What's the Point of All This Again?
The Death of Meaning, Then and Now. Sign Up for Session Nine of The Peak Notions Book Club. We're discussing Albert Camus' The Stranger and absurdism
The book club is a paid subscriber perk, and one of my favourite parts of running Peak Notions. As well as access to the book club sign-up sheet, a paid subscription will also gain you access to the archive containing hundreds of written and audio articles, the weekly chat thread and videos of prior and future book club discussions so you can read along at your leisure. Thanks for supporting Peak Notions!
TLDR? scroll to the bottom to sign up to attend the next book club session on September 4th
While making the short walk home from the gym this week, thinking as I often do about how my legs hurt and I have to repetitively lift things until I die just to prevent my dumb five-foot-tall skeleton from turning to butter with age, I halted suddenly. Canberra city centre has a small (but still much too large considering the wealth and size of the city) cast of homeless characters who you’ll recognise if you hang around long enough. Most clearly suffer from serious issues with mental ill health and addiction. It’s not uncommon to see the guy who walks about barefoot muttering angrily at people even in this cold winter weather. Or the ‘guy who screams’ and is clearly desperately unwell.
Anyway, on this particular day, I saw one of these locals bent over on the street, and stopped suddenly in surprise. He wasn’t in medical distress as I first thought. He was just taking a shit. On the pavement outside a busy restaurant in the middle of a bright, crisp afternoon — the sort of weather Wordsworth would have written a poem about — with his trousers and underwear around his ankles.
Now I confess that if I’m alone and I encounter a man on the street with his penis exposed for any reason at all, I’m heading quickly in the opposite direction. I’m not stopping to check on his welfare or engaging him in a conversation. It seems other people felt the same, because nobody approached him. Everyone acted as though he was invisible. Because it was too hard to parse what we were seeing, everyone on the street conspired to erase this problem person — in this moment somehow both victim and offender — from our visual reality. It was easier to collectively engage in the pretence that a man was not naked from the waist down and taking a crap on the street than to contextualise what we were looking at.
That’s absurd.
It felt like an apt metaphor for being alive in this moment — that we need the evidence of widespread social and economic breakdown to be invisible so badly that we create the conditions that sustain it. I felt a sort of philosophical despair at how we got here, and at the half-baked ideas we have to pretend to believe in order to make sense of a world that is full of arbitrariness, unfairness, suffering, deprivation and obscenity.
At the bleak heart of every kind of despair is meaninglessness — a compulsion to ruminate on the question ‘what is the point?’ and to feel both crushed and affirmed by the silence that necessarily comes back (because we don’t really ask the question when we have a sense of purpose). So that’s grim. That’s absurd. But really, despair (and marvelling at how strange and stupid and sad things are) is as much a feature of the human experience as falling over in public — falling humiliatingly, languorously, as though you’ve got time to give away to it — while holding something embarrassing, like a bag of clementines or a warm urine sample. Then trying to get up with a semblance of dignity, your clementines now all wedged under the bus seats or your grey t-shirt spattered pissily with dark flecks in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Despair is as basically human as crying from sheer tiredness or joking about something too awful to process otherwise.
It’s part of being alive, just one of the more dangerous parts. Despair is not a place for lingering, and since meaning seems to be its antidote — that sense of purpose and momentum which leads us out of asking ‘what’s the point?’ and into immersing in our lives rather than floating next to them, it makes sense that we are collectively asking questions about meaning at the moment. Because things don’t make sense, and you’ve noticed. We’ve all noticed.
So we’re preoccupied with questions of meaning — where we can find it, or how we create it. How it might serve as a remedy or balm for the chaos and the sense of disempowerment that runs its cold fingers up our spine. How the lack of meaning makes us feel like we’re drifting, and how we worry that some people are looking for it in non-ideal places (fentanyl, the misogynist or misandrist underbelly of the internet, short-lived, instrumental and weirdly intense religious conversion, making and consuming excessive batches of homemade fudge, whatever).
