CONCEPT
Philosophical Suicide
Camus's term for the leap of faith into any system — religious, political, ideological — that promises to resolve the absurd by providing guaranteed meaning.
Philosophical suicide, in Camus's usage, is not literal suicide but the abandonment of the absurd confrontation through a leap into a system that promises resolution. The religious believer who accepts revelation resolves the absurd by adding a cosmic meaning the universe does not otherwise provide. The ideological true believer who surrenders to a total system — Marxist, fascist, triumphalist, Luddite — resolves it similarly, by substituting the system's answers for the question's unresolvability. Camus calls both responses suicide because both kill the specifically human capacity: the capacity to live in the full lucidity of the absurd without fleeing it. In the AI context, philosophical suicide takes two contemporary forms — the triumphalist faith in the machine as salvation, and the Luddite faith in a pre-machine past that was never actually free of the absurd.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept appears in the second major movement of The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus works through the available responses to the absurd and rejects all of