Is Camus the worst popular philosopher ever?

I don't get you guys. Even he admitted not to be a philosopher, he just proposes a way to struggle with existential problems. His books helped me a lot when a teenager and I still see the effect he did at me nowadays.

Camus is not and never was a philosopher. He's an author. His writing is informed by philosophy, and at times he tackles philosophy directly (Sisyphus) but that doesn't make him a "philosopher" any more than someone like DFW is a "philosopher".

He doesn't value leaps of faith, he considers them cowardly and therefore bad. If he doesn't care about living honesty with absurdity, then he is saying literally nothing at all beyond "God is dead nihilism is true"

>because we can have objectives
Absurdity as a concept is about the arbitrariness of all human projects colliding with how seriously we take our projects. Having objectives is one of the premises.

And if everything he says is "obvious" then there you go.

The existential problem he's setting up is false (Is/Ought is a much better starting point for nihilism than lol cosmos), a sixteen year old is capable of doing everything he does, and he basically tells you to live your life in a way that's rebellious, ironic, and cool (for no good reason). It's trash.

You're a tard. Camus basically confronts the issue of meaning in a modernizing, post-WW1 society that was becoming increasingly nihilist. As an absurdist, he thinks that humans should create their own meaning. If you want that meaning to be God or morality, good for you.

>As an absurdist, he thinks that humans should create their own meaning
First, Nietzche did this earlier, and second, Camus does not think this. Camus thinks people should accept the absurdity of their existence and not try to rationalize it away by giving weight to their projects, rather humans should realize their projects are arbitrary and treat them ironically, forging on in life out of scorn for death and fate.

He has no decent reason for saying any of this. Literally "be a rebellious hedonist because it's cool."

>what is historical context
Camus was very relevant in a world that was shocked by the World Wars, the realization that life is not rational and that their lives are in the hands of the whims of anonymous governments.

It might not seem like a big deal to someone who already lived through modernity and has gone through the necessary teen angst phase, but this came as a shock for a society just coming away from Romanticism

You do know that Camus is mainly a novelist and not a philosopher, right? He never claims to be expressing anything groundbreaking.

>should realize their projects are arbitrary and treat them ironically
You won't be able to quote him on that asspull
>because it's cool."
That's only you tacking this on him because of the posing pics
Congratulations on being equally superficial I guess

Worst popular philosopher is Coehlo. He isn't even one, yet he's seen as the second coming of Christ.

He wrote philosophy, whether he was novelist first or second, and his novels are largely philosophical fiction. His philosophy was complete garbage, regardless of his talent as a novelist. If history needed an apologist for the possibility of surviving atheism and nihilism, it had several before him.

>You won't be able to quote him on that asspull
Read Don Juanism. Hell, read all of the absurd man, he speaks very disparagingly of Christians and people living with "screens".

He gives no decent reasons for why it is better to, like Sisyphus, scorn fate and struggle courageously against the absurd universe. He's channeling an appeal to something noble or badass in it, and it's not a stretch to read his stuff and believe he thought he was cool. Honestly, it isn't far from bragging.

I ain't mad because i expected you to say it.

Anybody else think that the reason contrarians hate Camus is because he's a Chad?

>Chad
No, you aren't the only person to think that, but leave this board if you use that word

>using stock tropes and terms to describe a certain type of person is bad
You know this is the Literature board, right? Give me one word that would fit better in that context.

normia
*normie
:D

Normie != Chad

>hate Camus is because he's attractive and fucks lots of women
Keep your /r9k/ and PUA terminology where it belongs please.

Solomon did it first and best with Ecclesiastes.

>stop using this slang term for a long description!
>muh r9k PUA boogeyman
>virtue-signaling this hard
Kindly fuck off back to plebbit

The French were the original /r/atheists.

I'm not a leftist, but the cancerous faggotry where you call yourselves beta males needs to stay where it belongs.

Get rekt

Historical context, mostly. He wrote for a world where an order that had existed for hundreds of years was permanently changed. The kind of detatched acceptance Camus advocated probably resonated pretty deeply with that society.

Of course, now we read "we must conclude Sisyphus is happy" and think "muh edge." Existentialism is so ingrained in society we already get it without the need for arguments, so it seems like he was a pseud that contributed nothing.

LMAO don't listen to these homos, here's what you oughta do.

So, L'myth de Sisyphe was your favorite book (as of now) but you want to expand your mind, right? Well the best (and literally only philosopher you need) is:

albert camus

that's right! And his philosophy bears the most 'coherent' and 'sound' (no, not music-sound you PLEBE (he-he, this is what Veeky Forums uses!(the rest of Veeky Forums uses NIGGER but we use PLEBE))) name:

abusrdism

so, that should cover love-of-wisdom (I speak Koine Greek, this is what φιλοσοφία (= philosophy)) means!
:)

Are you sincere?

No existentialists believe there is provably meaning in human existence. Absurdism says that meaning does not provably exist or fail to exist. This is basic shit that you don't understand because you are a failure and will always be a failure. Please leave this board forever

His philosophy is great if you are handsome

Kek nice one

This doesn't change anything. Thinking morality may or may not exist is practically indistinguishable from thinking it doesn't, and doesn't change what absurdism is or that Camus fails to use appropriate logic at any point in his writings

>And yet he's popular here
How could you get the idea anyone on this board likes Camus? Every time he's brought up, a bunch of shitposters come out of the woodwork to talk about how incompetent he was.

