Name: Is life meaningless? And other absurd questions - Nina Medvinskaya
Uploaded: 2020-11-17T18:37:46.000Z
Duration: 6 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Albert Camus grew up surrounded  by violence.

His homeland of Algeria was mired  in conflict between native Algerians

He lost his father in the First World War,

and was deemed unfit to fight in the second.

Battling tuberculosis in France  and confronting the war's devastation

as a resistance journalist, Camus grew despondent.

He couldn't fathom any meaning behind all this endless bloodshed and suffering.

could our individual lives  still hold value?

Many of Camus' contemporaries  were exploring similar questions

under the banner of a new philosophy called existentialism.

Existentialists believed people  were born as blank slates,

each responsible for creating their life's meaning amidst a chaotic world.

But Camus rejected  their school of thought.

He argued all people were born  with a shared human nature

One such goal was to seek out meaning despite the world's arbitrary cruelty.

Camus viewed humanity's desire for meaning and the universe's silent indifference

and considered trying to fit them together to be fundamentally absurd.

This tension became the heart  of Camus' Philosophy of the Absurd,

which argued that life is inherently futile.

became the guiding question behind Camus' early work,

which he called  his “cycle of the absurd.”

The star of this cycle,  and Camus' first published novel,

"The Stranger" follows Meursault,  an emotionally detached young man

who doesn't attribute much  meaning to anything.

he supports his neighbor's scheme to humiliate a woman,

he even commits a violent crime — but Meaursault feels no remorse.

For him the world is pointless  and moral judgment has no place in it.

This attitude creates hostility  between Meursault

slowly increasing his alienation  until the novel's explosive climax.

Unlike his spurned protagonist, Camus  was celebrated for his honest philosophy.

"The Stranger" catapulted him to fame, and Camus continued producing works

that explored the value of life  amidst absurdity

many of which circled back  to the same philosophical question:

is committing suicide  the only rational response?

There may not be any explanation  for our unjust world,

but choosing to live regardless  is the deepest expression

Camus explains this in one  of his most famous essays

which centers on the Greek myth  of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was a king  who cheated the gods,

and was condemned to endlessly  roll a boulder up a hill.

The cruelty of his punishment  lies in its singular futility,

but Camus argues all of humanity  is in the same position.

And only when we accept  the meaninglessness of our lives

can we face the absurd with our heads held high.

As Camus says, when the king chooses to begin his relentless task once more,

Camus' contemporaries weren't so accepting of futility.

Many existentialists advocated  for violent revolution

to upend systems they believed were depriving people of agency and purpose.

Camus responded with his second set of work: the cycle of revolt.

In "The Rebel," he explored rebellion as a creative act,

Camus believed that inverting power dynamics

only led to an endless cycle of violence.

Instead, the way to avoid  needless bloodshed

is to establish a public understanding  of our shared human nature.

Ironically, it was this cycle  of relatively peaceful ideas

that triggered his fallout with many fellow writers and philosophers.

Camus began work on his most lengthy and personal novel yet:

an autobiographical work entitled "The First Man."

The novel was intended to be the first piece in a hopeful new direction:

But in 1960, Camus suddenly died  in a car accident

that can only be described  as meaningless and absurd.

While the world never saw his cycle of love,

his cycles of revolt and absurdity continue to resonate with readers today.

His concept of absurdity has become a part of world literature,

20th century philosophy, and even pop culture.

Today, Camus remains a trusted guide for moments of uncertainty;

his ideas defiantly imbuing  a senseless world with inspiration

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Is life meaningless? And other absurd questions - Nina Medvinskaya

genuine

arbitrary

philosophy

inspiration