The Absurdity of Albert Camus

I've never seen an unhappy astronaut on the ISS :P

fwiw, I largely agree with mkovach's interpretation because of the direct analogy to modern work culture. But I do admire your view as well, I get a lot of satisfaction from deep cleaning and maintaining things, and there's a commensurate amount of pride watching the item transform back into something clean again.

But you're right, it can also be easily used to justify horrible things. And in this case, you can still lead to authoritarian nightmares, or worse.

Maybe bad people are bad, and no matter what philosophy you adopt, one can twist it to be bad.

That isn't to say it was intentional or to fault them for it, its only natural. What the buddha figured out goes in the opposite direction of how existence is structured. It's essentially impossible to stumble upon, and definitely impossible to figure out purely through thinking. If ones behavior doesn't change, it remains intellectual. In order to abandon craving, you have to not act on it. Otherwise there's no space between 'you' and 'it' so you could never see it for what it is.

That's moreso what i meant by "Camus couldn’t conceive of" - especially in this day and age, you can only get so far without someone else pointing it out. Who would possibly randomly think to just not act on any intention of body, speech, or mind that was rooted in craving? Its in our nature to not do that, so its normal that no one else has gotten there through philosophizing. Shoppenhaur had his whole denial of will thing but he just moved the goalposts and settled on more refined sensuality.

I would even be careful about settling that the buddhist outlook is about acceptance of the ground truth of suyata. Most of that idea comes from later traditions. It definitely is mentioned in the pali canon, but not as some universal ground truth - that often leads to a different dressing around the nihilism you mentioned. The buddha said all determined things are subject to change. All determined things are unsatisfactory. All phenomena are not-self. It's not like there is a nature of reality that is empty or something like that.

(replying to part of another comment you posted): its not about accepting ultimate reality or accepting anything really - quite the opposite. The buddha over and over again told people not to be content with 'progress' they had make. The goal is the inability to suffer amidst things that cause sufferring. Not to learn how to accept them, or quickly deal with them as they come up, as is commonly taught - its to make it so its impossible to suffer no matter what. That can only be done through seeing the structure of your existence. Then you can't take its determined nature for granted anymore (ie take it personally)

I think the Buddhist reply would be that living without craving and without yearning leads to truly being ‘alive’ and enables one to feel, to touch, and to experience the world as it is and in the immeasurably short time a person is alive within it. An existence where the present is experienced and cherished in the moment of having it, while knowing and accepting the inevitability of this moments ending. Such a life, in the Buddhist tradition, embodies the knowing and accepting of the ultimate emptiness of reality and then proceed to live, not in spite of the emptiness, but in the full appreciation of the act of living.

If the mind's full of clinging (either in demanding what isn't present or refusing to release what was present but which is now leaving the present) then that mind doesn't have any room left to experience aliveness.

So (to me) the material doesn't suggest asceticism or abandoning the human sensual potential, it reminds that clinging will sneak in and take over the mental cycles, undermining your ability to live to that potential.

This is emphatically not the case, though! Not only does he not deny any sense of hope, he dwells on his hope. He practically lives on it.

I'll quote from the book:

"There were two other things about which I was always thinking: the dawn and my appeal. . .

"Then all day there was my appeal to think about. I made the most of this idea, studying my effects so as to squeeze out the maximum of consolation. . .

"I gave myself leave, to consider the other alternative; that my appeal was successful. And then the trouble was to calm down that sudden rush of joy racing through my body and even bringing tears to my eyes."

The prison scenes mostly concern how he alternates between clinging to hope and distracting his mind. He merely claims to lose hope in the book's very last paragraph, and imagines a spectacular public execution. (Something else that's quite weird in itself, as the French banned public executions in 1939 and the book takes place in the 1940s.)

> I think the first part was an exploration of the absurd hero's life, and the second part was more of the reaction to the absurd hero by society.

This is by no means clear, as I don't think that Mersault is a well-defined "absurd hero" (VERY subtle differences in framing, and more introspective narration, would have you believe that he's the perfect bourgeois citizen!) nor is the "reaction by society" at all credible.

In that way he is more representative of the society that has placed him on trial than anyone else in it.

His works (essays, short stories, plays, etc.) build on one another, gradually unfolding an argument: first confronting the absurd, then asking how one should respond to it, and later exploring what it means to live and act in spite of it.

You don't though. There is no meaning, and need not be any meaning, and life has lost nothing by not having meaning.