Office by Alex Penny
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. preceding and succeeding death, sanity and insanity, beauty and man's immaturity. knowledge, faith and misinterpretation, internal turmoil and eternal ambiguity.
(via alchemst)
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Suhrkamp ed., vol 12, p. 121; trans. Douglas Miller, Scientific Studies (via fuckyeahexistentialism)In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism.
Imagine, Kierkegaard wrote in his pseudonymously published The Concept of Anxiety, a man standing at the edge of a cliff. When he glances over the edge, he is overcome with dread, not just because he is filled with fear at the thought of falling, but also because he is seized by a terrifying impulse deliberately to leap. ‘He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy’, Kierkegaard gnomically observed. That dizziness ‘is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss.’ For if ‘he had not looked down’, he would not have felt that dread. What grips that man, Kierkegaard suggests, is dread of the possibilities open to him; what he experiences ‘is the dizziness of freedom’.
Sartre, too, sees what he calls ‘anguish’ as the condition of human freedom. Since nothing can determine our choice of life for us, neither can anything explain or justify what we are. There is no inherent meaning in the universe. Only we can create meaning. Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist and fellow existentialist, called this sense of groundlessness the ‘absurdity’ of life. There is, Camus observes in The Myth of Sisyphus, a chasm between ‘the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world’. Religion is a means of bridging that chasm, but a dishonest one. ‘I don’t know if the world has any meaning that transcends it’, he writes. ‘But I know that I do not know this meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.’ Camus does not know that God does not exist. But he is determined to believe it, because that is the only way to make sense of being human. The only way to find meaning, the only way to bridge the chasm between the cold, silent world and the human need for moral warmth, is to create our own meaning, our own values. Sartre similarly sees the world as absurd in the sense that there is no meaning to be found beyond the meaning that humans create. The price of making meaning is anguish.
The recognition that humans have to bear responsibility for our lives and the values we create is the source of anguish. A wholly authentic or truly human life, Sartre suggests, is only possible for those who recognize the inescapability of freedom and its responsibility and are happy to live with anguish. But humankind, Sartre agrees with TS Eliot, mostly ‘cannot bear too much reality’. They fear, they dread, they feel enchained by, the responsibility of freedom.
Humans try to avoid the anguish that comes with looking over the cliff edge by hiding the truth from themselves, by pretending that there is no cliff, that something or someone has erased that edge. There are, Sartre suggests, many ways in which people do this. The most important, and the idea for which Sartre is probably most celebrated, is that of ‘bad faith’. People often try to evade the terrifying realities of the human condition by ordering their lives according to some preordained social role, in essence by turning themselves into objects, in an effort to deny the burden of subjectivity.
(Source: sunrec, via fuckyeahexistentialism)
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Albert CamusIn the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God…
(via lucifycrucifer)
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
(Source: violent-buddhist, via violent-buddhist)
philosophy should never be connected to the justification of existence; that is not it’s purpose or aim.
it seems this is something to be ignored with the integration of global connection to each other, past ideas and quick fixes to momentary lapses in self-worth.
the only thing that will come from trying to patch up quick glimpses of purposelessness with ideas that help you continue your meaningless life, without trying to improve yourself or the world around you, is a more intense unhappiness and separation from the world you are a part of (just later in life).
i wish everyone (myself included) wanted to try and be more aware of the problems around us, and our impact (and i do try).
as a friend of mine once said:
“Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”
the interpretation of nihilism as a speculative opportunity has helped me see my impact on the world, and i really try to slow down my impact on the negative effects our world seems to cater for. this interpretation seems hypocritical i know, however i see it more as a chance, not a bastardisation, to give more meaning to our possibly accidental/evolutionally necessary consciousness (it’s not about giving us a meaning/purpose before now, but meaning starting from now).
we have invented the word responsibility, and in first world countries it is ours to the rest of the world. evolution, i think, is now a conscious process (to us) and i think we can take advantage of this, if only we rid of ourselves these silly biases and blindfolds towards certain parts of life we don’t wish to acknowledge.
i’m not saying it was always or is our purpose now, but i think now it is something that we should all be a part of because we are the responsible ones, taking advantage of that which doesn’t know better. we are the parents while still in a conscious adolescence.
i don’t want to militantly force information down peoples’ throats and i never would. i just wish it was more commonplace for people to see their impact on the world and improve it.
philosophy has been a nearly stagnant subject for 2000 years, and maybe now we have the opportunity to improve on that. forming meaning in this way from something that may have meant nothing more than; ‘i am then i die’ or ‘i am accidentally, therefore i have no obligation’ is something i hope that will be met with acceptance, because if we cannot improve the world around us, then what is the point of living?
could it be that most do not have the courage to instantaneously kill themselves, but slowly do it over a few decades? could it be that experiencing acceptance from others helps us see ourselves better, no matter how short a time that lasts for? is that in itself an addiction?
maybe camus was right all along, or maybe we can try to help improve those things in this world we do not like. hate and contempt breeds nothing but that, so the only way to further mental evolution is through love and understanding (the underlying theme of this idea!).
i’d much rather people try to help themselves and others instead of an active indifference or universal cynicism. if only nihilism was consistently paired with mental advancement.
An infinite mind in a finite body.
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Leo Tolstoy, The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom (via violent-buddhist)(Source: en.wikiquote.org, via violent-buddhist)
Larry Carlson
I’ll have whatever he’s having
(Source: ohifeelthecosmos)
