He defined absurdity as the gap between humanity’s desire for meaning and the cold, meaningless reality of the universe. Those doing degrees in French may be aware of his book L’étranger (The Stranger).Ĭamus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay about the absurd nature of existence. Possibly the most famous absurdist writer and philosopher is Albert Camus.
The philosophy of absurdism became more refined over time. This philosophy states that the knowledge of unimportance should be taken as a good thing, and that you should enjoy the little things. To put this into modern day terms, it basically means that the things you choose to do day-to-day have no effect on existence as a whole. I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection. The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith. These ideas continued in the writings of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act. The absurdity of reality comes in part from how we will never truly understand existence. With the idea of phenomena and noumena, he distinguishes between how things appear and how they actually are. Immanuel Kant was the first to talk in terms that we would now consider absurdist. With nonsensical memes and stranger-than-fiction current events, one thing is certain: the internet is becoming an increasingly absurd place. Recently, we’ve seen the return of the mullet and low-rise jeans are also threatening to make a comeback. We also know that culture comes and goes in cycles. Strange references, and many meme formats layered on top of each other, often with niche meanings, all come to mind when thinking of meme culture. We all know that memes can get a little…unhinged. What do memes and a philosophical approach dating back to the 1800s have in common? Surprisingly a lot.
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