Pompous, trendy, and fashionable: hipsters
are the iconic representation of our time.
Although it may seem like their zeal for independence
and going against the grain originated in
the 2000s, one of the biggest hipsters was
born in 1913: Albert Camus. We’ve read his
book and butchered his characters’ names,
but why don’t we learn about the man
himself? His father, Lucien, was a cellar
man, but Camus did not get to know him so
well because Lucien died in the Battle of
Marne when Camus was just eight months old.
His mother Catherine, on the other hand, was
a cleaning woman. Camus lived with her, his
grandmother, and 6 other family members in
a small three bedroom apartment without running
water or electricity. At home, both his mother
and his grandmother were illiterate, so he
didn’t know how to read or write until he
got to school, where he fell in love with
learning and became an excellent, role model
student. Camus continued his education by
attending the University of Algiers, and ultimately
graduated to become very involved in politics.
In 1936, he joined the Communist Party but
quickly realized that he did not agree with
their principles. Later, he became a journalist
for an anti-colonialist newspaper to write
about controversial topics like the Muslims
of the Kabylie region. He then settled down
in Oran to become a self-proclaimed pacifist
writer, which ultimately got him kicked out
of Algeria for being a threat to national
security; however, this was not the end because
Camus ended up joining a clandestine resistance
cell called “Combat” during WWII, where
he smuggled news of the war to the Parisian
public using the false identity “Beauchard”.
It was during this period of his life where
Camus started formulating his philosophy of
the absurd and the sacredness of human life.
Camus’ philosophy is all about the absurd.
What is the absurd, exactly? According to
Stanford University, the absurd is when there
is a conflict between the impulse to ask ultimate
questions and the impossibility of achieving
any adequate answer. One of Camus' works,
the Myth of Sisyphus captures the idea of
the absurd perfectly. Just as how Sisyphus
struggles to push his rock up a mountain just
to watch it roll all the way back down every
time, humans struggle by repetitively asking
about the meaning of life, only to realize
that there are no feasible answers. Even though
Camus came up with this brilliant idea of
the absurd, he did not think of himself as
a philosopher. More strangely, Camus posed
one of the most famous existentialist questions
in the 21st century, “There is only one
really serious philosophical question, and
that is suicide”, and he didn’t label
himself as an existentialist. Camus was in
a whole different category of his own; he
didn’t want to build a philosophy on a philosophical
system just like Plato or Socrates did, he
wanted to start a whole new format surrounding
absurdity and rebellion. This same reason
is why Camus did not label himself as a philosopher
in a famous interview with Jeanine Delpech:
he supposedly did “not believe sufficiently
in reason to believe in a system. Surely,
only a character like Camus could have fully
comprehended and created a belief that the
whole universe is absurd. Hopefully now you
can see why I labeled Camus as such a big
hipster. He didn't want to be categorized
with any philosopher or any philosophy. If
you think about it, Camus' philosophy is really
applicable to daily life. Each and every day,
every being must cope with the idea that humans
are just one species out of countless ones,
living on a spinning planet that is floating
in a dark vacuum. The thought that we must
accept the absurdity of life and we must go
on living is exactly the message that Camus
wanted to send out. There are always those
mornings where one lies in silence contemplating
his/her use in life. Every human, in some
point of their life, has thought “what’s
the point of this anyways? Is this even worth
it?” Well, if Camus’ philosophy were to
be applied to this situation, he would say
that “death is, as human beings, our only
certainty”. His philosophy would
assert that all hard work and life experiences
are only second hand and parasitic. Therefore,
humans must live to learn with an unfeasible
emptiness because as curious, intelligent
creatures, humans cannot escape asking, “What
is the meaning of existence” even if there
is no answer.
