When next you meet an existentialist, ask him what kind of existentialist s/he is. There are at least as many varieties of existentialism as there have been high-profile thinkers propounding it. Several major strains ran through postwar France alone, most famously those championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus — who explicitly rejected existentialism, in part due to a philosophical split with Sartre, but who nevertheless gets categorized among the existentialists today. We could, perhaps, more accurately describe Camus as an absurdist, a thinker who starts with the inherent meaningless and futility of life and proceeds, not necessarily in an obvious direction, from there.
The animated TED-Ed lesson above sheds light on the historical events and personal experiences that brought Camus to this worldview. Beginning in the troubled colonial Algeria of the early 20th-century in which he was born and raised, educator Nina Medvinskaya goes on to tell of his periods as a resistance journalist in France and as a novelist, in which capacity he would write such enduring works as The Stranger and The Plague. Medvinskaya illuminates Camus’ central insight with a well-known image from his earlier essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” on the Greek king condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity.
“Camus argues that all of humanity is in the same position,” says Medvinskaya, “and only when we accept the meaninglessness of our lives can we face the absurd with our heads held high.” But “Camus’ contemporaries weren’t so accepting of futility.” (Here the Quentin Blake-style illustrations portray a couple of figures bearing a strong resemblance to Sartre and de Beauvoir.) Many existentialists “advocated for violent revolution to upend systems they believed were depriving people of agency and purpose.” Such calls haven’t gone silent in 2020, just as The Plague — one of Camus’ writings in response to revolutionary existentialism — has only gained relevance in a time of global pandemic.
Last month the Boston Review’s Carmen Lea Dege considered the recent comeback of the thought, exemplified in different ways by Camus, Sartre, and others, that “rejected religious and political dogma, expressed scorn for academic abstraction, and focused on the finitude and absurdity of human existence.” This resurgence of interest “is not entirely surprising. The body of work we now think of as existentialist emerged during the first half of the twentieth century in conflict-ridden Germany and France, where uncertainty permeated every dimension of society.” As much as our societies have changed since then, uncertainty has a way of returning.
Today “we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history.” But the existentialists argued that “this control is illusory and deceptive,” an “alluring distraction from our own fragility” that ultimately “corrodes our ability to live well.” For the existentialists, pursuit of good life first demands an acceptance of not just fragility but futility, meaninglessness, absurdity, and ambiguity, among other conditions that strike us as deeply unacceptable. As Camus put it, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. But can we?
Related Content:
The Absurd Philosophy of Albert Camus Presented in a Short Animated Film by Alain De Botton
The Meaning of Life According to Simone de Beauvoir
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Jean Paul Sartre is thé father of Existialism as an humanism , not Camus.Sartre,a free Martin Heddehger have profess this subjet.Camus is an littéraire is thé autour of “l’ homme absurd” and thé complex of eadip”.
Camus Also have a book ” thé myth of sysiph.
I m very fascinated by Albert Camus’ philosophical concept of absurd. I wish you could supply us with more other interesting vidoes
I think the absurdity of life is parallel with the ‘absurdity’ of God. Since He is unique and unknowable, it goes without saying that the absurdity that we see is just something we fail to comprehend as human beings, where in actuality everything in life is perfectly set up in order the way it is. I believe we are all Sisyphus, and if you can imagine him being happy, then you too can imagine yourself being happy in this paradoxical world.
But when you’re young it’s so much fun watching the huge stone roll down the hill. You sit at the top and giggle. When you’re old you sit at the top to catch your breath. And then maybe a little giggle!!
Nice article, AWFUL BAIT TITLE. I know you correct it in the first paragraph but that is just misleading and wrong. Absurdism IS NOT a type of existentialism and introducing it to people in this fashion is as deceitful as the rest of the content marketing we see everywhere.
Well put.
His first book I read was Outsider. Last month I finished reading The Plague. He is very objective in his writings
Some of the lines in The Plague are very beautiful which are very much relevant to pandemic time. Some those lines I write below.
Our life has reduced to same dull rounds inside our own town. We are in exile in our own home. We are drifting through life rather than living. Loveless world is a dead world and there comes a time when we crave for warm and wonder of a loving heart. His quote I like most-
Being happy doesn’t mean everything is perfect but it means you have started looking beyond imperfections