Hi Jussi.

I always found the metaphysics (so to speak) in existentialism much more compelling than the ethics. So I basically agree with you.

I’d say you have to take out the “should” when reading anything about our actions in existentialism (despite all of Nietzsche’s scorn against the lies and weaknesses), which sort guts ethics anyway.

Bottom line, I agree with you that

Camus is making no claims about what anyone should do. — Jussi Tennilä

Once we realize the absurd, specific acts are never a “should” (so not really ethical). You can do anything or nothing at any time or all of the time. The sole quasi ethical component is merely realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong.

acting with integrity requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. Only by first regardin the world as valueless and absurd and - Prof Deigh — Jussi Tennilä

Notice he says “requires” and not “should”. I think the practical point is that, when making a value judgement, one has to realize this is being made against an empty abyss. Each judgment needs to be admitted to oneself as ultimately absurd, before proceeding to judge and act anyway. Arguing whether a honking taxi is also a symphony is an exercise in absurdity. But that is because arguing, a human thing, is always arguing with the abyss. So if one chooses to value this above that and that below this, it “requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live.” It requires choice and artifice.

Ultimately calling the existentialist approach to life “ethical” seems to misuse the term ethical to me. It’s not acting ethical to take responsibility for one’s absurd reasoning, it’s just the true nature of authentic acting. In the end, any particular act (murder or self-sacrifice, either/or) is meaningless in itself, beyond good and evil.

Hello Jussi, welcome abroad.

I think professor Deigh didn't actually misunderstand Camus but he put this author in the wrong group or literary current. Everything you explained about Camus is perfect, and I guess Professor Deigh is in the same sense. But he is not an existentialist but a nihilist. Honesty, when I read what professor Deigh thinks about existentialism, precisely here: ...despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. I thought about other authors or thinkers. My opinion is that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky can fit in the 'despair' of choosing the right code of conduct to live.

Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed religious, psychological, and philosophical concerns in his novels. His works explore such themes as suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. These are a real example of existentialist, or a existentialist literature that maybe Deigh was referring to.

I think Camus goes beyong than just that. I agree when you say his work are metaphysical in the sense of the absurdity of the beginning of the world. Furthermore, nihilism is life-denying, so it is not worried about ethical dilemmas or the anxiety of what is the right choice. Camus affirms that life is meaningless, but further declares in the preface “that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.”

My conclusion is that while Camus was looking for 'what is a purpose' of life (nihilism), existentialist authors debate the despair of what should be the proper behavior to follow in a life already produced.

And therefore, i suggest, Prof Deigh may have misunderstood Camus in a pretty drastic way. Am i right? — Jussi Tennilä

Partially. He was indeed a nihilist... But I don't know if we can label his works as true examples of existentialism. I think it is not that drastic. Both concepts seem similar, but they aren't.

As editor of the Parisian daily Combat, the successor of a Resistance newssheet run largely by Camus, he held an independent left-wing position based on the ideals of justice and truth and the belief that all political action must have a solid moral basis. Later, the old-style expediency of both Left and Right brought increasing disillusion, and in 1947 he severed his connection with Combat.

[snip]

As novelist and playwright, moralist and political theorist, Albert Camus after World War II became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world. His writings, which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe, the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of death, accurately reflected the alienation and disillusionment of the postwar intellectual. He is remembered, with Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the existential novel. Though he understood the nihilism of many of his contemporaries, Camus also argued the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation, and justice. In his last works he sketched the outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected the dogmatic aspects of both Christianity and Marxism.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus

Not a moral nihilist at all, but a deeply moral thinker. Perhaps it is not so much John Deigh who misunderstands Camus, as the contributors to this thread.

Interesting. I understood that Camus rejected the idea of inherent moral values or an objective meaning to life, but he didn't deny the possibility of creating subjective meaning and ethical principles. Isn't Camus project crudely one of accepting that life is inherently meaningless and irrational and despite this 'absurdity', individuals can gain a sense of meaning and value through acts of defiance and rebellion against the absurd. Morality might even be one such act.