There are many ways to think about meaning, and clearly, some are more enriching than others (fudge and fentanyl will both kill you with long-term overuse). One of our most enjoyable Peak Notions Book Club sessions yet was on psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he wrote about the capacity of human beings to endure even the worst possible suffering provided they had a why they believed in — provided they had a sense of meaning. Frankl writes about his experience in a number of concentration camps throughout World War Two, suggesting that meaning is crucial to our ability to cope, to live and to make sense of the struggle life inflicts on us both while we are experiencing it and in the lengthy, lonely aftershock.
Because these sorts of questions were of course particularly pertinent around the Second World War, when worlds of various kinds were ending and the very concept of truth was fought over by both states and citizens, every philosophically inclined person was concerned about meaning. Why all this was happening, how people might live and help one another through it, and which ideas are worth defending or fighting against. Existential crises promote existential questions. Those who lived during and then survived the war were tasked with coming up with new reasons to live in an unrecognisable world.
People living in German-occupied Paris were no exception, and they included the philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Conflation between the two is common because they were contemporaries, though Sartre worked as a meteorologist during the war (a relatively snug job which gave him a lot of time to read and write until he was captured and imprisoned in a POW camp for nine months), while Camus edited Combat, the clandestine newspaper of the French resistance.
Both men smoked their way dolefully and tweedily around Paris drinking too much coffee and hitting on women at a pathological pace which would get them cancelled these days (Sartre was released and back in Paris by 1941). Not to be shallow about it but Sartre would likely be cancelled first since he looked a little like one of those deep sea fish who live down in the dark at high pressure and Camus was a dreamboat with a wry, sad face that made women suspect they could probably save him. Regardless, both were the product of a time in which nihilism had gained traction, traditional values were collapsing beneath the weight of a transformed sociopolitical reality they could not adequately meet, and the consequent ‘death of God’.
In 1882, Nietzsche had written in his work The Gay Science that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This phrase, which remains the philosophical equivalent of an absolute banger, comes up again in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and is not so much a t-shirt slogan for atheist conventions as a warning about the future. It diagnoses a metaphysical rupture which characterises the cultural moment in which we lost collective belief in absolute meaning.
This is not at all a finger-wagging philosopher suggesting we should take religion more seriously or be more devout. Rather, it is a warning about what society looks like after the death of a shared belief in absolute meaning — the kind that had previously provided our moral and existential framework, and which underpinned every element of life. This framework provided an answer to the question ‘What is the point?’ to anyone feeling low enough to ask but it also generated the values and norms that rendered the world recognisable and comprehensible to people.
Nietzsche’s words serve as a warning that the ‘death’ of God — or the removal of this framework as the context or provider of meaning in Europe and the Western world— doesn’t necessarily produce enlightenment or increased freedom. It creates a vacuum. We live in that vacuum today (only with Uber Eats along with the street defecation and existential despair), and so did Sartre and Camus. They lived at a time when Nietzsche’s writings about the death of God or meaning were reified by hitherto unimaginable horrors — the holocaust (during which Viktor Frankl developed his meaning-first ‘therapeutic doctrine’, Logotherapy), the atomic bomb, and the moral vacuum that became the climate of a fractured postwar Europe.
For those who survived this period of history and were charged with making sense of it in a way that allowed them to keep going rather than lie down on the floor and sack it all in, there was a major task in meaning-making. The institutions and concepts they had once trusted to anchor meaning — church, state, ideas like nation, progress and truth, or whatever ideology a person or culture had subscribed to before the war — were all terminally undermined, obliterated or exhausted. Rendered irrelevant or useless in a new world. Nietzsche’s claims about the death of God were no longer academic. In postwar Europe, they were a sombre description of the ambient reality.
It’s unfortunate that Sartre and Camus are often considered to hold essentially the same beliefs — both asked questions about meaning at a time when these questions were critical. The ways their answers differ are quite important for anyone who has questions about meaning (as we do and should), and who worries that God is dead.
Readers often conflate Camus’ absurdism with existentialism. Many’s the seventeen-year-old who reads Camus for the first time, buys a pea coat and a beret, takes up vaping and shouts ‘I’m an existentialist!’ over a Charli XCX track at parties. That’s not pejorative. It’s just an observation.
