dose anyone else find Camus's absurdist philosophy really

>>8700332
*does not dose

i cant really put it into words but the myth of sisyphus really leaves a bad taste in my mouth

something about the implication that my life is no different that a 2clever4u king who was forced to roll a boulder uphill for the rest of his life for being a cheeky cunt doesnt resonate with me at all

>>8700332
it's normie nihilism

>just be urself brah just keep on pushing

>>8700332

I agree. I think writing a whole book around a Greek myth metaphor and then having it turn out that you're only invoking it so you can say "but he can choose to be happy lol" is shit philosophy. If you're going to bring in a myth to prove a point, it'd help if you actually make use of the attributes that myth has to make some new connection we didn't realize was there before. But no, he just says he could choose to be happy, which he could've done with any example of a man in an apparently unpleasant situation.

>>8700358
More like a normiefied version of Sartre.

>>8700332
yes, its very trendy to hate on camus right now. nice, well done- impressive, even.

>>8700513
>tfw will never be hip enough to hate on camus

>>8700513
how is it at all hip or trendy to dislike camus

>>8700332

This is definitely my feeling. With other philosophers, you could spend hours learning the depth of their philosophies. With him it seems to come down to a few catchy phrases, that no one seems to explain further.

What does fighting the absurd even mean? Why is Sisyphus happy? Is it just an edgy version of nihilism (which also seems to have 0 depth)?

>>8700356
The parts about him being a cheeky cunt aren't relevant.
There is no difference between the life you lead and the life of a person who is condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever is more what he's saying.
You're doomed but you don't have to despair in it, and not despairing in it is a revolutionary act, specifically for Sisyphus because it's thumbing his nose at Hades and for general life because it's rebelling against the absurd.
>>8700332
Nihilists don't believe that you can create your own purpose.

>>8700645
neither does camus he believes that even thou you will end up forced to do the same thing you can enjoy it.

>>8700644
But why does something being deep and complex make it better philosophy?
All the questions you asked just show you haven't put any hours learning the depth of Camus' philosophy which, yeah, is not super complicated.

>>8700651
Not can, must.
To Camus the purpose of life is to rebel against the absurd which is basically just the world that you live in which is incomprehensible and uncontrollable and painful to you.
He doesn't mean that you can't have morals and beliefs like nihilists do.

>>8700652
he is saying that Camus philosophy lacks any real substance and doesn't effectively answer the existential problem

>>8700652

>why does something being deep and complex make it better philosophy?

Because philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge and shallow ideas are by definition ideas that haven't been pursued as deeply as non-shallow ideas.

>>8700676
i don't really even understand.
how is the purpose of life to pretend life has purpose when you know it doesn't

>>8700652
My feeling when reading about his ideas is just "cool...then what?" Does that make sense? It's just very unsatisfying. Like, sure you can embrace the absurdity of man's need for meaning in a universe without it. But then what do you do in the meantime? Rebel against that? What does that even mean?

>>8700690
Because if you remove life from the picture, there's no question of it. The world is only absurd to the people who live in it. So there is no point to life other than to try to find a point to life--to rebel against the absurd even if you know that it is futile.
>>8700687
I think that's just because it's basic and fundamental. How to not commit suicide without lying to yourself.
>>8700712
It means continuing to try to find meaning in it even if you know that there isn't any because you are alive.

>>8700735
but why lie to yourself why pursue meaning if it isn't there. there isn't one and therefore this philosophy doesn't solve the problem

>>8700866
It's our function. You have a purpose even if you don't see it clearly otherwise you would be dead. Camus tries to help us see the truth in our situations.

>>8700888
i still don't quite follow
there is no purpose but i still have a purpose cause it is natural and that purpose is to pretend to have a purpose

>>8700626
everybody is big on determinism all of a sudden because it's easier to just throw your hands up and shout that you've been victimized by biology and circumstance than it is to actually fix your personal problems

this probably correlates to the resurgence of people living at their parents' house and the underemployment epidemic

>>8700927
ok but i am not arguing against him from a deterministic point

>>8700900
You have a purpose to continue living. Whatever it is it could be a trivial thing like watching TV. However, in the grand scheme of things there is no purpose for your life. It doesn't matter if you were born or not. Also, due to your human brand of consciousness you assign meaning to things automatically when there is no meaning. It's truly amazing when you think about the way language is structured and how innate it is in the human mind to attribute a mental life to inanimate objects. For instance, if an object is placed in a position that is different from the position you last saw it you would say that the cup had moved. There are also psychological studies on shakes showing that children as young as three years old see shapes as either friendly or antagonistic depending on their position on a slope.

>>8700959
*Shapes not shakes

>>8700927
This doesn't refute determinism in any way.

>>8700735
>It means continuing to try to find meaning in it even if you know that there isn't any because you are alive.

