Does Camus make sense?
As someone with a casual interest in philosophy, Albert Camus became an early acquaintance of mine. I agreed that the 'death of God' was a point of departure into absurdity, and also that everyone was faced with the question of 'suicide' whether they liked to admit it or not. Camus' reconciliation of these points that one should embrace absurdity while making the choice not to kill oneself seems a little mistaken to me.
He uses the examples of absurd heroes as people who accept absurdity from the point of departure from God's death. However, realistically in comparison to the norm, these are a type of suicidal and self-destructive behavior. I can't help but to think the whole philosophy is erroneous as a type of slave mentality wherein the slave self-destructs without his master. This differs from an atheism wherein believing in God is the point of departure for a life of absurdity, and the adherent goes on to live unaffected without religion.
It seems to me Camus' writing offers nothing original from the religious belief that those who fall from the grace of God, or stray too far from the shepherd and his flock will find nothing but damnation in this life and the next. I have no way of knowing what effect Camus' writing has had on the mass audience that his popularity reached, but can't help but think his philosophy fed the institutions most associated with religion with human sacrifices to the gods that they worship. I'm talking about venereal diseased Don Juans to hospitals, disorganized anomics to psychiatry, drug addled to rehab, the deviant to corrections, the list goes on. It seems like the death of God in the minds of the people will feed the expanded mystical body of Christ in all its extremities, ironically giving God new life.
He uses the examples of absurd heroes as people who accept absurdity from the point of departure from God's death. However, realistically in comparison to the norm, these are a type of suicidal and self-destructive behavior. I can't help but to think the whole philosophy is erroneous as a type of slave mentality wherein the slave self-destructs without his master. This differs from an atheism wherein believing in God is the point of departure for a life of absurdity, and the adherent goes on to live unaffected without religion.
It seems to me Camus' writing offers nothing original from the religious belief that those who fall from the grace of God, or stray too far from the shepherd and his flock will find nothing but damnation in this life and the next. I have no way of knowing what effect Camus' writing has had on the mass audience that his popularity reached, but can't help but think his philosophy fed the institutions most associated with religion with human sacrifices to the gods that they worship. I'm talking about venereal diseased Don Juans to hospitals, disorganized anomics to psychiatry, drug addled to rehab, the deviant to corrections, the list goes on. It seems like the death of God in the minds of the people will feed the expanded mystical body of Christ in all its extremities, ironically giving God new life.
Comments (78)
He claims to have only a casual interest in philosophy. Sort of like me.
Once upon a time, long ago, I read Camus and Sartre. I haven't had any desire to return to their books.
Quoting introbert
Oh to be young and angsty again! No, I don't think everyone is faced with the question of suicide. One could just as easily say that everyone is faced with the question of living, whether they like it or not.
God is dead. Or what?
wiki
I don't know if God ever existed, let alone died, but I'm pretty sure that if he does exist, he was able to survive the Enlightenment and Fred Nietzsche.
Quoting introbert
What are you going on about here?
Quoting introbert
Are we, perhaps, possibly, out of our depth here? I know I am.
Old joke:
God is dead. -- Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is dead. -- God.
:up: :sparkle:
[quote=Albert Camus]There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.[/quote]
:up: :fire:
Thats one of the main complexities of human nature. The aim of surviving when we were born to die
Conatus (re Spinoza).
I gave the example that a philosophy that said the death of god should be a point of departure for living a life believing in god is absurd.
To me that Camus' (and Sartre's) existentialism led into postmodern critiques of institutions by those such as Foucault and Deleuze is not coincidental but the ongoing process of the individual not only recognize god is dead but, what Camus did not recognize, to also keep god dead!
- The Sum of All Existentialst thought and Movement is the above thought by Soren Kierkegaard
I think these philosophers and original authors laureates with the Nobel prize of literature deserve more respect.
Well theyve got the respect conferred to them by that prize and their fans but not mine.
Dont get me wrong from a literary point of view they can express themselves fairly well.
I get a sense that he has a superiority complex compared to his fellow creatures
Sartre (amongst his catalogue of brilliance and bullshit)
Since when is it one or the other? Either eternal consciousness or wild ferment and emptiness and unhappiness? If so, I should alert all the happy atheists I know.
