SubscribeThe human condition is ultimately absurd. Yet the unconscious mind works in ways to disguise that fact from our awareness while circumventing the uncomfortable feelings that would otherwise be provoked. The threat is always there – as is our unending thirst for psychological equanimity. Illusionary ideological systems offer meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence, and […]
In the last post I began sketching out a plausible theory regarding the evolution of consciousness. I suggested that our phylogenetic history led us down a dead-end path of painful contradiction – the emergence of the first symbolic animal: a creature that desperately craves meaning and purpose, but exists in a physical world that has […]
This post follows the previous two entries (part 1, part 2) exploring the human desire for meaning and its natural flow into Camus’ notion of rebellion. Rebellion emerges from the rebel’s growing awareness and sensitivity to forms of injustice, slavery, or rational murder. To do nothing is to acquiesce to this state of affairs, or […]
The unanswered question of human meaning gnaws at the collective unconsciousness like an open wound begging to be stitched. Lucid reasoning led us to the full scope of this dilemma – but it must also note its limits: it cannot reconcile the irreconcilable and one must not ‘forget’ what it has uncovered – human absurdity. […]
In a four-part series of previous posts I have tried to offer a sketch of Camus’ concept of absurdity (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). Before reading the following, I might recommend that new readers first visit those introductory posts on the topic. Absurdity Revisited We can attain some measure of […]
The Grand Inquisitor is a chapter from Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ It is an important section of the book and has become one of the most praised passages within modern literature. The Grand Inquisitor is a parable told by Ivan to his brother Alyosha, where Christ returns to earth during the time of the […]
The discovery of the absurd will often lead to one of two reflexive responses. The first entails a kind of negative leap into suicide and despair. The second involves a more common and subtle positive leap, where an underlying anxiety about the human dilemma presumably causes one to ‘forget’ the starting point – the place […]
Camus was not the first to come to the conclusions thus far described – Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and others less known, have also followed lucid reason to arrive at the ‘waterless deserts’ of the absurd… … but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last crossroad where thought hesitates … […]