You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
Monia filosofeja ja ajattelijoita voi luonnehtia älykkäiksi, joitakin nerokkaiksi. Mutta vain harvaa kuvaisin viisaaksi. Siksi erityisellä kiitollisuudella totean Camus'n mielestäni saavuttaneen viisauden. Sisyphuksen myytissä Camus kysyy onko elämällä merkitystä tai tarkoitusta, mutta toisin kuin on ihmiselle luonteenomaista, hän ei pyri vastaamaan kysymykseen. Sen sijaan Camus toteaa kysymyksen itsessään olevan merkityksetön. Todellinen kysymys Camus'n mukaan on itsemurhan kysymys; onko elämä elämisen arvoista? Camus'n mukaan tämä on ensimmäinen kysymys. Kysymys, jota vasta seuraavat muut kysymykset.
Löytääkseen vastauksen Camus esittelee absurdin. Ihminen itsessään ei ole absurdi, kuten ei ole maailmakaan. Absurdi syntyy näiden kohdatessa. Ihmisen yrittäessä ymmärtää maailmaa, joka ei vastaa ja tavoitellessaan onnea maailmassa, joka ei välitä. Camus'lle ihminen on maailma, joka yrittää ymmärtää itseään.
Camus'n mukaan vastaus on hyväksyä absurdi ja siten vapautua. Elämä saa arvonsa itsestään. Ainoat edellytykset ovat luopua toivosta ja pysyä tietoisena kaiken uurastuksemme turhuudesta. "It is enough to know and to mask nothing." Camus'lle toivottomuus ei ole syy epätoivoon. Päinvastoin ilman toivoa ihminen on vapaa tavoittelemaan itselleen mieluisia asioita. Camus kuvaa rakastajan, näyttelijän, seikkailijan/valloittajan ja taiteilijan. He kaikki saavat täyttymyksensä, mutta kohtaavat väistämättä tappion. Todellinen vapautuminen ja onni löytyy pitämällä tuo väistämätön tappio jatkuvasti mielessä ja uurastamalla silti. Tämä hyödytön kapina on ihmisen elämän ytimessä.
Camus ymmärtää syvällisesti ihmisen olevan ristiriitainen pelästymättä sitä. Camus uskaltaa viedä vastaukset perustavanlaatuisimpiin kysymyksiin aivan niiden lopputulemiin saakka; uurastuksemme on turhaa ja olemme vailla toivoa. Näistä Camus löytää kapinan ja vapauden. Camus kannustaa rohkeuteen, rehellisyyteen, rakkauteen ja jatkuvaan tietoisuuteen. Camus'n mukaan lopussa on todettava kaiken olevan hyvin.
Löytääkseen vastauksen Camus esittelee absurdin. Ihminen itsessään ei ole absurdi, kuten ei ole maailmakaan. Absurdi syntyy näiden kohdatessa. Ihmisen yrittäessä ymmärtää maailmaa, joka ei vastaa ja tavoitellessaan onnea maailmassa, joka ei välitä. Camus'lle ihminen on maailma, joka yrittää ymmärtää itseään.
Camus'n mukaan vastaus on hyväksyä absurdi ja siten vapautua. Elämä saa arvonsa itsestään. Ainoat edellytykset ovat luopua toivosta ja pysyä tietoisena kaiken uurastuksemme turhuudesta. "It is enough to know and to mask nothing." Camus'lle toivottomuus ei ole syy epätoivoon. Päinvastoin ilman toivoa ihminen on vapaa tavoittelemaan itselleen mieluisia asioita. Camus kuvaa rakastajan, näyttelijän, seikkailijan/valloittajan ja taiteilijan. He kaikki saavat täyttymyksensä, mutta kohtaavat väistämättä tappion. Todellinen vapautuminen ja onni löytyy pitämällä tuo väistämätön tappio jatkuvasti mielessä ja uurastamalla silti. Tämä hyödytön kapina on ihmisen elämän ytimessä.
Camus ymmärtää syvällisesti ihmisen olevan ristiriitainen pelästymättä sitä. Camus uskaltaa viedä vastaukset perustavanlaatuisimpiin kysymyksiin aivan niiden lopputulemiin saakka; uurastuksemme on turhaa ja olemme vailla toivoa. Näistä Camus löytää kapinan ja vapauden. Camus kannustaa rohkeuteen, rehellisyyteen, rakkauteen ja jatkuvaan tietoisuuteen. Camus'n mukaan lopussa on todettava kaiken olevan hyvin.
