Philosophy Now Forum

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Jul 24, 2025 9:06 pm Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

The 4th January 1960 was an overcast and drizzly day in northern central France. Albert Camus was returning to Paris with his publisher Michel Gallimard and Gallimard’s wife and daughter in a powerful four-door sports car, a Facel Vega. The Vega was infamous for its rear hinging ‘suicide’ doors that were known to pop open at high speeds upon high vibrations. However, this would not be the issue on this particular journey. Joining the Route Nationale No 5, at about half a kilometer from Yonnes, the car lost control and hit a tree. Gallimard’s wife and daughter were thrown from the car, landing between 10-20ft from the wreck. They would recover. Gallimard suffered severe impact wounds, and would die two days later in hospital. Camus was killed instantly.

In fact, that's often how the Benjamin Button Syndrome unfolds for all of us. Out of the blue a sequence of events more or less beyond our completely understanding or controlling can precipitate all manner of terrible consequences. 

In other words, who really knows what might have unfolded had Camus taken the train instead of the lift. In regard to existentialism, and in regard to the lives of all those who knew him.

Thus:

He was only forty-six years old, and had written as recently as 1958, “I continue to be convinced that my work hasn’t even been begun.” Camus had wished to take a train back to Paris and was renowned for his dislike of cars, but Gallimard had persuaded him to take a lift. The train ticket for the return journey was found in the top pocket of Camus’ jacket.

What if...what if...what if.

So, is there something definitive that philosophers might be able to ascertain regarding experiences like this? 
Meanwhile some will just come at you with things like, "shit happens", "that's the way the cookie crumbles", "it is what it is", "two tears in a bucket", "c'est la vie", "que sera sera", "it's just one of those things",  "some things you just can't explain", "these things happen", "you get that sometimes"   

Click.

The definitive wisdom from the death of Camus is that determinism does not imply prediction.

Existentialism & Culture
Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

The Two Faces Of Existentialism
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes of everyday life:


“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm … But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

For me, this experience [sort of] goes way back...

I still recall the very first experience I had as a teenager with my "identity" as more than just me thinking this or doing that. I was at my Aunt Betty and Uncle Mike's house in Miners Mills, Pennsylvania. My family moved to Baltimore when I was 7, but every summer I would go back and spend a couple of months at my Grandmother's house. That day I had done something I was being reprimanded for but I refused to go into details as to why I had done it. That's when my Aunt Mary said something to the effect of, "it's no use, he is just like his father".

And then for the first time, and for reasons I did not understand, I began to really think about that. "Philosophically", as it were. I began to wonder how the boy I had become was connected to my parents and my family and how they had raised me and how in some ways I had come to be like them.

What if I had been raised by different parents in very different circumstances? Would I have done what I did that day? Would I have reacted to others as I did?

But then of course I slipped back into just being a kid again.

This is Camus’ revelation of absurdity (terminology borrowed from Sartre). He is claiming that normal consciousness and perspective are, to a certain degree, empty; or taking the view to an extreme, that life is not worth living.

This is a frame of mind that revolves around the assumption [my own] that just because human interactions and experiences are essentially meaningless and purposeless [if that is even true], there are any number of things that existentially can bring mere mortals in a No God world all measures of satisfaction and fulfillment.

This part:

And then those like me who suggest that one can live a largely fulfilling life without the need for either one or another philosophy of life or one or another One True Path. Or one or another essential meaning and purpose. Think of all the things you can choose to do from day to day to day that bring you great pleasure. It might revolve around the food you eat, the relationships you pursue, a job you love, music you listen to, sports you enjoy, hobbies that sustain you. As for coming to terms with death, that's the whole point: you embody the pursuits that bring you to fruition and they become "distractions" from all the grim stuff.

We could easily imagine that the culmination of the above activities could be the car crash on the road to Yonnes: an absurd end to the absurdity of existence.

