Is Camus right in his idea about Philosophical suicide and that the atheist path is the authentic one? — Ross Campbell

Assuming that the world is inherently meaningless, It does seem more honest to aknowledge that fact about the world than to invent stuff to satisfy a desire for meaning that isn't there in the world.

Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

He was an existentialist, so I don't know if he wanted everybody to accept his idea of the absurd... maybe that would be arrogant. But purely as a description, I think the term philosophical suicide works, because if you start believing in something metaphysical because you want meaning, you are essentially giving up on trying to make sense of the world that you see with reason.... which is what philosophy is essentially.

Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

But it isn't that person's authentic meaning, it's an off-the-shelf, prepackaged meaning that someone else thought up. To that extent, it is philosophical suicide: you are killing your authentic self in preference for an inauthentic one.

If a person wants to "believe" (guess) there is a GOD...and that guess brings the person comfort and contentment in some measure...why would that be an "inauthentic" path? Why would "believing" (guessing) there are no gods be "authentic?"

Why would guessing in either direction be more authentic than simply acknowledging that one does not know if there is a GOD (are gods) or if there are none...and that the probability of either direction cannot be determined?

Honestly...suggesting to either element that their guesses are "philosophical suicide" is more than just arrogant...it is absurd.

Is Camus right in his idea about Philosophical suicide and that the atheist path is the authentic one? Is belief in a religion or some secular ideology a type of avoiding asking life's fundamental questions. It's a refusal to acknowledge that the world is meaningless and indifferent yet humans continually try to find meaning. My view is that Camus's solution would not work for many people including those who are religious. Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

Ignorance is bliss you mean? Because that's what the sense of meaning in religion gives you. You are ignoring to think about the world and life authentically and without filters in order to feel content with a meaning that has been given to you by others, not yourself.

My view is that Camus's solution would not work for many people including those who are religious. — Ross Campbell

He was an existentialist, so I don't know if he wanted everybody to accept his idea of the absurd... maybe that would be arrogant. — ChatteringMonkey

If a person wants to "believe" (guess) there is a GOD...and that guess brings the person comfort and contentment in some measure...why would that be an "inauthentic" path? — Frank Apisa

All his life Camus claimed he didn't believe in God and his opposition to Christianity was also permanent.
He didn't believe in God because he thought it was a fictitious and purely escapist solution to the problem of the absurdity of existence. He didn't believe in Christianity because its rejection of the world favoured the belief in a universal guilt which was contrary to its paganising vitalism.

Like any person with more or less firm convictions, he believed in what he was saying, and it seemed to him that his opponents were wrong. Otherwise he would be a sceptic and Camus was not.


But he was never a fierce rival to his opponents. He gave some talks for believers and distanced himself from the atheists of his time because he found them too belligerent.When he said this he must have been thinking of his number one enemy Sartre, who was a militant atheist.

But it isn't that person's authentic meaning, it's an off-the-shelf, prepackaged meaning that someone else thought up. — Kenosha Kid

Your authentic self similarly would be off-the-shelf and prepackaged to many many others.

Religion offers a golden stamp of validity to many subjective notions. Whatever path you take to arrive at them and then act upon them, would be your authentic self. Equivalently for non religious belief sets.


By accepting religion, you are prescribing to a dogmatic set of rules. These can't be arrived at rationally by any other means except for them being "just so".
In this respect, it's absolutely philosophical suicide as you are killing the opportunity for further discussion and logical conclusion on these points.

Your authentic self similarly would be off-the-shelf and prepackaged to many many others. — Risk

It might seem so, if you authentically arrive at a common position. But many many others is irrelevant. That's kind of the point of authenticity: you don't let others override your true self.