Is that really all there is? That's what existentialists have all been saying (although they usually have more ideas about how to go about that).

>>8700959
so you are saying that even thou meaning doesn't exist i should assign it to things cause that is what humans do

What's so bad about nihilism again?

>>8701042
I'm not trying to tell you to do anything. I'm trying to tell you that you already assign meaning in a meaningless world. Meaning exists in tandem with meaninglessness. You could strive for more powerful meanings and values that mean much more to you than your already spontaneously formulated meanings.

>>8701055
Why does there have to be anything bad about it? Some people like it and some people don't. Some days those against it are more vocal and some days the opposite is true.

cool rhetoric bros

i must've missed the definitions page since we haven't defined "meaning" yet

>>8700900
The purpose is not "to pretend to have a purpose". Rather the idea is that humans create purpose. They're not "making it up", as it were. Rather the role that humans play within the cosmos sub specie aeternitatis (as well as any other, so to speak, existentially conscious life) is as the ultimate sources of all purpose. The world qua things-in-themselves is indeed devoid of meaning and absurd, but the existence of the conscious individual brings meaning into the world. It is thus not that the world has no meaning, but rather that the objective world is intrinsically devoid of meaning in itself, leaving the subject with the option of exercising their metaphysical freedom to construct meaning as a project of their own life or being as inhabitants of this world.

>>8701105
>The world qua things-in-themselves is indeed devoid of meaning and absurd
proof? since they're clearly the result of the prime mover

>>8700332
If we believed everyone when they said they weren't existentialists then the only one left would be Sartre. Sartre made a definition of existentialism which not surprisingly fitted his philosophy very well. But this is not what we mean today when we use the term. I can think of no reason to consider Camus anything other than an existentialist. Maybe if you wanted you could create a subgroup within existentialism called Absurdism.

>>8700368
But he did do that with the myth. He put a spin on the story so it becomes a man who wanted to live forever and so tricked the gods into giving him immortal life. While it is unorthodox it actually works pretty well considering he was punished for trying to live forever.

>>8700513
It's one thing for someone to misunderstand Camus and call him stupid for his misunderstanding of him, it's another to not like his philosophy.

>>8701091
That's not really important. We all have a tacit understanding of what we mean by "meaning" in this case. We all mean roughly something like as sense of existential purpose or significance for one life. One can never define all the terms employed in discourse or a discussion on a particular topic. The purpose here is not, so to speak, to construct the most rigorous argument or to scrutinize and analyze our assumptions and the usage of our terminology, or otherwise engage in linguistic analysis. Rather, we're primarily concerned with one's sense of personal significance and the relationship between the individual and value within the context of the universe as a whole.

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>>8701134
>One can never define all the terms employed in discourse
Exactly, so why even start to have a discussion.

>one's sense of personal significance and the relationship between the individual and value within the context of the universe as a whole
might as well just read pic related

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>>8701134
>tacit understanding
Also CS Lewis may have used this reasoning to prove a sense of meaning and purpose

>>8701124
Yes, but this prime mover is, ex hypothesis, external to or independent of these "material" or "physical" objects. The whole problem here - that is, regarding how ethics, aesthetics, and existentialism arise in the first place - is that meaning can't and doesn't reside in physical objects. Nowhere in the world of objects is value or meaning to be found. Hence we find ourselves in the face of a problem regarding meaning and value: these are not present or realized as components of the Objective world, so how are they to be grounded? If no foundation can be provided, nothing has any value or meaning or significance. Both the world and life are then, in short, pointless.

Religion addresses this issue by grounding value in the divine or the mystical - in god. Idealists provide a foundation for meaning and value in a realm of abstract and eternal forms. Existentialists ground meaning and value in consciousness itself: crucially in the selfhood and freedom of the individual consciousness.

>>8701134
>Rather, we're primarily concerned with one's sense of personal significance and the relationship between the individual and value within the context of the universe as a whole.

Really well worded there.

>>8701148
Whereof one cannot speak, my friend, whereof one cannot speak.

>>8701178
>prime mover is ... external to or independent of these "material" or "physical" objects
impossible

>Nowhere in the world of objects is value or meaning to be found.
also impossible, since God put them there. Also according to modern science, objects are simply information, and we are computers processing information. All computations appear meaningless mid-computation.

Atheistic existentialism is unsatisfying, yes.

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>>8700332
all French existentialism is nihilistic. Take Sartre for instance. He suggests that the concept of "meaning" is so inconsequential that it can change at pure individual discretion. The credo of this group is "Life. why not?". I can think of nothing more nihilistic than that. Camus in particular I find to be an intellectual cockroach who proposes we cast aside what is essentially the coping mechanism proposed my Kierkegaard and instead commit ourselves to an unobscured doggish apologist glorification of life. His whole philosophy is about assimilating and fostering a stockholm syndrome with life.

