About a decade ago, I wrote a Big, Beautiful Dissertation. Like most dissertations, it was written for a handful of readers and promptly forgotten — including by me.
But I didn’t write it to get a job or satisfy a committee (thank God because I’m not sure I accomplished either). I wrote it because I was possessed by a few stubborn questions:
- Why do people cling to ideologies?
- What happens when we lose belief in God, or justice, or meaning itself?
- Can we resist injustice without inventing new lies to justify ourselves?
- Is it still possible to live with dignity and clarity in an absurd world?
I chased those questions through the works of Albert Camus and from there into Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Those two writers were the lodestars for Camus. He grappled with them in almost everything he wrote. They were both diagnosing the problem of nihilism in the modern world and each offered very different solutions, neither of which Camus could fully accept.
Not sure I ever landed on final answers but I did discover, in Camus, an orientation towards the world that neither collapses into despair nor escapes into illusion.
That’s basically what this series is about.
Why Now?
The interesting thing about Nietzsche is that he really did seem to be a 100 years ahead of his contemporaries. He anticipated the political conflicts of the 20th century because he noticed the collapse of Western metaphysics in the previous two.
For Nietzsche, metaphysics was an umbrella term, encompassing all of religion and traditional morality. These transcendental doctrines were a firewall against practical and theoretical nihilism. Dealing with the consequences of this loss was the guiding aim of Nietzsche’s critical project. Dostoevsky, for his part, understood everything Nietzsche did, but resisted it in a completely different way. And Camus’s work is essentially an effort to internalize the best of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and chart a different course out of the darkness.
I keep returning to all three of these writers because I think we’re still living in the nihilistic world they described. And they still have so much to offer us in this moment.
Camus is worth revisiting, especially in such a polarized, bitter political climate. What drew me to Camus in the first place was his contempt for the totalizing “isms” of his era. In a time when so many intellectuals surrendered to Marxism, nationalism, or technocratic rationalism, Camus held his ground as a humanist. He hated any form of thinking that elevated ideas over people, abstractions over experience. And he resisted the moral certainty of ideologues and rejected any modern political project that swapped History for God in pursuit of Justice.
In all his work, there’s just a fundamental decency that’s impossible to miss. It’s why I fell in love with books like The Rebel and The Plague. There’s a principled commitment to limits, to dialogue, to human dignity in the face of historical madness. And he took Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation deadly seriously, knowing it was only a point of departure. Indeed his whole political philosophy is an attempt to deal with the crisis Nietzsche anticipates while somehow avoiding the temptations of absolutist politics.
This series is an attempt to follow Camus down this path, looking closely at his personal notebooks and essays and novels and plays. I continue to believe that he was a deeply under-appreciated political thinker and, hopefully, you’ll agree by the end of this thing.
What You’ll Find Here
Over the course of several months, I’ll be publishing a serialized version of my dissertation. If you’re a philosophy sicko, you don’t need any convincing. For everyone else, my plan is to make this as accessible and non-tedious as I possibly can. But I want to be super clear about this: much of the writing is academic. I will do by best to cut out the insufferable jargony shit and make it penetrable, but this is more or less my dissertation as it was originally written. I’ll write up intros and other commentary to compliment the posts and add context, and at the end of all this I’ll figure out where I want to go next.
In the meantime, each post will be a short, self-contained essay exploring a handful of essential themes:
- The seduction of ideas
- The absurdity of existence
- The logic of political violence
- Revolt without illusion
- Hope without transcendence
The idea is to post stuff that curious, open-minded, maybe a little existentially restless, people will find worthwhile.
On the Practical Side
I’ll publish a piece every week or so. This could change depending on how things go.
Posts will be free for the foreseeable future. Eventually, if enough people dig this, I’d like to offer deeper dives, annotations, reader Q&As for paid subscribers.
If you want to follow the full arc, consider subscribing now. If you want to support this kind of writing, even better.
And if you’re not sure yet, that’s cool. Linger. Read. See if it speaks to you.
—Sean
I’ve decided to do a thing on here, a bit of an experiment, and I hope you’ll come along with me!
I’m far more hyped about it than I could ever have thought I would be. I look forward to having you, a writer I already know and like, walk through some “important” writers that I have very little understanding of.