CHAPTER 1 I Introduction Existential Therapy : A Dynamic Psychotherapy 6 The Existential Orientation : Strange But Oddly Familiar

absolute-was called into doubt, the more difficult it was for the human being to embrace a cosmic meaning system. But meaning systems cannot be relinquished without some substitute. Perhaps we can forgo the answer to the question, Why do we live? but it is not easy to postpone the question, How shall we live? Modern secular humans face the task of finding some direction to life without an external beacon. How does one proceed to construct one's own meaning-a meaning sturdy enough to support one's life? Meaning in an Absurd World: Camus and Sartre. Let me begin by examining the thinking of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, two of the important thinkers who helped paint us into the corner of meaninglessness in the twentieth century. How did they deal with the question of life meaning? Camus used the word "absurd" to refer to the human being's basic position in the world-the plight of a transcendent, meaning-seeking being who must live in a world that has no meaning. Camus stated that we are moral creatures who demand that the world supply a basis for moral judgment-that is, a meaning system in which is implicit a blueprint of values. But the world does not supply one: it is entirely indifferent to us. The tension between human aspiration and the world's indifference is what Camus referred to as the "absurd" human condition. What then are we to do? Are there no guidelines? No values? Nothing right or wrong? good or evil? If there are no absolutes, then nothing is more important than anything else, and everything is a matter of indifference. In his novels A Happy Death and The Stranger, Camus portrayed individuals who live in a state of value-nihilism. Meursault, in The Stranger, exists outside the moral world. "It's all the same to me," he says repeatedly. He attends his mother's funeral, copulates, works, and kills an Arab on the beach, all in the same state of profound indifference. Earlier, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explored the tension between his nihilism and his ethical demands and gradually began to forge a new, secular, humanistically based vision of personal life meaning and a set of guidelines for life conduct that flow from that vision. His new vision posits that we can construct a new life meaning by cherishing our "nights of despair," by facing the very vortex of meaninglessness and arriving at a posture of heroic nihilism. A human being, Camus believed, can attain full stature only by living with dignity in the face of absurdity. The world's indifference can be transcended by rebellion, a prideful rebellion against one's condition. "There is