Albert Camus | The Myth of Sisyphus (part 1) | Existentialist Philosophy & Literature

today we're starting a new thinker and a new work a very early work thanks essentialist thinker Albert Camus we're looking at his essay a very long essay actually as it turns out the myth of synthesis oftentimes it's anthologized and they only give you a little bit of it what I'm going to do is take several lectures to actually go through the whole of it because it's a very important piece for understanding existentialism not only because it shows you come his early attitude towards things you can pair this up in part with some of his fictional works but also because he's reflecting on other existentialist this is in some ways as far as the movement goes a late piece so you'll discuss retrospectively and also critically how their attitudes towards life death meaning human nature almost those sorts of grand themes how they come together whether they're adequate where I want to begin with this Camus distinguishes between what he calls an absurd sensitivity that can be found widespread in the age and an absurd philosophy which in art which our time properly speaking has not done his job as he feels it is to articulate that absurd philosophy and this is a little bit different than some of the other existentialists that he's going to take issue with Rhianna see so he thinks that we inhabit a time remember he is writing you know mid-century last century a lot of things have taken place there's been a sort of general eclipse of reason or rationality understood in many ways philosophy has had plenty of time to you might say both turn itself in word and look at individual experience and start focusing on existential conditions and also to see that the pretenses that were made earlier of this being you know the best of all possible worlds a time of continual progress all those had sort of you know fallen by the wayside by the time of World War one the great catastrophe that that entailed and the subsequent you know economic dislocations grant hopes that were raised during those times and then crushed in many ways seeing movements originally aimed at some sort of radical reform and reworking of human nature turn just as totalitarian and dangerous as any other ones and then also seeing the rise of in response to that of fascism hold another thing add to that just the day-to-day you know thinking about the world which never is fully made sense anyway under any lens perfectly and you have a good mix for a time in which the absurd becomes a preoccupation so Cameroon was focusing on that and he says one thing that you can distinguish from the beginning is whether you take the absurd as a starting point or whether you reach it as a conclusion of your philosophical or semi philosophical investigation some sort of exercise of Reason which is trying to make sense out of other things and he also says another thing later on and I wanted to bring this up right away another distinction is whether we're talking about the experience or the feeling of the absurd that's one thing or whether we're talking about the notion or the concept something a bit more particulate a bit more explicit a bit more intellectual at least to inform each other of course but we want to distinguish between a sort of general big-picture broad environmental sense of the absurd and then being able to look at the absurd with the mind's eye but the absurdity what he is is going to take as his focal point he's going to address the thought of some existentialist thinkers and I put a lot of stuff over here on the board as well that's one of the beauties of this essay as far as I've concerns that he's actually addressing a whole range of people who are part of the Canon of the same movement that he gets associated with but which he's in some ways uncomfortable with and you know he's going to differ from Sartre he's not going to talk about Sartre in this essay he will break with Sartre about other things later on here he is concerned with Kierkegaard with Heidegger to a little extent with Carli offers a little bit more with a guy who's not very well known but but deserves to be lay on chest off and with a few other thinkers as well also with some thinkers who don't fit into existentialism per se but but are associated with it continental philosophy like who Cyril and he also mentions ma Schaller now he sees them as making it advance others the lot and he attitudes in the twentieth century well even in the 19th century we want to talk Kierkegaard Nietzsche all y'all so Vincennes in each and dostoevsky if we want to talk about them they're making it advanced and yet at the same time they're going astray they're not actually lingering with the absurd as such they're they're engaging the observed in a way that other people are failing to do so but then they're having a kind of losing their nerve there they're not following through combooo things on the consequences the intellectual the relational even the in some way physical consequences of living an absurd life so we'll get to that in a moment where does he begin this essay he starts as very famously by saying there is only one truly soup series there's only one truly serious philosophical problem and that's suicide so that's an interesting way to start it's very unusual to begin even a piece of Gloria Lassa fee and this is this is in large part you know if you had to decide where you're going to put this in the traditional boundaries of philosophy where would you put this it's not epistemology it's more in some ways metaphysics moral philosophy not aesthetics really it's not political philosophy yet maybe philosophy of human nature so he's already preoccupied with moral questions and we're going to