Absurdism

Absurdism is Camus's name for his own philosophy, which he preferred over existentialism: the clash between the human longing for meaning and a silent, indifferent universe. Per sartre-camus-thecollector (TheCollector, T4), the article distinguishes it from nihilism — where nihilism reads the absence of meaning as a reason to give up, absurdism reads it as a reason to keep living regardless.

Camus's figure for this is the myth of Sisyphus: by accepting his endless, pointless task, Sisyphus rises above his fate rather than being crushed by it — "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Camus shared existentialism's atheism and its relational view of the self with Sartre, but drew the opposite political conclusion from it: a social reformism built on non-violence, open dialogue, and attention to the present rather than a utopian future, set out at length against revolutionary violence in The Rebel (1951).

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albert-camus · jean-paul-sartre · existentialism · nihilism · sartre-camus-thecollector