Since I’ll soon be a guest on Joseph Folley’s Unsolicited Advice podcast and he is organizing a reading group on Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus this month, I figured it would be a great idea to revisit one of my earliest philosophy articles that I published in the Journal of Camus Studies.
Veit, W. (2018). Existential Nihilism: The Only Really Serious Philosophical Problem. Journal of Camus Studies 2018, 211-236. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26965.24804 [Download]
My goal was simple. While Camus is usually seen as the least philosophical among the existentialists - more a novelist than a philosopher - I argued that he is, in fact, more philosophically rigorous than his existentialist brethren, and that his arguments are compatible with more analytic and naturalistic philosophy.
The article grew out of an essay I wrote during a semester abroad in a seminar on existentialism at the University of Helsinki, through the EU’s Erasmus programme. I was especially grateful for this opportunity, as it was the first and only class in continental philosophy I took during my entire philosophical education. While many universities in Germany are historically oriented and offer plenty of classes on continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the like, the University of Bayreuth, where I completed my undergraduate studies, was entirely analytically oriented. But, of course, like most undergraduates studying philosophy much of what I had read before going to university was not work in the analytic canon. And while I am usually seen as an analytical philosopher today, I hope to have made clear in my essay on the end of analytical philosophy that I do not consider myself as such, instead categorizing myself as a naturalistic philosopher.
The End of Analytic Philosophy
A few years ago, while I was pursuing my PhD at the University of Sydney, the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright wrote a provocative blog post titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. It painted a bleak and rather depressing picture of the field and its capacity to make progress.
Naturalistic philosophers, I pointed out in the essay, are often more appreciative of continental philosophy and other traditions, such as Asian philosophy, as seen in attempts to naturalize Nietzsche and Buddhism (see for instance the work of Brian Leiter for the former and Owen Flanagan for the latter). And it is no different here.
If we look at the world through the lens of science - one governed by physical laws and biological regularities - there does not appear to be any role for purpose or meaning in a cosmic sense. While we might value certain life projects, this does not mean that they are objectively meaningful or that there is some true, authentic way in which life should be lived. Yet, we strive for this deeper meaning in a meaningless world, which Albert Camus diagnosed as the Absurd condition of our existence.
As an atheist naturalist philosopher, that message struck a chord with me - doubly so in my formative years, when I was asking myself what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. What matters? What should I do? Is this life path enough to be happy? Add to that the cold, dark winter months of Helsinki, and I joined many other Finns in suffering from seasonal affective disorder. One could hardly be in a better state to write about existential nihilism. I even watched Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty during this time, which could hardly be more nihilistic shows, and even ended up making it into my article.
Unlike other existentialists who sought to escape life’s meaninglessness, Camus faced it head-on, urging us to live in spite of it, committing neither actual nor philosophical suicide. If you want to learn more about Camus’ solution to the “only really serious philosophical problem” please take a look at my article.
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