Albert Camus, Nihilism, and Antidotes to the Meaninglessness of Life

By: Donald A. Crosby

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

― Albert Camus

Camus gives expression to cosmic nihilism when he speaks of the world as “dense” and “strange,” or when he refers to it as “a vast irrational,” exhibiting “primitive hostility” and remaining stubbornly unresponsive to our yearning to feel at home within it and to reduce it to unity and clarity of understanding.

He sees human beings as hopelessly alienated from their world, claiming that it can never be made their own or rendered familiar to them… The reason the world is totally alien to us is that we lack the capacity to know it, except in superficial ways that make it only too clear that we cannot find in it that fullness of meaning for which we yearn.

We want desperately to have everything explained, insisting that we must have that or nothing. But our insatiable appetite for clarity and unity runs up against fragmentation, contradiction, and absurdity.