Friday, September 25, 2015

Why did Camus Cross the Street? Because this Act was at the Core of His Radical Self and Free From Societal Influence

What is the meaning of life? Nothingness. Randomness. Entropy. Disorder. Chaos.

If Camus is to believed. Yet, I believe that Camus is wrong. I disagree completely with the theories of existentialism.  Existentialism argues that life is random. Death is the only constant and that no societal values (like love, friendship, family, money, success, jobs, etc) actually contribute to the essence of life. Camus explains that to be truly grasp life and to embrace your humanity, you must release all societal values from your grasp. Instead you must realize who you are at your core and embrace your "radical self". You must stop letting any external pressure affect you in any way and instead act on your intrinsic impulses. It preaches that you must reject all "bad faith". It says to achieve this perfect state of humanity, you must be super aware and conscious of these societal values and reject them completely. Yet I think that this act of rejection is intrinsically ignorant and an act brought out by unawareness of one of humanity's most important tendencies; peoples sociability. To accept existentialism is to reject the essence of all other forms of life. Social values did not just come from thin air; they were constructed by other people, by other forms of life. I think that the essence of life cannot be derived from cutting yourself off from the rest of life. I believe that though the essence of life is chaos, chaos is bound to order and that order comes from societal values.

If existentialism and Camus are to be believed, then I don't think there is a meaning to life. After-all, meaning itself is a social construct, and how do you derive meaning from randomness?

2 comments:

  1. I enjoyed reading this

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  2. That's an interesting viewpoint on existentialism Atreya, a very fascinating read.

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