[1] http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/absurd%20reasoning.htm

It took me a few minutes to realize that the section I was reading in the little paperback I received a while back was actually an essay completely separate from The Myth of Sisyphus; in fact, though, this essay—entitled “An Absurd Reasoning”—is so compelling that I intend to read this all the way through. Here are a few points that really hit me, with more to come.

• “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.” The more closely aware we become of the absurd, the more we have to face the fact that death is a part of life, and we must choose either to be happy or to, essentially, kill ourselves. It seems Camus is arguing that anything but these two options is intellectually dishonest.
• Suicide, for Camus, is tantamount to confessing that life is too much for you, that you don’t understand it. On the other hand, “the body shrinks from annihilation,” and so does the mind; so it takes an enormous effort—it seems to me—to either kill oneself or to not kill oneself, once aware of the absurd.

  Now, I’d like to summarily say that this problem does not exist for the Christian. That the absurdity of life is, negated because death, for the Christian, is not death in an absolute sense, only the beginning of a metamorphosis, or of a second phase, or what-have-you, to life. But this denies the fact that the Christian mind is not at all aware of the absurd, or need not deal with it, when in fact, this is not the case at all. A friend of a friend recently committed suicide. She was active in the church, seemed fairly undepressed insofar as we all are at this uncertain stage of life, and left no note. What drove her to commit this act? Was she confessing that life was too much for her, or that she’d rather be with God than on Earth? How could she have overcome the “backshrinking”? I don’t pretend to know.

• In the next section, “Absurd Walls,” Camus discusses knowing an actor even just a small bit better simply by watching him act, though we know nothing of the man himself necessarily. I’d have to agree; I think this is true of any actor we more or less admire.
• Weariness with a rhythmic, mechanical life gives birth to reflection, to the asking of “Why,” “tinged with amazement.” This sounds suspiciously like the universal definition of—or at least, the common understanding describing the exploration of—philosophy itself.
• When we assert our place in time, when we become aware of it, it ceases to carry us; we carry it, and whereas we were wishing for tomorrow, it has now arrived, and in our awareness we fear the acceleration unto death. This has personal significance: when I turned seventeen, I remember being in a panic for almost a week, because I was “almost eighteen, which is practically 21, and 25 is just a step away, and then you might as well be thirty, and life just keeps slipping away!” An exaggeration at which we laugh now, but at the time I was serious as death (no pun intended); and aren’t we all just flickers after all? How is it any more ludicrous than the man who considers death when he’s reached fifty, or eighty? What’s eighty years out of the history of the universe?
  “Not enough.”
• “In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. 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 sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.” This is most troublesome to me, and why I so enjoy Kant and the “professional rationalists,” as Camus calls them, but I know that there is no truth in that absolute sense, to be gained apart from Christ.

  Now, that’s also easy to say. But the more theology I study, the more I read, the more I hear, the more fragmentary and less certain even doctrines seem. On everything from speaking in tongues to the rapture to the exegesis of certain large swaths in Paul, there are so many interpretations. This is not reason for indolence, as so many try to escape the study of scripture for just this reason, or some other half-assed excuse involving the little catch-phrases “organized religion” or “I can’t read Greek and Hebrew.” I have a dark place in my heart, I must confess, for people who hide behind those stupid smoke-screens and so dismiss the edification of their souls with a simple phrase. But it is difficult. Exegetical fallacies abound (in fact, D. A. Carson has written a book on them), and the Truth is elusive and comes only to the humble seeker.

• Science can’t tell us anything about real truths of the world. Camus is at least intellectually honest; so refreshing after dealing with research psychologists who believe that they have the keys of the universe because they know how to read an fMRI cerebral scan.
• “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 privileged moment.” Perfect. Doesn’t that sound like fun? That’s why I run this blog!

Endnotes:

You can find a complete copy of the paperback I’ve been reading, including “An Absurd Reasoning” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” by clicking on the title of this post.

Thanks to the good folks at Saluda Restaurant in Five Points, Columbia, SC, for running a free WAP.

