Episode 18, Albert Camus (Part II)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2017
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All the reading can be found at www.thepanpsycast.com! Please tweet us your thoughts at www.twitter.com/thepanpsycast. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is perhaps the most read philosopher of the 20th century. Camus is generally considered to be the father of absurdism, the idea that life's meaning is beyond our reach and that we should embrace what he called the absurd. Given the extraordinary number of people that have read Camus' work, it is no surprise that he is one of the most romanticised philosophers to have lived. In this two-part special on Camus, we're going to be asking questions like; Who was Albert Camus? Is life worth living? What is the absurd? And How should we deal with the absurd? Part I. The Life of Camus (04:20), Part II. The Absurd (16:40), Part III. Camus' Response to the Absurd (00:10 in Part II), Part IV. Further Analysis and Discussion (15:25 in Part II). Make sure you've subscribed to us on iTunes to get new episodes as and when they're released! Thank you, we hope you enjoy the episode!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan |
| 0:02.0 | Pan |
| 0:03.0 | Psychats |
| 0:05.0 | Part |
| 0:06.0 | Part |
| 0:07.0 | What is What is Kamu'sing to the absurd. Our inquiry question, what is Camus' response to the absurdity of life? |
| 0:26.2 | So in part two, we recognise that we shouldn't end our lives physically, and we shouldn't end our lives philosophically. |
| 0:32.5 | So what was Alba Camus's solution to the absurd? |
| 0:34.8 | Well, he requires us to imagine Sisyphus as smiling as he's |
| 0:40.3 | pushing the boulder up the hill. Now, that seems like a pretty weird sight, wouldn't it? |
| 0:45.4 | This guy condemned to pushing a boulder up for infinity and doing the same mindless task |
| 0:51.2 | over and over again. But one of the things that the gods do not condemning him to do is to enjoy the process. |
| 0:58.3 | I guess they want it to be a punishment, and you could view your life as a |
| 1:02.9 | endless punishment of your own existence. |
| 1:06.0 | But Camus challenges you to say, right, okay, so it is absurd. There is this tension between yourself and this |
| 1:14.6 | unrelenting, meaningless existence that is there. But you have to try and embrace this, and you have to |
| 1:21.5 | try and enjoy it. And that ultimately is about finding the things that you authentically enjoy doing and embracing those as fully as you can do until you die, because there is literally nothing to life other than that. |
| 1:35.2 | And the key word there is embracing, isn't it, the idea that you cannot help your absurd position. You can't change it. There's nothing you can do about it. But what you can do in terms of your cosmic circumstance, you can't change. You're in a, you're in a universe which is indifferent to |
| 1:49.1 | you at best. But you can embrace that absurdness and almost use that as a kind of, as a kind of energy, |
| 1:55.2 | can't you, to kind of almost make the best of your situation? Yeah, it's sometimes referred to as |
| 1:59.8 | like a revolt against the way life |
| 2:02.9 | is and that, yeah, I kind of like looking at it that way. You have to do almost a bit of |
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