see him working out something like in ethics in a little while but when you do something like that do you begin with a single issue not usually you begin with some principles you say something like the only thing that matters is the goodwill or what is happiness here's some views and this is probably the best view or mankind is totally in the thrall of is paraphrasing of course totally in the thrall of two masters pain and pleasure and everything else boils you start out with general principles usually and then you start talking about things like well as suicide justified or is euthanasia justified or how should we deal with world hunger things like that so coming as privileged in a particular problem as the philosophical question to get with that's an interesting tape to start with I mean if you were going to privilege some other philosophical question as d1 start with might be something like what am i what kind of life should I live how can I come to know myself you know what really gets people started with philosophy is this sometimes like Aristotle says in wonder you encounter something that makes you marble but quite often what gets people started is a preoccupation with some actual real tangible existential problem so he's going to start with suicide and where is he going to be headed with this ultimately it's towards three consequences my revolt my freedom my passion he says so let's look at this philosophical problem suicide first he says that the learning and classical dialectic must yield to a more modest attitude of mind arriving at one at the same time from common sense and understanding that's his beginning place he doesn't you'll notice he's not quoting an awful lot of other philosophers in this you also try to begin from our experience there's an empirical of that sense and he says we're concerned here at the outset with the relationship between individual thought and suicide an act like this an act like suicide is prepared in the silence of the heart as is a great work of art the man himself is ignorant of it the person who is going to commit suicide that he's saying is not necessarily ignorant to the fact that they're going to suicide but they're not aware of everything that's going on within them ultimately impelling them towards that and he says something more varieties that's beginning to think is beginning to be undermined beginning to think about things not in a narrow sense but in a broader sense sometimes if you wanted to use a metaphor with this not just what you're focusing on directly but the things that you also see out of the corners of your eyes and the things that you're you're aware of that sort of awareness is to begin to be undermined the things you believe in the things you're taking it's all that is real start to become the ephemeral or unstable or less reliable that you would suppose he says Society has but little connection with such beginnings the worm is in man's heart it's part of our human nature this is where it must be sought so how does this work he says living is never easy you continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons the first of which has happened and you know again if you think about this what is 98 and 99 percent of our life it's going through and doing the sort of things that we do without particularly thinking about it I use this example many times in class when I ask my students not for through this but when I'm teaching about other things I'm talking about the force of habit and our means and our ends I asked them how they got themselves to the classroom did they actually have to think about what to do once their alarm went off and they got themselves out of bed did they have to you know whether if they were going to take a shower did they have to go to the shower nozzle and figure out how that works and what the optimal way of doing it was no you do these things by heaven did anybody actually sit down and ask themselves what am i doing by going to this class is this part of my my grand scheme of life no you just go to class because you're a student that's what you do and that's the way many of us are most of the time even those who are doing philosophy and are really doing it right not just you know quibbling about arguments are doing a purely historical investigations but thinking about life even they are only doing in a portion of the time so he says you continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons the first of which is habit dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized even instinctively the ridiculous character of that habit the absence of any profound reason for living the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering so when a person kills themself and then this is a very big problem actually 20th century France I mean Durkheim actually wrote it and wrote a piece on it because he was interested in why people killed himself look at it statistically there were enough statistics to go by why does a person kill himself life has in a certain sense lost its its fundamental moorings that doesn't mean that there are no meanings but there are no meanings that are supported by deeper meanings I might say so he says there's a feeling of absurdity that that arises and he says the world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world this is an important concept Camus is going to stress over and over again the difference between the unfamiliar and the you familiar what we're at home with what we can make sense out of what is to our sides you might say and then the rest a world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world but on the other hand in a universe suddenly divested of illusions of Lights man feels an alien a stranger his exile is