. The philosopher says that Sisyphus is the perfect model for us. He has no illusions about his position and its meaninglessness, but he rebelles against circumstances. With each new fall of the stone, he makes a conscious decision to try again. He pushes this stone over and over and realizes that this is the meaning of his existence.