I don't think I'd say that's his project, exactly. And I agree with -- Camus is no moral nihilist, and is a deeply ethical thinker.

In a rough-and-ready way I'd say sure to your description, but if I want to be more precise I'd say Camus is no nihilist, or at least would want to note distinctions.

I think you're doing a good job of comparing the texts to the summations.

But I very much doubt that the professor misunderstands Camus -- I think what you'll find, as you read more philosophy, is that there is more than one understanding of a text.

Keep at it!

But also remember that summations are meant to help you rather than the prove a point. To prove a point for Camus you'd have to write it in French ;)

Camus is no moral nihilist, and is a deeply ethical thinker. — Moliere

I'm not arguing that Camus isn't an ethical thinker.

This all depends what you understand a nihilist to be. I don't think all versions of nihilism preclude morality. It rejects inherent meaning and morality.

Hence what I wrote:

Camus rejected the idea of inherent moral values or an objective meaning to life, but he didn't deny the possibility of creating subjective meaning and ethical principles. — Tom Storm

This all depends what you understand a nihilist to be. I don't think all versions of nihilism preclude morality. It rejects inherent meaning and morality. — Tom Storm

OK cool. I wanted to note there are distinctions of nihilism, and so in some senses he's no nihilist and in others' he is -- the negative connotation of "nihilist" is mostly what I'm rejecting, at least as a way to say "nihilist" has shades.

But to me it seems Camus is making no claims about what anyone should do. In my reading, Camus is making a metaphysical claim rather than ethical - the world IS absurd, regardless of what anyone thinks.
Everything might seem stable and understandable until all of a sudden:

"Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it
exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers." (Ibid. p 7)

And therefore, i suggest, Prof Deigh may have misunderstood Camus in a pretty drastic way. Am i right? — Jussi Tennilä

Nice OP. I thought everyone had forgotten about Camus since existentialism is so out of fashion. The fear Husserl had that modernism was leading to a loss of meaning, and Heidegger as well in his Concerning Technology essay (and "the they" that rules dasein's inauthenticity), I mean, they did see this coming, the flattening out of human existence to dull interest in "standing reserve" mentality toward the world. But to speak of Heidegger brings up the point you raise regarding the making of an metaphysical claim rather than an ethical one. One could argue that the two are not separable. After all, in The Stranger, Meursault may be indifferent to the affairs around him so important to others, but his indifference put him under the guillotine for murder. Isn't Camus telling us something about ethics: kill and arab, don't kill an arab, who cares? Metaphysical nihilism is after all metaethical nihilism. And it certainly can lead to bad consequences.
Reading his essays, I am struck by the very conceptions of the absurd forged by the prose themselves: Camus is not arguing so much as constructing a rhetorical narrative out of what I would call "terms of despair". It is not an objective work, and one could claim not a metaphysical work either, for it is mostly a vivid exposition of the "mood" of metaphysical dispossession that occurs when one all religious hope is lost. See the way his prose works here:

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

Don't get me wrong, I think his writing is compelling, and he knows how to write persuasively, but what we are witnessing here is more psychological than philosophical.

In my opinion Camus didn't understand our existence very well because he never understood metaethics.

Let's see...

I think I'd make a pretty hard distinction between existentialism and nihilism.

Existentialism is the philosophical response to the necessity of nihilism: given how we've lived meaningful lives before, and given how things have progressed this world feels absurd: the absurd is always an encounter. And absurdism is different from existentialism in that absurdism is a little more specific -- Sartre was no absurdist, so far as I can tell.

Nihilism is something like solipsism, but in the ethical realm -- it's an extreme point that people diverge from in various ways, and few (if any) actually adopt it philosophically (though they may in practice).

Perhaps it is not so much John Deigh who misunderstands Camus, as the contributors to this thread. — unenlightened

I never said Camus was a nihilist. I don’t really even know what nihilism means. I see why people attach nihilism to existentialism, but the existentialists actively resist that attachment and so would I.

You don’t see the absurd without looking for meaning and truth.

