Throughout the novel "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, he shows a lot of his existentialist philosophy. In particular, he emphasizes the absurdity of life, especially in the last chapter. When Meursault is yelling at the chaplain, he repeatedly says that nothing really matters. He also says that the chaplain was " living like a dead man"(120). Because the chaplain accepted the social construct that is religion, we was not a radical subject and thus he may as well not be alive because he was living like a dead man.
But, just because someone accepts a social construct and lives by it, does that mean that they lead a life not worth living. According to Camus, yes. But, I have trouble agreeing with this view on life. These social constructs often serve useful purposes in society and were created by other people. And, since humans are social creatures, why can we not use ideas that were thought of by others? Why must we act purely on our own thought? If, for example, people did not use the ideas of others in physics or any other science, we would be nowhere in terms of our technological progress because each person would have to repeat the work of the last, and no actual forward progress would be made. So, it seems silly to arbitrarily say that we can't use others ideas for societal creations.
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