Tag Archives: camus

In a World Without Meaning, Why Live? – Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”

In my attempt to rebuild my philosophy from the ground up, I examined the most fundamental of questions: suicide. Per Camus, suicide is the most important philosophical question and thus I decided to read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and that is the book that will be analyzed/explained first.

Absurd Life

So I know this isn’t truly starting at “the big” question of whether humans actually exist, but for the sake of argument, we must assume that humans do in fact exist in the physical sense. I’m sorry Descartes (and to some extent Hume), but musing over those questions, while great for keeping one up at night, will get me nowhere in my search for a new value system. Thus I will start with a few basic assumptions, nothing more:

  1. Humans exist in a physical form
  2. Death is a real thing and, although the definition is debatable, there is a distinction between life and death (sorry Lanza)
  3. Humans have some sort of free will
  4. There is no god (This one is debatable but, I have written answers to The Kalām Cosmological Argument, twice, The Fine Tuning Argument, twice, and The Transcendental Argument, among others)

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Nietzsche, The Fear of Death, and Life Affirmation

As much as I respect Friedrich Nietzsche, the interpretation of his works on the inevitability of suffering and the affirmation thereof are, more often than not, fundamentally flawed and present a view of the world and of humanity’s attitudes toward death that is not only ahistorical, but antithetical to Nietzsche’s concept of life affirmation.

Now before I begin, we need to understand two view points. The first being Nietzsche’s (and contemporary’s) idea that suffering is inevitable and trying to change that fact is merely a denial of life, and the second being historical views towards suffering and death.

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US Security Discourse: Physical and Ontological Implications

 

Part 1: Genealogy of War

            The past 200 years has seen a dramatic shift in the United States, the United States’ supposed “role in the world”, and, contrary to the video game series Fallout’s motto[1], even the very nature of war itself. Over 200 years ago, a group of wealthy white aristocrats decided that they had had enough of England’s “oppression” over them and they decided to revolt and form a new nation built around the pillars of liberty, equality (for some), and for lack of a better word, isolationism. In his farewell address, George Washington is quoted as having said “[i]t is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world” (Fromkin). However, this “true policy” was not to last as demonstrated by World War I wherein the US’ role shifted from stoic observer to what some neoconservatives like to call the “benevolent hegemon” (Dolman). In addition and parallel to this shift in the US’ role in the world, there was a change in the very nature of war itself. Before the 19thcentury, wars were conceived “as battles between sovereigns”, but all that changed with the advent of so called “strategic bombing” commonly credited to the Italian theorist Giulio Douhet (Collier and Lakoff 4). According to Douhet, war was “no longer [a thing] fought between armies but between whole peoples. All the resources of a country…would focus on the war effort” or, as it is commonly called, “total war” (C&L 5). Thus the rise of total war saw with it the rise of a new kind of geopolitical strategy, that of threat calculation in regards to so called “critical infrastructure”.  In addition, total war’s rise created a whole new beast, the unpredictable threat. This new kind of threat, one that “did not fit within the strategic framework” of the time, necessitated a new kind of response, that is to say, a new kind of outlook on threats in general (C&L 3). Everything was perceived as a potential target, from the obvious military bases to the less obvious roads and water towers (the “critical infrastructure”).  Everything was under attack and everyone was a potential combatant and thus the reign of the constant threat began.

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