The meaning of life, if there is any, is one of the oldest and most profound questions in the history of human civilization. The sheer number of philosophical traditions that attempted to answer it in one way or another suggests there is no easy and evident solution to it. However, as with many philosophical problems, the absence of a clear and obvious answer is part of its allure for the countless thinkers that have reflected on it and continue doing so. Moreover, there is an entire philosophical tradition stating that the search for the meaning of life is senseless because life is, by its very definition, absurd. A prominent proponent of this tradition was Albert Camus, a French philosopher. According to Camus, trying to rationally deduce the meaning of life is a fruitless attempt to cope with its absurdity, yet the sheer fact that life is meaningless does not necessitate surrender to its absurdity.
Generally speaking, the human yearning for meaning comes from the desire for validation and support, which, in turn, rest in the inescapable fact of death. Faced with the reality of having to stop existing at some point, humans are left to invent coping mechanisms, and searching for the meaning of life occupies a prominent place among them. It is not a coincidence that Camus stresses the “finite nature of man” as an important foundation of his philosophical thought (McBride 245). As far as the French philosopher is concerned, people had and will continue trying to find the meaning of life simply because the inescapable reality of their demise is too much to bear. Moreover, apart from death itself, the process of living is also not necessarily pleasant and is often full of suffering and futility (Onwuatuegwu and Arinze 43). Thus, humans need to cope not only with the oppressive understanding of the fact that, no matter what happens, they still die but also with the hardships of life itself. Trying to find a deeper meaning inherent to life is a psychologically necessary response to the reality of living.
For Camus, the search for such meaning as a premeditated element of existence is senseless because life, as experienced by an individual, is always absurd. Absurdity is, in fact, the central concept of Camus’ philosophy and is absolutely essential for understanding his view on the meaning of life. It is important to stress that, for Camus, absurdity is not an inherent characteristic of the world but, rather, the result of how the human mind perceives it. As rational actors, humans seek to find reasonable explanations for the problems they face, but the world itself is too complex and chaotic to be reduced to absolute rational principles (Arinze and Onwuatuegwu 529). Hence, absurdity is “neither a human characteristic nor a quality of the world” (McBride 247). Rather, it is the result of conflict between the humans’ attempts to rationalize their existence and the nature of the world, which denies attempts at such rationalization – a consequence of disparity between the two. Hence, as far as Camus is concerned, there is no and cannot be a meaning of life in the expression’s usual sense – an objective truth that rationalizes human existence.
If human experience is fundamentally absurd, and there is no predetermined meaning of life, the obvious question is what is to be done – and Camus has an answer to that. According to him, once an individual realizes the fundamental absurdity of living, there are three ways of coping with it. The first one is a suicide, since absurdity ends in death, but Camus rejects it as demonstrating weakness and succumbing to the absurd (Onwuatuegwu and Arinze 44). The second one is the leap of faith or the acceptance of the improvable and irrational belief in exchange for the soothing psychological effect it provides. Camus derided it as well and called it “philosophical suicide” because, as far as he was concerned, it negated the fundamental human faculty of reasoning (Onwuatuegwu and Arinze 44). The third solution, and one advocated by Camus himself, is revolt when a person understands the absurdity of life but chooses to resist it. Revolt means accepting the reality of absurd yet stubbornly finding the reasons to live through despite this absurdity – and, for Camus, it is a preferable alternative to the search for the inexistent deeper meaning.
As one can see, the search for the meaning of life is a philosophical pursuit that is fundamentally human but not necessarily productive. Trying to rationalize the world and impose a semblance of order upon it corresponds to the psychological need for justification in the face of life’s suffering and the inescapable death. However, as Camus argues, trying to find rational principles behind the essentially chaotic world can only lead human beings to understand the absurdity of their existence. Since suicide would mean succumbing to this absurdity and the leap of faith sacrifices the fundamental human ability for reasoning, the only feasible alternative is revolting against the absurd. This proposition allows Camus to turn the age-old problem upside down: there is no meaning of life, but life is worth living regardless – if out of sheer spite for the absurdity that surrounds humans.
Works Cited
Arinze, Ambrose T., and Ignatius N. Onwuatuegwu. “The Notion of Absurdity and Meaning of Life in Albert Camus Existentialism.” Open Journal of Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 24, 2020, pp. 528-538.
McBride, William. “Camus.” The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers, edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia, Routledge, 2018, pp. 245-251.
Onwuatuegwu, Ignatius N., and Ambrose T. Arinze. “The Problem of Absurdity and its Solution in Albert Camus Existential Philosophy.” London Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 20, no. 15, pp. 43-45.