“In The Plague, Camus wrote about a doctor who doesn't believe in God, redemption, or higher purpose. Yet every day, he shows up to help the dying. Why? Because it's right.
Camus believed morality begins when justification ends. You don't do good because it saves you, or earns approval. You do it because suffering exists and you refuse to add to it.
He called this ‘the modest heroism of the absurd.’ In a meaningless world, the only meaning left is what we create through compassion, courage, and presence.
Camus saw that people want cosmic justice, rewards, closure, divine order. But decency doesn't need a witness. True morality, he said, is doing what's right when no one's watching.
In an age obsessed with saving the world, Camus reminds us that goodness isn't grand. It's quiet. It's the everyday rebellion of kindness in a world that's indifferent.
You can't fix chaos. You can't end suffering. But you can refuse cruelty. You can choose integrity. You can make one small corner of existence less unbearable.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe the most moral life isn't one that saves the world but one that quietly refuses to make it worse.”
— Existential Reflections
I read Camus' Nobel speech (for my advanced reading exercise) and absurdism before reading any of his chef-d'oevre and I just immediately thought that his absurdism is such a humanism because he thought a true artist does not scorn anything but to understand and not limit oneself to their community, and an artist definitely never works in a vacuum.
Also discovered Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. Although it is considered the work did not perfectly reflect his ideology, humanism is what comes first to my mind when mentioning existentialism/absurdism.
