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Hello. I read your blog article on Camus & Kierkegaard. I enjoyed your examination of the absurd in each of the authors. I agree they are both very important philosophically.

I suggest that many existentialists would celebrate the absurdity of a human fighting for significance in a vast, uncaring world. The achievement is the fight, not winning. The creation of value as thoughts, emotions, & actions may be futile & absurd, but isn't it wonderful that it is done anyway?

A different take on absurdity could be pushed further back then to individual philosophers, or back further than even the whole of philosophy. For many, evolution is a very plausible biological theory (let's not argue about facts & theories now). By what biological mechanism can we have become the savants who can discover & understand the meaning, or lack thereof, of the universe? By what leap?

I consider humanity's flight from nature, civilization, is the place where such questions of life's meaning or absurdity come into play. The universe doesn't care or does care, but we as evolved creatures cannot know this. When our distant forebears in poorly tanned furs chased giant elk, while the other tribe members sat hopeful & starving at camp, humanity was closer to the meaning or absurdity of life than now.

Now we have built ourselves fortresses from which we sally forth to destroy whole species & ecosystems. Most of us don't even notice these actions & even deny they happen. We have isolated ourselves in our ever growing enclave from which we measure, gene splice, make smart phones, celebrate our magnificence, & weigh the value or nonvalue of the universe. Our circumscribed redoubt of reason, science, economies, morality, & meaning are the place considerations of absurdity & meaning belong. Our considerations are localized by our limitations which we have exaggerated with our drive to separate ourselves from the grunting, smelly ancestors we know about, but at the same time, by some sleight of mind, refuse to truly acknowledge as being us.

To return to existentialism, I consider existentialism to be a human endeavor reserved for the educated, well-spoken civilian immersed in human culture. It has value within that orbit. As for the universe, or even the natural world we have walled ourselves from both physically & intellectually, such considerations of absurdity or meaning, don't even exist. We invented such considerations … & that is existentialism at its core.

How can you say life is absurd when we can spend it making money or growing our Instagram account? We have the freedom to vote for the politician of our choice and pick any gender we choose. If this does not give meaning to a persons life, what could?

Belief in a physical reality dependent on causality had only one place it could end up. I guess one could sum up the last 6000 years of human thought by the acronym GIGO.

If man cannot quantify progress its possible man is chasing his tail in ever increasing rapidity such that centrifugal force will cause his entire enterprise to self-destruct.

https://youtu.be/vxhTDIUCPMM

There is no definition of absurdity given here. We are left to wonder what is absurd. That's the challenge of life, not supposing to know but to try to understand.

Neither Kierkegaard or Camus pose Absurdity as a question. In their works, Absurdity is not something to understand but to accept; a premise to the questions they explore; life's context and environment.

For Kierkegaard those questions he explores bias towards the creation of meaning, existential dread, and christian virtue. For Camus those questions were on suicide and reason.

While Camus does explicitly tackle Absurdity as a concept, he concluded that the absurd arises from our desire for order and meaning juxtaposed with the indifferent nature of our environment. The Absurd is consequently the context of metaphysics and our relationship with everything other than ourselves. To Camus it is not a life's great challenge to ponder the Absurd, it is life's great challenge to not commit suicide in an absurd universe. To Kierkegaard it isn't a challenge but a feature of the environment to overcome by creating meaning.