Albert Camus (1913–1960) has been one of my favorite philosophical writers writing about existence since my undergraduate days long ago. Camus was a playwright, journalist, and author known for addressing topics like revolt, Absurdity, death, meaning, responsibility, freedom, justice, and Alienation in both fiction and non-fiction mediums, at times offering up some very unlikeable and rather controversial characters. He was not a career academic nor did he aspire to be one. He openly denied being an existentialist like his friends and contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and he did not accept the title of philosopher of the Absurd. Camus was an authentic rebel defying convention and category. He is considered one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and yet it feels like his work is not always engaged with to its fullest potential.
Like many academics, my introduction to Camus followed a very standard format in which we read one or two works, compared them to each other and then to other existentialist writers’ concepts and characters. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it is limited in its application and scope. It puts Camus into a little box and does not allow his brilliance and flexibility to really shine. So, how do we understand Camus as a philosophical thinker to be taken seriously without compromising or restricting his rebellious nature and label of defiance? How do we celebrate him and utilize his ideas but not confine him to traditional discourses? If we take two of his most important and interrelated concepts, the Absurd/Absurdity and Alienation, a path emerges.
We encounter the Absurd every day; it is a lived experience that we feel constantly. This feeling lays the foundations for understanding it and its truth. The Absurd arises in the existence of the simultaneously contradictory natures of the human being and the universe; it lies in their confrontational union. It is what crushes us, and what is essential in it are confrontation and unceasing struggle. Absurdity is found in our actions that constantly seek value and meaning in a silent, indifferent universe: We are the ones who create meaning in our lives, it is not ready-made for us. We live in a universe that is not oriented towards our concerns or endeavors. The Absurd destabilizes us because it evades our understanding, defies knowledge, and undermines our attempts to get comfortable and accustomed to life in this world. Other evidence for Absurdity comes in the form of twists of fate, irrational patterns of behavior or decisions made that we do not understand, and moments of intense and odd sense experiences. Death also plays a role in Absurdity. Again, we all know that we are going to die one day, that it could be any day, and yet each and every day we are creating meaning and achieving things in the face of it all being suddenly annihilated. Death makes our lives Absurd and with death the Absurd ends for each of us.
Drawing on what has been said here, essential characteristics of the Absurd include divorce, laceration, and opposition, and the result of living this confrontation constantly is feeling Alienated. Camus describes three significant ways we experience Alienation: (1) from nature, because the world can be incomprehensible, indifferent, and even hostile towards us and our interests; (2) from other people, because we cannot access their thoughts or feelings; and (3) from life itself, because we have no control over our birth or death.
These lived experiences of Absurdity and Alienation find application in the history of philosophy, specifically with Hume and Kant and their arguments concerning the boundaries of human knowledge. As I have argued before, Absurdity and Alienation are the existential consequences of Hume and Kant. When we look at the positions each held about metaphysics and epistemology, the experiences of Absurdity and Alienation are logical outcomes.
Hume cast heavy doubt on what we could know with certainty and truth. He argued that necessity is really the result of psychological habit or an inclination to see connection: With cause and effect, for example, when we witness two events happen in succession more than once, we tend to think they are connected. The more repeatedly two events succeed each other, the stronger that connection feels. Thus, Hume argues, necessity is learned through experience and not gained by reason alone, making them matters of fact that are at best probable. The sun has risen every morning of my life, and I tend to act as though it will rise tomorrow and the next day, etc. by making plans. But do I really know it will with certainty? What evidence do I have that this will necessarily happen? Hume revealed that much of what we think we know or take as certain is founded on inductive reasoning and strengthened by psychological propensity, which is not very solid when you hold it up to a magnifying glass. His skeptical arguments about the limits of human knowledge hit not only metaphysics like a cannonball but any science or domain that used inductive reasoning as its foundation.
Kant was greatly inspired by Hume’s skepticism concerning metaphysics and causality, and he praised Hume for disturbing his “dogmatic slumber.” His approach differed from Hume’s in that he posited a special cognitive relationship between the knower and what is known. Specifically, the mind contributes to knowing objects by way of the structures it has built in and that set the limits of knowledge and experience. This is not to say that the mind creates reality. Rather, what Kant means is that the mind imposes structures onto the empirical data we take in through the senses, it processes this material according to its own organizational system, and the result is what we consider knowledge or its building blocks. This position entails that there may be colors in existence we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear, and taste sensations we cannot have because as humans we have limited faculties and abilities. It is here that Kant offers up his most significant and controversial distinction, known as phenomena and noumena: how something appears to someone (after they cognize it) and how it is in itself.
