In this framework, resilience is not mere endurance; it is creative defiance. Just as Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, can be imagined happy because he chooses to embrace his fate, so too can humanity find meaning through the act of rebellion itself---by investing experience, relationships, and creative endeavors with subjective significance, despite their ultimate impermanence.
3. Relevance to AI Disruption
In the era of AI, Camus' philosophy offers a stark but liberating perspective. If machines threaten to render human functions redundant, the challenge is not to seek metaphysical assurance of human superiority, but to embrace the absurdity of an existence where boundaries between human and artificial cognition dissolve.
Meaning, under Camus' model, emerges from the conscious act of rebellion---redefining value not in terms of exclusivity (what only humans can do) but in the intentionality of living authentically, even when utility and uniqueness are no longer secure. AI becomes not a guarantor of meaning, nor its negator, but the latest stage upon which humanity enacts its creative defiance.
C. Frankl: Logotherapy and Acceleration of Meaning through Hope
Viktor E. Frankl (1905--1997), through his workMan's Search for Meaning(1946), shifts existential discourse in a more therapeutic direction. In contrast to Kierkegaard, who emphasized the leap of faith, or Camus, who rejected metaphysical hope, Frankl offers a frameworklogotherapy---an approach to psychotherapy that places the search for meaning as the most fundamental human need, even more so than the drive to seek pleasure (Freud) or power (Adler).
1. Meaning as a Determinant of Survival
Frankl's experiences in Nazi concentration camps provided the empirical basis for his thesis that humans can survive in the most extreme conditions if they have"Why"to live. Hope plays a role as catalyst logotherapy, accelerates the process of searching for meaning by giving individuals direction and purpose, even in the midst of suffering.
2. Hope as an Accelerating Force
Frankl did not view hope as a metaphysical escape (as Camus rejected it), but rather as a psychological energy that enables individuals to transcend the reality of suffering to the horizon of meaning. Hope triggers an existential shift---from focusing on uncontrollable conditions to focusing on possible meanings that can be found inside it.
In this context, acceleration occurs because hope activates human creativity in finding meaning more quickly and dynamically---through experiential values, creative values, or attitudinal values.
