Or, People in Glass Houses...

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Camus and the Search for Meaning

Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the only serious philosophical question: whether life is worth living. If the universe is nothing more than matter and energy unfolding under physical law, then it contains no built-in purpose, no moral grammar, no script written in the stars. The galaxies turn, particles collide, organisms struggle and perish. Our demand for meaning meets not an answer but a blank face. Better: not even a face. Silence.

This, for Camus, is the absurd: the collision between the human need for intelligibility and the world’s refusal to provide it. His answer is neither despair nor consolation. It is revolt: lucid, stubborn, unsponsored. Live fully, he says, while knowing that no final justification is coming. Make meaning anyway, even though the universe does not underwrite it.

There is courage in that position; there is also fragility.

For the weakness in Camus is not that he sees the problem too clearly, but that he solves it too lightly. To make meaning sounds bracing until one asks what such meaning really amounts to.

If it is merely private assertion, it floats free of truth and becomes taste with better manners.

If it is shared human value, then one must still explain why such value deserves allegiance in a world stripped of transcendence.

Camus wants the dignity of moral seriousness without metaphysical backing. He wants the cathedral atmosphere after dismissing the architect.

And it is not just religion that stands on unprovable ground. Every philosophy of life does. Secular humanism, political idealism, private codes of honour, romantic authenticity, moral seriousness itself: all rest, in the end, on commitments that empirical science does not and cannot certify.

Science can describe the mechanisms by which creatures like us came to have purposes, preferences and social attachments. It can tell an external story about selection, survival, cooperation and reproduction. But that is not the same as discovering meaning. To explain our hunger for meaning is not to show that any particular meaning is warranted. 

That is where the smugness of the more vulgar atheist polemic collapses. To sneer at religion as just a story is unimpressive when one’s own secular creed is also, at bottom, just a story: a structure of value, loyalty and interpretation laid across a mute material world.

The issue is not whether one lives by myth: everyone does. The issue is whether one’s myth is shallow or profound, incoherent or disciplined, life-giving or degrading.

Camus saw the abyss clearly. What he did not fully admit is that revolt itself becomes a creed. The moment one says that lucidity, defiance and fidelity to experience are admirable, one has already crossed beyond description into valuation. One has begun, however reluctantly, to craft meaning.

So the real choice is not between myth and no myth, or between faith and some magically presuppositionless reason. That fantasy is done. The real choice is between rival frameworks of meaning, none of which can be proved in the manner of a laboratory result, all of which shape a life.

Which myth to live by?

Your call. Choose well.

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