Religion offers a golden stamp of validity to many subjective notions. Whatever path you take to arrive at them and then act upon them, would be your authentic self. — Risk

No it wouldn't. It would be accepting someone else's meaning. Unless you happen to arrive independently at the conclusion that, say, the world was made in six days by a benevolent creator who believed knowledge was a sin so bad that you and all your offspring inherit it and the only way out is for that creator to send himself to be murdered by us -- which is a bit of a stretch -- then you're foregoing your own freedom to create meaning for yourself and wholesale buying into someone else's.

By accepting religion, you are prescribing to a dogmatic set of rules. These can't be arrived at rationally by any other means except for them being "just so". — Risk

But there's nothing stopping you arriving at a set of rules that overlaps with a given religion's. The golden rule, for instance, is as accessible to each of us. You don't have to accept the entirety of a creation myth, dodgy history lesson, outdated local laws, etc. to figure out that out rationally.

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It's been a long time since I read The Myth Of Sisyphus--back in high school I think it was. I don't recall all the detail. However, I do remember Camus trying to pass an argument suggesting that the logic of life recommends being an actor. The tendentiousness of this line of reasoning always felt egregious and the conclusion silly.

if you authentically arrive at a common position — Kenosha Kid

The many is incredibly relevant. What I'm eluding to is that non of your ideas were arrived at independently in a different sense to those who follow religion. Unless you were somehow not exposed to academia or society as a whole, you were influenced into a set of beliefs.

You are just defining pre-packaged purely on the number of others who prescribe to it. Whereas your life view is somehow arrived at by you and you alone. I think that seems like the stretch.

The golden rule is a fantastic example of a "just-so" rule. I saw someone else put up a damming argument resolving around raising children to be Christian when you are not a Christian. The golden rule has no logical basis.

You're clearly setting up a false dichotomy in which an entire package must be subscribed to or else every view you have be utterly novel. That isn't the case. There is a world of difference between considering many different ideas, whatever their source, and selecting the ones you personally feel are right and subscribing wholesale to a pre-established mythos, pseudo-history and morality. I can have three eggs. It's not a choice between the whole dozen or none.

I'm not and apologise if you think I'm intellectually dishonest in it. I don't perceive religious dogma as an entire package. I don't believe all religious beliefs are a full package, people tend to pick and choose but based on a predetermined structure. Similarly to other sets of beliefs that don't come as full package but are chosen from a set of learned academic ideologies.

I'm attempting to highlight the death of discussion when you boil things down to a "just-so" axiom which is where Camus came from, at least in my interpretation. Atheism is one way to ensure this non suicide when it comes to religious based views but I don't think it is the only example of philosophical suicide. I would extend it to believing in any universal system. Ironically still applying to the belief that there is no universal system.

the logic of life recommends being an actor. — Tommy

Film or television?

It strikes me as quite right. One cannot choose not to choose, and hence not to act. Even choosing to do nothing is choosing an action.

Given that this is Camus, probably theater. But this is actually what Camus meant, that one should not commit suicide because the logic of life suggests that you should be a performer, an actor. Not in a vague sense like an entity with agency or something. Literally like a reads-lines-for-a-living actor. To be fair, if I remember correctly, his general argument is that the logic of life suggests that one should have as much experience as possible. He concludes that, as an actor, one is able to derive the most experience possible as a human.

Really someone should double-check my statements, it's been years since I've read the book. But that's how I remember it.

Someone might take on Christianity as their rock, choosing to be happy pushing it every day?

It's more a direction of fit. Let's oppose two views. In the first, meaning is discovered in the world by examining it. In the second, the world is without meaning, but meaning can be imposed on it.

Someone who takes to the second view will look on those who take to the first view as pretending that the world has meaning. They would be seen as imposing their meaning one the world, but this would actually be just posturing. The world is inherently meaningless, but there are those who, inauthenticity, pretend otherwise.

That's how Camas sees religion.

Might it be open for a religious person to agree that the world is inherently without meaning, and yet choose to impose their particular brand of religion on the world? The Knight of Faith, perhaps. I don't see how this could be done without losing coherence.