But what makes it essentially absurd is the fact [if it even is a fact] that [God or No God] we can't come up with a font that takes us much beyond the existential parameters of our lives.

Or, rather, I can't "here and now". How about you?

The "brute facticity of existence" as some call it.

Existentialism & Culture
Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

This absurdity is well illustrated in one of Camus’ novellas, L’Etranger (The Stranger). The hero, Meursault, attends his mother’s funeral with an air of ambivalence, indicated from the outset of the text with the statement “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

Over and again, we can be confronted with this sort of thing. In other words, we live in a particular community where there are things that "normal" people are expected to say and do given particular sets of circumstances. When your mother dies it's not normal to act as Meursault does. Why? Because, in part, the whole point of sustaining normal behavior in a community revolves around giving everyone a template for differentiating right from wrong, good from bad, true from false.

If others note you rejecting this, many of them will see this in and of itself as a threat. You are no longer "one of us". Then it all comes down to how threatening you are perceived to be. Enough in other words for them to confront you, imprison you, disappear you?

He continues in an attitude of indifference as he meets a girl the following day and takes her to a show. Meursault searches for sensation from a world that he views as indifferent to its inhabitants. Eventually Meursault kills a man in this attitude of passive separation from the world.

"Meursault kills the Arab in Albert Camus's The Stranger due to a complex combination of overwhelming heat, dazzling sunlight, and a feeling of being threatened by the sun, which triggers a detached, almost fatalistic, impulsive act rather than a logical or premeditated murder. This moment, and his subsequent indifference, highlights the novel's central theme: the absurd and meaningless nature of the universe, where human attempts to find order and reason are futile." AI

Like very different people who have lived very different lives won't react to this in very different and conflicting ways.

Although Camus never used the term in his life, he is here showing an existential standpoint (the term existentialism was first used by Søren Kierkegaard) – an approach to existence which maintains that we are ‘unnecessary’ and that the world that envelops us is the only reality, therefore any meaning we attempt to attain is a pure illusion, or at best, a personal construct.

Here's how Michael Novak once encompassed it:

"I recognize that I put structure into my world....There is no 'real' world out there, given, intact, full of significance. Consciousness is constituted by random, virtually infinite barrages of experience; these experiences are indistinguishably 'inner' and 'outer'.....Structure is put into experience by culture and self, and may also be pulled out again....The experience of nothingness is an experience beyond the limits of reason...it is terrifying. It makes all attempts at speaking of purpose, goals, aims, meaning, importance, conformity, harmony, unity----it makes all such attempts seem doubtful and spurious." The Experience of Nothingness

Only he blinked. He took his own existential leap of faith to Catholicism, to Capitalism. You tell me in what order.

Sartre champions this approach in his novel Nausea, where nausea is the state that overwhelms the main character Roquentin in a bar when alienation and the mystery of being take hold. Roquentin is left “alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices” in a state of oppression by the uncaring universe. This understanding leads to Sartre’s famous dictum that ‘man is a useless passion’.

Then straight back to the distinction made between existential passions in which different people are passionate or indifferent regarding different things, and an essential passion in which the objectivists confront us over and again with their own One True Path.

Existentialism & Culture
Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

[The above] all sounds very depressing and suicidal, and you may ask why I’m choosing to discuss it. I cannot deny these states of consciousness exist, and as we stampede towards further technologicalism and materialism I feel we are more susceptible than ever to angst-ridden existence – to moments when life seems meaningless, as illustrated by Eliot’s Hollow Men or in much of Samuel Beckett’s work.

This is a frame of mind which might follow the assumption that, philosophically or otherwise, human interactions are essentially meaningless and purposeless, devoid of objective morality in a No God world, and culminating in oblivion.

On the other hand, there are any number of antidotes one might pursue:

1] a God, the God 
2] Pantheism 
3] hedonism
4] stoicism
5] idealism
6] deontology
7] ideolog
8] biological imperatives
9] becoming a sociopath
10] solipsism

Or those who are too busy merely sustaining themselves and their loved ones [subsisting] from day to day.
 

