Life Meaning in Albert Camus’s Philosophy Essay (Critical Writing)

Each person determines his or her life’s meaning: Camus’s ideas

The main ideas contained in the assignment where Albert Camus expounds of the issue of life’s absurdity and suicide can be outlined as follows:

1. The absurd derives out of dichotomy between an individual’s inner predisposition to seek logic in a surrounding reality, on one hand, and such reality’s essential pointlessness, one another. Therefore, one’s decision to end its life should be discussed within the context of how he or she strives to defy existence’s absurdist essence: “The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd” (555).
2. The absurdist nature of existence creates a situation when the issue of suicide should be thought of as philosophy’s foremost subject matter.
3. Even though the issue of suicide has traditionally been assessed through socio-political lenses, it makes much more sense to assess it through the lenses of psychology: “Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide” (554).
4. The notion of the absurd cannot be thought of as ‘thing in itself’ – it is only when a particular individual interacts with a surrounding reality that he or she gets to realize the absurdist quintessence of a process: “In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together” (559).
5. Those that consciously chose in favor of suicide position themselves as rebelliously minded individuals (as their suicide defies absurd), which in its turn elevates them above the universe’s pointlessness: “Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme… Suicide settles the absurd” (561).

The closer analysis of Camus’s ideas outlined earlier points out to the fact that they are based on conceptually fallacious assumption as to an absurdist essence of surrounding realities. It never occurred to Camus that, even though there is no classical ‘divine’ sense in the universe’s functioning, the principles of this functioning can be referred to as anything but absurdist. As even today’s moderately intelligent people are being aware of – the history of the universe is the history of an ongoing process of universe’s matter assuming ever-more complex forms, as the ultimate mean of defying the forces of entropy.

Whereas in million years after the Big Bang, there were only two elements in the universe: hydrogen and helium, nowadays, there are hundreds of eighty-two elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table. The organic life itself is an integral element of this process – as time goes by becomes ever more complex. The recent breakthroughs in the fields of biology and informational technology had established objective preconditions for organic life to advance as far as assuming the form of pure intelligence very shortly.

Therefore, it is quite inappropriate to draw a line between the essence of people’s psychological anxieties and the objectively existing universe, as Camus does – as representatives of an evolving Homo Sapiens species, we are not mere spectators of life, we are its agents. Thus, Camus’s subtle glorification of suicide as some kind of a heroic deed should not be perceived as the indication of this particular philosopher’s ‘sophistication’ but rather as an indication of his mental inadequateness – pure and simple.

For some highly irrational reason, the author had assumed the absurdity of life as representing an undeniable truth-value, while expecting readers to uncritically subscribe to such his point of view. Nevertheless, for mentally and physically healthy individuals, endowed with a rationalistic mindset, such Camus’s assumption appears utterly unsubstantiated. This is exactly the reason why, despite the author’s denial of the validity of an application of the sociological approach to dealing with the issue of suicide, it is namely when we properly assess the socio-political preconditions, associated with a high rate of suicide within a particular society, that the true nature of people’s tendency to toy with the thoughts of suicide will become perfectly apparent.

Why is it the case that Gothic/Emo sub-cultures, concerned with savoring different aspects of death, suicide, and decay, had attained such strong popularity among specifically White adolescents? Is it because by affiliating themselves with these sub-cultures White teenagers strive to defy life’s absurdity? The answer to this question is most definitely not.

According to the principle of Occam’s razor, to reveal the actual essence of a particular phenomenon, there is no need to resort to the utilization of complex explanations, for as long as simple ones are available. When we apply Occam’s principle to explain the nature of White ‘sophisticate’ teenagers’ fascination with death, it will become clear that such their fascination simply reflects their lack of existential vitality, which in its turn, reflects an ongoing process of the White race’s disappearance. Whereas at the beginning of the 20^th century Whites accounted for 30% of the world’s population, they now account for only 5%.

Therefore, the very fact that in the second half of the 20^th century the existentialist philosophy had attained immense popularity among Westerners simply reflects these people’s ever-increasing rates of biological degeneracy. Hence – Camus’s idea about suicide as the pathway towards addressing life’s ‘absurdity’ should be referred to as what it is – a mental by-product of his clearly defined existential decadence (one would only need to familiarize itself with Camus’s biography and with his physical appearance, to realize the full validity of an earlier suggestion).

Enough, while writing The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus remained utterly ignorant as to the basic notions of physics, biology, and psychiatry; otherwise, he would never come up with several essentially anti-scientific claims, such as the following: “A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural” (559).

We will dare to disagree – the natural is enjoying life to its fullest because by doing it, we act by the laws of nature. Those who defy these laws suffer consequences. When life becomes devoid of pleasures, or when it becomes the very synonym of pain, then the most natural and human way to deal with a situation would be putting an end to this life – pure and simple. However, given the solely instrumental nature of suicide as the ultimate mean of addressing physical/psychological pain, there can be no ‘philosophy of suicide’ just as there can be no ‘philosophy of driving nails’ or ‘philosophy of brushing teeth’ for example. It never occurred to Camus that emanations of life’s absurdity are not something that can be assessed introspectively, but rather extrovertive.

When a child is born with physical deformities, inconsistent with life, as it is being often the case in families of ‘sophisticate’ Whites, who conceive children when they are 40-45 years old, the absurdity of such a child’s life becomes instantly apparent. Yet, when a particular individual appears physically/mentally healthy and financially secure, his or her life cannot be defined as ‘absurd’ by definition.

The only reason why in Absurdity and Suicide, Camus implies something opposite, is that his very philosophy is a philosophy of someone who had lost the will to live – hence, his suicide-related ‘progressiveness.’ And, as psychologists are being well aware of, mentally inadequate and biologically degenerative individuals, such as Camus, are being quite incapable of rationalizing the applicability of their philosophical insights.

Just as Sigmund Freud, who after having observed the behavior of mental patients for a while, had assumed that the nucleus of normal people’s anxieties cannot be defined by anything else but by their hypertrophied sense of sexuality, Camus had assumed that his incompatibility with life, as essentially a degenerate, is being somehow reflected in the lives of others. Such a suggestion, of course, cannot be referred to as anything but utterly preposterous.

It is only narcissistically minded ‘sophisticates,’ known for their decadent lifestyles, who may find themselves attracted to toying with thoughts of suicide while lacking the courage to end their misery once and for all. Therefore, we hardly have any other option but to refer to the ideas contained in Absurdity and Suicide, as intellectually poisonous. It was not an accident that, while blowing buildings with people inside and while hijacking planes, neo-Marxian terrorists from the sixties and seventies derived ‘inspiration’ out of works of Albert Camus. The practical utilization of Camus’s ‘existentialist’ philosophy was bound to result in producing nothing but death and destruction – it simply could not be otherwise.