Umm I believe its called the Ad Hominem fallacy?
Not really an ad hominem as such. I mean Garry Glitter and Jimmy Saville probably made ok music. The fact that both turned out to be pedophiles SHOULD be held against them.
To be frank I still can listen to Michael Jacksons music without committing any ad hominems not because he doesnt deserve it but I guess his work does stand for itself
Me calling him a pedo and STILL listening to his music does not create any cognitive dissonance when playing billie Jean.
Yes. In principle, I think we should separate the work and the author. Or, the politician/producer/coach...and his sex life. Why shouldn't we let someone's personal life define their public life?
We buy the book to derive pleasure (or instruction). We are not buying the book as an endorsement of the author's private life (which is private after all. Most people want to be in public without some aspect of their private past being used to discredit an unrelated achievement.
Politicians, producers, professors, etc. are voted for (or not), funded, or hired on the basis of their ability to produce results. If the politician has a string of affairs, but is an effective politician delivering the results voters wanted, what is it to the voters that he was lecherous? John F. Kennedy was much more active sexually than the public was aware of. This is as it should be.
The NYT claims that 201 powerful men were bright down by #ME TOO. Powerful men, or powerful women, are powerful usually because they are productive and influential in their field, not because of their sex lives. James Levine was fired in 2018 after 40 years of conducting the NY Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (and the Boston Symphony and Munich Philharmonic) because of allegations of his having had sex with young (male) musicians. Some of the 'incidents' go back 50 years!
I can disapprove of the sexual relationships other people have without it determining how I rate their professional performance.
The issue of not separate the books of Yukio Mishima from his personal character was the main of being "disliked" in Japan, because he is seen as a weird Samurai with old fashioned ideas who kill himself after a ceremony wearing a military uniform.
The past summer, I have read an interesting biography about Mishima written by one of his best friend who ended up being the mayor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara.
Shintaro tells in the book that Mishima was hated and disliked by a lot of people in Japan but they accepted the talent in his literature. Most of the reviewers saw him as a Japanese artist who was against any sense of modernism in Japan after WWII. (Even some writers insinuated his compromise on far-right politics when Mishima founded Tatenokai, his private militia)
Shintaro Ishihara celebrates the fact that the youngest generations of Japan no longer see Mishima in a negative perspective and they finally separate the personal issues from his works.
Some artists are drunks, drug addicts (William Burroughs comes to mind), hateful bastards, dishonest, fakes, and so on. We like them because of the art they produce, in spite of their sometimes dissolute personal lives. (The artists are the ones who suffer; we should be compassionate.).
Exactly! This is why we should pay more respects to artists/writers despite the fact that we probably don't like his/her personality at all.
So many famous composers were anti-semitic, anti-black, not to mention philosophers. In my opinion no - the art should be judged separately from the man. Including Gary Glitter (although his music sucked anyway.)
Think of a beautiful piece of music you love, let's say by Debussy. If you found out he was a rapist *he wasn't) it doesn;t change one note of Clair de Lune. It may cause YOU (or me) to boycott him, but the music is still exactly the same.
If Kant turned out to be a serial killer, it wouldn't change the categorical imperative (pro and con)....although it would be pretty darned ironic....
Ad Hominem = To the Person (Latin). there is no ad hominems here as both authors are dead. Also i did not attack any of their philosophical arguments by calling them idiots merely expressing my view on the significance of their thought on western philosophy. It was a simple ranking exercise.
Now you came along this thread and tried arguing with a dead man by picking up the quote I posted from Kierkegaard and in your infinite wisdom either expect me to defend a dead mans logic (btw there is no defence required on my part as his paragraph is watertight and you dont understand what hes actually saying so you try to nit pick it logical inconsistentcies where there are also none) or expect him to rise from the dead.
To re-iterate I have not committed the ad-hominem fallacy as you suggest by downplaying the importance of their work.
I thought Id point the topic in its rightful direction as the point on the matter was made.
- youre right - you werent really committing ad hominem, I went back and reread your posts more carefully. My apologies.
