Matt Connors’s Reviews > The Myth of Sisyphus > Status Update

Camus writes of Don Juan, how the legend seems of an absurd attitude and responds to typical views of Juan. Not having a belief in “eternal LOVE” (whose conception is formed by common depiction) but the phenomenon of what he feels. Juan loves different, a way that recognizes the entity of his conscience and doesn’t glorify LOVE (lesses everything else) but instead feasts on the focus of love’s spot light.

One living a life lucid of the absurd (Absurd Man) focuses on the actions available to them, navigating with their courage (to live without appeal) and reason (informing of one’s limits) in tow. How is an Absurd Man to conduct oneself? “…integrity has no need for rules”(66) Value is scaled to how mendacious an idea or a life is in the absurd world. Actions serve/don’t serve people, face your consequences

With no future after death and harboring absurd freedom by rejecting a leaping belief, living a life of quantity follows the revolting mind.“Quantity” not as in the time lived, but time lucid and conscious. Living the “best” life implies a scale of values resulting from a unity, aka negation. “Quantity” as in awareness of the absurd/rebellion, the limit of death/the freedom it gives, and desire for life

In belief of the absurd and appeals to divinity, there are different sorts of freedom and slavery. The divine gives a FEELING of liberation or free oneself to another place after death, but comes with responsibilities, enslaving the mind by limiting choice. The absurd enslaves us here, this world, by presenting death as final but liberates us from a responsibility of acting for a next life. To live a hopeless rebel

Suicide negates the “consciousness desire for unity” part of the absurd equation. With no mind, the absurd is resolved by rushing to death, which is our end when no meaning or future-after-death is presented, when only abstract leaps can be made to conclude rational meaning/universal cohesion. In this way, we are “condemned to death”(pg55) therefore to live with this “truth” is to revolt against death.

When a consciousness highlights the absurd and wishes not to leap away from the anguish the tension creates, one must be ever aware of this unreasonable world and one’s own desire for unity or reason. This causes the problems of day to day to strengthen in the mind, as there is no alternate place to go after life, this is it. “Abstract evidence”(I think=assumptions) shifts towards a sight of human creation.

Reread this section (specifically 41-47) it discusses philosophical suicide, the different ways people negate or rationalize the absurd. Spoke of Husserl’s phenomenology and how its premise is absurd aligned, but Husserl further contemplation reveals a metaphysical truth in everything (compared to Plato’s “world of forms”)

The struggle being an absence of hope, continual rejection, and conscious dissatisfaction. If these three are altered by a proposed view, then the absurd losses meaning and attitudes resulting from holding onto these three, soiled. (How does the loss of any of these three, soil conclusions? How are the conclusions different and why is this soiled conclusion “soiled” compared to if these three remain intact?)

The absurd is a confrontation between our expectation that the world is reasonable, has a meaning for us, etc and the world possessing paradoxes and silence. If the world or human is gone (death) then so too is the absurd, there is no one without the other since it is the tension born of the contradiction, which results in struggle for humans.

The absurd is THE conflict between the contradiction of human existence. Our drive for a recognizable pattern, a unity, something familiar to stabilize our perspective of nature and our world holding paradoxes which object any stable perspective. This implies that without a human, there is no absurd, for there would be no entity searching in such an environment, implying this to be a pure human issue.