If nothing matters then Camus's revolt doesn't matter either.
The Myth of Sisyphus is pleb shit for morons. People say it changed their life and you ask how and they say 'Just gives me this feeling of, like woah, things are strange but I'm heroic for, like, putting up with it'
Give reasons why 1. His revolt is of any worth/importance and not equally meaningless 2. Why we must imagine sisyphus happy and 3. In what real-world non abstract bs way this essay is life changing
pro le tip: you can't
Cosmogramma is excellent.
The Myth of Sisyphus isn't about his revolt having any kind of worth or value, it's about coming to terms with the inherent meaningless of a fundamentally meaningless and absurd existence.
The essay tries to tell you that, despite it being impossible for life to be anything but chaotic and random, we can avoid having to either 1. taking a Kierkgaardian leap of faith or 2. kill ourselves by accepting absurdity and essentially going with it.
We imagine Sisyphus happy because he can accept absurdity and find pleasure in life, even if he doesn't believe it has any salient purpose. That's how the essay is life changing, it is a manifesto for personal agency and self determination in a godless, meaningless universe.
Give reasons why (...) we must imagine sisyphus happy
You would know if you've understood the actual essay you dipshit
if his revolt has zero value/worth why would bring it up, why would he add it to the essay?
Sisyphus accepting his absurdity is essentially him not fleeing from what is actually going on, this is the fundamental idea of absurdism, taking reasoning about why to live to the very end, this is what Camus gives himself a pat on the back for. If life has no purpose, fine, but accepting those conditions gives zero reason why one would enjoy it, let alone pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity. That is nothing but heroic sentimentality as far as i can see.
and you would know why there is good reason to be skeptical about it if you decided to read it with some thought
He revolted because he wanted to (despite acknowledging it as a pointless gesture), and that agency is the source of his happiness. The essay evokes an idea similar to Sartre's radical freedom.
which has zero application in real life, which should go under the same criticism that he does to everything else in order not to 'commit philosophical suicide' but clearly doesn't and which is just posturing
What does have application to real life, i your eyes?
rubbing my dick
People who read philosophy like a self-help book are never going to get anything out if it.
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No, you don't understand. Remember when Don hallucinated his father on the porch berating him and calling him a "bullshit farmer"? That's the source of Don's existential dread. That what he's dedicated his life to doesn't matter, that's he's nothing but a professional liar with a fancier title. He feels unfulfilled because he serves no meaningful purpose or greater good. He decides that what he does has meaning after hearing that one guy's monologue about dreaming that he's an item in the refrigerator that his family passes over. This speech is meant to personify the products Don sells as being grateful for his service. Just like the abused child Dick Whitman, these products want to be wanted and are powerless to make it so. But with Don's help they are seen for the beautiful unique creations they are. And that's how he finds inner peace: he realizes that he's not a prostitute or a bullshit farmer or a meaningless ad man. He's a miracle worker who helps people see the value in things that they would otherwise gloss over
But is that really agency? Isn't that him just playing into his own enslavement and attempting to recontextualize it as freedom?
And I'm going to re-echo the original poster's concerns. Why is accepting absurdity better than suicide or taking the leap of faith? Aren't all three options equally absurd if any choice we make is absurd? If all choices are equally absurd can we really argue that one is preferable to the other? Even if you argue that asserting his agency in this way makes him happy - isn't happiness just as absurd as sadness or despair? Can we then claim that happiness is a preferable motivation?
Flying Lotus makes great music but the guy is a complete fucking idiot.
i don't even like that album that much, i like the artwork though
Within the context of a religious structure yes (see Paradise Lost for a fantastic exploration of this idea) but given that the existentialist viewpoint is an atheistic one (unless you are following Kierkegaard) it is freedom within the bounds of our own humanity, accepting the lifespan that entails.
Whether ways of dealing with these things are 'better' than one another is entirely auxiliary to the point which Camus makes. Kierkegaard suggests that a leap of faith is the ONLY thing that a person can take to overcome existential angst, whereas Sisyphus is the argument that we can overcome it without what he would have seen as self deception. You're correct that all choices are equally absurd, Camus just wants us to accept that there is a decision in the first place.
Shit i got the tags the wrong way around just read the response that makes sense to the given question
>If nothing matters then Camus's revolt doesn't matter either.
Camus is a bit of a joke, I'll give you that, but you are a full blown moron.
>If nothing matters then Camus's revolt doesn't matter either.
this is a perfectly valid criticism. If he's continually coming to the conclusion that nothing matters then putting up some heroic front and revolt by shaking a fist at the universe even though it isn't listening is quite clearly assigning far too much importance to a life he's deemed meaningless. it's very simple... at least to some
But Camus never asserts nothing matters. In fact Camus believes many things to matter. His arguments may be unfounded but who you are trying to critique is not Camus.
>"the Absurd" refers to the conflict between (1) the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and (2) the human inability to find any.
absurdism is rooted in life having no intrinsic value or meaning. This is a view of his. How can you argue he views life as mattering when he thinks it has zero intrinsic value. What is the big distinction between no value or meaning and not mattering?