No it is not at all the same as thinking it doesn't. You posit that Camus may as well be a nihilist and then complain when he isn't but by doing this you miss the whole argument. It is the crux of his work and you don't understand it so you are obviously not worth talking to about the subject.

Tell me what his argument is, and how absurdism being a demand for evidence rather than a determinate negation is integral to it.

Derrida is the worst by far. He is 99% obscurantism, except when promoting his boring progressivism. When he's doing that, he's suddenly completely clear and straightforward

Ater Nietzsche philosophy in general became dopey as fuck. You can't just start positing teleology out of nowhere. You have to establish an ontological model and proceed methodically from there.

I find the reason so many atheists have trouble considering teleology is because they assume that because of the language used in it, to them, implies a weird ontology when it doesn't. Teleology does not require (though there are systems that have it) the establishing of any sort of different ontology. If you read the early modern virtue ethicists this is made very clear.

well maybe not a different one but you have to proceed from some sort of model of reality and you need to be explicit that you are doing so.

This could be said of literally everything, there is no reason to single out teleology for this criticism.

no that's just my point. A rigorous philosophical framework will be comprehensive and internally consistent. If you decide to have a go at aesthetics or ethics or anything without thoroughly establishing your premises then you'll be relegated to sophistry.

The sam harris special

Reminder that this is what a Camus acolyte actually sounds like

I think he meant to compare him to the detritus left over from punching a piece of paper.

I don't think you understood his argument. You can for instance accept Moral Subjectivism and moral absolutes (they dont have to be absolutes but this is the more difficult to defend position) at the same time. The difference is you take up the responsibility for those absolutes rather than relying on something else.

The meta-ethical position changes, but the normative doesn't.

>existentialism is so ingrained in our society

and that is lamentable

If I do history it implies and requires a set of metaphysical beliefs. I personally don't have to be a metaphysician and a historian. I am relying on metaphysical beliefs as set out in metaphysics and preciously because of this I don't have to reference that in the works themselves. Again what you are saying is applicable to everything ever, there is no reason to single out teleology.

I don't even really understand what you are on about. You thought that teleology implies a certain sort of metaphysics. I said it doesn't have to. You said it needs to be based in something. Yes it does. We are both in agreement here.

he is entry level, and i leave it at that.

many a drunken nights were spent talking to friends or strangers about our cursory understanding of his thoughts.

other philosophers, more thinkers than writers of prose really, ascended farther out into their logic

I am only pointing out the tradition of philosophers to build a comprehensive system of thought as Plato and Kant and Nietzsche all did. Since the turn of the century philosophy has been moving further and further away from this sort of rigour.

Well firstly this is because philosophy is now too big. It is impossible to know very much because of how much there is to know. This is literally why specialization happens. To be broad only means what you know lacks depth. The other reason is that with the rise of instant communication and modern academia we don't need to write enormous tomes of our theory of everything. It's far more efficient to write much shorter things on very specific points.

>further and further away from this sort of rigor.
It's the exact opposite. It's in the pursuit of rigor that people have moved away from it.

The last 100 years have been immense for the growth of philosophy. To say that philosophy became shit after Nietzsche only makes me suspect you don't know very much about 20th century philosophy.
I don't mean to sound condescending but this is what your posts indicate to me.

lol. sophistry yes, philosophy no. pedantry is not rigor.

it is not that philosophy advanced, it is now simply collapsing under its own bloated weight. modern philosophy is self-contained, and self-referential. a dead end

Hell, I don't take offense. To be precise, I don't know very much about philosophy in general. I do however recognize the failing of Camus' thought is to reconcile his epistemological nihilism with the moralizing that comes later.

but then they aren't absolutes. you're conscious that you are subjectively imposing them if you take responsibility for them

If you find him fraudulent, you must've never read a single Derrida-tier actual charaltan with no matter hidden behind the enormous obscurantism

But guess you're like 19, first discovered him and got upset because you prefer regular nihilism

You think you're smarter than Camus?

I think Camus is a wonderful writer and a man whose not really trying to create an academic philosophy, but rather just solidify some themes to his works. If you're looking at him from some kind of metaphysic, you'll obviously be disappointed, because he clearly rejects the epistemology behind it, like in beautiful passages like this:

>And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste.
These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall
I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will
give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach
me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they
are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you
teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and
that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to
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continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate
around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you
have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant?
You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends
up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a
work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand
of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I
realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for
all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not
know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that
teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach men but that are not sure. A
stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as
soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to
know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its
assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring
into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal
renunciations.

Obviously this will trigger every analytic here, but what he's trying to explain is the sheer phenomena of our total uncertainty to life - which creates that feeling of the absurd when it meets with our demands for one. I think that what he's saying isn't groundbreaking in the slightest, he's talking about a common theme with no real solution that many writers and poets and some philosophers have seen, but that only makes it seem more and more like a clear case to me.

u have not read camus

He's good to read if you're bummed out about being alive. The Rebel is a fun retrospective too. His contribution is simple language expression of thoughts many others obfuscated with fancy and technical language. Kind of the fuck you, you know what I'm saying presentation of philosophy.

You have not read Hume, Nietszche, or any earlier existentialist

that was Nietzche

is that Norm Johnson speaking?

fuck off

>L'myth de Sisyphe
wat

Camus wasn't a philosopher, he was a novelist.

I think Campus was a great writer. He triggers sperglords, which is always a good sign, and people also always forget what a brilliant and entertaining killer whale he was at SeaWorld.

Haven't you ever seen badly spelt French before?