An incredible eye opener, thank you so much! Now well into reading the Myth of Sisyphus thanks to your explanations above, and it's directly contributing to my own growing concept of a living philosophy. Great series, please do keep going, thanks!
While I think that absurdism would be a better way of living for me, I find myself acting and behaving as an existentialist. I find it difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy. How can one be happy in misery? How can one be happy in pain, in despair, in agony, in fear.... ? Emotions and feelings are part of our "essence" and to deny them is -so it seems to me- a form of self deception. Can anyone explain to me how to imagine happiness when there is none without resorting to magical thinking?
I think what stops it becoming magical thinking is that it is based in reality. It needs to be a genuine attention to the joy of life around you. It is gratitude. If I was able to lug a massive boulder up a hill every day, I would only have to focus on the true magnificence of the strength of my muscles and I could be quite happy. Imagine how someone in a wheelchair feels about that story? It is all perspective.
The emotions are there, but like the Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment, you don't have to attend to them or dwell in attachment to them. That isn't denying them, it just isn't giving them the centre stage. I think of it like parenting a screaming child. You have to see past the emotional experience to see what is happening for the person underneath. We grow as adults and learn to regulate our emotions (ideally) which isn't the same as suppressing them, it is just giving them their appropriate place.
“There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.”
I took a few months to mull over your reply. I keep coming back to the above quote by John Scalzi. You say "It is all perspective" which can also be translated as "it depends on what you think is important; what your values are" which is just another form of magical thinking (value is a construct).
The problem I have with your reply is that some things are inherently natural (reality/the universe) and other things are made up. If someone suffers you should look at what the cause of that suffering is and if it is caused by "the universe" you could try and help them "changing their perspective". But if the cause is a construct (read: other people) then the only help should be to eliminate the cause. Why would mental abuse be treated anything else than physical abuse?
When you have a fever, a doctor will look for the cause and treat it. If you are depressed, they tell you to learn te live with it. To make Sisyphus happy is to take away his boulder. If you don't, you are just enabling his torturer and are part of the problem.
Similarly to Sisyphus, we can't do much, we can't change the whole system to stop going to work everyday, we can't trap ourself into our houses just to cry about how everything is so unfair; we can't do much about anything but what we focus on, what we make an effort on
I understand your perspective and its hard to keep up with unjustice of reality. I'm no expert but I think your problem to understand the sisyphus is that you can't help, he can't beg for his torture to stop, he's condemned to eternity. You can't escape, you can't change anything about it, what could you think at that moment? Will you cry, everytime you move that rock uphill, or will you cry when it goes down? I think, you won't cry for eternity, so what will you focus on?
First, "eternity" is not something we need to consider in real life. I get what you mean, but in the end I try to translate the story to real-life hardships.
What people focus on, I think, and it has been said by someone else in this thread, is self-deception. People tend to look for something of value, something to believe in (religion being the big elephant in the room) so they may place the problem outside of themselves. I find it impossible to believe in something when I know it to be untrue. I find it difficult to see value in a universe that is relative. MY whole point/question was "what do you focus on if you are unable to focus on anything?" I wont cry for eternity, but I cried for the past 50 years at least once a day for how unbelievably cruel humans make life to be for each other. And I will probably still will the moment I die, fully aware that my entire existence at that moment was absolutely worthless. As is that of everyone; there is no end goal (that we know of) we all work towards. It being pointless is bad enough, making it unfair for each other only adds insult to injury.
Precisely miss. Imagining happiness in Sisyphus' state is tantamount to self-deception. Camus said so because he felt correctly that Sisyphus experienced the futility and meaninglessness of his endless struggle. However, doing the same thing only to get the same result (-) amounts to an inherent feeling of despair.
Absurdism is a beautiful philosophy, though quite impractical. Existentialism however is a more preferable idea to me. We exist to seek meaning and that is what makes our subjective world meaningful. Camus however failed to realize that embracing the absurd is also a way to seek meaning,and that meaning which is the only essence in absurdism is to preserve one's existence.
Satisfaction in the moment over a job well done despite pain or sorrow, surety about your place in an objective eternity, and focusing on your locus of control
Quantum mechanics and the observer effect may be the closest objective proof that perception shapes how we view the world. The universe quite literally changes based on who is observing it. Perhaps you can apply this to your lived experience.
