Through the mists and whispers of my youth, comes a calling, a calling to end it all? To die. Sounds peaceful and serene. The soft, gentle petals of the rose-colored life I envisioned, fading day by day, falling at my feet. I try to grab them, lifeless they look, all dried up and passionless. I try reaching out for other fig trees with fresh live figs, they taste sweet at first but slightly not mine, not the way I’d have tended and nurtured it. And on and on it goes, a fruitless tree, am I?
I also want to..live, the last word almost a whisper, a prayer, a begging, a permission, a last wish. As if dying were more courageous and in character than choosing to live.
I burn, I burn, I burn to live.
But what is life?
Disclaimer: The following notes deal with death in the philosophical aspect, it might have something that might make you uncomfortable, but it does not deal with any personal grief, so is safe to read.
My Notes from The Myth of Sisyphus: (till Page 52, bf. Absurd Freedom)
The famous essay by Albert Camus, ends with quoting “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” and it annoys me. Firstly, there is the word “must”, must I imagine Sisyphus happy? It doesn’t say “can”, it doesn’t leave the possibility open. Well, it’s the concluding line, at least it concludes. I would like to reserve my opinions till the very end of reading this, as I have not read the work in toto, they will be expressed in the next post.
Camus starts his essay by talking about suicide, the reasons people commit suicide and questioning if that indeed is the right answer. He argues, dying voluntarily, means you have figured out what living requires, the effort and the uselessness of the effort. And ironically, often people who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. He remarks how the body came before thought and wants to live.
He insists the difference between refusing to grant meaning to life is not equivalent to suicide. He talks about how many people have thought about this and crossed the line –and given up. Camus suggests lingering longer in the deserted vegetation of our mind, for we may find some answer there.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.
In the daily humdrum of life when you suddenly pause to ask a “why”? That’s the end of your mechanical life and the birth of the Absurd. Weariness is symbolic that you are done living your automaton life and “consciousness” has taken over. Everyone lives as if not knowing death, because death is the absence of living. There are no accounts from post-dead people. They are just dead.
All human brains want to do is to unify – theories, laws, explanations – that brings them eternal joy. All existentialist philosophers agree with each other that nothing is clear, all is chaos. Knowing that the world is not reasonable but trying to unify it, because we feel the nostalgia of once being full or at home is the feeling of the Absurd. Camus exemplifies how to think of the Absurd, say a swordfighter is fighting off the machine guns. That is absurd!
Definition: the absurd does not live in the man or the world, it is the confrontation between the two. Man’s longing for comfort and meaning and the unrelentless silence of the universe.
Absurd arises from the following:
– comparison of facts and reality
– it is not inherent to either party
– it is born out of the confrontation of the facts
Camus goes on to dissect and roast Chestov and Kierkegaard, which is fun and amusing, but required me to backfill my understanding of their works. He criticizes both of them for their approach when they were finally face to face with the Absurd. According to Camus, Chestov’s approach was to start hoping beyond the Absurd and Kierkegaard attributed it to religiousness, and that Christianity will explain the absurd. Kierkegaard wants to be cured of his nostalgia. (My notes say: “yeah, I don’t blame him”)
When Chestov can’t find answers to the unreasonable, he deifies it as God and admits there is no justification for it. The gap he feels is the bedrock of transcendence. Camus call this a leap.
Camus claims that by making absurd as part of the universe, Chestov eludes the problem of having to face it.
Kierkegaard bows down to Christianity when faced with the Absurd. Camus calls this also a leap.
And this is attitude, this leaping to explain the Absurd by attributing it to God or God-like properties, is what he calls “Philosophical Suicide”.
He then began countering Husserl, the last contender but the most respected, he goes till the very end, the theory of reality being by fragmented projections of the actual experience, we cannot explain it but only describe it. Camus counters this with Husserl bringing heaven to earth, every moment is privileged, there is God in every atom of the human soul, immanence instead of transcendence.
Quotes from the book:
These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that that existence is humiliated. The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of beings.
cutting-my-cheese-block,
calra
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