2 Answers

  1. Albert Camus himself sought to make sense of human life (including his own). His works are dedicated to what affects everyone without exception. �Therefore, I will not be mistaken if I say that reading his texts themselves will bring you closer to understanding the author than this answer of mine)

    The core of the views of Albert Camus lies in the work “The Myth of Sisyphus”, written by him in 1942.

    In the text of the essay, the author highlights the absurd as an insurmountable condition of human life. (Absurdity is the absence of a higher purpose for human life, the absence of a higher unified order. The realization of the absurdity of the world leaves a person alone with his own mortality). Camus seeks to understand whether life is worth living in the absurd situation he has discovered.

    “The following pages will deal with the feeling of the absurd, which is found everywhere in our age – a feeling, and not a philosophy of the absurd, which is actually unknown to our time.”

    Camus is convinced that the philosophical tradition is nothing more than a tradition of escape from the absurdity of the world. None of the philosophers could stand a prolonged examination of the absurdity of life, they all tried to escape. And they found their refuge in mysticism, religiosity, or in attempts to explain life and the world through a certain unity (through substance). This cowardice in the face of absurdity can, according to Camus, be easily detected in their well-established and finely honed systems of rational philosophy.

    True courage is not to build shelters for the mind, but to face the absurd boldly and directly. Won't this look destroy you? Won't it break you? (Even if philosophers for centuries have found many ways to avoid contact with the contradiction, with the absurd).

    This is exactly what Albert Camus is concerned about.

    There is only one really serious philosophical problem-the problem of suicide. To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer a fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else – whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind is guided by nine or twelve categories-is secondary. These are the conditions of the game: first of all, you need to give an answer.

    For Camus, any person living in the world is a philosopher (by birthright). After all, all of us by our very life solve the basic, by Camus ' standards, question of philosophy “to be or not to be?”�

    For all the radical way in which the question of suicide is raised, Camus turns out in the essay to be an ardent opponent of this option of escaping the absurd.

    I can consider the notion of absurdity essential and consider it as the first truth. This is how the first rule of the above method arises: if I believe something is true, I must save it. If I intend to solve a problem, then my solution should not destroy one of its sides. Absurdity is the only given for me. The problem is how to get out of it, and also whether suicide is necessarily deduced from the absurd. The first and, in fact, the only condition for my research is to preserve what destroys me, to consistently observe everything that I consider to be the essence of the absurd.

    The attempt to hide in the impregnable tower of pure reason, in religion, and finally in death – all these are ways of rejecting the first and most important truth of human life – its absurdity and inconsistency.

    True life consists in a constant awareness of the contradictory nature of the world, in man's revolt against the totality of the absurd, a revolt that can only end with man himself.

    Suicide is the exact opposite of rebellion, since it presupposes consent. Like a leap, suicide is an acceptance of one's own limits. Everything is finished, man surrenders to the prescribed story; seeing a terrible future ahead of him, he plunges into it. In its own way, suicide is also the solution of the absurd, it makes even death itself absurd. But I know that the condition for the existence of an absurdity is its undecidability. Being both a consciousness of death and a rejection of it, the absurd escapes suicide.

    Suicide, then, is not a rebellion, a challenge, or a final chord in the awareness of the contradictory nature of the world; suicide is an escape and an act of surrender.

    Therefore, knowing about the absurdity of fate, you can live it only if the absurdity is always before your eyes, obvious to consciousness. To reject one of the terms of contradiction in which the absurd lives is to get rid of it. To eliminate conscious rebellion is to circumvent the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus transferred to individual experience. To live is to bring the absurd to life. To bring it to life is to keep your eyes on it.

    Life does not have to have a special meaning to be lived, but it must be a constant contemplation and awakening of the absurd, which, in turn, makes a person brave and determined.

    For Camus, the myth of Sisyphus is an illustration of such a life.

    The gods condemned Sisyphus to lift a huge stone to the top of the mountain, from where this block invariably rolled down. They had reason to believe that there was no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless labor.

    We can only imagine a tense body trying to lift a huge stone, roll it, and climb up the slope with it; we can see the face convulsed, the cheek pressed against the stone, the shoulder holding the clay-covered weight, the foot tripping, the hands lifting the stone again and again with dirt-smeared palms. As a result of long and measured efforts, in space without a sky, in time without a beginning or end, the goal is achieved. Sisyphus watches as, in a matter of moments, the stone rolls down to the base of the mountain, where it will have to be lifted back up to the top. He goes down.

    Camus examines Sisyphus during the pause during which Sisyphus descends to his stone.

    At this time, along with the breath, consciousness returns to him, as inevitable as his calamities. And at every moment, as he descends from the summit to the lair of the gods, he is above his fate. He's harder than his rock.

    The tragedy of the Sisyphus myth is that the hero knows that his actions are useless and purposeless. There's not a shred of hope in him that this can end. After all, if Sisyphus had hoped, his work would no longer be a punishment. The immutability of the situation and circumstances in which Sisyphus finds himself can be compared with the irremediability of the absurdity of the very fact of life, realized at least once by a person.

    Sometimes the descent is full of suffering,but it can also take place in joy. This word is appropriate. I imagine Sisyphus descending to his rock again. In the beginning, there was suffering. When the memory is filled with earthly images, when the desire for happiness becomes unbearable, it happens that sadness comes to the heart of a person: this is the victory of the stone, this is the stone itself. It is too heavy to bear the immense burden of grief.

    Happiness and absurdity, Camus concludes, are products of the same world, the same earth. Happiness and absurdity are one.�

    From the realization and acceptance of the absurd, happiness can be born, but also from the desperate desire for happiness, absurdity arises.

    In the inexorable moment when a person turns around and takes a look at the life he has lived, Sisyphus, returning to the stone, contemplates the incoherent sequence of actions that has become his destiny. It was created by himself, bound together by his memory, and sealed by death. Convinced of the human origin of all that is human, willing to see and knowing that there will be no end to the night, the blind man continues on his way.

    And again the stone rolls down. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain! There is always a burden. But Sisyphus teaches a higher faithfulness that rejects the gods and moves the stones. He also thinks that everything is fine. This universe, henceforth devoid of a master, does not seem to him either barren or insignificant. Every bit of stone, every glimmer of ore on midnight mountain is a world to him. One fight for the top is enough to fill a person's heart. Sisyphus should be imagined as happy.

    So, a person finds himself living, knows about his inevitable mortality, does not find the highest meaning of his own existence. The main tragedy occurs at the moment when he accepted these introductory conditions as irremediable conditions of his life, but only from this tragedy is born the awareness of his own power. Tragedy turns into a life in which there is a place for human happiness.

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  2. Is it hard to understand a person who is no longer alive? I don't think that's possible.
    Is it difficult to understand his literature? This is an interesting question. Technically speaking, his works are quite clear, so there should be no problems.

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