And when you find the absurd you don’t forget the truth and meaning of it.

Once we realize the absurd, specific acts are never a “should” (so not really ethical). You can do anything or nothing at any time or all of the time. The sole quasi ethical component is merely realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong. — Fire Ologist

I think "quasi-ethical" is probably where this lies. But then, if one is "doing it right," where is the standard to determine this? Certainly it is not self evident, for there is no "evidential standard" for anything. Nihilism is nothing across the board!

It could be argued that the only evidence there is, is the world itself, and in this world things matter, as in being in love, avoiding guillotines (unlike poor Meursault). and the rest. But how, one asks Camus, does this world's ethics fail to register metaphysically?

Ultimately calling the existentialist approach to life “ethical” seems to misuse the term ethical to me. It’s not acting ethical to take responsibility for one’s absurd reasoning, it’s just the true nature of authentic acting. In the end, any particular act (murder or self-sacrifice, either/or) is meaningless in itself, beyond good and evil. — Fire Ologist

I'd say this is more the nihilist position.

Where I reject Camus is in his answer, but not in his question.

I think "taking responsibility" has a lot of ethical "weight", even if another disagrees with the reasoning -- even if they call it absurd.

The difference is that Camus answers his question, whereas you reject his answer and think everything is meaningless "in itself".

Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. But having now read a lot more philosophy, I think there is a way in which they are very much speaking to a specific historical epoch, whereas when I first read them, it seemed like they should be responses to "all thought up to this groundbreaking point where the Absurd was recognized."

But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy. I don't think there ever was much of a movement that thought what was good was obvious, ethics trivial, or one that believed in any "objective/inherit meaning/value," that stood apart from an agent who knew these things. A certain sort of relativism is sort of the norm in ancient thought, with its disdain for "barbarian ways," whereas something like awareness of the Absurd shows up in ancient literature (e.g. Ecclesiastes is around 450-200BC IIRC).

And that's why I now think of them more as responding to their specific era and the rise of positivism and scientism, which also spurred an anti-modernist fideist backlash in religion as well. From the first you get "in-itselfness," "meaning-of-itself," and objectivity as the gold standard that all knowledge, including moral knowledge, needs to meet. From the second you get the idea that the good is obvious and has been through all history, and cannot be shaped by context.

You also see self-government and self-control morph from being the key thing that you need to be free, to often being seen as a sort of tyranny enforced from the outside. It sort of strikes me that industrialization and the attendant alienation from one's labor, and compulsory education might have something to do with this.

Which is more just commentary on my own initial ignorance. I would have to go back and read them again to see if there is a historical awareness of this in the texts themselves. I've read Nietzsche more recently and I didn't really see it. It seems helpful for a framing of the views though.

And when you find the absurd you don’t forget the truth and meaning of it.

Ha, just so.

realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong. — Fire Ologist

I am painting too stark a picture, even for existentialism, but just to highlight the point.

if one is "doing it right," where is the standard to determine this? — Astrophel

The absurd becomes the standard. If you are doing something without any irony, with absolute certainty instead, without at least a nod to the absurd whatsoever, you are wrong (and so are an example of the absurd, because you would be thinking you found a new standard.)

But this doesn’t leave you with nihilism, nor is it a dogma. Everything is still there as it was, just now you placed yourself, in it, up against it, experiencing it, making the very disconnection you now absurdly endeavor to reconnect, knowing you never will.

You can lean towards the barren side of this bleak picture, and call this leaning “nihilism”, but that is just a leaning. Or you can lean towards you, the subject, in it. The existentialists had real bodies, and never let go of this instinctual being, but facing the predicament that is the human in it, the being with.

This is where the ethical component of existentialism comes in. The OP drew a line between the metaphysical and the ethical components of existentialism, and leaned towards the metaphysical. I’ve been staying on this to highlight the metaphysical backdrop in which existential ethics sits. It has to be an ethics that addresses not only the fact of our reasons and choosing, but also the fact of the absurd.

