ABSTRACT
Jean Grenier, in a small book entitled Choice,1 wrote: ‘We are not in the world, this thought is the genesis of philosophizing… It is not that the world seems bad, but that it seems different. Pessimism is not necessarily the starting-point of philosophical speculation, but rather a more general feeling, a feeling of strangeness.’ In his Myth of Sisyphus Camus describes man as ‘divorced’ from his world. Yet on the other hand ‘being-in-the-world’ and Mitsein are key concepts of phenomenology. How are these apparently mutually exclusive positions reconciled, if at all? Is there any meeting-point between human sense and the world’s nonsense?