without remedy because he's deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land this divorce between a man in his life the actor in a setting is properly the feeling of absurdity so when we have this sense of absurdity we're grasping the absurd what we're realizing is that things are not as they typically seem to us we've been making all sorts of assumptions we've been living with illusions and those can't really be I mean they could be justified in one sense we need them to keep on living but you know you can ask yourself why keep on with that and if you go down to that foundation there's there's nothing there to support it he'd say and so he lays out the fundamental problem of this this entire work and here you see that even though Camus is quite often saying things like I don't have an ethic there are no values or norms by which I guide myself but that's one way people understand existentialism there is a norm there for him so for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be muck what he believes to be true must determine his action so there's a demand for consistency for following through for even if the rest of the universe doesn't make sense at least in my action and my willing I can make that make sense you see this not only in common we you see this also in jean-paul Sartre existentialism is a humanism and also in Being and Nothingness and in other essays you also see this in Simone de Beauvoir the sense that even if you strip everything else away there is at least this possibility of consistency of following through on one's thoughts so he says believe in the absurdity of existence must then determine his conduct so if you actually accept this notion of the absurd then you have to follow it through it and you'll be tempted to go off in this direction and go off in this direction and not stick to it and he says I'm speaking of course with men inclined to be in harmony with themselves and now he asks so does the absurd dictate death is there a logic to the point of death since I cannot know unless I pursue without reckless passion in the soul light of evidence thinking this through not just relying on feelings the reasoning of which I adhere suggesting the source this is what I call an absurd reasoning many have begun it I do not yet know whether or not they kept to it so we're going to look at some people and see whether their ways of becoming aware of the absurd and then following through on what it would mean the meaninglessness of what would mean it said you want to joke around whether they have stayed consistent to it or not and now it says something very interesting as well the problem is not so simple as yes no and you know if you think about this when you have a problem or a question quite often we want to say well you know there's two ways you can go and if the problem here is suicide either kill yourself or you don't right I mean that's what you say while you try to kill yourself you know don't succeed maybe that's somewhere in between here even if you're actually really trying to kill yourself and somebody prevents you from it that's not your fault right of course you know there's all sorts of people who cut the wrists this way rather than this way and by now we're all I think if we watch movies fairly conscious that there's no difference between that it's not so simple as this though come-to says he says there's there's contradictions between our opinions and our actions allowance must be made for those who without concluding continue questioning so another possibility is to neither take neither poll and at least for the moment that means accepting now but that's not a definitive no that's saying I'm not going to kill myself now life has enough meaning for me to make it through this day or this week or this month but if things changed if they you know like lost enough of the provisional meaning that it possesses then I'll do it or maybe I'll think about it later or maybe not here's another possibility I'm so busy I can't be bothered with it right now he says I also noticed that those who answer no act as if they thought yes that's that's very interesting there are some people who say no to killing themselves but they also do things that show you that they don't their own their own existence and he says as a matter of fact if I accept the Nietzschean criteria they think yes in one way or another their life denying he says on the other hand it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life so some people actually do say yes but it's not because life possessed no meaning for them it's because they lost great example of this in Roman times you had a power struggle and your side lost well you killed yourself and it wasn't you know saying screw you to the universe or something like that I mean this was done by people who was advised to actually by some people who seemed to really have it together it was the realization that man my side lost I there's nothing I can do now and I can kill myself or I can wait for them to come and kill me that's a bit different now he says two things they do keep many people going so that they say no to suicide even though they might you know tend towards it the body he says in a man's attachment to life there's something stronger than all the ills in the world the body's judgment is as good as the minds and the body shrinks from annihilation we get into the habit of living before acquiring any habit of thinking another thing is hope now this is an important theme for this essay because cow Moos going to say we should live without hope but hope to meet people to keep going in a very by their experience of serve existence he says another life one must deserve would give you hope