To only focus your perception on pain, despair, agony, and fear is an act of self-deception, conscious or not. Anyone's lived experience may vary in the amounts of joy vs. pain they feel in a given time period, but denying the existence of all of it is denying yourself the opportunity to tangibly change your reality and thought processes. Like the observer effect, your perception is your lived experience and is objective to you but subjective when perceived by others. Deceiving yourself into only noticing negative experiences is changing your lived experience. Your perception of Sisyphus' circumstances doesn't negate his experience.
Sisyphus may have chosen to deceive himself into a state of positivity, peace, or even just acceptance of his circumstances. Similar to how one might deceive themselves into despair. In my interpretation, he instead shifted his focus and that altered his objective, lived experience. He did not, however, deny the existence of other feelings. He just chose to focus on the others. Whether or not you classify that as self-deception is up to you. In my view, denial would be deception. Denying his potential to shift focus would also be self-deception.
That is not magical thinking when applied to us, our brain physiology physically changes depending on our perceptive focal points.
While we don't have to understand the meaning of the universe or why we even feel that urge in the first place, we can understand human's amazing cognitive flexibilities. This, we can observe and change whether independent or with the help of modern medicine and therapeutic practice.
You don't need to imagine happiness or contradict it with pain, you just experience it. Just because you feel happy for one moment doesn't mean you are denying the existence or potential existence of other emotions.
Great article. We could add a fourth option to nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism: nondualism, which is the realization that meaning is not something to be sought externally but already there, effortlessly, in our being
In summary, Nihilism acknowledges the absence of inherent meaning in life, while Existentialism emphasizes the individual's responsibility to create personal meaning through their choices. Absurdism, on the other hand, highlights the conflict between our quest for meaning and the universe's indifference, urging us to embrace life's absurdity with defiance and integrity, rather than seeking false comfort.. That's inspiring.
I second this. One thing I have noticed with these modern thinkers is that they come from an "outside in" approach. They begin with the world and try to work their way into the mind, but in doing so find an inherent lack of meaning. No duh! The rock means nothing to the rock. The action is actionless without someone to ascribe some kind of meaning or purpose to it. Faith is nonsensical when you begin from a set of atoms as your basis.
Fantastic essay. It’s difficult not to use these terms interchangeably even to describe myself. When I say I’m a Nihilist that connotes hopelessness and ingratitude that I don’t generally experience. When I say I’m an Existentialist, people think I believe the “meaning” I create for myself is the same thing as their Meaning. And most don’t know what Absurdism is. But I agree most with Camus that suicide is the logical choice but to truly embrace the absurd we must choose revolt and live in spite of it. Thanks for writing this; I’ll definitely be restacking.
I loved this piece. I kept getting drawn away from it yesterday but finally finished it this morning. So glad I persisted. I agree with Matt...it really flowed in a way that was really understandable. I am curious what influence Buddhism, especially the concept of non-attachment, may have had on Camus in his Absurdism philosophy?
Great article, loved it. All of these philosophies are ultimately anthropocentric. The life we imagine, our narrative, is certainly absurd, but life itself? The universe? Still just shades of being captured in the reflection of ourselves in the water. All three speak of the need to fill the void with something, the buddhist concept of dukkha. As a naturalist, i find stripped of the supernatural, the philosophy of taoism the best description of reality; the buddhist of the human condition. The three philosophies here are as guilty as the religions they portend to replace of filling the void with a narrative and imagining that particular narrative to be more sophisticated than those of the past though they end up as just another chapter in the narrative itself. Nice try, but mind candy all.
I think these thinkers would disagree with you and accuse you of the same thing.
Sartre does not tell you how to live or what to do with your life (though, granted, his writings are full of personal opinions), but rather what you do does have consequence and does matter: what you do makes up who you are, and there is nothing else that can do this.
Camus says the same thing but embraces an even greater meaninglessness: that not even your actions have any bearing on who you are. Camus says that you can be whatever you want to be, even your past be damned. Sisyphus is happy because... he chooses to be despite everything perceivably negative.
But even the Taoist has desires to reach a certain state of existence... namely, the simplicity and self-sufficiency of the Tao. The Taoist does not decline to view their own existence, for that would be to deny what is. You think that these philosophies over-emphasize one's own existence, but I suspect that this speaks more to your personal views and shortcomings in your own religion than their true ideas.