>>8701203
Now you're playing semantic games. Existential meaning is different from"information" in the information theoretic sense. In fact, in Russian this problem doesn't even exist because we have two different words. Moreover, I have an undergrad degree in math, and I can tell you the information in that sense has nothing to do with "meaning" in the sense of existential or ethical value. I suggest you look into the is/ought distinction. By definition, meaning doesn't reside in material objects because material objects are simply extended collections of physical properties.

Furthermore, your account of the prime mover is somewhat mistaken. C.f. St. Augustine's confessions. While God permeates all of creation, he cannot be identified with it (in that case he would also have to be identified with God). The world maintains a degree of freedom from God, without even being ontologically cut-off from his presence (God is always with you). Furthermore, if God is identified solely with the world, then it doesn't make sense to say that he also created it, because that amounts to circular reason. If God is the World and the World is God, it doesn't make sense to ask "who created the world" and to then reply "God did" ("the world did"). God must be, at least in part, transcendent. Their must be some part of God that is temporally or ontologically prior to the material world, or to say the same, more fundamental than the material world.

>>8701241
*in that case, the evil in the world would also have to be identified with God

>>8701241
You are too clever for me.
Goodnight.

>>8701055
It's invalid. Not a philosophy.

>>8701238
Not being deeply familiar with the philosophies of either, how do Sartre and Camus differ? Superficially, they seem extremely similar, Sartre just has written more thoroughly about his existentialism. Sartre also seems to have been more politically active than Camus.

>>8701055
Nothing, except when it tries to pass itself off as anything else. The truest nihilist is Stirner.

>>8701090
Where are these pro-nihilsts? Because every time the position is brought up it's like people are talking about AIDS or something, and no arguments are brought up to why, but we just have to avoid this condition for some reason? Look at this guy for example: >>8701238

>>8701255
Invalid how?

>>8701296
A mindset that rejects all things as no-things cannot be philosophical.

>>8701300
Why?

>>8701303
Because philosophy is active and nihilism is inactive.

>>8701310
Stop throwing definitions and actually say something.

>>8701318
I am saying things, you're just very stupid.

>>8701324
Assume my stupidity then.

>>8701326
I already have, don't worry.

>>8701328
Well then, talk.

>>8701296
I am >>8701238


Let me clarify that nihilism is alright in my book. I'm not personally a nihilist but I'll respect a diversity of perspective. What I take issue with is the moralizing that Camus does. Once your position is nihilistic, you don't get to prescribe moral doctrine as Camus presumes to do. He can't say that suicide or faith are "wrong' because he already admitted he was epistemologically nihilistic. Its more like he just has the opinion that they are wrong. Well who fucking cares? He's just some edgy frog. It doesn't logically proceed from his ontological system.

>>8701333
I have, I do not speak differently to the retarded because I am not ablest.

>>8701337
So how you talk depends purely on how painful your anus feels at the moment, rather than being understood? It sure is reassuring to know intelligent people are like this.

>>8701336
Can a glorification of life for its own sake really be called nihilist?

>>8701357
Not necessarily but Camus' certainly can.

>>8701238
kirkeguaard is more than a coping mechanism he legitimately believes that the only way to be happy is to relate oneself to the eternal

>>8701336
this my dude

>>8701381
I was speaking from Camus' perspective though.

>>8700687
an idea can't be shallow
it can be simple, it can be wrong, but it can't be shallow, that's a character trait

>>8701300
>>8701303
>>8701310
>>8701318
>>8701324
>>8701326
>>8701328
>>8701333
>>8701337
>>8701343
mm, the highfalutin boards have the best bants

>>8701296
>Where are these pro-nihilsts? Because every time the position is brought up it's like people are talking about AIDS or something,
kek'd, very true anon

>>8700332
my problem with the myth of sisyphus is the lack of clarity on which the book is written, there's barely any explanations of what Camus is trying to say and just assumes you are in the same train of thought as he is, which worked for me in some cases but not in other (specifically, the idea of absurd freedom and passion)

>>8701041
Can you show me anything more?

>>8701076
>>8701134
>>8701178
>>8701238

Good posts

>>8700356
I mean yeah - try to tell the story of the myth of sysiphus to anyone actually living in slavery. Someone from a middle class background who feels constrained by their surroundings might be able to mentally represent the world in more positive term like Camus argues you shouldz A fourteen your old whose metaphorical boulder is waking up every day to be raped by strangers for the profit of the person who had her trafficked to the US as a sex slave is going to tell Camus to go fuck himself.

>>8700332
Camus is the closest thing to religion that an atheist can muster. Sad.

>>8700332
OH, look, it's an episode of "/lit/ didn't understand Camus". I wonder in which way they will misinterpret him this time.