- if disagreeing with a famous philosopher is arguing with a dead man then half the people on this forum - or more - do it. Its called critiquing and its pretty common in philosophy, in my experience. You had some pretty nasty things to say about Camus and Sartre (catalogue of brilliance and bullshit, mere footnotes) - are you insulting dead men?
- of course I dont understand all of kierkegaard, but you put up a quote that was pretty straightforward and I commented on it.
Ok Im out of here - help yourself to the last word. Or not.
I think that it'd be easy to justify self-destructive behavior from the point of view of an absurdist. However, I think I'd say that the reason Camus chooses these eccentric personalities is to highlight in what way his ethical stance isn't traditional. But also, there's just something not as gripping as the heroic accountant embracing the absurd task of never-ending calculation. So, yes, I think there's a bit of entertainment in his choices, and that's where you'd get the impression of self-destructive behavior as a sort of substitute for suicidal desire in light of the absurd.
But I don't think that we must read the essay in that way. And, obviously, I think this would count as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of absurdism. It was, after all, meant to overcome the absurd. And isn't self-destructive behavior just suicide, but more exciting?
Without agreeing or disagreeing, if not that way, then in what way must we read the essay?
It is the first instance I meet on this forum a claim that multiple, possibly (but not necessarily) contradicting ways, and definitely different ways are all allowed to interpret a text at the same time and in the same respect.
This is interesting. Carrying this further, which to your credit you don't, if we accept that more than one interpretation of reality can be accepted, AND THEREFORE TRUE, then the acceptance of more than one interpretation contradicts the doctrine that everything is caused and everything causes everything else that comes after it.
Maybe this is why I don't like divergent thinking. With more than one solutions to a problem. Especially when one is lectured that HIS way of reading the text is wrong, but the opposite of his way, has many different acceptable ways of interpreting the text.
Accepting more than one interpretations, that are non-congruent with each other, then obviously many of them are wrong, and only one or zero are right.
So what's the point of accepting more than one explanations, interpretations, etc? I should have thought that philosophy was about finding the truth, which is necessarily singular, and not about pussy-footing around a set of acceptable interpretations.
You have confused philosophy with mathematics. Proposing criteria for judging and methods for "finding the truth" is not itself "finding the truth". Philosophical statements are useful suppositional at best; they're not truthful propositional themselves (e.g. the problem of the criterion, the hermeneutic circle, reflective equilibrium, language-games, dialectics, etc). In philosophy, perhaps more than any other rational discipline, answers are merely how questions generate more questions ... Thus, Sisyphus' boulder is also known as "the philosopher's stone." :fire: :eyes:
[quote=180 Proof]The journey is the destination.[/quote]
[s]We must imagine[/s] Sisyphus happy!
Any life affirming philosophy is good but without any of the wishy washy philosophy which can seem new age etc.
I will take you up on the offer of having the last word as you put it. Im here for for honest intellectuall discourse. Youre here for one-up-manship or to claim some sort victory when it comes to debating issues. Whatever it is you are trying to achieve with your last sentence it seems instead of strengthening your argument it weakens it.
Running away like that is nothing more than intellectual cowardice for the fear that you might be shown up somewhere along your reasoning/argument.
Oh and feel free to have the last word on any of the above points Ive raised. Or not.
Now Im out of here.
We must imagine ourselves agreeing with Camus.... :D
I don't think there's any one way to read a text, so there's no way you have to read it. I'm more inclined to say there are things which are obviously wrong: Camus is not writing a math textbook, and other of the multiple -- possibly infinite -- obviously wrong readings that are available to us.
Quoting god must be atheist
Heh, I'll note I disagree with your first assertion, that only one interpretation is the right one. What would it even mean to have a right interpretation? The closest I can imagine is that we have the same interpretation as the writer when they published the text -- the intent of the author is usually the way about making a "right" reading. But the problem with that is we don't have access to Camus' intent -- all we have are his words and the various facts of his life that we might use to bring sense to the words he wrote. We can't check up with him and ask "Did you mean this, or that? Or both?" -- and the "both" could very well be the answer an author gives, disappointing any interpreter hoping to demonstrate that their reading is the correct one.