...someone should double-check my statements, — Tommy

Here you go, then: The Myth of Sisyphus.

Hmmm, I remember the book being a tad longer than two pages...

The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays

Of course The Plague would be far more apt for present consideration.

I thought Camus was trying to re-frame the questions concerning belief. The assertion that his view is a solution of some kind does not fit with the exhaustion expressed about the conversation.
I thought we were in the still pissed off stage where the previously offered solutions all sucked.

I do remember Camus trying to pass an argument suggesting that the logic of life recommends being an actor. The tendentiousness of this line of reasoning always felt egregious and the conclusion silly. — Tommy

Camus liked to provoke. In the midst of a depressive phase, at the end of his life, he even said that the only two things that deserved him respect in life were football and theatre. Forced to explain himself, he said he was passionate about football because of its spirit of cooperation and respect for the opposite. (I think football today would make him want to vomit.) And theatre because it recreated an ideal life that allowed him to escape from the absurd. Paradoxically, he said that the life of theatre seemed to him to be the only real one. Not very coherent for someone who had criticized the ideologies of escape. But I have said that it was very worn out.

More seriously, he was always a defender of a vital hedonism that respected the rights of others. He wasn't always consistent in this, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone. It is this hedonism that led him to defend that by assuming the absurdity, the lack of meaning in life, one can also be happy. The Myth of Sisyphus ends with an image that caused astonishment and forced him to write The Rebel: Sisyphus, happy in the exhausting and inexhaustible task of carrying his rock for nothing.

By the way, he didn't consider himself an existentialist and I don't think he was. Rather, he was one of the last humanists.

I don't perceive religious dogma as an entire package. — Risk

Dogma is a package: a set of incontrovertibly true principles according to an authority. Which bits people choose to adhere to, yes, not so strict. Okay, split the difference: a substantial chunk thereof. More so than can be accounted for by "Those were just the individual values she settled upon".

There is an extent to which this is not even philosophical suicide but philosophical infanticide: most people who hold strong religious beliefs were indoctrinated as children. I suppose it depends whether you consider the choices when faced with evidence against as real choices. Obviously being raised in a faith is a strong bias toward that faith that a lifetime atheist will never know or fully appreciate. That said, one in twelve turn away from the religion of their parents, so there's some element of choosing the package.

This isn't unique to religion, by the way. It's only because the thread is about religion that that came up. The same goes for any ideology where you identify yourself according to a pre-existing set of morals and beliefs, including Sartre's communism.

Religion as texts, are open to interpretation in many different ways using many different cultural sub-contexts. Similarly with all systems of belief it is an ambiguous set of principles that generally only excludes things, leaving the available set of principles infinite.

A set of values picked from the religious set, is no more or less authentic than those arrived at without religious precedent. Both are concluded at by the individual, through their life experience and their learning.

I'm not sure what basis you could possibly argue that they are somehow less authentic purely because there may be a seemingly large intersection with other peoples values? (hence the importance of the many I mentioned before)

I'm not sure what basis you could possibly argue that they are somehow less authentic purely because there may be a seemingly large intersection with other peoples values? (hence the importance of the many I mentioned before) — Risk

Because they are not derived from experience and consideration, but rather a pre-existing dogma of a religion that you're overwhelmingly likely to have inherited.

My view is that Camus's solution would not work for many people including those who are religious. Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

I would attempt to convince them (if they are rational) that you don't need ultimate meaning or purpose to enjoy your life. Also the false hope and meaning that religion gives you is like opium (alluding to Marx).

It's an interesting and quite relevant argument.

Finding out there's a door in a room full of complex puzzles you previously thought you were trapped in shouldn't fizzle your interest in them. In fact, it makes them interesting. To solve or even fail with a chuckle instead of a soulless stare of futility.

Anything can be used a crutch. Even an able body. Just something to think about.