Great article - very informative. As someone who revels in the freedom I found when I embraced atheism many years ago I think I may enjoy learning more about Absurdism.
Thank you. I wonder what is integrity according to the Absurdists like Camus? You wrote, "We meet the Absurd as it is, without escape, and with integrity, and we maintain the tension of the Absurd in us without turning away."
But Don't we need a philosophical basis/argument for defining "integrity" and if so, then where does that come from? Integrity for one might mean deception while for another it might mean pacifism. Might the arbitary nature of the absurdist conception of integrity make Absurdism absurd?
The other quote from Camus seems to present the same problem; i.e., what is "free?" He said,
“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
What is more free than not eating, for example? What is more free than not thinking? Or one might say that doing whatever comes to mind is freedom. Does that create a better life, gain anything for the Absurdist, over just simply embracing a faith in an ultimate meaning beyond death? For certainly there is and never will be any proof that this is not possible, that death will certainly be the end of consciousness.
From your description of the Absurdist it seems logical to fit him or her under the existentialist umbrella. You wrote "Absurdism on the other hand says that we shouldn’t seek to create our own meaning but we should stare into the face of the Absurd and rebel against this meaninglessness."
Isn't it obvious that this enjoyment of the struggle/the meaninglessness is the very definition of what the existentialist seeks to do? Doesn't the existentialist affirm his or her own creative/intellectual power to find happiness despite the objective meaninglessness? Isn't that Camus's integrity? How can we say that this perspective is NOT meaningful to Camus?
Really well structured article. I've never seen the differences between nihilism, existentialism and absurdism put so succinctly.
Thanks Matt!
An incredible eye opener, thank you so much! Now well into reading the Myth of Sisyphus thanks to your explanations above, and it's directly contributing to my own growing concept of a living philosophy. Great series, please do keep going, thanks!
Ah no way! That's awesome Bruce! Thanks for reading and thanks for the kind words!
Sad boy vs. Bad boy vs. Mad boy
No room for girls, unfortunately we’re actually sane
While I think that absurdism would be a better way of living for me, I find myself acting and behaving as an existentialist. I find it difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy. How can one be happy in misery? How can one be happy in pain, in despair, in agony, in fear.... ? Emotions and feelings are part of our "essence" and to deny them is -so it seems to me- a form of self deception. Can anyone explain to me how to imagine happiness when there is none without resorting to magical thinking?
I think what stops it becoming magical thinking is that it is based in reality. It needs to be a genuine attention to the joy of life around you. It is gratitude. If I was able to lug a massive boulder up a hill every day, I would only have to focus on the true magnificence of the strength of my muscles and I could be quite happy. Imagine how someone in a wheelchair feels about that story? It is all perspective.
The emotions are there, but like the Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment, you don't have to attend to them or dwell in attachment to them. That isn't denying them, it just isn't giving them the centre stage. I think of it like parenting a screaming child. You have to see past the emotional experience to see what is happening for the person underneath. We grow as adults and learn to regulate our emotions (ideally) which isn't the same as suppressing them, it is just giving them their appropriate place.
“There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.”
I took a few months to mull over your reply. I keep coming back to the above quote by John Scalzi. You say "It is all perspective" which can also be translated as "it depends on what you think is important; what your values are" which is just another form of magical thinking (value is a construct).
The problem I have with your reply is that some things are inherently natural (reality/the universe) and other things are made up. If someone suffers you should look at what the cause of that suffering is and if it is caused by "the universe" you could try and help them "changing their perspective". But if the cause is a construct (read: other people) then the only help should be to eliminate the cause. Why would mental abuse be treated anything else than physical abuse?
When you have a fever, a doctor will look for the cause and treat it. If you are depressed, they tell you to learn te live with it. To make Sisyphus happy is to take away his boulder. If you don't, you are just enabling his torturer and are part of the problem.
Similarly to Sisyphus, we can't do much, we can't change the whole system to stop going to work everyday, we can't trap ourself into our houses just to cry about how everything is so unfair; we can't do much about anything but what we focus on, what we make an effort on
I understand your perspective and its hard to keep up with unjustice of reality. I'm no expert but I think your problem to understand the sisyphus is that you can't help, he can't beg for his torture to stop, he's condemned to eternity. You can't escape, you can't change anything about it, what could you think at that moment? Will you cry, everytime you move that rock uphill, or will you cry when it goes down? I think, you won't cry for eternity, so what will you focus on?