I used to be highly dissociated in the monotonous rat race of modern life and was not sure whether or not I was truly happy. After reading The Myth of Sisyphus, however, one must imagine I am happy.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
reread with annotations necessary
The absurd is the scream of humankind's will for meaning into a world that responds with silence.
Camus' reflections are masterfully crafted and pose a novel approach to existential questions that have been pricking at me for several years now. What is meaning? How do we create it? And how do we confront the lack of meaning?
Notable Quotes:
"After all, what negates me in this life is first of all what kills me. Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity. In the Algerian summer I learn that one thing only is more tragic than suffering, and that is the life of a happy man"
"If the nature of art is to bind the general to the particular, ephemeral eternity of a drop of water to the play of its lights, it is even truer to judge the greatness of the absurd writer by the distance he is able to introduce between these two worlds. His secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion."
"For a truth also, by its very definition, is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning."
"It is strange in any case that works of related inspiration like those of Kafka, Kierkegaard, or Chestov—those, in short, of existential novelists and philosophers completely oriented toward the Absurd and its consequences—should in the long run lead to that tremendous cry of hope. They embrace the God that consumes them. It is through humility that hope enters in."
"Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them"
"Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment"
"To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate"
"All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images"
"I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought—revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility"
"Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors."
"existence is illusory and it is eternal"
"What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems"
preference they have shown for writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance. They consider the work of art both as an end and a beginning. It is the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and its consummation. But it is complete only through the implications of that philosophy
"the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting."
"If the world were clear, art would not exist."
"There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same anxiety merges them"
"For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work"
"All try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime."
"Art and nothing but art, said Nietzsche; we have art in order not to die of the truth."
"Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have decided to be an integral part of it. This is why I esteem the individual only because he strikes me as ridiculous and humiliated. Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories"
"What matters, said Nietzsche, is not eternal life but eternal vivacity. All drama is, in fact, in this choice."
"melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they don't know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters. And that is indeed genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers"
"All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion"
"The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions"
"The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life—it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence. The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation"
"Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining."
"Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me"
"One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."
"And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"
"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations."
"Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd"
"it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity."
"Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of another life one must deserve or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it."
Camus' reflections are masterfully crafted and pose a novel approach to existential questions that have been pricking at me for several years now. What is meaning? How do we create it? And how do we confront the lack of meaning?
Notable Quotes:
"After all, what negates me in this life is first of all what kills me. Everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity. In the Algerian summer I learn that one thing only is more tragic than suffering, and that is the life of a happy man"
"If the nature of art is to bind the general to the particular, ephemeral eternity of a drop of water to the play of its lights, it is even truer to judge the greatness of the absurd writer by the distance he is able to introduce between these two worlds. His secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion."
"For a truth also, by its very definition, is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning."
"It is strange in any case that works of related inspiration like those of Kafka, Kierkegaard, or Chestov—those, in short, of existential novelists and philosophers completely oriented toward the Absurd and its consequences—should in the long run lead to that tremendous cry of hope. They embrace the God that consumes them. It is through humility that hope enters in."
"Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them"
"Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment"
"To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate"
"All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images"
"I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought—revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility"
"Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors."
"existence is illusory and it is eternal"
"What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems"
preference they have shown for writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance. They consider the work of art both as an end and a beginning. It is the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and its consummation. But it is complete only through the implications of that philosophy
"the great artist under this climate is, above all, a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting."
"If the world were clear, art would not exist."
"There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock, and the same anxiety merges them"
"For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work"
"All try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime."
"Art and nothing but art, said Nietzsche; we have art in order not to die of the truth."
"Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have decided to be an integral part of it. This is why I esteem the individual only because he strikes me as ridiculous and humiliated. Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories"
"What matters, said Nietzsche, is not eternal life but eternal vivacity. All drama is, in fact, in this choice."
"melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they don't know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters. And that is indeed genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers"
"All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion"
"The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions"
"The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life—it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence. The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation"
"Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining."
"Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me"
"One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."
"And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"
"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations."
"Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd"
"it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity."
"Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope of another life one must deserve or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it."
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Okay, so I've just learnt that life has literally no meaning?
Feeling better.
• Still cannot imagine Sisyphus happy (/j).
• RATING: ★★★★
Feeling better.
• Still cannot imagine Sisyphus happy (/j).
• RATING: ★★★★
challenging
reflective