Tag Archives: albert camus

In a World Without Meaning, Why Live? – Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”

In my attempt to rebuild my philosophy from the ground up, I examined the most fundamental of questions: suicide. Per Camus, suicide is the most important philosophical question and thus I decided to read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and that is the book that will be analyzed/explained first.

Absurd Life

So I know this isn’t truly starting at “the big” question of whether humans actually exist, but for the sake of argument, we must assume that humans do in fact exist in the physical sense. I’m sorry Descartes (and to some extent Hume), but musing over those questions, while great for keeping one up at night, will get me nowhere in my search for a new value system. Thus I will start with a few basic assumptions, nothing more:

  1. Humans exist in a physical form
  2. Death is a real thing and, although the definition is debatable, there is a distinction between life and death (sorry Lanza)
  3. Humans have some sort of free will
  4. There is no god (This one is debatable but, I have written answers to The Kalām Cosmological Argument, twice, The Fine Tuning Argument, twice, and The Transcendental Argument, among others)

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Nietzsche, The Fear of Death, and Life Affirmation

As much as I respect Friedrich Nietzsche, the interpretation of his works on the inevitability of suffering and the affirmation thereof are, more often than not, fundamentally flawed and present a view of the world and of humanity’s attitudes toward death that is not only ahistorical, but antithetical to Nietzsche’s concept of life affirmation.

Now before I begin, we need to understand two view points. The first being Nietzsche’s (and contemporary’s) idea that suffering is inevitable and trying to change that fact is merely a denial of life, and the second being historical views towards suffering and death.

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