Again, there is plenty of room left to talk about ethics. But the backdrop, where Dionysian instinct for Nietzsche lives, where either/or matters and matters not the same, the abyss, where existence precedes…, where Sisyphus absurdly climbs again. Precise in its starkness, yet somehow setting the widest stage. I love that stuff.

At this lonely place of separation, you build an ethics of authenticity, something intimately tied to a “self” and need foremost one’s lonely disconnected will, to chose, and only then be ethically.

I think I'd make a pretty hard distinction between existentialism and nihilism.

Existentialism is the philosophical response to the necessity of nihilism: given how we've lived meaningful lives before, and given how things have progressed this world feels absurd: the absurd is always an encounter. And absurdism is different from existentialism in that absurdism is a little more specific -- Sartre was no absurdist, so far as I can tell.

Nihilism is something like solipsism, but in the ethical realm -- it's an extreme point that people diverge from in various ways, and few (if any) actually adopt it philosophically (though they may in practice). — Moliere

This is interesting. Existentialism comes in various forms, including Christian existentialism. But isn't existentialism of the secular variety built upon similar notions as nihilism? The absence of meaning. Nihilism holds that life, existence and reality itself are devoid of inherent meaning, purpose, or value. It rejects the notion of any objective significance or ultimate truth. Existentialism tends to identify same lack of meaning and then moves in to fill the void.

I would often consider myself to be a nihilist. But I don't tend to see this approach as one of destructive apathy, or assertive repudiation, rather a more cheerful springboard to make decisions about what choices you will make and what you will do. I would not consider myself to be an existentialist.

Anyhow, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course (but must visit Hume, Descartes and Locke and Hegel). But if I had to stay local, I’d never want to leave Greece - they tried to describe all the same things we discuss still today, right now, and gave us all the questions we’d ever need.

Nietzsche was a correction after all of that. Needed. He was right.

Reason had become a facade, a monolith, standing in place of everything. Platonic eternal forms more cherished than a cup of coffee - rediculous!

But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy — Count Timothy von Icarus

Never need to leave Greece. Cratylus, Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus..

Existentialism addressed everything. It showed that the sum total of our progress was both a loss, and something new. I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era. Like 500 years from now, when we line up the renaissance, and the enlightenment, through the romantic to the modern, it is existentialism that brought the modern, the era that we are still living today. The internet and digital life may finally bring something new (but post-modernism, like post-existentialism, still refers to the modern, to the existential.)

Most of the famous existentialists demanded they were not relativists or nihilists. With the bleak scene they create it is easy to see why they had to scream so loudly.

It’s hard to describe, but I don’t see the relativism or nihilism. I just see the existential as the stage, the basecamp for being human. It’s necessity and purpose as much as it mingles with nothingness and becoming. The existentialists just were sick of talking about the “truth” of it all because we had so often botched it, lost our sense of what there really was in life to talk about - our disconnection, our predicament wondering what else is there besides these ancient questions.

In the end though, we need more than existentialism to explain who humans are here at basecamp. Existentialism is good stuff, but not enough.

The difference is that Camus answers his question, whereas you reject his answer and think everything is meaningless "in itself". — Moliere

Hmm. I don’t think everything is meaningless. So I’m giving you the wrong impression.

Camus’ answer is that it becomes absurd to seek answers where answers all vanish in the grasping. He allows himself to stop asking the question. I love the question anyway. I see that the answers vanish in the grasping, so absurdity is always lying in waiting, at every step, around every corner, but also that seeing this, knowing absurdity, is now fixed and permanent clear and rational.

Personally I see:
1.absurdity outlines the rational mind that is confounded by it, and,
2.the rational mind creates the conditions for its absurdity,
as the one and the same thing.

One object in opposites united is the meaning.

The absurd, or instinct, is enough to beget all of all that.

Thank you for responding!

