odysseus wrote: ↑Fri Feb 14, 2020 3:04 am
Immanuel Can
Extreme? Camus, yes. Kierkegaard...well, that depends.
No. Camus is, I would say, quite tame, and his thoughts are just shadows of Nietzsche, who is, in my estimation, tame as well.
I'm amused.
Not disagreeing, but amused.
I've often noted that Nietzsche gets hailed as a proclaimer of freedom from faith -- often because his admirers know little more of him that the famous meme, "God is dead." After that, people seem to pretty much say, "Nietzsche said it, I believe it, and that's the end of it." So it's refreshing to get a more thoughtful take on him.
Tame because it amounts to a reductionism to the most accessible and tedious: affirmation in nihilism, the latter absurdly grounded ethical naivete.
I'd love to see this comment further explained, though.
Yes, Nietzsche leads nowhere but Nihilism, at the end of the day; but given his ontological supposition, how is it we would call his view "naive"? I think he sees exactly the
right implications of his ontological premises, in regards to ethics, though I think the premises are wrong. And his attempt to recover by means of appealing to "the will to power" and the autonomy of the übermensch, well, that's just a hopeless step. But his
ethical conclusions, if he is given his premises, seem right to me.
Camus just doesn't understand the metaethical dimension of our existence.
This, I don't quite get at all. I'd need some more unpacking of what you mean by that.
Kierkegaard, on the other hand, holds that our quotidian life, the daily living and breathing of being a self, is nearly on a par with an animal, not yet risen to "sin," and when spirit is posited, the whole body of our affairs becomes sin until one affirm the eternal present's freedom, soul, God. The world, all our institutions and social "habits" are either sinful or presinful. That's radical, I would say.
I think this is
almost right.
Kierkegaard, I find, isn't a social critic
per se. His concern is wholly focused on the individual. When he mentions social structures, it always seems it's just to point out that thinking about fixing them is the wrong way to go, because the problem, as he sees it, it always ultimately in the attitude of the individual to his situation.
Camus is essentially telling us, as a good journalist should, to note that there is no metaphysical hope in the facts. Many people these days, perhaps most, already think this, or, do not think enough about it not to think it. It's implicit everywhere, and Camus is commonplace.
Yes, it is. And that's what I mean about Nietzsche's logic, too. It's become commonplace.
But I like the way you put it: they "do not think enough about it
not to think it." (words yours, but emphasis mine, of course). It's not the deeply thinking person, the philosopher, say, who is subject to this despair alone. It's the ordinary man, caught in the modern condition, who absorbs it through the skin, and then lives it without ever really bringing it to consciousness. And maybe that's a service Camus does us: at least he makes the unconscious conscious, in that regard.
You could equally say he's less arid and sterile than analytic philosophy has tended to be. But I wouldn't call being literary a fault, unless in pursuit of the literary one says what is not true.
Truth and literature? Can a narrative be false?
I think so. Just as literature can be truthful, as when it rightly represents the lived experience of an author or of the reader, I think it can lie. That is, it can tell reassuring lies about how things are. So, for example, if Hardy's great strength as a novelist was his ability to depict the angst of the agnostic from the inside, to tell the truth about that, so too we could get ideologues who tell us sunny stories about the inevitability of the triumph of the proletariat and the classless society. Those would be lies, but in narrative form: for the fault with the Marxist metanarrative is not merely that it hasn't happened YET, but that it never will, because it's assumptions are so horribly wrong. And still that narrative fires the imaginations of fools today.
Or take the story of "the Galileo Trial" -- not the historical facts of it, but the narrative made from it, that has been used as a paradigm example of religious ignorance pitted against scientific wisdom, framed in black hats and white hats...
Orwell knew narratives could lie. In fact, they are some of the most powerful lies, for they go around the critical faculties by means of entertainment.
Stories are neither true nor false, they are.
I disagree. Stories can be false...not merely in detail, but in import as well. Evil hardly ever gets going without using a narrative. I think again of things like the racial supremacist narratives, which teach the superiority of one "race" and the disposability of others. Are these not lies in narrative form?
Despair/anxiety for K is something that is part of the structure of our existence, but it gets much worse when a person rises to metaphysical awareness, a point at which there is a "qualitative" advance toward sin. Weird, but that is the way it is with him.
Not weird at all, if you've had the experience.
As one comes to greater awareness of sin, one becomes sicker...closer to that "sickness unto death" of which Kierkegaard speaks. But one also has, at the same time, a greater possibility of repenting of one's sin as the symptoms of the disease become more pressing -- as despair sets in. Or, to put it in Biblical language,
"But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; 10 and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me..." (Rm. 7:8-10)
Of course, despair can also be greeted with a determination to double down -- and that is truly the sickness unto death. So that awareness brings one closer to crisis...but potentially closer to salvation.
As I said, what I do not appreciate about Camus is that he is simply mundane. He's good at it, granted; but thematically limited because he doesn't think deeply enough. Ethically, he has barely begun. I'm reading Fink right now, which is why I mentioned him twice before, on my mind. His 6th meditation takes the metaphysical threshold of thought and experience and does what Kant does with the logic of a logical proposition in terms of radical disclosure. Fascinating to witness.
I haven't read Fink. Tell me a bit more about that.
