In my 6th form, 17 year old me read The Plague and The Outsider, quite ostentatiously. I thought girls would want to snog me, but they didn't. Years later a song I wrote about this period went ... 'I read clever books, but they never give me second looks'.
When I was a freshman in college, I read The Plague and loved it. The Myth of Sisyphus too, though not quite as much. Ten years later I read The Stranger and it did absolutely nothing for me. Maybe it had something to do with my discovery of philosophy (starting with Descartes and Hume and eventually leading to contemporary analytic stuff) during the intervening years. I don’t know.
The comparison to Wittgenstein is apt. I’ve read the Tractatus twice—the first time with the guidance of a professor and some secondary literature—but I’d be reluctant to claim I understood any of it. It all sounds cool as shit, though.
Now that I think about it, loving Camus at age eighteen was probably a big part of what inspired me to take that intro to philosophy class, which spurred my love of the subject and eventually led me to enrich more than a dozen lives with my Substack newsletter. So maybe I shouldn’t throw too much shade.
“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.”” <- Do they TRULY enjoy such books, or do they simply enjoy the pride boost they get from reading them?
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Camus, Nietzsche, etc etc understood this. You shouldn't use the same (in your case purely analytical) mental framework to evaluate Benatar's asymmetry and Camus on the meaning of life. But they're both legitimate methods to find useful answers to the ~same, real question, and insofar as there's a home for the latter in academia, it's philosophy.
I'm deeply appreciative of analytic philosophy (and I don't like Camus), but to my mind, this essay mostly highlights its weaknesses. It's so obsessed with technique and precision that it refuses to even acknowledge the important questions people struggle with but that fall outside its domain.
I'm guessing it would be really annoying if I said that I felt similarly when I was your age, but that time has changed my mind?
Yes, all this essay really does is make the obvious point that Camus is not analytic philosophy and then express the writer’s belief that analytic philosophy is the only legitimate form of philosophy (a belief that is asserted more than argued). There’s no real critique of Camus here.
I had the same reaction! There is something deeply ironic in pointing out that the existentialists often peddled illformed emo-sounding statements without substance but much of “precise logical” analytic philosophy is concerned with purely logical systems that can’t actually be tied to reality and therefore also lack substance / are immaterial. Imo, good philosophy is often less-precise systematic philosophy (much of political or social philosophy — ie Hegel) or primarily persuasive/literary but intending to advance a specific goal (Nietzsche can be criticized for the quality of his ideas but he does have a goal), it doesn’t all have to be like a wordy version of a mathematical logic class.
To do away with this tendency once and for all we must embody their opposite. We must become boring-er, dweeb-ier. We must make Carnap look like Mick Jagger.
You know, this is what I always disliked about my culture as a Continental European. We think being educated, learned, intellectual is to read literature, poetry and go to the theatre. We don't really have a culture of reading essays like economics.
Whenever I tell people that I'm interested in philosophy, they're always surprised because I'm known as a math and physics guy. Of course, this shouldn't actually be surprising. Analytic philosophy is more similar to math than any other academic discipline, and philosophy is interesting for the same reason physics is. But because the cultural prototype for a philosopher is someone who asks meaningless questions about the meaning of life, not people who use arguments, rigorous analysis, and endless clarifications to try to figure out truth and refine our reasoning, my being interested in philosophy doesn't jive with people's assumptions.
I should add that I wish more writers would write like this. A genuinely good essay.
Thank you!
Thank god you wrote this essay. I have never agreed with something more.
In my 6th form, 17 year old me read The Plague and The Outsider, quite ostentatiously. I thought girls would want to snog me, but they didn't. Years later a song I wrote about this period went ... 'I read clever books, but they never give me second looks'.
lol
It's funny now. I was totally serious at the time. Kafka didn't work either.
I did at one point read a bit of Wittgenstein to impress a girl.
We've all been there
This reminds me a bit of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/inquiry-porn and Daniel Dennet's idea of a 'Deepity'.
When I was a freshman in college, I read The Plague and loved it. The Myth of Sisyphus too, though not quite as much. Ten years later I read The Stranger and it did absolutely nothing for me. Maybe it had something to do with my discovery of philosophy (starting with Descartes and Hume and eventually leading to contemporary analytic stuff) during the intervening years. I don’t know.
The comparison to Wittgenstein is apt. I’ve read the Tractatus twice—the first time with the guidance of a professor and some secondary literature—but I’d be reluctant to claim I understood any of it. It all sounds cool as shit, though.
Now that I think about it, loving Camus at age eighteen was probably a big part of what inspired me to take that intro to philosophy class, which spurred my love of the subject and eventually led me to enrich more than a dozen lives with my Substack newsletter. So maybe I shouldn’t throw too much shade.
“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.”” <- Do they TRULY enjoy such books, or do they simply enjoy the pride boost they get from reading them?
This is exactly the kind of essay I imagine you would want to write. Good work.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Camus, Nietzsche, etc etc understood this. You shouldn't use the same (in your case purely analytical) mental framework to evaluate Benatar's asymmetry and Camus on the meaning of life. But they're both legitimate methods to find useful answers to the ~same, real question, and insofar as there's a home for the latter in academia, it's philosophy.
I'm deeply appreciative of analytic philosophy (and I don't like Camus), but to my mind, this essay mostly highlights its weaknesses. It's so obsessed with technique and precision that it refuses to even acknowledge the important questions people struggle with but that fall outside its domain.
I'm guessing it would be really annoying if I said that I felt similarly when I was your age, but that time has changed my mind?
Yes, all this essay really does is make the obvious point that Camus is not analytic philosophy and then express the writer’s belief that analytic philosophy is the only legitimate form of philosophy (a belief that is asserted more than argued). There’s no real critique of Camus here.
I had the same reaction! There is something deeply ironic in pointing out that the existentialists often peddled illformed emo-sounding statements without substance but much of “precise logical” analytic philosophy is concerned with purely logical systems that can’t actually be tied to reality and therefore also lack substance / are immaterial. Imo, good philosophy is often less-precise systematic philosophy (much of political or social philosophy — ie Hegel) or primarily persuasive/literary but intending to advance a specific goal (Nietzsche can be criticized for the quality of his ideas but he does have a goal), it doesn’t all have to be like a wordy version of a mathematical logic class.
To do away with this tendency once and for all we must embody their opposite. We must become boring-er, dweeb-ier. We must make Carnap look like Mick Jagger.
You know, this is what I always disliked about my culture as a Continental European. We think being educated, learned, intellectual is to read literature, poetry and go to the theatre. We don't really have a culture of reading essays like economics.
Whenever I tell people that I'm interested in philosophy, they're always surprised because I'm known as a math and physics guy. Of course, this shouldn't actually be surprising. Analytic philosophy is more similar to math than any other academic discipline, and philosophy is interesting for the same reason physics is. But because the cultural prototype for a philosopher is someone who asks meaningless questions about the meaning of life, not people who use arguments, rigorous analysis, and endless clarifications to try to figure out truth and refine our reasoning, my being interested in philosophy doesn't jive with people's assumptions.