The claim I am making here is that Prof Deigh seems to suggest that Camus is making ethical arguments, whereas, to me, he is only stating a metaphysical claim. It seems to me that there is no two ways about it. Prof Deigh explicitly attributes to Camus the argument that to live with integrity, one must make a choice from the absurd perspective. To me it seems Camus is making no such arguments. He simply does not care whether anyone lives with any kind of integrity. Camus does show us how live in moderation and integrity if one has realized the absurdity of it all (in the stranger, the plague and the rebel). But that is not the same as what prof Deigh attributes to him.
Pretty hard for me to see how to read Camus and end up where prof Deigh seems to be. I might be wrong, that's why I asked!

This is interesting. Existentialism comes in various forms, including Christian existentialism. But isn't existentialism of the secular variety built upon similar notions as nihilism? The absence of meaning. Nihilism holds that life, existence and reality itself are devoid of inherent meaning, purpose, or value. It rejects the notion of any objective significance or ultimate truth. Existentialism tends to identify same lack of meaning and then moves in to fill the void. — Tom Storm

Yes, I think there's a dialogue there, but a distinction.

I would often consider myself to be a nihilist. But I don't tend to see this approach as one of destructive apathy, or assertive repudiation, rather a more cheerful springboard to make decisions about what choices you will make and what you will do. I would not consider myself to be an existentialist.

Heh OK fair. I'll eat my words, then, because now that you say this I feel like I know what you mean, but I'd also say this isn't the position I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines that nihilism is the end of value, and value is desired -- a kind of negative nihilism? Basically an extreme position that people wouldn't find attractive, but can serve as a conceptual benchmark.

EDIT: Though I'd still stand by my comment that Camus is no nihilist, I think, even of the sort you put here. I don't think a joyful springboard is what comes to mind when I think of Camus, but more of a resolute hero.

Cool.

You list the novels. But have you read the essay The Myth of Sisyphus? That's where I'd draw from to point out his ethical thinking.

I think I'd put Camus' answer differently. Though perhaps this is part of the disconnect in the conversation between nihilism, existentialism, and ethical or metaphysical thinking.

I'd say Camus answers the absurd with heroism. It doesn't matter which role you take on, but this is still a deeply ethical thought about the world we live in: what do we choose in the absurd world?

The opening of The Myth of Sisyphus...

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that
is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to
answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—
whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind
has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. — Camus

And -- here's a quote from Camus in the preface to The Myth of Sisyphus to back up where I'm coming from:

For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea
which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the
problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of
murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which,
temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary
Europe. The fundamental subject of “The Myth of Sisyphus” is
this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a
meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide
face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in
God, suicide is not legitimate. — Camus

Which also backs up your account -- that these writers are using an old philosophical conceit to write philosophy which is for the times and in response to their times.

My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course

An interesting mix. Plato and Aristotle have a pretty similar vision of the human good, but Nietzsche and Kant's seem very different from each other and from Plato and Aristotle.

I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era

I think this is absolutely true. I would imagine the Nietzsche is the philosopher most read by the general public today, and Sartre and Camus are probably up there. I always check bookstore's philosophy sections just to see what is considered marketable, and the section is generally small (shrinking) with the same few titles. Nietzsche almost always has the most shelf space.

It really seems like the movement came to dominate popular culture and the arts after WWII. And I'd agree that we still seem to be in that era. Although we seem to have hit a sort of second stage where something like Nagel's ironic stance on the Absurd has become more dominant than the deadly seriousness of the earlier era.

The positivism/reductionism that inspired modern existentialism does seem to be cracking up. If scientism is one half of the modern secular "religion/world view," then you'd expect the philosophical side to change when science moves away from reductionism. After all, while you don't need reductionism/smallism to justify the absurdity of the world, the case for its absurdity is often made through appeals to "everything being meaningless particles in the void."

But that view seems to be declining in the sciences, along with the "anti-metaphysical" view, whereas in philosophy proper at least "objectivity" has increasingly been redefined in order to make it coherent, so that it is no longer the "view from nowhere," or a synonym for noumenal and "in-itself."

The other reason for change I see is how the message of existentialism, the drive to "create yourself," has been co-opted into the self-help literature of late stage capitalism, increasingly applied to career success, having a "grindset," side-hustles, etc. This cheapens it and ties it to relatively noxious parts of modern culture and individualism run rampant. Plus, it seems at odds with societies undergoing rapid declined in social mobility.

