Although Camus was called the 'conscience of his age', no writer has continued to be both more vilified and exalted in the West. This book is a gateway to investigating whether Camus' ideal of living without conceptual absolutes is an attainable goal.

Introduction: Experience of the Absurd; Logic that Reassures; The Absurdity of Existence; From Existential to Logical Absurdity; An Absurdity of Excessive Logic; Living Without an Excess of Logic; Disquietude that Cannot be Distilled; Maintaining a Tension of Existence; Existential Conflict; Conflict and Metaphysical Why; A Metaphysical Answer; Answers and Nostalgia for the Absolute; Camus' Own Revolt Against Absurdity; Absurdity in the Absence of Conflict?; Conflict and the Search for Meaning; The Meaning of Nothingness; Politeness and Politics; Politeness: The First Degree of Justice; Loving Abstract Humanity; A Contagion of Group Think; Self-Refuting Political Thought; Utopias Which Destroy Themselves; The Longing to be Free From Pain; A Politicised Existentialism; Flirtation and Revulsion; Intoxicating Paradoxes at a Cafe; From Paradox to Moral Anarchy; Ensuing Orthodoxies of Modernism; An Aftermath of Postmodernism; Rise of the Bourgeois Bohemians; A Mean Between Extremes; An Extremism of Success; Sacrifice to the Ever-Pressing They'; Bourgeois Anxiety and Existential Angst; Experience Defined Rationally; Contrast to an Eastern Position; Nostalgia for the Absolute; Quest for an Absolutist Epistemology; From Epistemology to Political Ideology; Rationalism Par Excellence; Independence of the World for Intelligibility; A Search for Intelligibility Ends in Paradox; A Paradox of the One over Many; From the Many to a Critique of Pure Reason; Reason and Absolutism in the Final Analysis; Need Reality Conform to Reason?; Psychological and Logical Thirst for Reality; Reality and Verbal Limitations; Limitations in terms of the Madhyamika; The Madhyamika and Misunderstanding; Misunderstanding an Eastern Existentialism; From the Existential to the Logical; Logical Consequences; Beyond the Conceptual and Linguistic; Index.