What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?
Context: I’ve been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.
What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?
Context: I’ve been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.
Lets break down the arguments, and throw up that content warning because were about to do a philosophy.
(Sad dead Dutch/French thinkers)
The first option was to embrace Nhilism, this option is the worst outcome because one of the logical outcomes is if the universe has no meaning, why, as a part of the universe, should you. We’re going to drop this option right here because one of the physical representation of this viewpoint is suicide and thats not a healthy state of mind to be in, plus someone would have to clean up your mess.
The second option is Soren Kierkegaards leap of faith, by putting your faith (synonomys with “meaning of life” in this context) in something other than your self, you are no longer responsible for it. A leap of faiths original intent was to join a religion (cough christianity cough), but this is Lemmy and atheists abound in the 21st century so there isnt much point delving into this option here. The point is that your faith is put into an entity higher than yourself. I would argue that it does not need to be an abastract entity like the abrahamic god, gaia or Tom Cruise anymore, anything that can be used to provide a higher objective meaning works (as irrational as it is). This option could be viewed as suicide in a philosopical sense because you cease seeking meaning, because you claim to have already found it.
The final point, rejection of the absurd, is unfortunatly the last option and also requires the most effort. To use it as a personal philosophy involves the rejection of objective meaning and focusing on subjective meaning in spite of the absurdity of it all. That is the part that I feel takes effort, spite (without anger) is a taxing state of mind to maintain, and it does not provide the structures that tends to come with the package of option two. To quote many of the other thread and to use it as a jumping off point, the phrase “Do no harm”, the first word is Do, an action, something altered in the universe, something changed. If the universe is meaningless, then to revolt is to simply doing something and putting in the effort to make it a subjectivly good something.
This is the point where people would comicly point out that Camus being very French (Algerian), rebelion and revolt are sorta their national past times, and Ive always gotten a chuckle out of that.
Damn this took all day to write and got a little rambly… Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.
Thanks for the detailed response! It’s helping Camus’ writing make a bit more sense, still not 100% convinced but this is getting me closer.
Glad I could help. Remember a personal pilosophy is subjective, your going to have to reach those conclusions on your own. But if you want to talk shop, nerds are here to help.