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And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false.
For the one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad infinitum.”
This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling.
parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.
If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled.
It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life.
So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia.
Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.
Socrates’”Know thyself” has as much value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance.
They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.
All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
everything ends up in a hypothesis,
art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
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.
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
On this plane, at least, there is no happiness if I cannot know.
They negate its profound truth, which is to be enchained. In this unintelligible and limited universe, man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning.
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.
On the plane of history, such a constancy of two attitudes illustrates the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear vision he may have of the walls enclosing him.
is of capital importance, the themes of irrational and religious thought.
it must be said that what matters above all is the conclusions they have managed to draw from those discoveries.
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that that existence is humiliated.
But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish,
perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.”
“the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself.”
“the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish.”
it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and “existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness.”
ontology
“naïveté.”
He knows that the end of the mind...
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In this ravaged world in which the impossibility of knowledge is established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only reality and irremediable despair seems the only attitude, he tries to recover the Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets.
“The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold one’s tongue but to talk”
Kierkegaard to his beloved scandals begins likewise in the chaos of an experience divested of its setting and relegated to its original incoherence.
The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity.
Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of
Proust, into a privileg...
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This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important than the end. All that is involved is “an attitude for understanding” and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the beginning, at very least.
I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense.
If one could only say just once: “This is clear,” all would be saved.
But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.
But I wish to reverse the order of the inquiry and start out from the intelligent adventure and come back to daily acts.
It is alive; in other words, it must die or else reverberate.
Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated.
It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together.