or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it refine it giving up given meaning try it so if for example a person is a committed Christian or a committed Muslim or if a person is committed to some political doctrine that that's not just you know about managing city affairs or something or gaining power but something really big picture somebody's committed communist and wants to work for the liberation of all the proletariat worldwide and ending human suffering or somebody is a radical transhumanist there's a lot of different varieties out there if there's some sort of ideal that you have that could motivate you then then you can go out living even when things seem to be absurd he's got a great passage about feeling passion and reality since like great works deep feelings always mean more than their conscious of saying the regularity of an impulse or repulsion in the soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking is reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing great feelings take with them their own universe splendid or abject they light up with their passion and exclusive world in which they recognize their climate there is a universe of jealousy of ambition of selfishness or generosity a universe in other words of metaphysics and an attitude of mind what is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate simultaneously as vague and as definite as remote and as present as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity now what's the connection between the animal where is talking the suicide well I mean you can have a great ideal that motivates you that's intellectual essentially I mean it ties in with your the roots out of his roots in your soul or your personality or your heart but it is primarily you can cognos and then there's effectivity then there is mood feeling passion desire and the world is very different to the person who's motivated primarily by this feeling think about the way the world is someone who is inhabited by and guided by joy or gratitude as compared to the person who is motivated primarily by jealousy and the need to compare our constantly to others or the person who is melancholic or depressed or sad all the time or the person who is constantly seeking excitement alternating between excitement and boredom these are very different modes of being in the world and absurdity itself Camus says cannot have one of those feelings so what is the feeling of absurdity this is very interesting so now we make a transition here and this is a good spot to put a little bit of other things up on the hip sir how do we encounter well before we talk about that let's talk about whether we can keep it in check Camus says that the feeling of absurdity cannot be contained and it cannot be predicted you can't make it you that means that you also cannot automatically produce it if you were say an evangelist of existentialist if there is such a thing and you wanted to try to produce the feeling of absurdity in some people let's say you are a professor teaching and existential is of course you want to make your students feel the full weight of absurdity you can't do that either it's not something manageable it did by its very nature it eludes and escapes our attempts to do that sort of thing but he says at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face as it is in its distressing nudity and its light without a full gence it is elusive beautiful phrase right there like without effulgence it lights things up it does not actually cast illumination of them he says at any given human being whatever we may know about that person or practically be able to deal with there's always sides there's dimensions to them that escape us and this not only applies to human beings other human beings out there even those as close to us as our children our parents our brothers sisters our other family our close friends our enemies we think they may know inside and out any of these people it also applies to ourselves we can't fully predict our own selves and it applies to the world itself there's always science to it we're missing he talks about with respect to ourselves a lower key of feelings inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mine they assume so even our own feelings most of our feelings we feel and we're conscious of feeling them but there are some feelings that we may not be entirely aware of and you know if you think of it just to dwell on this a bit if you think about some of the basic assumptions not just psychoanalysis but you know plenty of other types of psychotherapy the idea is that we have motives and effects that are not fully conscious but are operative within us as subjects not necessarily as conscious egos but as subjects as agencies and that these drive us if you want to understand how somebody who's being driven by unconscious motives actually feels about things now there are techniques to you know bring this to white partially what I'm not going to talk about those what I'm talking about here is how can we develop consciousness of that one way is by observation you actually look at what a person does do and the way not just the things that they say but the way they say things the context in which they do it and you can actually start telling something about their desires about their loves their hates their their fears their their homes and you can do this with yourself too this is part of self-knowledge this has been running through has been running through moral philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks paying close attention to what it is that you actually do and what that reveals not only about what you think but how you feel that it became even more intensified with Christian thinkers particularly in