[2] http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/absurd%20reasoning.htm

It took me a few minutes to realize that the section I was reading in the little paperback I received a while back was actually an essay completely separate from The Myth of Sisyphus; in fact, though, this essay—entitled “An Absurd Reasoning”—is so compelling that I intend to read this all the way through. Here are a few points that really hit me, with more to come.

• “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.” The more closely aware we become of the absurd, the more we have to face the fact that death is a part of life, and we must choose either to be happy or to, essentially, kill ourselves. It seems Camus is arguing that anything but these two options is intellectually dishonest.
• Suicide, for Camus, is tantamount to confessing that life is too much for you, that you don’t understand it. On the other hand, “the body shrinks from annihilation,” and so does the mind; so it takes an enormous effort—it seems to me—to either kill oneself or to not kill oneself, once aware of the absurd.

  Now, I’d like to summarily say that this problem does not exist for the Christian. That the absurdity of life is, negated because death, for the Christian, is not death in an absolute sense, only the beginning of a metamorphosis, or of a second phase, or what-have-you, to life. But this denies the fact that the Christian mind is not at all aware of the absurd, or need not deal with it, when in fact, this is not the case at all. A friend of a friend recently committed suicide. She was active in the church, seemed fairly undepressed insofar as we all are at this uncertain stage of life, and left no note. What drove her to commit this act? Was she confessing that life was too much for her, or that she’d rather be with God than on Earth? How could she have overcome the “backshrinking”? I don’t pretend to know.

• In the next section, “Absurd Walls,” Camus discusses knowing an actor even just a small bit better simply by watching him act, though we know nothing of the man himself necessarily. I’d have to agree; I think this is true of any actor we more or less admire.
• Weariness with a rhythmic, mechanical life gives birth to reflection, to the asking of “Why,” “tinged with amazement.” This sounds suspiciously like the universal definition of—or at least, the common understanding describing the exploration of—philosophy itself.
• When we assert our place in time, when we become aware of it, it ceases to carry us; we carry it, and whereas we were wishing for tomorrow, it has now arrived, and in our awareness we fear the acceleration unto death. This has personal significance: when I turned seventeen, I remember being in a panic for almost a week, because I was “almost eighteen, which is practically 21, and 25 is just a step away, and then you might as well be thirty, and life just keeps slipping away!” An exaggeration at which we laugh now, but at the time I was serious as death (no pun intended); and aren’t we all just flickers after all? How is it any more ludicrous than the man who considers death when he’s reached fifty, or eighty? What’s eighty years out of the history of the universe?
  “Not enough.”
• “In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. 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 sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.” This is most troublesome to me, and why I so enjoy Kant and the “professional rationalists,” as Camus calls them, but I know that there is no truth in that absolute sense, to be gained apart from Christ.

  Now, that’s also easy to say. But the more theology I study, the more I read, the more I hear, the more fragmentary and less certain even doctrines seem. On everything from speaking in tongues to the rapture to the exegesis of certain large swaths in Paul, there are so many interpretations. This is not reason for indolence, as so many try to escape the study of scripture for just this reason, or some other half-assed excuse involving the little catch-phrases “organized religion” or “I can’t read Greek and Hebrew.” I have a dark place in my heart, I must confess, for people who hide behind those stupid smoke-screens and so dismiss the edification of their souls with a simple phrase. But it is difficult. Exegetical fallacies abound (in fact, D. A. Carson has written a book on them), and the Truth is elusive and comes only to the humble seeker.

• Science can’t tell us anything about real truths of the world. Camus is at least intellectually honest; so refreshing after dealing with research psychologists who believe that they have the keys of the universe because they know how to read an fMRI cerebral scan.
• “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 privileged moment.” Perfect. Doesn’t that sound like fun? That’s why I run this blog!

Endnotes:

You can find a complete copy of the paperback I’ve been reading, including “An Absurd Reasoning” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” by clicking on the title of this post.

Thanks to the good folks at Saluda Restaurant in Five Points, Columbia, SC, for running a free WAP.