Not who you're replying to, but Absurdism is about humans being unable to find meaning - this does not mean meaning does not exist.
being unable to find meaning is coming to the conclusion that there is no meaning based on your best reasoning. The only difference is he leaves out the possibility that there is some meaning which is inaccessible to us. How is that any different than fundamentally no meaning considering this line of questioning/problems is contained only for humans
how so?
I saw Flying Lotus a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn't want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, "Oh, like you're doing now?" I was taken aback, and all I could say was "Huh?" but he kept cutting me off and going "huh? huh? huh?" and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw FlyLo trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like "Sir, you need to pay for those first." At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started SCANNING it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually "to prevent any electrical infetterence," and then turned around and winked at me. I don't even think that's a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
ebin
Because at no point does he conclude or claim "being unable to find meaning = there being no meaning"
That is why he is able to still believe in some intrinsic meaning, because of this difference between the two.
I can certainly see where you are coming from though. But in the end, the inductive leap from the inability to find meaning to there being no meaning is no different from the leap to assuming meaning.
Implying FlyLo's candy of choice would be milky way
how could he possibly believe that humans are unable to find intrinsic meaning and then still believe in some intrinsic meaning unless he is not a human. You simply haven't got a point.
Camus was absolutely never interested in just playing with words and abstracting for the sake of winning a point, the essay is about the real world application of his ideas which I've argued have plenty of flaws and which I'm not seeing any rebuttal to.
Even if I grant you your point which is just pettifogging, let me ask the question with a different, more specific set of words which mean the exact same thing in this context.
If Camus believes that life has no intrinsic value, this includes every aspect of life, which then contains his revolt. Why is it that his revolt is not subject to this philosophical scrutiny that he's been going on about again and again which is needed in order to not commit philosophical suicide
4u
>camus's revolt doesn't matter either
That's what the revolt is about. Nothing has meaning, and so you revolt against life and keep trying to find meaning, even though your own revolt has no meaning.
That's why he used the Myth of Sisyphus. It's a neverending, futile task, but Sisyphus still does it because "fuck it, i have nothing to lose and nothing to win".
sisyphus still does it because he has to do it.
nothing has meaning so therefore you rebel against it and try to find meaning even though you know there isn't any.
Why on earth is this a step which makes a lick of sense, especially to someone who claims to make such a big deal out of not committing philosophical suicide
Absurdism is not nihilism, friendo.
There may be meaning out there but the chances of man finding it are astronomically remote. Choosing to try anyway is romantically appealing.
this is essentially nihilism. There are likely no serious nihilists who say it is absolutely impossible that there is meaning in the same way that atheists don't think it is absolutely impossible that there is a god and so on. They believe based on their best reason that there is none but not absolutely objectively because you can't be sure this isn't a simulation and all sorts of shit. It's the same thing
It's agnostic nihilism.
that was a quick change of mind
Amen
wrong.
life is absurd because we are trying to find meaning in a world that can not give it to us. the separation of our striving and the inherent meaningless of existence is the absurd
Agreed, Camus is absolute pleb tier. That the contrary is argued is beyond me.
wow dude.
Still think it should've ended with his suicide. The entire series was building to it.
>come to terms with a fundamental lack of meaning
>But you better do it on MY terms. Don't kill yourself or be an exploitive prick because that is cheating and you don't want to be butthole
>Only one down payment of 39.95 to learn the secrets of becoming the Absurd Hero!
shaking my head
Why do nihilists think they can prescribe moral doctrine anyway? If your ontology is that there is no meaning or at least your epistemology is that meaning is fundamentally intractible then you have effectively deplatformed yourself. I don't need to take any of your ideas as mere sophistries or even just opinions holding no real weight.
as anything more than*
All his shit is free online and he makes better arguments for his own philosophy in The Plague and The Rebel.
I was just making a joke but I'd rather not read any of it. Claiming that there is no fundamental meaning does not support any kind of conclusions about how people should live ideally. Beyond his ontology his philosophy is a complete non-starter.
>Why do nihilists think they can prescribe moral doctrine anyway?
Moral nihilists don't
The accuracy of a speaker's ideas isn't dependent on his character or lack of hypocrisy
The argument that there is no inherent meaning beyond that which you apply isn't refuted if you hypothetically accept the argument and choose not to apply value to it
This. Existentialists don't get to just claim they are not nihilists and have it be so. A teleology cannot subsume the category which necessarily contains it. Therefore a condition of "subjective meaning" cannot hope to have any relevance beyond a purely practical meaning for the individual. All of this only amounts to an optimistic form of nihilism. In the case of Camus (whose stance is epistemological) it still remains a practical nihilism.
tl;dr
I got a bit tired out with The stranger, it just pissed me off.
At least Sarte in 'Nausea' gives a go at some sort of meaningful end.
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How is he wrong?
Camel is an idiot