Albert Camus is a frustrated rationalist. He values reason and wants the world to be rationally penetrable, but he finds that it is not. What he calls the Absurd consists in the disproportion between the human need for understanding and the world's unintelligibility, "the unreasonable silence of the world." (Myth of Sisyphus, Vintage 1955, p. 21, tr. Justin O'Brien)
Lev Shestov, on the other hand, is an irrationalist. He delights in what he takes to be reason's impotence.
Such wild diversity in the life of the mind and spirit does not delight me, but it does fascinate me and serve as a goad to struggle on, day by day, for as much light as can be attained in these inasuspicious circumstances until the curtain falls -- or lifts.
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