Reading & the Good Life
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Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist, How to Be Yourself, How to Think, and Being in the World, and Condemned to Be Free, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored a broad range of issues from meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence. Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism include: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Who is Albert Camus?
Albert Camus (1913—1960) was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs—at the weather bureau, an automobile-accessory firm, a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as a career. His books include The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and The Rebel. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures in the Western world. Read Part I of our exploration of The Myth of Sisyphus here.
The Myth of Sisyphus (Part II)
Albert Camus is considered the founder of a philosophy known as Absurdism. One of the essential paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy is the notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea that philosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannot escape asking, “What is the meaning of existence?”
Camus writes,
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.
The moment one recognizes absurdity, stresses Camus, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. “But whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question.”
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