Yet we go about our days in a paradoxical flux, as there is also an intense feeling we experience during our best moments, that life has meaning; that it is priceless and filled with immense potential.

Most of us, however, are indoctrinated as children to believe the only meaning life has is the one crammed into our heads historically and culturally by family and friends. And then as we do become adults, there are any number of "one of us" moral, political and spiritual One True Paths one can choose from in order to be convinced "in one's head" that there are essential answers regarding...everything? 

Either on holiday, or when enjoying ourselves at home; when immersed in an activity, in music, or at moments of celebration, we no longer feel separate, contingent or alienated from reality. As W. B. Yeats expresses it in his poem Under Ben Bulben:

…when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.

Over and again, however, from my own perspective here and now, proposals like this can be made such that each of us as individuals will react to them subjectively and subjunctively given our existential trajectory rooted in dasein for discussions such as this one. And then one may or may not be successful in communicating this to others.

Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

For me these moments [above] occasionally arise while in a football game, when I play with such ease and am sure that all touch and contact with the ball will be inch-perfect. I am usually a very inconsistent and average football player, yet in moments of relaxed concentration volleys can be struck with confidence and minimal effort. I have slipped out of the ‘me’ that stumbles and trips in both action and speech, into a ‘me’ that is purposeful and overflowing with vitality and focus.

Of course, some will insist this is basically their own experiences as philosophers. Only it's done more with words up in the analytical clouds than with assessments of things those words convey to them regarding their interactions with others socially, politically and economically. 

At these times it seems that a glow has ignited in my head and all my action and movement are at one with my surroundings. This is what J. G. Fitche meant when he said that man only knows himself in action. I no longer feel separate, contingent or extraneous to reality. I feel part of the world.

Speech acts, perhaps?

"Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language is a landmark 1969 book by philosopher John R. Searle that provides a systematic and comprehensive theory of speech acts, building on the foundational work of J.L. Austin. The book argues that speaking a language is a form of rule-governed behavior and classifies speech acts into categories like representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations, offering a framework for understanding the various actions we perform with language." AI

Okay, but then back to the part where you either are or are not able to demonstrate empirically that the words you use are applicable objectively to all of us. Again, the difference between noting "Donald Trump is now president of the United States" and avowing "Donald Trump is a great president."

The seventeenth century French philosopher Blaise Pascal called this ‘authentic existence’ – in contrast to an ‘inauthentic existence’ in which people waste their lives concerned with trivialities.

On the other hand...

“When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.” Blaise Pascal

Or is that basically what I am myself accused of doing here...driving people to despair?

Likewise, the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in Being & Time of “Being that degrades itself in the mediocrity of everyday life” and of our “forgetfulness of Existence.” In other words, we can become so bogged down by the actualities of just surviving day by day that we forget to enjoy the knowledge and feeling of being alive in the world.

Let's run this by the Nazis among us. Talk about speech acts! 

Why is this? Why can we experience moments of oppression, and at other times moments of almost divine bliss? And which is correct? Vision or Nausea? Meaning or Meaningless?

Yes.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 10:47 pm Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

For me these moments [above] occasionally arise while in a football game, when I play with such ease and am sure that all touch and contact with the ball will be inch-perfect. I am usually a very inconsistent and average football player, yet in moments of relaxed concentration volleys can be struck with confidence and minimal effort. I have slipped out of the ‘me’ that stumbles and trips in both action and speech, into a ‘me’ that is purposeful and overflowing with vitality and focus.

Of course, some will insist this is basically their own experiences as philosophers. Only it's done more with words up in the analytical clouds than with assessments of things those words convey to them regarding their interactions with others socially, politically and economically. 

At these times it seems that a glow has ignited in my head and all my action and movement are at one with my surroundings. This is what J. G. Fitche meant when he said that man only knows himself in action. I no longer feel separate, contingent or extraneous to reality. I feel part of the world.

