More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference.
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).
Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection.
In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide—
By it, he means life.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.
The important thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in the second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible interest in the conclusions of existential philosophy.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them.
The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
Thus I return to Chestov. A commentator relates a remark of his that deserves interest: “The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.”
For when, at the conclusion of his passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say: “This is the absurd,” but rather: “This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
there is no truth, but merely truths.
All things are not explained by one thing but by all things.
I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide.
In this frame work of suicide versus living.. There is no way to confirm if suicide is ever the right answer. if it were... The person who discovers this proof would not be around to publish
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom.
the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules.
While the question of human freedom in the metaphysical sense loses interest to the absurd man, he gains freedom in a very concrete sense: no longer bound by hope for a better future or eternity, without a need to pursue life's purpose or to create meaning, "he enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules". From Wikipedia
Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of it—this involves the principle of a liberation.
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated.
How should the absurd man live? Clearly, no ethical rules apply, as they are all based on higher powers or on justification. "Integrity has no need of rules. 'Everything is permitted' is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact." From Wikipedia
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.
It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim.
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 b...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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,
Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man.
There, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of which is the total gift and forgetfulness of self.
A mother or a passionate wife necessarily has a closed heart, for it is turned away from the world.
There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.
A fate is not a punishment.
“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have decided to be an integral part of it.
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.
Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the struggle.
Victory would be desirable. But there is but one victory, and it is eternal. That is the one I shall never have.
The lover, the actor, or the adventurer plays the absurd. But equally well, if he wishes, the chaste man, the civil servant, or the president of the Republic.
This absurd, godless
world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.
“Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”
I want to know whether, accepting a life without appeal, one can also agree to work and create without appeal and what is the way leading to these liberties.
So many questions to be taken into consideration in a last effort. It must be already clear what they signify. They are the last scruples of an awareness that fears to forsake its initial and difficult lesson in favor of a final illusion.
