If he doesn’t, then it’s obvious why he could not be the source of life’s ultimate meaning. It certainly seems to provide comfort to many people, but this could not amount to genuine meaning for Camus because it involves an illusion. He says, “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” He was haunted by this question of whether suicide could be the only rational response to the absurdity of life.īut why did he think life was inherently without meaning? Don’t people find meaning in many different ways? What would be the point of living if you thought that life was absurd, that it could never have meaning? This is precisely the question that Camus asks in his famous work, The Myth of Sisyphus. Appropriately, then, his philosophical view was called (existentialist) absurdism. He thought that life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning.
His answer was perhaps a little depressing. Many people believe that the most fundamental philosophical problem is this: what is the meaning of existence? That’s a question that Albert Camus dug into in his novels, plays, and essays.
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