Philosophers on the Absurd in an Individualistic World

In traditional philosophical inquiries, just to mention Kierkegaard’s and Camus’ formative insights into the matter, the category of the absurd arises out of the fundamental and ontological disharmony experienced between an individual’s search for the elusive meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. Yet nowadays, scholarly perception and the philosophical interpretation of the absurd seems to have changed: it is no more the adequacy of the world in satisfying our deepest needs which is put in question, but it is these needs themselves that should adapt to a new, individualistic way of conceiving life. The feeling of absurd in our contemporary societies is assimilated to an individual disease: so, in the end, it seems that the individual himself is the problem, not the opacity of the world in which he lives. Hence, in a purely Durkheimian mode of analysis, the paper claims that an individualistic society increases the subjective perception of the absurd, while a society motivated by solidarity does the opposite. Since the world can answer to man’s demand of meaning only with the voice of other men, it should be expected that a more supportive world would be perceived as more adequate to our deepest needs.