Of the absurd reasoning and existentialism.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Influenced by Nietzsche, Camus argued that life is inherently meaningless, while human continues to impose order on existence and to look for answers to unanswerable questions
Absurd and suicide
Suicide is the solution for the absurd:
- People never died because of ontological arguments
- Suicide is often the result of people who didn’t find worth in the living
- Life is not worth living therefore I took the easy way out
as a paradox:
- Suicide is the justification of meaning of life ← the most important question for philosophers
- From Nietzchean prose, those who say “no” acts as if they said “yes”: Schopenhauer
Fantasise the act of eluding:
Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery those who lives not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it meaning, and betray it.
Logic is easy, but it is impossible to be logical to bitter end. It is considered truth if one decided to die at the hand of self, but does that mean life itself just have no meaning?
Absurd reasoning is based on whether there are logic to reasons for men who died by their “own hands consequently follow to its conclusion of their emotional inclination”
The absurd come from the abject at birth, similar to end pages of the books starts from the beginning. To understand absurd is to understand the art of living, the world of intelligence.
Seemingly the questions of the absurd stems from question “Why”. The wearing of a normal life, inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.
Heidegger: “mere anxiety [is] a source of everything.”
definition of absurd
See also P.17, P.20, P.25
I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.
Absurd is the confrontation of this irrational call for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart
The absurd is measured by the mans in the world
The attack of reasons and decency are never stronger than our own
Once we recognised the absurd, it becomes passion. How many lives with his passion or not is a different question.
Philosophers lives through their lenses of the world such that they ran these experiments and believed so strongly in the results
Jaspers despair any ontology because we have lost naïveté
Kierkegaard lives the absurd: no truth is absolute and can render satisfactory an existence impossible in itself.
The absurd is born from reasons man making sense of the world and the irreparable silence of the universe echoed back to one.
P.30
In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them. If I wish to limit myself to facts, i know what man wants, I know that the world offers him, snd now i can say that i know what links them.
Rule of method: A man is always a prey for his truth. Once he has admitted them he cannot free himself from them. a man who become conscious of his absurd is now forever bound by it
Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken.
I do not want to suggest anything here, but how can one fail to read in his works the signs of an almost intentional mutilation of the soul to balance the mutilation accepted in regard to the absurd? It is the leitmotiv of the Journal. “What I lacked was the animal which also belongs to human destiny… . But give me a body then.” And further on: “Oh! especially in my early youth what should I not have given to be a man, even for six months … What I lack, basically, is a body and the physical conditions of existence.”
Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. It allows one perhaps, aa can be seen, to derive hope of its contrary, which is death
Kierkegaard’s view on despair is that it is not a fact, but a state: the state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to God. Therefore, the absurd is the sin without God
P.44
I read merely these assertions of Husserl, apparently parade cal yet rigorously logical if what precedes is accept That which is true is true absolutely, in itself; truth, one, identical with itself, however different the creation who perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods.” Reason triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice, I cannot, deny. What can its assertions mean in the absurd word The perception of an angel or a god has no meaning for me. That geometrical spot where divine reason ratifies mine will always be incomprehensible to me. There, too, I discern a leap, and though performed in the abstract, it nonetheless means for me forgetting just what I do not want to forget.
Husserl exclaims: “If all masses subject to attraction were to disappear, the law of attraction would not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible application, I know that I am faced with a metaphysic of consolation. And if I want to discover the point where though leaves the path of evidence, I have only to reread the parallel reasoning that H voices regarding the mind: if we could contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic process, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, like the basic laws of theoretical science. Hence they would be valid even if there were no psychic process.
Even if the mind were not, its law would be, i see then a psychological truth H aims to make a rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he leaps this expedient by eternal reason.
Husserl’s concrete universe in that all essences are not formal, but some are material, that the first are the object of logic and second of science, this is mere question of definition.
I then realize that merely the order of the procession has been changed. This world has ceased to have its reflection in a higher universe, but the heaven of forms is figured in the host of images of this earth. This changes nothing for me. Rather than encountering here a taste for the concrete, the meaning of the human condition, I find an intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete itself.
absurd freedom
Iindividual f I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve.
The absurd is simultaneously the awareness and rejection of death. Suicide as a solution for the absurd, the absolute, such that man’s cannot seem to live with his dreadful future, that he choose suicide as a solution.
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Consciousness and revolt as rejections are contrary of renunciation
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The method regards to a matter of persistent
Freedom
Knowing whether or not a man is free involves in whether he can/cannot have a master. The paradox of this freedom is that understanding the metaphysical liberty takes away its meaning of being free. God is problem of evil: either we are not free and God all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but god is not all-powerful.
Freedom cannot be inferred as a general solution, such that it can only be derived from one’s experience. I don’t inherit freedom from a higher being, as I’m my own owner of my thoughts and actions
Such that I’m responsible for my own actions. If the absurd cancel put the eternal freedom, it restored and magnifies my freedom of action.
Man is bound to postulate his freedom based on the illusion of which he was living.
Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of it - it involves a principles of liberation. Such new independence has a definite time limit, like any freedom of action.
the absurd man
The actor trains himself to feed only on appearances.
Analysis
Camus’ argument on the absurd:
- the world is full of irrationality and indifference. The world is silent against humanity search for the meaning of life.
- Meaning and value are constructed by humans, instead of what Kierkegaard implies in putting faith as a solution for outsource our value system. Because eventually life is meaningless
- But what Kierkegaard is doing is actually a philosophical suicide.
Note
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcend it. But I know that i do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it
Note
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me. I can understand only in human terms.
Did he mean the world or the human as absurd? No, because as rational human being we are programmed to create order and put meaning to life in a indifferent and irrational universe
The why arises, and trying to find rational in an irrational world is absurd. The absurd cannot be negated, meaning we can live either in acceptance or escape from it. Religion is a set of pre-made answers for existential and philosophical questions, and use as tools for control.
Philosophical suicide is to elude the absurd and trying to figure out the meaning of life, with a set of man-made beliefs
How to live life in a meaningless world? It is to let loose in all definitions of meaning and live life fruitfully.
Instead of despairing, see the silver lining, to focus on this life, create value on our own, when our time is limited, with a full perception of it. One should not accept the absurd, we should revolt around it as we have full control of our own actions and freedom.
Rebellion: full of thoughts and actions. as rejection of hope. The goal is to live solely with what he know, to accommodate with what is and to bring in nothing?