Hello. I read your blog article on Camus & Kierkegaard. I enjoyed your examination of the absurd in each of the authors. I agree they are both very important philosophically.

I suggest that many existentialists would celebrate the absurdity of a human fighting for significance in a vast, uncaring world. The achievement is the fight, not winning. The creation of value as thoughts, emotions, & actions may be futile & absurd, but isn't it wonderful that it is done anyway?

A different take on absurdity could be pushed further back then to individual philosophers, or back further than even the whole of philosophy. For many, evolution is a very plausible biological theory (let's not argue about facts & theories now). By what biological mechanism can we have become the savants who can discover & understand the meaning, or lack thereof, of the universe? By what leap?

I consider humanity's flight from nature, civilization, is the place where such questions of life's meaning or absurdity come into play. The universe doesn't care or does care, but we as evolved creatures cannot know this. When our distant forebears in poorly tanned furs chased giant elk, while the other tribe members sat hopeful & starving at camp, humanity was closer to the meaning or absurdity of life than now.

Now we have built ourselves fortresses from which we sally forth to destroy whole species & ecosystems. Most of us don't even notice these actions & even deny they happen. We have isolated ourselves in our ever growing enclave from which we measure, gene splice, make smart phones, celebrate our magnificence, & weigh the value or nonvalue of the universe. Our circumscribed redoubt of reason, science, economies, morality, & meaning are the place considerations of absurdity & meaning belong. Our considerations are localized by our limitations which we have exaggerated with our drive to separate ourselves from the grunting, smelly ancestors we know about, but at the same time, by some sleight of mind, refuse to truly acknowledge as being us.

To return to existentialism, I consider existentialism to be a human endeavor reserved for the educated, well-spoken civilian immersed in human culture. It has value within that orbit. As for the universe, or even the natural world we have walled ourselves from both physically & intellectually, such considerations of absurdity or meaning, don't even exist. We invented such considerations … & that is existentialism at its core.