His position regarding Algeria says everything.
The Absurdity of Albert Camus
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Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Everyone has to find an answer to the meaning if life. For the non religious/escapist, you have to stare into the void and find an answer at some point. Existentialism (Sartre) says you have to find your own meaning. Camus says there cannot be meaning; life is inherently "absurd". Any of the existentialist philosophies will be adjacent to angsty teenager stuff; they dance closely with nihilism and cynicism.
> Everyone has to find an answer to the meaning if life. For the non religious/escapist, you have to stare into the void and find an answer at some point.
You don't though. There is no meaning, and need not be any meaning, and life has lost nothing by not having meaning.
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Camus saw the problem (or got close to it) but kept it. He noticed the craving for meaning, noticed the world won't answer it, and then chose to hold on to the craving anyway and call that defiance freedom. That's just suffering with extra steps and rationalizing it. The buddha didn't offer a "justification for existence." He pointed out that the demand for one is the problem (part of it anyway). You crave meaning, t…
At least for me, the idea of giving up the craving for _everything_ seems to be rather...undesireable. I'd argue that a futile existence, with full knowledge that it is futile but living anyways, is much more "life-affirming" than giving up all desire. I want to feel, to touch, to yearn. Even if those don't mean anything, I think it's much better to do rather than to not do. And I think that humans, more than anythin…
If you substitute "clinging" for "craving" (Burbea's Seeing that Frees expounds on this very clearly) then I think we get a better English interpretation of the material.
If the mind's full of clinging (either in demanding what isn't present or refusing to release what was present but which is now leaving the present) then that mind doesn't have any room left to experience aliveness.
So (to me) the material doesn't suggest asceticism or abandoning the human sensual potential, it reminds that clinging will sneak in and take over the mental cycles, undermining your ability to live to that potential.
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#84Feel great to read this type of article on hackernews.
Camus died too young, and the current world have enough of evidence of absurdity.
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#85Hm, Absurdity is an interesting concept, M. Camus. Thank you for posting it to HN, I have looked through the docs and I got curious. How does it compare with Buddhism of Siddharta Guatama and the preceding buddhas, or Stoicism by Zeno? I have been a big fan of Stoicism 2.0 by Marcus Aurelius. Why should one continue to download and install Absurdity? Can anyone who’s been running Absurdity in production do a comparis…
I think Reality is so big, you can superimpose any Quality (Absurdism, Discordianism, Hedonism, Lovecraftian Horror, Bhakti Devotion, Theatre metaphors, Infinite Games metaphors, etc). The way I think is : all these qualities are of a subset and we are applying these qualities to a superset through morphing step by step. One just has to be clever enough with words.
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#86If you are not familiar with Camus' work, I highly recommend reading the essay collection Nuptials ( Nuptials at Tipasa , The Wind at Djémila , Summer in Algiers and The Desert ). It was written in 1936, when Camus was in his early twenties; several years before he articulated his "philosophie de l'absurde" in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Camus himself described Noces as belonging to a pre-absurdist "pagan"…
>At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. What does this mean ? Why "black" ?
I understand it as sunlight so bright that your eyes are half-closed, obscuring the landscape
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#87His Sisyphus essay is famous for its closing line but I find it interesting how for several pages it closes with a thump, thump, thump and metaphor fusion (the essay is ending, the rock is rolling, the gods are watching, the choice is being made...) Even the second-last line is underrated: "There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. [...] His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. [...] The absurd man…
I still don't understand how that metaphor works when Sisyphus' entire existence had meaning in the sense that god had basically cursed him to continue doing it regardless of what he wants (in the actual myth Camus references). But that is kind of weird because it doesn't really mean what Sisyphus is doing is absurd or meaningless (it follows the perfectly valid logic that gods had put a spell on him, and he must do…
The Meaningless and absurdity part comes from doing the same thing over and over, and it’s done as a punishment and not to serve a grand purpose.
You can see something similar on humans with myth if you can call it that where humans humans must work after the sin of Adam and eve
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#88His Sisyphus essay is famous for its closing line but I find it interesting how for several pages it closes with a thump, thump, thump and metaphor fusion (the essay is ending, the rock is rolling, the gods are watching, the choice is being made...) Even the second-last line is underrated: "There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. [...] His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. [...] The absurd man…
> One must imagine Sisyphus happy I have my disagreements with Absurdism, but still, Gavin Aung Than's comic on Bill Watterson's "A Cartoonist's Advice" adds to perspective on what it might mean to forever push boulder up hill & yet manifest happiness: https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoo... / https://archive.vn/a34Bx
What are your disagreements with Absurdism?
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One must imagine Sisyphus happy Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you? I imagine that he's happy because he takes pride in the quality of his work pushing the stone.
I don't know if Camus and/or people who're very familiar with his essay would approve but maybe the Pixar movie Soul (2020) has something similar to what he was gesturing at. The protagonist finally gets a big break as a performer and says: "It's just I've been waiting on this day for... my entire life. I thought I'd feel different." The woman replies: "I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish…
Regarding the water thing, David Foster Wallace once said this:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Re: The Absurdity of Albert Camus
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand how that metaphor works when Sisyphus' entire existence had meaning in the sense that god had basically cursed him to continue doing it regardless of what he wants (in the actual myth Camus references). But that is kind of weird because it doesn't really mean what Sisyphus is doing is absurd or meaningless (it follows the perfectly valid logic that gods had put a spell on him, and he must do…
The Meaningless and absurdity part comes from doing the same thing over and over, and it’s done as a punishment and not to serve a grand purpose. You can see something similar on humans with myth if you can call it that where humans humans must work after the sin of Adam and eve
I think you should read the paper I shared since it explains the prespective much better.