Albert Camus, who was a French-Algerian journalist, columnist, novelist, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, created the idea of the absurd, as Ms. Raglin said. As defined by Aronson, absurdity is the “paradoxical situation…between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer.” This arises from the desire of humans for “clarity and transcendence on the one hand and a cosmos that offers nothing of the kind on the other…we inhabit a world that is indifferent to our sufferings and deaf to our protests,” as written by Simpson. If it is meaningless to find the meaning of life when it is impossible to find out, why not commit suicide? Camus would argue the ‘solution’ of suicide is absurd within itself; instead we should embrace the absurdity of our existence.
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Albert Camus rejected the term “existentialist” when used to describe him, since he often thought existentialists contradicted themselves. Aronson also notes one of Camus’ greatest works, The Myth of Sisyphus, was actually written against existentialists, namely Shestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Camus was different from these philosophers, although he did agree life was absurd in the grand scheme of things, but he resists utter hopelessness; instead, we should endure and embrace that our lives are
Albert Camus rejected the term “existentialist” when used to describe him, since he often thought existentialists contradicted themselves. Aronson also notes one of Camus’ greatest works, The Myth of Sisyphus, was actually written against existentialists, namely Shestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Camus was different from these philosophers, although he did agree life was absurd in the grand scheme of things, but he resists utter hopelessness; instead, we should endure and embrace that our lives are