Of course The Plague would be far more apt for present consideration. — Banno

:rofl:

For thousands of years millions of people in all civilizations have found belief in God and religion satisfied a natural spirit need that human beings have. Many original and brilliant thinkers had religious belief eg. Einstein, Newton, Aristotle and many others. I don't agree with Camus therefore that it's philosophical suicide to hold such beliefs as long as you still retain an open and enquiring mind and not allow it to become dogmatic. There are different kinds of religious believers those who are dogmatic and intolerant of opposing views and those who are tolerant of differing views. In my view Camus's view is a typical intellectuals reaction against commonly held belief systems of humanity labelling them as "Philosophical suicide".

I think Camus places the issue of suicide in the foreground because of Dostoevsky's influence.The theme of suicide in Dostoevsky was a central piece in his relentless struggle against atheism and socialism. This theme was typified by Kirilov, a relevant character in The Devils. I have never understood Kirilov's tangled reasons for suicide. Perhaps the unusual complication of his thinking made him famous.

Camus is more elementary. Suicide is a possibility for an absurd mind. It is brought about by the despair of a meaningless life.

Anyway, they both sound like literary figures. Actual suicides kill themselves without any speculative complications. They kill themselves because they can't live. The reasons, if any, come later. The absence of God, his silence, the search for Paradise or the absurd. Or that Daisy doesn't love me.

Dostoevsky was puzzled by the suicide of a young Christian. Finally, Camus found that suicide by absurdity was wrong. But these things doesn't stop us from discussing his theories of suicide. Perhaps we want to discuss Dostoevsky's anti-theism and the meaning of life and not suicide, really.

Is belief in a religion or some secular ideology a type of avoiding asking life's fundamental questions. It's a refusal to acknowledge that the world is meaningless and indifferent yet humans continually try to find meaning. — Ross Campbell

I believe that one can still believe and subscribe to Albert Camus's views in The Myth of Sisyphus and still belong to a religion or secular ideology. I think his statement that believing in aspects of these beliefs and avoiding asking life's fundamental questions is an extreme statement. Most existential Christians, for example, believe that life is meaningless unless they 'make' meaning through their belief and subscription to their God/savior. So, life is meaningless unless you direct some of your attention and meaning to what God prescribes (referencing the book of the Bible Ecclesiastes here - this is the conclusion of that book). Nietzsche and Camus both argue, and have the view, that although life is meaningless, one has the opportunity to push back on this absurdity and create their own meaning in their life and the experiences in which they will endure.

My view is that Camus's solution would not work for many people including those who are religious. Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

But what if an atheist goes through philosophical suicide, tabula rasa, and then begins to come toward this aforementioned view that life is meaningless and then 'makes' their own meaning to the fact that life is meaningless unless one acts within their God prescriptions? I bring forth this question because Camus states that one makes their own meaning once they decide to live, this is the entire point of him saying that we must rebel against the absurd and not let it win, which would result in us committing suicide or living with absolutely no meaning (referencing from the rebellion part of The Myth of Sisyphus).

Ignorance is bliss you mean? Because that's what the sense of meaning in religion gives you. You are ignoring to think about the world and life authentically and without filters to feel content with a meaning that has been given to you by others, not yourself. — Christoffer

One can still have a sense of meaning in religion if they 'make' their own meaning post-philosophical suicide, which is what Albert Camus prescribes in The Myth of Sisyphus. He wants his readers to 'rebel' against the absurd and to 'make up' their own personal meaning, even though in reality there is no meaning to life. So, just because someone may have a sense of meaning in religion, there is still a possibility that that person found this sense post-philosophical suicide and after the fact that in reality, they believe there is no meaning. But for comfort and for the sake of 'making' their own meaning, they subscribe to some prescriptions that religion gives them. Also, what about doing this makes this person be thinking 'non-authentically' as you have stated?

Anyway, thanks for your quote and insight. Even though I don't agree, I love hearing others' opinions, especially about this wonderful work from Camus.