In Which I Rant About Albert Camus

This will be unhinged

With all due respect, you're such a fantastic moron. What are you talking about? It's so painful. It's so painful to listen to this idiocy. Please stop displaying your imbecility. Don't put on public display that you're a moron, at least have the self possession to shut up. At least have some humility. You have no idea what you're talking about, it's just so embarrassing.

—Norman Finkelstein

A brief note: this article is partly satirical. Thus, some of the sentiments that I describe will be played up for comedic effect. They’re thus like the gospels—there’s some underlying sentiment, but through repeated oral transmission (better than anal transmission) they got embellished over time.

There’s a stereotype of the philosophy nerd, amplified by social media, that’s rather common in my generation. This is a person who spends a lot of time musing about the meaning of life, declares that life is absurd so you just have to live it, and makes endless jokes about imagining Sisyphus happy. Such people wear turtlenecks or dress fashionably in some other way and probably went through a Nietzsche phase wherein they were seduced by Nietzsche’s bad arguments but generic edginess before they realized that Camus is the way, the truth, and the light.

I hate these people.

This is irrational. We all have our interests. Some people like making a mockery out of philosophy by making it seem like it’s just people amorphously musing about ill-formed questions. Some people enjoy reading Camus, others like other things. There’s nothing especially vicious about these people, no great sin they committed beyond liking something that irks me.

Nonetheless, I want these people to die! I’d take avid readers of Mein Kampf over avid readers of Camus. I most understand infernalists about hell when I hear people use the analogy of Sisyphus to make a point they think is profound while wearing a tweed jacket and turtle neck.

There’s something perhaps pathological about my hatred of these people. Those who are enthralled to Camus might say this is fear because of an uncomfortableness with recognizing life’s meaningless absurdity. But these people are wrong. My hatred—as unmitigated as Van Inwagen’s modal skepticism (this is a joke that Camus readers will not get because they don’t know any philosophy)—is totally rational. Perhaps the extent of it is extreme, but shortly after God wrote the moral law, he wrote the law of which things are objectively annoying, and Sisyphus-fetishists top the list, coming in just above people who stand in doorways to talk to their friends, totally blocking the flow of traffic (I also hate those people more than is typical—before you get worried, I hate most things less than is typical; I’m a very healthy and well-balanced person, sort of like a plank of kale on a tightrope, but where the tightrope is big so it’s well-balanced).

A first reason these people should be consigned to the nth circle of hell, where n is the circle of hell which has serial killers, those who trash-talk the holy spirit, and those WHO STOP WALKING TO TALK TO THEIR FRIENDS IN THE MIDDLE OF DOORWAYS BLOCKING EVERYONE BEHIND THEM, LOOKING SMUG AS IF IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO THEM THAT THE MIDDLE OF WHERE EVERYONE IS WALKING IS NOT A GOOD PLACE TO STOP AND HAVE A CONVERSATION, AS IF EVERYONE BEHIND THEM IN LINE IS WHOLLY EXCLUDED FROM THEIR MORAL CIRCLE, is that they make us real philosophy nerds look bad. When you tell someone you’re interested in philosophy, and you tell them specifically the area that interests you most currently is anthropics, they’ll often ask you what that is (I’m sure this happens to all of you reading this quite often—see, I’m just like you, a man of the people, a hard-working middle American who works in middle America and thinks about anthropics). So you tell them, of course, that anthropics is the field that involves reasoning about your existence.

Were it not for these Camusiacs, this statement would be greeted with a sort of air of mystique. Anthropics is the cool, bad-boy field of philosophy, as everyone knows. In the nearest possible world (W) where Camus and his ilk (and by his ilk, I mean Nazi pedophiles) never lived, describing that one is interested in anthropics would immediately result in at least 9 women launching themselves at you, desirous of sex (you know, as occurs on a typical morning of mine where I don’t talk about anthropics).

But because of the Camus sensation, engendering fascination, that’s sweeping the nation, people think, when one talks about reasoning about one’s existence, that you’re talking about stuff that Camus talked about. “Oh yeah,” they’ll reply “I once read The Myth of Sisyphus.”

This is not real philosophy! Real philosophy involves making arguments for things, not just sounding pompous and musing vaguely. Camus and his fanatical followers fail at this. They should instead take up another hobby like tennis or philately. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy devastatingly declares:

He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death.

Boom! Take that Al. Take one of his most famous quotes which makes his followers transparently horny, “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” Ooh, so deep, so profound.

