http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus
'In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."' Oops! Sorry, Camus, old chap! He seems very political and sexual, too things I find hard to understand. (I feel scarcely human.) I forgot, I read /The Myth of Sisyphus/ (also in translation) as well. It also said nothing to me, even though I can pretty much agree with its (rhetorically overstated) opening sentence, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" (which for me is scarcely an overstatement). "Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither [...]" I've never got this. I'm only too well aware of how utterly absurd almost everything is, but that does not seem to me to be a natural or inevitable condition of things. (So, perhaps I should read /The Fall/? Well, we'll get to that. I have a vague feeling I might even have read it once, a long time ago ... no, don't think so.) I see humanity as having a future, and the present age as just being another rather dark primitive period. Things will get clearer, very slowly (too slowly to be of much help to me, I fear). On the other hand, I see the human mind as being very limited, perhaps for all time, and we are probably very low in the scheme of things. That might perhaps be loosely and distantly related to what Camus is getting at, but for me it is associated with vaguely paranormal and religious intuitions. Anyway, I don't see why we can't live within our limitations, and make what sense we can of things, which is surely a very great deal more sense than most people make of things at the moment. I'm not pessimistic, in this sense (although I am more pessimistic than those who believe that science can or even does explain everything). "His main aim was to express the positive side of surrealism and existentialism, rejecting the negativity and the nihilism of André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre." Well, that sounds promising, I must say. (But I fail to see whatever he saw that was positive.) The section of the Wikipedia article about /The State of Siege/ seems badly written, or perhaps I'm just not awake yet. At any rate, I don't understand it, although the plot of the play, and its relationship with /1984/, sound quite interesting. "Kierkegaard explains that the absurdity of certain religious truths prevent us from reaching God rationally" That makes a little bit more sense to me. "ultimately our endeavours are meaningless" Well, I disagree. My life is more fucked-up than I can describe, but (as with the general condition of society) I don't see this as a natural condition, and it is not meaningless to try to un-fuck-up my life! 'What still had meaning for Camus is that despite humans being subjects in an indifferent and "absurd" universe, in which meaning is challenged by the fact that we all die, meaning can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by our own decisions and interpretations.' I definitely have a more theological response than this. (My response might well be of the "nondual" kind that Molly has pointed me to, but it must also pretty definitely have a Western twist to it, even if not a specifically Christian flavour - it has taken me a long time to even begin to see any sense at all in Christianity. I stumbled into Meister Eckhart the other day: he seems appealing.) Also, in a mad (absurd?) way, I used to cling to pure mathematics as a kind of salvation, and even now, I still think that something of the mathematician's way of thinking is going to help me to get out of this mess I'm in. "Camus' well-known falling out with Sartre is linked to this opposition to totalitarianism. Camus detected a reflexive totalitarianism in the mass politics espoused by Sartre in the name of radical Marxism." I'm pretty sure I'd be on Camus's side there. I don't personally like Sartre, although I have to learn something from him. "Meursault's inability to lie cannot seamlessly integrate him within society and in turn threatens the simple fabrics of human mannerisms expected of a structurally ordered society." Well, that's me, all right! I've always been a fish out of water. Is there water? "society incapable of realizing his seemingly inhumane and misanthropic behavior." Yep, that's me, all right (at least in one interpretation of the words - in a more obvious interpretation, I'm neither inhumane nor misanthropic) "Ultimately, the plague enables people to understand that their individual suffering is meaningless" Oh, great! That's exactly the state of suicidal depression that I'm trying to get away from. Seeing my suffering as meaningful is almost my only hope. "Camus' belief was that political and religious authorities try to confuse us with over-complicated moral systems to make things appear more complex than they really are, potentially to serve their own needs." How does that fit with "the Absurd"? In what sense did Camus believe that things are "simple"? I think perhaps he was struggling against religion, in part because of the (horrible) form which religion assumes, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition (which I myself find unspeakably alienating). I don't like football, either. :-). OK, I might give /The Fall/ a chance, although I'm not promising to do so.
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