Ok, I wrote out an entire entry with quotes and everything, and of course I lost it. Livejournal > Blogger.
Basically, rebellion is based on an affirmation of the universal rights of man. It's a turning away from enslavement in the present with freedom in the future for the dice throw that is solidarity with man. He also attests that you cannot be a rebel without respecting this solidarity, and that you lose your rebel status if you contradict that by restricting another's rights to it. Then you just "acquiesce" to murder. It is firmly about abandoning future angst and going for socialization, an attempt to bridge youreself with a human idea greater than you are. He finishes: "I rebel, therefore I exist." It is deeply human, and therefore innate. Innate? That's not the existentialism I know. Here I thought all bets are off, but he's really being just as axiomatic as Descarte, and deliberately. Is there some sarcasm here I'm not getting? I guess I thought of existentialism as not JUST a withdrawl of faith in god, but in humanity in general. Instead it's about a very purposeful, even affectionate, turning to the temporal. It's not the hereafter, but the here and now. That's where the good times are. It's about negation, but so clearly about affirmation as well.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Friday, January 12, 2007
Albert Camus' The Rebel: Introduction
OK, I certainly didn't understand much of this. I have a vague understanding of existentialism from an 11th grade research essay, so maybe the Introduction wasn't the best place to start. It did a very rushed job of condensing, rather than introducing, the topic of absurdism. For example, what does he mean by:
"Once crime was a solitary protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law."
I understand that he was speaking from the membrane of the second world war, unique for the sheer mass and degree of its atrocities, but the principles behind it are nothing new. He goes on to cite the particularity of the modern age; with "massacres for philanthropy" it seems imbued with a new demagnetification of its moral compass. But the belief in moral superiority—"innocence"—on the part of those committing murder is nothing new. Look at the crusades, or the entry of the Hebrews into the previously occupied Canaan thousands of years ago.
And hasn't crime always determined the law? It never existed in opposition in the first place; Foucault seems to point out that, if anything, it provides a mirror, not so much a contraindicator to perpetration.
Then again, Foucault probably has a geneology in Camus, so I guess it isn't too fair to force a critique on Camus back through his lobster trap of an ideology.
He then points to absurdism as something that needs to be experienced as a function of modern man, but not that it itself will hold answers. If we're lucky, after all the contradiction has been honestly dissected, it might render them. It reminds me of the fable of the frogs trapped a pail of milk (they were frogs, weren't they?) One frog says, "Hey, bro, this is looking pretty terminal, think I'll just check out and not waste all the effort." He gives up and drowns. The other frog keeps swimming, and of course, the cream turns into butter and he is able to hop out, alive and exhausted, and with skin like a baby's ass to boot. Existentialism says: hey, you may as well be that second frog. This chaos might just turn to butter in your fingertips if you flail long enough.
It's a nice theory; but like the frogs, we have no idea where this struggling will get us. We can look into a bucket of deadly cream and know that it will turn to a solid butter foundation given enough time and effort, but existentialism also seems to posit that in the realm of life there's a fairly good chance nothing will solidify at all. It's not thou shalt, it's thou mayest:
"Absurdism, like methodological doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodological doubt, it can, by returning on itself, open up a new field of
investigation, and the process of reasoning thus pursues the same course."
It renders the whole thing rather ritualistic; we undergo the absurdist function for the some of the same reasons we go to church, or dance around a fire all night long. We're trying to draw meaning (mana) out of it and accumulate it where it can be used with less immediacy. I picture a shell forming around a snail. Of course, we have a little more choice than the worm about how this shell is formed, or even, the choice to go ahead and remain shelless and hope that one will appear from the sky. It has a heisenbergian quality to it, the idea that we can create meaning by reducing it nihilistically bit by bit to nothingness, only to find (hopefully!) that the very process of reduction has imbued meaning where there was none.
Anyway, that's my interpretation of it. It's hard to say because so little is fleshed out. It's like a kid stomping around and trying to tell you something with his hand in his mouth. Camus is very excited about something in this introduction, but it's hard to say what.
"Once crime was a solitary protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law."
I understand that he was speaking from the membrane of the second world war, unique for the sheer mass and degree of its atrocities, but the principles behind it are nothing new. He goes on to cite the particularity of the modern age; with "massacres for philanthropy" it seems imbued with a new demagnetification of its moral compass. But the belief in moral superiority—"innocence"—on the part of those committing murder is nothing new. Look at the crusades, or the entry of the Hebrews into the previously occupied Canaan thousands of years ago.
And hasn't crime always determined the law? It never existed in opposition in the first place; Foucault seems to point out that, if anything, it provides a mirror, not so much a contraindicator to perpetration.
Then again, Foucault probably has a geneology in Camus, so I guess it isn't too fair to force a critique on Camus back through his lobster trap of an ideology.
He then points to absurdism as something that needs to be experienced as a function of modern man, but not that it itself will hold answers. If we're lucky, after all the contradiction has been honestly dissected, it might render them. It reminds me of the fable of the frogs trapped a pail of milk (they were frogs, weren't they?) One frog says, "Hey, bro, this is looking pretty terminal, think I'll just check out and not waste all the effort." He gives up and drowns. The other frog keeps swimming, and of course, the cream turns into butter and he is able to hop out, alive and exhausted, and with skin like a baby's ass to boot. Existentialism says: hey, you may as well be that second frog. This chaos might just turn to butter in your fingertips if you flail long enough.
It's a nice theory; but like the frogs, we have no idea where this struggling will get us. We can look into a bucket of deadly cream and know that it will turn to a solid butter foundation given enough time and effort, but existentialism also seems to posit that in the realm of life there's a fairly good chance nothing will solidify at all. It's not thou shalt, it's thou mayest:
"Absurdism, like methodological doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodological doubt, it can, by returning on itself, open up a new field of
investigation, and the process of reasoning thus pursues the same course."
It renders the whole thing rather ritualistic; we undergo the absurdist function for the some of the same reasons we go to church, or dance around a fire all night long. We're trying to draw meaning (mana) out of it and accumulate it where it can be used with less immediacy. I picture a shell forming around a snail. Of course, we have a little more choice than the worm about how this shell is formed, or even, the choice to go ahead and remain shelless and hope that one will appear from the sky. It has a heisenbergian quality to it, the idea that we can create meaning by reducing it nihilistically bit by bit to nothingness, only to find (hopefully!) that the very process of reduction has imbued meaning where there was none.
Anyway, that's my interpretation of it. It's hard to say because so little is fleshed out. It's like a kid stomping around and trying to tell you something with his hand in his mouth. Camus is very excited about something in this introduction, but it's hard to say what.
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