The other thing is that the increasingly histrionic political/social enviornment seems at odds with the ironic turn of existentialism. The political climate in turn has turned up the volume on identity, and of course much of identity politics seems to tie existence up in essence.

I don't know what comes next though. There is DFW's "post-irony," a sort of new sincerity that looks back prior to the modern era. The science writers turned social critics of our era (Pinker, Rovelli, etc.) tend to put forth a sort of pragmatic liberal neo-enlightenment humanism, but I just don't see it taking off. You might lump Harris in there too.

quote="javi2541997;895669"]despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. I thought about other authors or thinkers. My opinion is that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky can fit in the 'despair' of choosing the right code of conduct to live.[/quote]

I appreciate the way you put this, the despair of choosing. I think to question that defines this unique despair is better expressed Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky than Camus. K and D understand that this is metaphysical despair, and they will not reduce this to psychology. Once one leaves the familiarity of plain events, like Meursault's mundane life that is enjoyed so mundanely (reading The Stranger and the way Camus presents his own values one gets a real feel of disappointment: it is an aesthetically deflationary account of life, not just an intellectually responsible rejection of unearthly spirituality, but a miserable pale abstraction from the fullness of living that spirituality brings, and by spirituality I certainly do not refer to churchy trivialities and religious superficialities. One must think as Emerson did, as he put it:

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.
I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate
between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was
made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies,
the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how
great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations
the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every
night come out these preachers of beauty, and light the universe with
their admonishing smile.

Contrast a passage like this to this one Camus writes in Absurd Walls:

....absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void be-comes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday

Not so much an argument, not a rigorous discursive analysis here. It is an appeal to an "encounter" with the world at the most basic level. And words literally, in the two cases above, construct what this is about. The French are notoriously pessimistic (Baudelaire comes to mind, and his flowers of evil) while Americans have a long history of Christian optimism.

But for the matter to be more carefully presnted, I think your mentioning Kierkegaard is perfect. Not the rosy optimist nor a celebration of despair. But then, not a middle grounder either. There is no sign that K can do what Emerson could do and make a genuine "leap" toward affirmation. But note Emerson is not arguing! Like Camus, he is describing. Both he and Camus do not argue well. For this see Heidegger, who drew from K his description of human existential despair in anxiety. H's salvation comes from art.

Just a few ideas I thought you might find interesting

Again, there is plenty of room left to talk about ethics. But the backdrop, where Dionysian instinct for Nietzsche lives, where either/or matters and matters not the same, the abyss, where existence precedes…, where Sisyphus absurdly climbs again. Precise in its starkness, yet somehow setting the widest stage. I love that stuff.

At this lonely place of separation, you build an ethics of authenticity, something intimately tied to a “self” and need foremost one’s lonely disconnected will, to chose, and only then be ethically. — Fire Ologist

Rather brilliantly put, Ologist. I, too, love this stuff. It is about our existence, and so all that is affirmed or denied has its validity in the "impossible" world that stands outside of language possibilities. Referring to the "metaphysics" of our existence, and this kind of things finds it objective expression in phenomenology.

Here is where I might take issue, where you say,

The OP drew a line between the metaphysical and the ethical components of existentialism, and leaned towards the metaphysical. I’ve been staying on this to highlight the metaphysical backdrop in which existential ethics sits. It has to be an ethics that addresses not only the fact of our reasons and choosing, but also the fact of the absurd.