other desert monks people like Saint Augustine sort of self scrutiny and analysis so we have this deeper level of feelings now coming says we can actually analyze absurdity in different spheres and the ones that he mentions at that point so we have the we have that sort of day-to-day let's call it anywhere but numbers-- ones for more specific things as intelligence garden living which let's just call it what it is call a spade a spade turn the card over for what it truly is this is companies Alec he's not going to call it sod she's going to deny that he has nothing but this is really Wow and also in artwork this is art and by that we should think art production and to a lesser extent also consumption and this is what the bulk of the mythos synthesis the essay before we and I'll finally get to the park and hello symphysis we must imagine him happy which we're going to get to in a lot ways this is what the bulk of it is its analyses of how the absurd plays itself out in these different domains before we get to that let's think about the absurd in in general anyway he talks about these as involving themes that run through all literature's in all philosophies everyday conversation as well vectors of experience through which if we're paying attention we can encounter the absurd now you know we may encounter it and then we may be given some resources by which to try to banish it and say now things aren't really absurd our culture may afford us those we may have forged them ourselves but how who thinks that that's really a compa let's think about things that reveal to us observing at least Commodus version so there's deeds thoughts even the great ones who says where do they come from do they always come from great beginnings this is kind of an interesting thing to think about to linger over you know the ancients actually covers not talking about this but I think this could illuminate it the ancients they actually had a argument for the existence of God which it's been called by different forms I like to call it the argument from intelligence and it's until it's in some ways a cosmological argument in other way it's kind of a teleological argument you could rolled it into those but I think it's actually distinctive and here's how it goes you see sister all talking about this you see Augustine in certain respects talking about this we have intelligence we don't fully understand intelligence we're not totally transparent to ourselves we're not totally soft reflective but we are intelligent and we know that there are other things that lack intelligence and as a matter of fact most of the universe does seem to lack some sort of intelligence it certainly doesn't have the level of self reflectiveness and capacities that we have if we want to say that stone has a certain amount of intelligence because it knows to go down when we drop it that's fine but that's nowhere near the level of a dog nowhere near the level being where did that come from can you get a greater thing from a lesser cause if you begin from the postulate that no a greater thing can not come from a lesser thing then you're never going to get intelligence from random things being put together in certain ways revolution or from you know pick whatever mechanism you like any mechanism that begins with rod root material things that don't contain intelligence or have very low levels of intelligence it's not going to give you human intelligence so therefore according to this prove there must be intelligent beings of greater intelligence than us who are responsible for the very intelligence that we have come it was rejecting that and really you know a lot of modern culture has rejected that hasn't it I mean that's why the theory of evolution in all the different forms that it's taken it's taking a lot of different forms over time not all of which are compatible to each other that's why you can you can say it could provide any solution you have to reject the idea that that a greater cause a greater effect can only come from my a a greater effect cannot come from a lesser cause if you reject that then you can do evolution if you don't reject that then you can't so if you do reject that as kind of it does think about this where did deeds where the thoughts come from they often come from very very tiny random absurd beginnings greatest Oracle events quite often come from just a bunch of little causes coming together and some we're waiting then suddenly something happens and we all say oh so wonderful he also talks about another case the rhythm of unthinking on noticing life getting disrupted or seen through as he says one day the why arises and everything begins and that weariness tinged with amazement that's a beautiful line weariness tinged with amazement because you're already in the situation you've already been working and enduring for a while before the veil lifts another possibility suddenly realizing one's place or point he gives the example of being 30 and you know if you realize that you're 30 especially in our culture our 30 is the new 20 and 40 s new 30 and people say that sort of stuff would be a good thing he talks about feeling your sense of youthfulness but if you realize that you're 30 you realize that you're on a continuum and okay you're still closer to this end but you're moving this way and here's where you die and it might be way over here at 80 or it might be right here at 30 and a day so you become conscious of your your point in temporality the fact that temporary ality is irreversible that can help that can promote this this sense of absurdity right the natural world he says take a step lower and strangeness creeps in perceiving that the world is dense sensing to what degree a stone is for it and irreducible