First, "eternity" is not something we need to consider in real life. I get what you mean, but in the end I try to translate the story to real-life hardships.
What people focus on, I think, and it has been said by someone else in this thread, is self-deception. People tend to look for something of value, something to believe in (religion being the big elephant in the room) so they may place the problem outside of themselves. I find it impossible to believe in something when I know it to be untrue. I find it difficult to see value in a universe that is relative. MY whole point/question was "what do you focus on if you are unable to focus on anything?" I wont cry for eternity, but I cried for the past 50 years at least once a day for how unbelievably cruel humans make life to be for each other. And I will probably still will the moment I die, fully aware that my entire existence at that moment was absolutely worthless. As is that of everyone; there is no end goal (that we know of) we all work towards. It being pointless is bad enough, making it unfair for each other only adds insult to injury.
Precisely miss. Imagining happiness in Sisyphus' state is tantamount to self-deception. Camus said so because he felt correctly that Sisyphus experienced the futility and meaninglessness of his endless struggle. However, doing the same thing only to get the same result (-) amounts to an inherent feeling of despair.
Absurdism is a beautiful philosophy, though quite impractical. Existentialism however is a more preferable idea to me. We exist to seek meaning and that is what makes our subjective world meaningful. Camus however failed to realize that embracing the absurd is also a way to seek meaning,and that meaning which is the only essence in absurdism is to preserve one's existence.
Satisfaction in the moment over a job well done despite pain or sorrow, surety about your place in an objective eternity, and focusing on your locus of control
Quantum mechanics and the observer effect may be the closest objective proof that perception shapes how we view the world. The universe quite literally changes based on who is observing it. Perhaps you can apply this to your lived experience.
To only focus your perception on pain, despair, agony, and fear is an act of self-deception, conscious or not. Anyone's lived experience may vary in the amounts of joy vs. pain they feel in a given time period, but denying the existence of all of it is denying yourself the opportunity to tangibly change your reality and thought processes. Like the observer effect, your perception is your lived experience and is objective to you but subjective when perceived by others. Deceiving yourself into only noticing negative experiences is changing your lived experience. Your perception of Sisyphus' circumstances doesn't negate his experience.
Sisyphus may have chosen to deceive himself into a state of positivity, peace, or even just acceptance of his circumstances. Similar to how one might deceive themselves into despair. In my interpretation, he instead shifted his focus and that altered his objective, lived experience. He did not, however, deny the existence of other feelings. He just chose to focus on the others. Whether or not you classify that as self-deception is up to you. In my view, denial would be deception. Denying his potential to shift focus would also be self-deception.
That is not magical thinking when applied to us, our brain physiology physically changes depending on our perceptive focal points.
While we don't have to understand the meaning of the universe or why we even feel that urge in the first place, we can understand human's amazing cognitive flexibilities. This, we can observe and change whether independent or with the help of modern medicine and therapeutic practice.
You don't need to imagine happiness or contradict it with pain, you just experience it. Just because you feel happy for one moment doesn't mean you are denying the existence or potential existence of other emotions.
Great article. We could add a fourth option to nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism: nondualism, which is the realization that meaning is not something to be sought externally but already there, effortlessly, in our being
That would be the opposite of the others.
idk why this article just popped up randomly on my feed but i’m happy it did :) thank you so much for this well structured post <3
In summary, Nihilism acknowledges the absence of inherent meaning in life, while Existentialism emphasizes the individual's responsibility to create personal meaning through their choices. Absurdism, on the other hand, highlights the conflict between our quest for meaning and the universe's indifference, urging us to embrace life's absurdity with defiance and integrity, rather than seeking false comfort.. That's inspiring.
"That which is known exists in the knower according to the mode of the knower"
Philosophies are reflections of the philosophers personality/perspective.
To get more wholesome knowledge id recommended hermetic and platonic authors.
Great article though!
I second this. One thing I have noticed with these modern thinkers is that they come from an "outside in" approach. They begin with the world and try to work their way into the mind, but in doing so find an inherent lack of meaning. No duh! The rock means nothing to the rock. The action is actionless without someone to ascribe some kind of meaning or purpose to it. Faith is nonsensical when you begin from a set of atoms as your basis.