Regardless, this is truly a terrible book for school curricula — whoever suggested it because it’s easy to read in French (with its disarmingly simple phrasing and grammar) should be shoved firmly into a scummed-over pond. Giving this work of literature to young people solely as a grammatical exercise and without any philosophical context is like handing them a grenade and forgetting to mention it’s best to leave the pin in. Read it at the wrong time and in the wrong context, and this book might ruin your life. It might terminally alienate you from other human beings.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Worse, it might make you think that radical detachment is cool, and that is an alluring message for anyone who finds the everydayness of life difficult. The walking into rooms of strangers; the status anxiety; the worry for the future; the questions about what is meaningful in life, or what the point is. These questions are usually asked by healthy, astute seventeen-year-olds, and also by the rest of us. Even if we’ve become too jaded to ask them, they lie deep in us, forming the bedrock of our strung-out sense of anxiety and isolation in a universe that feels (much of the time at least) frighteningly, darkly indifferent.
Sartre felt that Meursault — the absolutely weird main character of Camus’ L’Étranger (usually translated as The Stranger and sometimes The Outsider) was an existentialist, but Camus certainly did not write him that way and thought his friend Sartre was a real pain in the arse for interpreting him like that. Existentialists are, ironically, slightly more optimistic than Camus’ worldview could create space for.
He did not see the absurdity of life as a problem we can solve or manage — it is merely something we have to run face-first into while, to use internet parlance, screaming, crying and throwing up. Meaninglessness is simply the condition of being alive. No constructed meaning can mitigate this, Camus tells us. That’s evasion, delusion, chicanerous nonsense.
While Sartre and co. agree with Camus that there is no objective meaning out there floating around and waiting to be seized upon, they consider our choices to make meaning. We choose our values through our actions, and in this way we impact the world and create meaning which didn’t preexist those actions. Without a moral objectivity existing ‘out there’, both our freedom and our responsibility are total. The existentialist counters despair in a meaningless universe by making their own meaning. Camus, on the other hand, says, while wiggling his eyebrows ‘ohoho, I don’t think so!’ (No - that’s not an actual quote, don’t worry).
He challenges us to try and live in a world that he says is in fact utterly indifferent — that is rife with suffering and street-shitting and people embarrassing themselves by falling over and brief joy and utter cruelty and deluded, power-hungry, myopic political leaders — and to live a good life anyway. To live in a way that allows us to have respect for ourselves. Look straight into the meaninglessness, Camus advises, and don’t look away. Don’t pretend. Don’t erase the things you can’t parse or seek comfort to distract from the vast, frightening abyss that meets the question ‘What’s the point?’ with brutal, horrifying infinite silence. Bound directly into it with open eyes, Camus says, and do. not. flinch.
For Camus, freedom comes through revolt. By living in a world that provides us with no meaning despite our deeply human need for it, and yet refusing to submit to illusion, despair or nihilism, we can live a maximally free, dignified and self-aware life in a universe that is not free. Decline to lie to ourselves and others, choose to seize joy in spite of life’s absurdity and not in an attempt to escape it, and find value in our own existential rebellion. And then we can accept death as a part of life, he says, as a value-free inevitability. That’s it for Camus — that’s all there is for us.
So that’s what we’ll read about for the next session of Peak Notions Book Club as we explore Camus’ The Stranger. It’s a truly odd book — easy to read but difficult to process. Sparse, discomfiting and shocking. It’s a case study in absurdism, in which Camus provokes the reader through the character of Meursault. He’s not likeable. He’s often mistaken for a nihilist or a sociopath. But we’ll talk about who or what he is, and where absurdism has value or falls short in our time when we get together to read one of the most famous works of philosophical fiction ever written. Existentialism is easy. Absurdism? That’s hard.
You don’t need any background in philosophy to come along to this session or to find value in the book. If you do have a philosophy background, the discussion will still be interesting for you!
The book club is my way of thanking paid subscribers who keep Peak Notions afloat, and of building community here. It takes research, work, and admin (which is not my forte oh my goodness!) so for that reason it’s open to paid subscribers only. There are 15 spots available for the ninth Peak Notions Book Club session, which takes place on Zoom at 8pm UK/Irish time on Thursday September 4th. You can get all the details (including the confusing time zone stuff!) and put your name on the list via the sign-up sheet linked below:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Peak Notions with Laura Kennedy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.