to us anything that you pick even in this human technologies world in an iPhone of sharpie marker paper these are all physical objects and they can suddenly lose their familiarity to us they're being in mixed in frameworks of purposes and designs and all that and they can stand out in their brood facticity to us and then they can start to make us feel the absurd so at the heart of all beauty lies something in human expect about landscapes following that that thought he says the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia for a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we've understood it slowly the images and designs we de tributo to it beforehand henceforth we lack the power to make use of artifis the world evades us why because it becomes itself again it becomes what it truly is it stands forth in its being against us in our existence he says that denseness and strangeness of the world is the absurd what about the humans our world is a humanized world isn't it that should make it not absurd anymore right well yes and no he says men to secrete the inhuman at certain moments of lucidity mechanical aspect of their gestures their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them and you know there's movies in which there are scenes were this sort of thing is being depicted it's not really being said necessarily with a voiceover suddenly I realized how absurd everything was but you see for instance somebody talking to another person and the second person one way of depicting this is the first person you're looking through the second person's eyes and you see their lips moving and suddenly there's like wawk wawk wawk wawk wawk wawk wawk and what they're saying doesn't matter anymore it's it's become absurd or they're doing things and what they're doing doesn't make any sense well that is another encounter with the observe finally death our own death not just that of others I mean that of others can can make the world seem pretty absurd to the death of one's one's loved spouse even worse I suppose would be a fiance you know you're about to get married and they get hit by the pasta what kind of universe is this you know that would be a sense of the absurd thinking about your own death he says in reality there's no experience of death properly speaking nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious here is barely possible to speak of the experience of others deaths it's a substitute and illusion and it never quite conventions convinces us that melancholy convention cannot be persuasive the horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the events if time frightens us this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterwards all the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved at least for a time from the this inert body at which a slap makes no mark the soul is disappeared this elementary a definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the absurd feeling under the fatal lighting of that destiny its uselessness becomes absurd that becomes evident now code of ethics no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics of command or condition so the fact that we're going to die and yet we can't make even sense of what is it to die and we can't even make sense of it by looking at other dead people I mean most of us in today's a very sanitized modern Western liberal democratic society have very little contact with with dead people and I they've been shunted off for the most part go to funerals every once in a while but we don't actually see people in the process of dying too often those who do know a hell of a lot more about it than those who don't you know and those who do are actually in touch with something that 99% of the people throughout the history of the world had to encounter share make sense out of it as much as they could in ways that people living in sanitized society don't I think something's actually lost and I'm speaking as somebody who's had a lot of contact with deafness also but not as much as many other people so where could we encounter the absurd the absurd can pop up anywhere at any time how can we encounter it well we can encounter it in terms of everyday life anywhere you look these grand themes like death itself human beings the natural world even the encounter with Beauty we can also encounter it in the life of the mind we can also encounter it in the way that we live you can also encounter it in art and you know art covers a lot of ground especially again in our society perhaps even more ground than it does in kamusta you know we have film music all the plastic art sculpture painting you dance you have plays coming actually himself role plays you have novels he wrote novels what do we we have way more music we can play at any time we want on demand some of the music that we have is actually sampled music using previous music not just sort of replicated through town tree which is copying it we films everywhere you can watch them on YouTube if you want you know you can actually produce your own cartoons if you like using say Xtranormal a few other services like that we have televisions just about everywhere we actually do have quite a few nice landscapes you can probably have access to reproductions of artists works way more than any time in history so if you want you know Monet on your laptop as your your you know wallpaper you can you can do that getting to see plays that's about the same level as it was before but but these other things you know artistic production and artistic consumption that's one way in which we can understand what's going on with the observe so I'm not going to go into any of these three in great detail or depth in this particular installment of the