Hume and Kant can be understood as arguing a similar point, albeit from different angles: Humans are innately psychologically constructed with regard to their perceptual abilities and capacities, and this can affect the level and extent of knowledge that they can gain from experience. The consequences of their position are twofold: (1) we are not able to know as much as we think we do or we would like to about the empirical world, and (2) we do not entirely know or control our own minds. When you dwell on these consequences, the feeling is deeply unsettling—a lot of angst brews up, if you will. What you think you know as certain, necessary, and true may not be. The world you navigate every day could be very different than you perceive it. Are you sure you will not wake up tomorrow as a cockroach, like Gregor Samsa? Do you know you are not living in the Matrix? When you take Hume and Kant’s positions to their existential consequences, you get Camus: You exist in an indifferent, Absurd universe that defies you truly knowing it and predicting it (and yet you keep trying!), and this leaves you alienated. Camus the serious philosopher has appeared and outside the bounds of existentialism!
But Camus can go further afield to even scarier things. The lived experience of confrontation with the Absurd and feelings of Alienation can ground our experiences with horror fiction. A prime example is weird, Lovecraftian horror, which, in its very design, taps into the gaps of knowledge we have about the universe at large and enhances its indifference to an incredibly terrifying level. Much of the deepest fearful reactions we have in response to Lovecraftian horror come from the fact that we carry our experiences of the Absurd and Alienation into them—it picks them up, plays with them, scares the pants off them, covers them in goo, and leaves them quivering.
There are several key interconnected characteristics of Lovecraftian horror that rely on our daily confrontation with the absurd to be deeply effective, the biggest being the fear of the unknown and unknowable. When we sink into the realization of how much we still do not know about the world we inhabit and the possibilities that could exist in the universe beyond it, we are left feeling anxious, fearful, and terribly unsafe. There may be malignant and awful creatures and Gods out there that, at best, do not care that we exist and, at worst, want to kill us. In these moments, we also grasp just how small and insignificant (even incompetent) we are, how our interests and values do not matter to the sublime and mysterious universe or anything in it. We are truly vulnerable, and we do not always know to what or who so we cannot even prepare. The universe is indifferent to us, and it does not care if we live or die. Lovecraftian horror tears open these gaps in our knowledge and, with a brilliant, creepy fusion of sci-fi and horror, erodes away any remnants of what we believed we knew or were certain of. It is no surprise that the fragility of sanity is also a key theme in many of Lovecraft’s works.
What Lovecraftian horror does is to take up our preexisting daily experience of living in confrontation with the universe, the Absurdity and Alienation we feel. It intensifies these, sinks into the gaps of our knowledge, and adds some terror by filling the massive, far-reaching universe as well as the depths of our world with unknowable creatures and forces that defy our understanding and concepts. When your life is existing, alienated, in confrontation with the Absurd, reading a story that speaks of an ancient creature or force “out there” that is completely unfathomable and would kill you at first encounter enhances these feelings and eats away at any remnants of your safety and certainty. Do you know Cthulhu is not real and here? Are you sure that someday a search for more knowledge or a mountain hike will not result in your madness? Lovecraftian horror is effective because of our lived reality of Alienation in an Absurd universe.
I am not the only one to see Camus as having a connection with Lovecraft. In the 2008 biographical film Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, Guillermo del Toro describes Lovecraft as an existential thinker on par with Albert Camus, and I wholeheartedly agree. I think the two share an understanding of the psychological pitfalls we cope with daily, being in a universe that does not care if we live or die, that we cannot fully know, and that holds secrets we cannot understand—and that probably will kill us. Lovecraftian horror takes these feelings and experiences that we carry (consciously and subconsciously); it exploits and exacerbates them as it pulls them into the darkest and eeriest places, offering us new depths and degrees of Absurdity and Alienation. And often with gooey, slimy textures. Camus’ notions of the Absurd/Absurdity and Alienation offer us an existential understanding of why Lovecraftian horror is and remains compelling and haunting.
The next time you watch films like Alien (1979) or The Thing (1982), a series such as Lovecraft Country (2020); read books by Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986) or N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020); or whatever format of weird horror fiction you are into, say, “Thanks, Camus, for framing the very experiences that underpin my fear and awe and make me keep that nightlight on!”
Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray
Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray is a sessional lecturer of social justice and peace studies and philosophy at King’s University College (Western). Her research focuses on early phenomenology, existential philosophy, and tattoo aesthetics and culture. Recent work includes “Adolf Reinach, Negation and Law” (2025), “Reinach’s Negative States of Affairs and The Role of Essence” (2025), “Revolt, Absurdity, and the Artist as Sisyphus” (2023), and “Camus and The History of Modern Western Philosophy” (2020).