But to answer your question -- even supposing there's a right interpretation, we wouldn't know if we had the right one. We'd only know if we had a coherent one. It's only by reading a multitude of interpretations and judging their relative merits that you'd be able to select the right one at all. So, at a bare minimum, even presuming there is a correct reading, the point would be to make sure the explanation or interpretation you have on hand is the right one or not.
Quoting god must be atheist
Is it possible for truth to turn out non-singular, in this process of finding it?
:up:
:roll:
I think Camus still makes sense. I don't pretend to understand every nuance, but the notion that humans toil impotently to create or find meaning in a meaningless world remains apropos. For myself I've never quite determined whether rolling that big rock up the hill should be an act of defiance or a form of joyful resignation. Are we engaged in recursive grunt work, or a form of ritual? Is this grind and toil an act of self-creation or of self-sabotage? It's all of this and I guess that's why it's absurd.
Camus' writing often resonates and soars.
I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I dont know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
- Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
Ritual grunt work. Creative self-sabotage. The reflex of respiration is absurd, no? Camus says, in effect, human dignity only manifests in clear-eyed living without evasions or nostalgias or indifference in spite of the world's indifference to human life. Makes sense to me.
PS I made a few other points against Camus as well, but I'm short on time.
Quoting introbert
What are societal values? I didn't think there were any - just an interpretive legal system and assorted sub cultures with their own values. Are you saying the nihilist is up against mainstream culture and its various incoherent set of values?
Quoting introbert
Can you explain what you mean in simple language? What moral argument is there against nihilism?
Quoting introbert
Perhaps that is the boulder rolling back down the hill, right?
Quoting introbert
I can't follow what you mean. Can you try it again is simple language? Are you talking about some nihilists creating or forging a set of new values, a la Nietzsche?
Surely the nihilist by definition does not accept moral values as being foundational. Morality is something the nihilist has to choose for themselves, in the absence of god/s or some kid of transcendent notion of The Good.
The key ones here are health, order, and rationality (reason).
Quoting Tom Storm
Nihilists consider the things people take very seriously as nothing. The moral argument against nihilism, if there's only one, is simply that it does not recognize the cornerstones and pillars of society.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'll have to make a sketch of that idea in my notebook. Thanks.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm not going to be the one to write the next chapter in Nihilism, I just see a direction that it is taking.
Thanks for clarifying. I hear you now. There are hard and soft nihilists. A hard nihilist might just choose suicide if the nihilism brings with it despair. My take of nihilism is that it is a place to start. It doesn't mean that others are treated badly or that all society offers is flouted. We are just aware of the arbitrary nature of meaning - there is nothing by way of foundation. Whatever meaning we find is ours to create. Similarly to atheism, a lack of belief in god does not promote evil or no morality or no social contract, it simply redefines how we understand the good and broadens our range. But then I'd argue that even with an organised belief system we are in the same boat anyway - all morality and social systems are constructed from shared meaning and are often, when unpacked, incoherent and hypocritical. All that's holding things together is power, the law, goodwill, fear and convention.
No need to be rude. We have a difference of opinion and suggesting mine is naïve/ignorant/contrarian because it doesn't match yours is not manners, right? Perhaps we won't find common ground then since I have already proposed that nihilism has various expressions and does not necessarily lead to anti-social behaviour. Can you demonstrate that nihilism invariably leads to anti-social (sociopathic) behaviour? I suspect that some forms of nihilism are just a type of anti-foundationalism. Many philosophers get along just fine thinking this way.
This seems like a reductio ad absurdum argument. What citation can you provide to substantiate that this is how nihilism functions in practice? I think most forms of hard nihilism are more likely to end up as silence via apathy.
Quoting introbert
We already have 'controls of social codes.' Some of these I am in favor of. One view of morality is that it is created to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve a preferred form of order. Anyway we've probably exhausted this one. Take care.
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/38809/Forsythe_Jeremy_E_2021_Masters.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
This link from a graduate thesis paper discusses the history of nihilism (search: "Tzar") and describes the 19th century nihilist movement in Russia that advocated destruction of society (antisocial enough?) to purge society of unworthy social structures to act against oppression and tyranny.