The metaphysics of the absurd is never a mere factual account because there is nothing absurd about facts. The absurd is essentially bound to value, the caring that there is this foundational indeterminacy in our existence. Why does one care at all? Caring is in the nature of the absurd, I mean, if there is no caring, there is no existential absurd. It is not about some division between the finite and the infinite, phenomena and noumena apart from the caring and valuing IN the friction between these. So as I see it, one has to look at the "fact" of the absurd in a different light, for the concept hangs on affectivity of caring.
And this affectivity of caring is central to ethics, for one cannot imagine ethics without it. As in, one cannot be in an ethical issue regarding the killing of an arab on the beach if one simply does not care at all about killing the arab. Others may be very ethically engaged, but not this on, not Meursault, and this is part of Camus' point. His "metaethics" is an existence without caring, and therefore without the dimension of existence that drives ethics, value. Notice how little his protagonist cares, and how descriptions of his affairs are so lacking in vigor and excitement. This IS what kills the arab.

One has to wonder how the metaphysics of absurdity by its own nature leads to this. Why not have Meursault blissfully engaged in everything? That smile on Sisyphus' face is disingenuous. To me Camus' perspective a reduction to his psychology. It lacks the ethical because the ethical can only survive if it is affirmed in metaphysics, and I think Camus would agree with this. Only Camus was simply a single-dimensioned person. He reminds me of Hemmingway, and going darker still, Baudelaire. javi2541997;895669 rightly brings in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. But it is not the objective fact of the absurd in play here, but the proposition that values, as Wittgenstein put, have no value (and Witt was a very interesting person. Passionate, like these others. He aligned with Kierkegaard in affirmation. Value has no value because one cannot SAY what value IS. Not because the world as such was absent of "value" like Camus).

I guess I am saying that the metaphysics cannot be removed from the ethics. The question then is, if one is pursuing this, what does the "presence" of value-in-the-world mean? Wittgenstein aside, value is, after all, IN the world.

Thank you for your answer, Astrophel. It is a pleasure to have exchanges with you. :smile: And yes, I find your ideas interesting.

It is very strange how some people consider Kierkegaard a nihilist. When I read this OP, I decided to search for information to back up my points, and surprisingly, Kierkegaard appeared as an example of a nihilist. Very disappointed with this! I think K was a lover but pessimistic about how Christianity was ruling in Denmark. In his diary, K confessed he was a true Lutheran. If he was that religious and a believer in faith, how could some people label him as a nihilist? For a nihilist, life is meaningless and there is no despair about choosing the right decision because everything is pretty absurd (as Camus points out).

On the other hand, I personally believe that a true nihilist doesn't recognize the existence of a sacred authority. For example, the quote of 'without God, everything is permitted' by Vania Karamazov. This phrase is wrongly connected to nihilism, but what Dostoevsky goes beyond just that.

Indeed, if the loss of God means the loss of all meaning and value, then actions are without meaning or value either, and one cannot say that it matters whether actions are "right" or "wrong," since those words, or the corresponding actions, don't mean anything more than anything else. Dostoyevsky, indeed, may be counted as himself an Existentialist, but in a theistic rather than the French atheistic manner,

https://friesian.com/existent.htm

Every character of Dostoevsky is Christian, but often display what later will seem to be Existentialist attitudes and ideas. The main concerns explore such themes as suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems. Christian Themes in Crime and Punishment.

What I attempt to say is that while K and D are true existentialists for dealing with ethical dilemmas, Camus is a nihilist because he doesn't bother to debate about this issue. :smile:

You list the novels. But have you read the essay The Myth of Sisyphus? That's where I'd draw from to point out his ethical thinking. — Moliere

I have, and the rebel is no novel either.

It is very strange how some people consider Kierkegaard a nihilist. When I read this OP, I decided to search for information to back up my points, and surprisingly, Kierkegaard appeared as an example of a nihilist. Very disappointed with this! I think K was a lover but pessimistic about how Christianity was ruling in Denmark. In his diary, K confessed he was a true Lutheran. If he was that religious and a believer in faith, how could some people label him as a nihilist? For a nihilist, life is meaningless and there is no despair about choosing the right decision because everything is pretty absurd (as Camus points out). — javi2541997

One of the basic tenets of Christianity has always been that the world is essentially evil. Buddhists think like this as well if you accept suffering as evil. I don't know of any other way to define evil than this. Most want to reserve the term for describing behavior, but then, it begs the question, what is it about bad behavior that makes it evil? One has to then turn to the world and its human and animal afflictions. But the concept of evil in the biblical sense raises suffering to metaphysics. Our familiar term of things being merely bad seems without controversy, but call it evil, and we are taken into a new order of things. This is Moby Dick's Ahab's world---recall how it is not the white whale that is the object of Ahab's revenge, but what lies behind it, the unnamable source that is being itself that belongs to eternity.