>>8701336
It's not like Camus is against suicide. In fact he disprove this popular belief in the very "myth of sisyphus". About what he's against is killing yourself because the realization of how meaningless life is. If you could find meaning in killing yourself then go ahead, but doing it because there's nothing to live for it's what makes it a mistake.
At the very end of it, Camus makes the argument that even while being confronted with the dire prospect of nihilism, you can overcome it by the realization that life is indeed meaningless from the perspective of "there's a higher meaning to it", so he pretty much tries to debunk the notion of a big other by replacing it with absurdism so you can continue to find the meaning that better suit you without having to think about that problem. Even if that meaning is found in killing yourself.

>>8703860
>Missing the point this hard
He's making a point based on ontology, your criticism is completely irrelevant and besides the point. I don't like Camus at all but could people learn how to understand his ideas before shitting on him? At least with Nietzsche you have an excuse but Camus is phil 101. This is just sad.

>>8703926

Did Camus ever suggest what could theoretically qualify as some conception of 'meaning' in some hypothetical reality?

Or beyond notion of any/every reality possible and not, the concept of meaning is meaningless eternally?

>>8703895
>you guys are interpreting him wrong but i won't tell you how

>>8704478
he says at some point in tMoS that is there were a God, that would provide meaning, and also that this would be preferable to a meaningless world without God.

>>8704491
>If I say someone was wrong in a greentext when they are right then that means they are wrong
I hope you realise you didn't explain what you thought was the correct way of interpreting him either.

>>8700358
nihilism is for normies

happy birthday camus

>>8704635
happy birthday Camus
happy birthday Camus
happy birthday dear Albert
happy birthday Camus

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>>8700332

>>8704492
How would that be different from my biological father providing me meaning, or nature providing me meaning, or the whole history of human kind providing me meaning, along with myself providing myself meaning?

I love Camus threads because it's so easy to distinguish the mentally impaired illiterate babies from those who have actually read more than The Extranger and the last page of The myth of Sisyphus.

Happy birthday, dear Albert.

>>8704892
such a dish.

It's simply lying to yourself
>what if instead of suffering, he's happy he's suffering like some bloody inhumane masochist?
No one is endlessly suffering in their life. Fuck these goddamn pessimist who think that all life is suffering and horrible and the worst fucking thing in the world is living because it's so goddamn hard.

>>8700927
I agree completely with this. The human will appears to have died to all but the wealthy.

We all know Sartre is a b-tier philosopher, but really, most of the whiney determinists and "waaaah I cand do it cuz I'm a __" on here could get a lot from his ideas of radical freedom and inauthenticity.

>>8705754
He doesn't say that life is suffering, he says that we can never know if it has a meaning and that certain knowledge is almost impossible to get.
This raises questions about hope and persistence and that's what's explored in Myth of Sisyphus.

tl;dr It's about meaning, not suffering

>>8706636
>I can't certainly know about poegazus
>Why leave

Continentals everybody

>>8704572
i did i started the thread with it and you told me i was wrong but not why

>>8705547
i read the myth of Sisyphus, the plague, and the stranger what exactly did i miss that i did not mention

>>8706768
And I am meant to know who said what on an anonymous image board how? Also in the first post you just said he was unsatisfying with no explanation. That's not an argument.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
This is an excellent reading of him.
Read it and tell me why your interpretation is better.

>>8700332
People confuse him for a philosopher when he's actually a novelist/essayist.

>>8704981
That none of these things are external to reality, they're all equally constrainted to the meaninglessness because they're part of a meningless world.

If there is a god, there is a reason behind everything, even if that reason is "lol dude lets see these dudes suffer", there still gotta be one.

>>8707937
What if God existed and implied the meaning was for people to find and create their own meaning?

The problem with you betaplebs is that you are just that. Camus was an alpha male, if you ever become close to that, you'll realize his whole philosophy is not absurd, it's compelling.

>>8700676
>He doesn't mean that you can't have morals and beliefs like nihilists do.

Nihilists don't.

If you dont understand it then why do you call it simple and shallow.

Absurdism is about knowing that everything is pretty meaningless but you still do it because you cant do otherwise as a human. There is no option and that tension is the absurd part. You cant say to kill yourself because that would also be considered a meaningful goal so there is no way out of it. Its not nihilism because you acknowledge the going on (the rebel path), its not existentialism because you still see your rebel path as meaningless (absurd) in the grand scheme of things. That is why it is called absurd. The whole tension and anxiety of not getting the answer is the absurd. You wont get clear definition because it is absurd. Its in the definition for a reason. It may sound easy but not every simple idea is as simple as people think it is. Sometimes the most complex are the clearest because there are a lot of "because" and logic points, implications and so on.

If you would want to define absurdism it would be something in between nihilism and existentialism or a fusion of them in some way.