_011 Albert Camus & Absurdism

Is life really worth living or should we just end it all? This is the key issue discussed by Albert Camus, a 20^th Century French philosopher, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in which he claims that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

The question arises when one considers the problem of Absurdism. Camus, although he wasn’t the first to talk about “The Absurd”, defined it as a conflict between two forces

     1)   Man’s inherent desire to find meaning in the world

     2)   His ultimate inability to find it (see Nihilism)

So our struggle is not derived solely from a lack of meaning, but rather the clash between that and our strong urge to find such reason and purpose in the world. He believes that it is fundamentally a problem of reason and the apparent absence of it in the universe despite man’s need for it.

For Camus, there are three possible ways of combating the absurd:

Suicide – for Camus, this could not be the answer, for it makes an unjustified leap. It goes from the idea that life is meaningless to the idea that it is not worth living, which are not necessarily one in the same. Yet Camus believes that it is our instinct for life that ultimately overrides our reason to commit suicide. More important for him is that he doesn’t believe that suicide is the only, nor the best option, but rather we can reconcile our experience with The Absurd.

Leap of faith – Camus rejected the methods that existentialists tried to use to combat The Absurd. Often existentialists like Kierkegaard resolve the irrationality of the universe with God, or another transcendent being. Camus said that this was not actually confronting the problem, but rather brushing it aside and finding comfort with no logic. He defined this as “philosophical suicide” and regarded it as lowly as the physical kind.

Recognition – This was Camus’ solution. In our demand for reason and certainty, there is only one truth that we can be undoubtedly certain about, which is The Absurd itself. He realises that to fully embrace The Absurd would be to commit suicide, but he preferred not to try and overcome it but consciously live with it.

Sispyhus (essay title) was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again. We must “imagine Sisyphus happy” – that is to be content with this lack of meaning to life.

Without meaning or purpose to tie us down, we can be truly free and live as we please, since we can only know what we experience for ourselves. Furthermore, without meaning in life, there are no moral values and thus no particular experience can be considered better than another. If all experiences are of equal quality, it is only logical to increase our quantity of experiences. Camus recommends we use our freedom to live the fullest life we can and we live in the present moment.

Word Count: 498

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1955 [MS].

_010 Spinoza & Pantheism

Spinoza was a 17^th Century Jewish Dutch philosopher. In his book “Ethics”, he attempted to redefine God towards that which is comparable to pantheism. This led to his excommunication from the Jewish community. So why were his views so controversial?

For Spinoza, God was the only substance, which he defined as that whose existence does not rely on other things. This is known as logical monism, which is the belief that the world is one essence, whose individual parts cannot exist independently. Spinoza thought that God must be infinite, since anything which is finite must be contained within something else, since it must have a boundary. Therefore, it cannot exist without other things (definition of substance).

In other words, God is the entire universe, specifically nature (but also transcends it). God is everything and nothing is separate from him. He is abstract and impersonal, not like the traditional view of God, who was outside the universe and had characteristics.

For this reason, Spinoza was a determinist. Determinism is the rejection of free will and the belief that all actions are caused by other events and forces. This means that the future is as fixed as the past. There is only one possible chain of events; people do not have the ability to choose their actions.

Spinoza said that the reason we are under the illusion of choice is because we have desires; things we want to do, but don’t understand why we have them. You may think that you chose to eat a slice of pizza, but really your hunger caused you to want it.

This implies a few things, specifically that we cannot be held morally accountable for our actions, since we never could have done something different. But Spinoza said that everything necessarily happens as it does and we shouldn’t try to do otherwise. We should accept reality because it is perfect. Many would argue that it isn’t perfect since there is evil in the world. Spinoza claimed that evil only arises from a limited conception of the world. Good and bad is merely an illusion since our perspective of the world is so tiny, we cannot see the full picture.

Therefore, instead of trying to change the way the world works, we should accept it. Happiness is aligning our will with that of the universe, instead of trying to battle against it. Only this way can we see how God views the world, under the aspect of eternity.We shouldn’t fear the future or death, nor should we blame, praise or criticise anyone for their actions. We should embrace that God is the universal cause.

But there is a way we can become freer, by becoming more aware of our causes. Reason can never triumph emotion, but through reason we can understand our emotions and causes, and thus change them from passive emotion to active emotion, thus becoming more like God. Happiness is having an intellectual love of God and accepting one’s place in nature.

Word Count: 498

Spinoza, Ethics, in Edwin Curley, translator, The Collected Writings of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), volume 1.