I bring this up so as to identify the nature of metaphysical nihilism. Ahab was not a nihilist, for he affirmed the meta-status of our familiar term, the (aesthetic/ethical) bad. He blamed God; after all, the whale that embodies the evil was God's color (in standard thinking), white, and the sea is abyssal, like eternity. Were Ahab an ethical nihilist, he would have just gone for a swim, for the ocean is just water and there is no higher order of things. But what of the leg viciously torn off? How can the nihilist simply ignore this dimension of human existence? Ahab was right to complain. It is Camus who misses the point: One CANNOT be this kind of nihilist that Camus boasts about, because this is not a genuine response to the fundamental problematic of our existence. We are thrown into existence to suffer and die and this comes to us in an interpretative vacuum, to hang in space without a peg. One, I argue, has to look very close at this, because it is there to find that suffering INSISTS on a remedy with the same doxastic insistence one finds in logic, apodicticity, that is, the necessity of a metaphysical remedy. This is something even Kierkegaard does not argue.

On the other hand, I personally believe that a true nihilist doesn't recognize the existence of a sacred authority. For example, the quote of 'without God, everything is permitted' by Vania Karamazov. This phrase is wrongly connected to nihilism, but what Dostoevsky goes beyond just that. — javi2541997

I agree. Philosophical nihilism refers to the absence of an absolute in our visible affairs. This not only is compatible with metaphysical ethical affirmation, it is the basis for validating such affirmation. Only in the presence of the world's miseries do we discover the need to overcome.(Of course, Camus adores this kind of rationalization, which seems to him blatantly indefensible.)

What I attempt to say is that while K and D are true existentialists for dealing with ethical dilemmas, Camus is a nihilist because he doesn't bother to debate about this issue. — javi2541997

Well, the reason the word existentialism caught on lies where Kierkegaard responded to Hegel by saying the latter had, in his radical rationalism, forgotten that one exists, thereby turning all attention to the distance between reason and the world. See how this is so well played out in Sartre's Nausea in which the world of existing things are set loose from the meanings we have about them. The world is not bound to logical necessity. It CAN do anything, and logic wouldn't blink.

Camus falls in line here. There is nothing rational about our existence. because existence is not rational. One is confronted by the question, is ethics rational in its essence? Kierkegaard said yes to this. They both, he and Camus, look to the world and one's existence in it.

M'kay. And my bad on calling The Rebel a novel. You're better read than I in that case.

I have read The Myth of Sisyphus a lot though.

I suppose that's why I'd say he's more than a metaphysical thinker -- based on that reading.

it begs the question, what is it about bad behavior that makes it evil? — Astrophel

Yes. Basically, what I learnt by reading those authors is that bad behaviour doesn't mean anything in the beginning. I mean, when someone is acting with bad manners or not accordingly, he is not aware of these actions. When only he is pushed to a trial of the soul, he realises if he acted or not with evil. If ever someone decides to act unethically on purpose, this means he has a huge problem because he cannot distinguish between good and evil. Nonetheless, most of the dilemmas are not that simple. I understand that most people don't want to act with bad manners, but each specific case has its exceptions. This reminds me when we debated about how a chain of bad behaviour can putrid my soul. We can agree or not that a spirit either exists or not, but if we care about these concerns and dilemmas, it means we care about life, and then we give it a meaning or a value. We are not nihilists, but existentialists. Kierkegaard argues that Abraham is his hero because he had a strong dilemma with choosing between he cared the most: his son and God. This despair and anxiety is a good example of an existentialist dilemma!

One is confronted by the question, is ethics rational in its essence? Kierkegaard said yes to this. — Astrophel

Absolutely, yes. I agree.