In Camus' The Stanger, a nihilistic protagonist violates social codes, kills a man, and gets executed.
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CS5dBwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA162&dq=nihilism+and+social+deviance+sociology&ots=NnuonKXok6&sig=St6Q1yrLbxHvc_q4MczkoppMPKI#v=onepage&q=nihilism%20and%20social%20deviance%20sociology&f=false
This interesting article discusses nihilism and violence but mentions Nietzche's evaluation of nihilism as potentially a destructive force of violence.
https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/eac-law-20/125947687
"By nature, legal
responsibility is normative and is expressed through the
existing system of legal norms. Therefore, the first sign of
legal irresponsibility is the lack of legal norms that
regulate legal responsibility. It is worth mentioning that
this feature makes the term legal irresponsibility closer
to the concept of legal anomie. The latter has already
been used in legal sciences (criminology, criminal law) to
explain legal nihilism in the marginal behavior of the
subject from the internal (psychological) point of view. In
classical understanding, anomie is the lack or violation
of the rules of behavior and their internal rejection by the
majority of society (process)"
This article discusses criminality/ legal nihilism but draws an arbitrary distinction
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0803706X.2017.1333145
Article mentions moral nihilism and violence
Still looking and reading...
Fair enough.
So my argument from earlier has been -
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't think anyone here has demonstrated that nihilism invariably leads to anti-social behaviour. But I'm going to accept part of your argument having thought about it more, that nihilism is often used as a synonym for evil and that it is associated in many people's mind with anti-social activities. Nihilism is a kind of epithet and has totemic power.
But for me, problematically, we can equally point to significant anti-social behaviour and atrocities committed by Islam and Christianity, surely not nihilistic in their intent and typical meaning making systems.
In Nihil Unbound: Naturalism and Anti-Phenomenological Realism philosopher Ray Brassier highlights his understanding of nihilism as a positive and necessary pathway back to truth-
"Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution his attempted overcoming of nihilism consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time's. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.
I'm not a Brassier acolyte - just noting this take:
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity."
I think that's what I meant when I wrote -
Quoting Tom Storm
I've pretty much remained consistent in saying that existentialism can justify bad things, but also saying that this isn't the whole story -- in a way I think that this reduction comes from a perspective that is still too rule-bound in their moral thinking. The nihilist is fine with changing rules, but the moral realist is not, and so thinks that the possibility of justifying selfish behavior with moral language is enough to defeat a particular way of talking -- I'd say the absurdist is just pointing out that this is what people often do, that it's absurd, at bottom, and frequently is a guise for selfish, rather than selfless, motives.
Why psychiatry? I'm not sure what you mean here?
Nihilism seems inevitable given the realization that despite what we say about ourselves, we're animals at heart, oui monsieur? We're beasts with post-human, divine ambitions; our hopes for meaning, meaning even an iota than the grandest possible we won't approve, is bound to be dashed to pieces.
I wouldnt take criticism of interpreting foucault from someone who shamelessly uses psychiatric discursive practices to defend realist tyrannical intetpretations
:cool:
Just finished reading The Stranger, incidentally, and it did in fact make perfect sense to me, though I felt that Meursault, the main character the tale, was absurdly contrived.
Quoting introbert
:rofl:
Indeed. I also sometimes think of this tale as the 'awakening' of someone with autism.
Absurdism = Nihilism +/- ?
How?
Well, he makes sense in many absurd ways. Take death for instance, were all bound to die one day so what actual difference does it make if we die 10 minutes from now or ten years from now. It makes sense that there is no difference, absurd as that may be. Or take Sisyphus for another instance, we can imagine him happy, absurd as that may be.
:death: :flower:
addendum to 180 Proof
Ok! Life is meaningless; death too, in the end, is meaningless. The universe also is meaningless. That's absurd because ... we're meaning-seeking beings (nah!). It isn't absurd is it?
You mean whether (just) a quirk or an illness? Hard to say from where I'm at - torn (to pieces) & yet still ...