discussion of this this essay what I'm going to do is next time I'm going to talk in great detail about the life of the mind and about the existentialists in particular and cow Moos complained about them I'm going to talk about that in just a minute in general and tell you a little bit about some of the people that he is he is bringing up because we need we'll talk about a bit of the art of living in that case and then we'll talk then in the next installment we'll talk very much about the issue of artistic production and we'll also talk about the myth of SIF assists himself what he represents so let's think about this a little bit broad terms what I want to leave you with on this particular installment is this I put this off before these represent three possible sets of responses and if you had to put them in terms of what percentages this would be most people this would be a few and this would be something I don't think that Camus believes that he is the only person to put forward his kind of way of living I think that if you look at the rest of his work he sees other people as living this life of the absurd as he puts it living without making the leap without buying into something another way that he puts it much later on is being able to live without a peel by that being willing to live in a world that that bottom turns out to be absurd without trying to smuggle in something else from the outside to make it make sense and there's a possibility to solve the beer but let's talk about this for for a moment so we say rationalists if you you know if you had an intro philosophy class you may have encountered the term rationalist in terms of the Continental rationalist versus the British empiricist during the history of philosophy decart Spinoza Leibnitz Locke Berkeley Hume you had to memorize those and okay there is some some some truth to that these people didn't call themselves rationals but for French philosophers rationalist as a much broader connotation and merely you know the people who believed in inane ideas as opposed to those who believed in experience from the French perspective that Camus is is working with woggels empiricists are highly rationalist themselves here's why what does the rationals believe the world is ultimately able to be made sense out of and a perhaps even fixed made better through reason reason is the human way the distinctively human way of apprehending the world of relating to other people of understanding itself and if you believe in a God of relating to God a rationalist believes in the power the capacity of reason they may not call it reason they may call it common sense they may call it by the name of a particular ideology but they have some set of beliefs some beginning points and some processes of inference that will allow them to make sense out of all of this stuff more or less or the things that don't make sense at least to say well you know those those don't matter that much we can brush those off sweep those under the rug the stuff that really matters the stuff that we're concerned with that all makes sense that can all be understood we may not even understand it all right right now but we're committed to the view that someday it can be understood so the scientific process itself those who are committed to science those who view technology itself is something that will you know ultimately make life better better better and not produce forecasts rafi other you know the process they are rationalists you could be a rationalist in a very debate sense if your idea is that the world can be divided up into you know republicans and democrats and then the gutless people in between and you know one of these is good one of these is bad they're diametrically opposed you're a rationalist by cow Moos review and if you have something like that those who are watching this in other countries pick whatever party analogues you like that would make you irrational most communists would actually be rationalist from Kunduz perspective most people on the far right would be rationalist from his perspective so the rationalist is devoted to this notion that the world makes sense it may not be fair it may not be entirely arranged the way it ought to be and it takes them some work but it ultimately does make sense and that's to ultimately try to push away the absurd now that might not be a way person truly feels but there are people go on like this what's another possibility well you know the existentialist that he does talk about who are the certain stations let me put this who are the existentialist that can move connects to in this piece he brings up Kierkegaard he mentions OST mentions Nietzsche so far so good I mean these are the three granddaddy's of existential ISM before it's called existentialism he mentions the Gospels we mentioned this kid guard guard he mentions a high gear anybody else that he mentions yeah there's a very important guy who Walken gets left out great Russian thinker emigrated to france chest off late liam chestnut all of these are existentialist thinkers and he does talk about a few other people as well again talks about Schaller talks about whose role these are phenomenologist s-- Heidegger is also a phenomenologist he Heidegger Heidegger hoods role and Schaller are the great three early phenomenologist you know there were other phenomenons but these are the three biggest names now come he was not criticizing Nietzsche for this so much so Ganesha pass right but the rest of these people who's never really talking about much about those dancing the rest of these people he thinks of what they're doing they're pointing out the fact that no you know you can't actually begin with a world that ultimately makes sense and just you know start