But that’s not a question you dolt! Suicide is a word, not a question. It does not have a question mark at the end and it’s not a proper sentence. And why is that the only serious philosophical question? The existence of God: unserious. The right view of anthropics: unserious. Whether to eat animals: unserious. Whether moral realism is true: unserious. But apparently the word suicide, which is not even a question, is the only real question!

No one would ever take this seriously if they saw philosophy the way they see other fields: namely, as things other than a joke. If a pseudo-historian went blundering into the study of history and declared “there’s really only one serious historical event: table,” no one would find them profound. It’s only because people stupidly deny that philosophy is a real area of expertise, where we can actually know things, that they find Camus deep.

Camus declares a complicated field, endlessly thought about and discussed by some of history’s greatest minds, to be a joke composed of no serious questions. And what’s his argument for this? There is none. He just asserts it. That’s not philosophy! Philosophers give arguments for things to an excessive and perhaps unhealthy degree. Camus is a philosopher the way David Eicke is a physicist, the way astrologers are astronomers, the way pornographers are filmmakers.

These people confuse philosophy—the field studied in academia, that people take classes on and think about—with philosophy, used when people say “my philosophy in life is to always be out partying on a Thursday.” They make a mockery out of the things done by real philosophers. They don’t like philosophy, they like literature. They enjoy books that say confusing things so that they can read them and think “wow, so profound—I must be a real intellectual for reading this.”

The “philosophers” that seep into the public consciousness, that are popular among normal people, aren’t the cleverest or the sharpest. Instead, they’re the ones who write vaguely and talk abstractly about ill-formed questions. Parfit, Huemer, Chappell, Bostrom—these people are an infinite number of times clearer at writing and thinking than Camus. But that’s the draw of people like Camus, or even Wittgenstein to some degree: it’s quite easy to feel profound when you’re giving a vague summary of a slippery idea.

This is thus one thing that I find annoying about such people—they think they have deep, profound insights when they do not. They are like the academics that Sokal and his followers hoaxed. Beneath the mirage of complex words, and metaphors about Sisyphus, there’s nothing there beyond naked assertions and terrible arguments.

And the questions they puzzle over endlessly are all rubbish. A great deal of time and ink is spilled on the question of what the meaning of life is. But does “does life have a meaning” have a meaning? If you ask five people talking about the meaning of life what they mean by it, you’ll get five different answers.

Some people, when they refer to the meaning of life, are referring to objective value. On this reading, those who deny objective meaning deny that there are objective moral values, that some things really matter. The view that there are no objective values is false, as I’ve argued at some length. But expressing talk of objective values in the language of the meaning of life is a uniquely confusing way of doing it! Because there is no agreed-upon meaning of the word meaning when used to ask if life has it.

Other people, when they ask about the meaning of life, are asking whether there’s teleology in the world—whether one’s proper function is to aim at something. Whether there is some objective purpose that we ought to follow, whether there are certain aims that it’s proper for us to follow. Yet if this is what people are talking about, why do people get so upset about the supposed absence of it? If there are certain actions that are of true significance, that are objectively worth taking, then why in the world does it matter if they stem from teleology?

Most people, however, don’t mean any specific thing by the term. It just sounds deep, but they can’t clarify what you’re talking about. And yet this bullshit pseudo question is thought of as the paradigm example of a real philosophical question, when philosophers mostly regard it with puzzlement and spend very little time thinking about it.

This is a misrepresentation of epic proportions that turns smart, analytical people away from the field, thinking it’s all woo. It’s a misunderstanding rather like the belief I held when I was in first grade—that advanced math was just multiplication, division, subtraction, and addition with increasingly large numbers.

And then the notion that the world is absurd is itself absurd. Well, I’m dubious that there’s such a thing as objective absurdity. But if there is, we’re in one of the less absurd .000000000000000000000000001% of possible worlds. The vast majority of possible worlds that contain consciousnesses have no well-ordered consciousnesses but merely chaotic fluctuations of consciousness at random. Our world is remarkably non-absurd—it follows predictable, graspable, orderly physical laws mirrored by our conscious experience.

The life of a Boltzmann brain or a psychophysical disharmonious being is a rather absurd one. But we don’t have those lives. We lucked out, living in a rich ecosystem full of other people whom we can form meaningful relationships with. Morganbesser famously, when asked why there was something rather than nothing famously quipped “If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!” If the world were really an absurd, poorly ordered chaotic mess, these people would still be complaining!