Fantastic essay. It’s difficult not to use these terms interchangeably even to describe myself. When I say I’m a Nihilist that connotes hopelessness and ingratitude that I don’t generally experience. When I say I’m an Existentialist, people think I believe the “meaning” I create for myself is the same thing as their Meaning. And most don’t know what Absurdism is. But I agree most with Camus that suicide is the logical choice but to truly embrace the absurd we must choose revolt and live in spite of it. Thanks for writing this; I’ll definitely be restacking.
I loved this piece. I kept getting drawn away from it yesterday but finally finished it this morning. So glad I persisted. I agree with Matt...it really flowed in a way that was really understandable. I am curious what influence Buddhism, especially the concept of non-attachment, may have had on Camus in his Absurdism philosophy?
What stays with me is that both Sartre and Camus saw the same emptiness — they just chose different ways to love it.
Sartre filled it with action.
Camus filled it with awareness.
And maybe that’s the art of being alive: learning when to build meaning and when to simply breathe through the void.
There’s a strange relief in realizing life doesn’t owe us purpose.
It gives us space instead — and that space is freedom. <3
We have philosophy because the dead cannot speak.
Great article, loved it. All of these philosophies are ultimately anthropocentric. The life we imagine, our narrative, is certainly absurd, but life itself? The universe? Still just shades of being captured in the reflection of ourselves in the water. All three speak of the need to fill the void with something, the buddhist concept of dukkha. As a naturalist, i find stripped of the supernatural, the philosophy of taoism the best description of reality; the buddhist of the human condition. The three philosophies here are as guilty as the religions they portend to replace of filling the void with a narrative and imagining that particular narrative to be more sophisticated than those of the past though they end up as just another chapter in the narrative itself. Nice try, but mind candy all.
I think these thinkers would disagree with you and accuse you of the same thing.
Sartre does not tell you how to live or what to do with your life (though, granted, his writings are full of personal opinions), but rather what you do does have consequence and does matter: what you do makes up who you are, and there is nothing else that can do this.
Camus says the same thing but embraces an even greater meaninglessness: that not even your actions have any bearing on who you are. Camus says that you can be whatever you want to be, even your past be damned. Sisyphus is happy because... he chooses to be despite everything perceivably negative.
But even the Taoist has desires to reach a certain state of existence... namely, the simplicity and self-sufficiency of the Tao. The Taoist does not decline to view their own existence, for that would be to deny what is. You think that these philosophies over-emphasize one's own existence, but I suspect that this speaks more to your personal views and shortcomings in your own religion than their true ideas.
Great article - very informative. As someone who revels in the freedom I found when I embraced atheism many years ago I think I may enjoy learning more about Absurdism.
What freedom do you find in atheism?
Thank you. I wonder what is integrity according to the Absurdists like Camus? You wrote, "We meet the Absurd as it is, without escape, and with integrity, and we maintain the tension of the Absurd in us without turning away."
But Don't we need a philosophical basis/argument for defining "integrity" and if so, then where does that come from? Integrity for one might mean deception while for another it might mean pacifism. Might the arbitary nature of the absurdist conception of integrity make Absurdism absurd?
The other quote from Camus seems to present the same problem; i.e., what is "free?" He said,
“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
What is more free than not eating, for example? What is more free than not thinking? Or one might say that doing whatever comes to mind is freedom. Does that create a better life, gain anything for the Absurdist, over just simply embracing a faith in an ultimate meaning beyond death? For certainly there is and never will be any proof that this is not possible, that death will certainly be the end of consciousness.
From your description of the Absurdist it seems logical to fit him or her under the existentialist umbrella. You wrote "Absurdism on the other hand says that we shouldn’t seek to create our own meaning but we should stare into the face of the Absurd and rebel against this meaninglessness."
Isn't it obvious that this enjoyment of the struggle/the meaninglessness is the very definition of what the existentialist seeks to do? Doesn't the existentialist affirm his or her own creative/intellectual power to find happiness despite the objective meaninglessness? Isn't that Camus's integrity? How can we say that this perspective is NOT meaningful to Camus?
Reading this with the satisfied smile of one who has found his people. 🙂