out with postulates that you're going to introduce and then you know make it fits and all of that sort of stuff the world doesn't admit that anymore there's there's a divorce and we're actually and finished with that when I can get us to that point these existentialists are aware of the fact that the world is absurd that man is absurd that the connection between the human being and the world is absurd that the connections between human beings and themselves are observed that the absurd can pop out at a moment he actually talks about Heidegger and the anxiety and that sense he talks about chest off sort of you know undoing rationalism at every every respect in that response and bringing in Nietzsche Dostoevsky in order to do so he talks about Kierkegaard is himself being committed to this but he sees this as a failure of nerve he sees them as all making what the leaf jumping saying that yogi the world is absurd and it doesn't have any meaning and that's why it has to have a meaning and that meaning is God or you know transcendence in the case of gaspers or something god knows what in the case of Heidegger or you know you can keep going out up hey perhaps you can you know uber metric for Nietzsche so if you do that you're acknowledging the absurd and you're lingering with it for a while but then you're leaving it behind you're not fully being consequent to it that's the canoes view that's the view of what he calls the existentialist what would the absurd what goes on with that what is actually taking place he says that there's a divorce involved in this earth and this is this is a good place to sort of sum things up and bring them to a kind of close we have the human being and the human being what can we say about the human being is conscious human being has desires you're not just a brain you're not just a mind your mind and your brain are motivated by my desires are these desires simply things like eat drink sleep have sex you have a desire for transcendence you have a desire for meaning you have a hunger and affection the nostalgia he says for unity for things making sense being brought together that's why the rationalist front of you is so strong that's why it works itself out that's why it attracted people what else where do you exist exist in the world the world includes you you are an object in the world the world includes other human beings but it also includes so much else and the world itself is ultimately irrational which means this it doesn't mean that it doesn't have any reason whatsoever it's that reason almost two stops fails it doesn't you were why there are different ways we can we can talk about this but say that the world is irrational means that you can be explore it to some degree with reason and you can you know with instrumental reason you can form things to make technology incredibly advanced technology like this you can make things work the way you want in limited areas but ultimately you don't control time and you don't control space even very much or its conditions and you don't control causality very much really understand it that well and once you start introducing other human beings and their purposes and accidents and things like that it gets very very muddy and very murky and then is start introducing and other living beings oh wow it's reason is going to grasp all of that the human being is rational and wants to make things rational human being as a designer the rational and there is this sort of divorce between the human being and the absurd encompasses this whole complex the human being includes the world and it includes the divorce between the two if surd is something that that exceeds all of these and brings them together says the absurd depends as much on man as on the world I said the world is absurd but I was too hasty the world itself is not reasonable but that's all that can be said what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart this binding together of the wanting so badly for things to make sense to work out human being in a world that you know may admit that to a certain extent but for the most part doesn't care and you know is going to sound actually going to try to screw you over or controvert you it's just not going to fit that thing that's that sition that that rupture that that in commencer ability between the two that is the absurd so we've gone a long way so far we haven't actually answered the question of should you kill yourself or not come who's going to say no so don't anybody watch this anything to do that we haven't yet started exploring these different domains in which absurdity takes place and we're now looking yet at the solution that capital brings but first we had to set the problem out and it's full like next we're going to look at the intellectual life and then we're going to get you know ethics and action then we're going to look at artistic production and then we're finally going to get to talk about this guy synthesis rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it fall all the way down to the other side then picking it back up and rolling it up and going all the way back down the central metaphor for this stiffest this is the absurd man synthesis is the representative of cow Moos ethic and so that is where we're going to ultimately have

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 92,668

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: Life, Meaning, Existentialist, Myth of Sisyphus, Absurd, Human, Absurdist, Reason, Existential, Sadler, Suicide, Sisyphus, university, lecture, Philosophy, Rationalism, World, Person, Failure, class, Albert Camus (Author), Thought, college

Id: _js06RG0n3c

Length: 59min 29sec (3569 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2012