The Strangers in my Life

I just finised reading, for my existential philosophy class, a book called "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Camus was a famous existentialist atheist and this is one of his 'great' works. The one thing I like about the Atheist existentialists (probably the only thing I like about them) is their logical consistency / systematic thinking. For them, there really can be no knowledge beyond your own personal experience. Thus for them, God is dead and irrelevant because to some extent reason is dead. Theorizing about the origins of existence are meaningless, indeed for them, life itself is entirely devoid of meaning.

It's disturbing to me because the story is all about a man who believes in nothing. He doesn't really believe in love, he doesn't care about God or anything metaphysical at all really. He doesn't feel anything when his mother dies, when a woman proposes to him, when he kills a man, or finally when he is condemned to death. Complete and utter apathy. In the novel the chaplains and lawyers can't understand how he has no desire for anything else, just life without any meaning or hope.

Now there are many non-Christian and even some atheistic worldviews that DO posit meaning to one's life or at least existence, and with those people a dialogue is possible. If a man loves his wife or even money one can have a discussion about values and meaning, etc. But if a man is utterly apathetic and detached from everything, there is nothing one can do.

I've met some people at Brock this year that have scared me in this way. They have terrible things happen to them, or be heartbroken, but none of this leads them to any questioning. They don't even hate God or life - which I think is preferable to indifference. They just are, they aren't looking for any answers.

It all reminds me of a character I greatly admire, a man who is the complete antithesis to Camus' 'stranger'. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens who asked the great questions about life, justice, goodness, beauty, etc. He ended up dying, but one of my favourite quotes from him is: "the unexamined life is not worth living". I tend to agree with him, and so I am still having difficulty dealing with people not content to even participate in life. People who just subsist. It reminds me that -as people from St. Augustine to Eli Wiesel have said before - that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. Apathy is like Darkness. It's the absence of anything.

cookie-cutter neo-darwinians/Dawkinites, University Buddhists, Drunken Hedonists, and God-Hating Atheists are all normal figures in university life. But Camus has shown me my greatest fear in his novel. If you want to know what life looks like in post-modern atheism, feel free to read the book. I guarentee you'll be looking for meaning anywhere after it.