A Climax of Ages? - (3)

Continuing this series of posts fairly representative of what this blog was originally intended to be about (an intention predating my many expressions of summarily juvenile angst and the devolution of said site into a journal/ travelogue/ movie review site). This one is less organized, and more rambling, than the prior two. The intended purpose is to tie up some loose ends and prepare to launch toward a more meaningful and inferential post...

Precedents: Climax of Ages?, Climax of Ages? - (2), a reading of God's Debris by Scott Adams, and loads of research on Wikipedia about many things (see other precedents for references).

Prologue: Carrying over from the earlier post, here are two interesting stories I read in the New York Times about the effect humans are having on evolution/ bio-diversity, and an article on human alleles and evolution. (You may need a free membership to read)

Begin Post:I want to kick off this post by talking about the one guy I mentioned in part 1 as part of the illustrious list of existentialists and their kin, but did not mention again let alone discuss in any detail.

I speak of course, of Albert Camus, the French-Algerian Nobel Laureate... and champion of Absurdism (as opposed to Existentialism) which is defined by Wikipedia as "a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists (at least in relation to humanity)."

Absurdism has its roots, as with existentialism, in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. But where Existentialism asks each man to decide on an his own subjective truth, his own illusory purpose, Absurdism contends that there is no meaning in the world, and therefore laughs at our petty attempts at finding something that does not exist. It also works on secondary levels. Two famous examples that I like are these:

Faith in God: Let us assume a man has faith in God and therefore dedicates his life to "serving God". He lives his entire life happily and is pious and adheres to the tenets of whatever religion he fancies. But this man is absurd because his faith in God is blind and comes to a crashing halt if asked a simple question. Ask a Christian who has declared his purpose in life as serving God what the purpose of God is, and most likely he will answer that it is unknowable. (God works in mysterious ways).

What makes this absurd is, that the only reason the man is happy is because his vision stretches ye far and no further. His reasoning/ quest for meaning ends with God - a God of undefined purpose!

The Myth of Sisyphus: This was actually Camus' most eloquent metaphor - an adaptation of a ancient Greek myth. In a nutshell, for crimes that pissed off some Gods (notably Hades), Sisyphus is a devious Greek condemned to blindness, immortality (from his own deception), and a life of pointless toil - he spends his time rolling a heavy rock up a hill. Inevitably, once he reaches the top, the rock rolls down again, ad infinitum (back to that dratted poem, eh?)

Come to think of it, imagine poor Prometheus too... condemned to be chained to a rock with crows eating his liver - only to have it regrow, until Hercules rescued him...

So anyway, mythological diversions aside the point is, Sisyphus' eternal toil is no different from say, me, sitting at a desk working on some godforsaken project day after day for a number of years... or any modern man, dissatisfied with the "material world" and looking for meaning, only to forget it time and again in the sensual orgy of consumerism.

But Camus went far beyond this metaphor. He went on to write what is considered by many his magnum opus - The Stranger. (The next paragraphs contain spoilers, so if you meant to read this book any time soon, don't read them, skip ahead to the next parentheses)

The Stranger: In this book, he depicts a man - Meursault - who refuses to cry at his mother's funeral because it would be dishonest, and later in a fit of rage brought on by excess heat, kills a man. During his trial for murder, instead of the specifics of the murder itself, the prosecution seems to accuse him of being an emotionless misanthrope. The facts of the case take the backseat to the question "Is a man who cannot shed tears for his own mother capable of remorse?".

Meursault is condemned to death, but before the novel ends, is confronted by a chaplain that offers him a chance at repentance - the choice seems to be death, or turning to God. Meursault chooses death, and at the close of the novel accepts that the universe does not care if he lives or dies, and only wishes lots of people come to his execution, full of hatred for him.

Camus' point in all this seems to be that any "higher purpose" is non-existent. Meursault kills the man because the sun drove him to do it. He is a sensual creature who responds to stimuli without sound reasoning or philosophical motive. Only at the end, when faced with death does he realize his actions have real consequences - to the point of killing him. And even then, he merely accepts the consequences as just, rather than being overly concerned with his own survival.

Throughout the piece, Meursault is like a classic 'stimuli-response' engine. He watches himself and his own behavior with clinical disassociation - as though a stranger were doing it all. (end spoilers)

The reason I loved Camus' work was he deals in paradox, and heavily so. Meursault, while an abominable idea to some, is actually very forthright, honest, and rational. He is the ideal absurdist (perhaps subconsciously so) because he does not pretend to any higher purpose other than sensual input and output. He is rational to the point of being beyond emotion and also honest, absurdly, in a world that admires such things, they are his undoing.

Absurdism transcends Existentialism. It is, if you will forgive the pun, perhaps a virulent strain of the latter. When an existentialist chooses to be satisfied with an illusion of meaning, he adopts a 'ye far and no further' answer to the Indomitable Three Questions...

(Sidebar: The Indomitable Three: 1) If this, the world as it is today, or as it will be in a hundred years or more, is the climax of ages - is it good enough?
2) If the life I am/ you are leading is the life that every generation of humanity from proto-history has aimed to achieve, individually and socially - is it worthwhile?, and
3) If the best minds have been at this (trying to solve the existential dilemma) for an age now... and there is no result, what does it mean?...)

But if you seek to break the bounds of ye far and no further, there is only one conclusion - there is no meaning. And it is now that you are faced with three options.

One is to become and Absurdist, and coyly laugh at all existence as foolish. The other is to become a Nihilist - to believe in nothing and be generally depressed. The last option is to be virulently disbelieving... that path leads to Anarchism - which in my estimation never really developed into a philosophy and has always had the status of that stunted cousin of philosophy - a political ideology!

(Sidebar: Nihilism was really Nietzsche's baby. He was more properly classified as a Nihilist than Existentialist. Oh, and Baudrillard called postmodernity "a nihilist epoch")

So anyway... returning to our discussion of philleles (we had last defined them as the philosophical equivalent of genetic alleles), it is clear that in any discussion of modernity, (all?) philleles can be classified as either Theistic, Atheistic or Agnostic (meaning organized around belief/ disbelief/ unconcern in God).

What is disturbing to me, to return to indomitable question 3, is that of the many great minds engaged in the sort of investigation that constitutes philosophy, so many are pointing toward Existentialism/ Absurdism/ Nihilism/ Anarchism and other forms of Agnosticism!

(Sidebar: A look at our formulation of the most prevalent phillele would reassure a theist at this point: A monotheistic but somehow existentialist (free-willed) being who engages in self-generated socio-economic purposes that eventually contribute to the strengthening and crystallization of the phillele.)

Now, here's my problem. If the task at hand is to discover which way the universe prefers we lean (toward theism/ atheism/ agnosticism), it is a dubious task indeed, since the consensus seems to be a judiciously even split between the three!

So is the universe basically telling philosophers (even those of us statistically inclined to average belief systems into consensus numbers) to - pardon my French - sod off? Is its unfathomability the primary property of the universe, and a defining precondition for the human experience?

(To be continued)