_009 Schopenhauer & The Will

Arthur Schopenhauer was a 19^th Century German philosopher who built on Kant’s philosophy, namely that the “double aspect” of the world. There is the world as we experience it (phenomenal world) and the world independent of our experience (noumenal world). Objects in the noumenal world are called “things in themselves”. We can never know about things in themselves because if we saw them then we would be perceiving them.

The world as we know it is a representation created by our mind. There are structures of our mind that help us to make sense of our experience, such a space, time and causality. We do not observe these things; rather they are an intuition we possess.

For Kant there must be something in the noumenal world, a thing in itself, that causes our perceptions in the first place. But Schopenhauer disagrees with this because the entire idea of causality only applies through our experience. It is simply a feature of the mind, incapable of causation.

But we experience our own body from within. It is an object, like everything in the phenomenal world, but we also are consciously aware that we inhabit it. Our body is the only object which we have internal access to and understanding of. Then he says that everything else must be the same; all people and animals and plants are aware of their own body too.

He developed this by claiming that everything in the world was a manifestation of  “The Will”, often referred to as “the will to live” which is a fundamental driving force to stay alive. But The Will is no benevolent force like a God, rather it is an evil demon, responsible for all the suffering in the world.

We are slaves to The Will, we are manifestations of The Will and it is the reason for our desires. We strive towards goals because we believe that it will make us happy, rid us of suffering and free us from The Will. But when we achieve our goals we realise that we haven’t obtained happiness, but rather just liberated ourselves from pain and stripped us of the delusion that happiness is waiting for us. In turn, this can cause boredom, an entirely different kind of evil.

So how do we rid ourselves of The Will? For Schopenhauer, one method was asceticism. This is the denial of The Will, the denial of oneself and the rejection of egoistic pleasure and desires (similar to Buddhism/Hinduism). An ascetic must recognise that there is no separation of objects in the world, since everything is just the manifestation of The Will. In this way, he must accept the pain of the whole world as his own and identify with all suffering.

Then, through the overcoming of human nature, an ascetic must rid himself of desires and thoughts and become “indifferent”. This is known as a “will to nothingness”. Fundamentally, suffering derives from the natural striving towards survival which must be transcended to avoid conscious pain.

Word Count: 499

1958: The World as Will and Representation, Vols. I and II, translated by E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications (1969).

_008 Wittgenstein & Picture Theory

Wittgenstein was a 20^th Century Austrian philosopher who attempted to distinguish between what can and what cannot be meaningfully spoken about. In other words, he wanted to know about the limits of what can be expressed through language. In his book, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” he ultimately concludes that we should abandon the act of philosophy altogether.

He asserted that for language to have any meaning, it must directly fit the world we live in. Language represents the world by depicting it. Therefore, a word must represent an object in the world. Any other words simply link these objects together. So a meaningful statement can be pictured in the real world.

Furthermore, the relationship between the words of a sentence must mirror the relationship between the objects in a fact. He was not necessarily referring to statements that we use in everyday conversation, but rather elementary propositions i.e. the simplest statements that exist. All regular statements can be broken down into these elementary ones.

A true statement is one whereby the arrangement of words is identical to the arrangement of objects.

“London is in England” is a true proposition because there is a city called London which is located in a country called England.

A false statement is one where the arrangement of objects simply describes a possible arrangement of objects.

“London is in South America” is a false proposition since it does not correlate with how things are in the real world. But it is possible, and therefore meaningful. It is conceivable that London could be in South America if the circumstances were different.

So then what is not meaningful? For Wittgenstein, it was philosophy. Judgements about ethics, beauty and religion, even though they were immensely important to him, were simply not accessible by means of language. We can never say anything meaningful about these things because they do not describe what is in the world. Instead they describe the world itself. He describes these as “transcendental”. There is no picture for them. Therefore, for him, all philosophical problems are actually just problems of language misuse.

Logic and mathematics were also, in a sense, without sense (kek). This is because logic tells us what the limits of sense are. Logic is itself the boundary of what can be express and thought. But it does not itself picture anything and thus have no sense (not to be confused with nonsense).

In this sense, Wittgenstein regards even the Tractatus as meaningless, that it should only be used as a ladder upon which to climb before discarding it completely. His own writing has gone beyond the limit of what can be expressed and thought, so it is ironically self-defeating.

Later in life, he refutes many of the arguments that he makes in the Tractatus, making him arguably the most famous philosopher to have admitted he was wrong. However, the Tractatus was a revolutionary work in the philosophy of language, which beforehand was a relatively dismissed section of philosophy.

Word Count: 494

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), 1922, C. K. Ogden (trans.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Originally published as “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung”, inAnnalen der Naturphilosophische, XIV (3/4), 1921.