Each Person Determines His or Her Life's Meaning

Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) on the Philosophy of Life. 

What Gives Life Meaning?

Camus examines "the absurd hero", the person condemned to endless, meaningless toil. Camus depicts Sisyphus, which stands as a symbol for all mankind: all human effort is equally devoid of meaning. Camus represents the agnostic existentialist position on the meaning of life. 
 
Although this absurd world cannot guarantee a future, it can free the existential human being to become what he or she wishes. A person's life is cast in terms of two existentialist values: (1) the revolt against conformity and the absurd, and (2) the freedom felt through existentially free choices.

Each Person Determines His or Her Life's Meaning

[ABSURDITY AND SUICIDE]

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering. 

Camus asserts that the denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd. He maintains that to understand is to unify. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illiterates the essential impulse of the human drama. The absurd depends on man as much as it depends on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.

The mind, when it reaches it limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. The absurd is born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contract it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated.

The feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. 

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. It is just as natural that he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator.

[ABSURD FREEDOM]

Now the main thing is done, I hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject--this is what counts. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems obvious to me, even against me, I must support.

Camus addresses suicide: Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. The absurd dies only when we turn from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a consistent confrontation between man and his own obscurity. [Suicide] is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. Suicide does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes.

It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will. Suicide is a repudiation, a rejection of something offered (life).