In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus sets himself the task of defining a philosophy for the individual that copes with our temporal condition without recourse to lesquive. He repeatedly refers to our situation as one of divorce: It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. We are all children of this divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. As this passage makes visible, Camus theme reintroduces the problem of the earlier generation of pessimists. The unity between the desiring subject and the object of its desire, they all agree, simply cannot exist; we can only recollect it dimly as part of our animal past, hence our nostalgia for it. But we cannot cope with this divorce simply by choosing which parent we prefer. If I attempt to solve a problem, Camus writes, at least I must not by that very solution conjure away one of the terms of the problem. This is especially the case here because all of our thinking has its roots in this confrontation between the two opposed forces of desire and logic. To solve the problem by erasing one element is to undermine the possibilities of reasoning itself. Camus is fundamentally committed to this point--it is his version of a Kantian a priori-- the condition of thinking that thinking has no choice but to affirm. In The Rebel, he repeats this point practically word-for-word in his conclusion; Rebellions movement, in order to remain authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction that sustains it. We live solely in and by contradictions so Camus believes that it is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity that is our initial spur to thinking. Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart. Is it not tragic to be a man, that perpetually dissatisfied animal? If i could, I would renounce my condition on the spot, but what would I become then, an animal? I cannot retrace my steps. This nostalgia for an animal condition (and sometimes, with Cioran, for a plant-like condition) is coupled, as one would expect, with the presence of death on the horizon of consciousness; when consciousness becomes independent of life, the revelation of death becomes so strong that its presence destroys all naïveté, all joyful enthusiasm. The self becomes divided and doomed to unhappiness since the secret of happiness lies in this original non-division of an impenetrable unity. The presence of Death in life introduces into ones existence an element of nothingness ...the nothingness inherent in the temporal. All events and moral judgments, to Cioran, seem meaningless in a time that is infinite and linear; Eternity does not lead to the triumph of either good or evil; it ravages all. Nothing created by man will endure. He even repeats Freuds judgment that life is a diversion from the natural condition of inorganic being; It is not normal to be alive. Death is no more than the cessation of an anomaly. This is a minor theme for Cioran -- his main focus, as with Camus and Unamuno, is at the existential level of analysis, the conflict produced in the thinking mind by its consciousness of time. Cioran refers to the general calamity that subsumes all these problems as the fall into time. -Joshua Dienstag ~Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 02:56:23 +0000
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