Speech acts, perhaps?

"Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language is a landmark 1969 book by philosopher John R. Searle that provides a systematic and comprehensive theory of speech acts, building on the foundational work of J.L. Austin. The book argues that speaking a language is a form of rule-governed behavior and classifies speech acts into categories like representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations, offering a framework for understanding the various actions we perform with language." AI

Okay, but then back to the part where you either are or are not able to demonstrate empirically that the words you use are applicable objectively to all of us. Again, the difference between noting "Donald Trump is now president of the United States" and avowing "Donald Trump is a great president."

The seventeenth century French philosopher Blaise Pascal called this ‘authentic existence’ – in contrast to an ‘inauthentic existence’ in which people waste their lives concerned with trivialities.

On the other hand...

“When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.” Blaise Pascal

Or is that basically what I am myself accused of doing here...driving people to despair?

Likewise, the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in Being & Time of “Being that degrades itself in the mediocrity of everyday life” and of our “forgetfulness of Existence.” In other words, we can become so bogged down by the actualities of just surviving day by day that we forget to enjoy the knowledge and feeling of being alive in the world.

Let's run this by the Nazis among us. Talk about speech acts! 

Why is this? Why can we experience moments of oppression, and at other times moments of almost divine bliss? And which is correct? Vision or Nausea? Meaning or Meaningless?

Yes.

Sam Morris's experience as described is about over-learned actions. Like when you are climbing or running down the stairs you do so more efficiently when you use muscle memory so don't need analyse every action . Or for instance once you have learned how to handle a car you do it from muscle memory and then you can give all your conscious attention to the road and traffic situation.This is about physical experience. Nothing to do with existentialism.
There is no question but that it's fun to perform expertly. Nothing to do with existentialism.

Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face

Why is this? Why can we experience moments of oppression, and at other times moments of almost divine bliss? And which is correct? Vision or Nausea? Meaning or Meaningless?

And what if all the options on all the philosophers' tool belts are unable to provide us with "the final answer"? What if one individual's vision regarding how the human race ought to unfold is another individual's idea of a nauseous hell?

And, you tell me, are human interactions pertaining to value judgments and conflicting goods best understood essentially or existentially? In other words, is it going to be one or another rendition of "It's our way or else!" or "let's try moderation, negotiation and compromise".

Some may view this problem [above] as basically irrelevant, like asking which is truer, summer or winter? or which moods are truer, happiness or depression?

Others, however, will construe it as anything but irrelevant...basically or otherwise. Those, for example, who insist it really is possible to say which season is the truest, or, given particular contexts, which mood really is the truest.

In other words, there's how people react differently to different seasons and sets of circumstances and philosophers/ethicists being able to denote deontologically the optimal season and the optimal set of behaviors.

Yet, as Colin Wilson highlighted in The Outsider (1956), when “Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, which seems to be a pure affirmation of life, yet ends his life leaving a note saying ‘Misery will never end’… the question was not only significant but, literally, a matter of life and death.”

Same thing here? The yawning -- inherent? -- gap between the two reactions such that, philosophically or otherwise, there may well be no capacity whatsoever to pin things of this sort down objectively. What, Van Gogh was essentially correct here, here, and here but was essentially incorrect there, there and there?

All of his paintings then ranked from most to least rational?

Angst and Affirmation in Modern Culture
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face.

...the sense of lack of meaning or purpose is very apparent in twentieth century literature, philosophy and art. Liberal humanism finds it impossible to accommodate? the irrational extremes of human behaviour. It is also difficult? to maintain allegiance to the possibility of a benign Marxism. Structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism have eliminated the individual human subject and stirred up scepticism about whether it is possible to make any absolutely true statement. To add to this, there is a general sense that the certainties provided by religion have been lost, never to be regained or replaced. Science solves our practical problems, but at times only widens the inner void of meaninglessness. So it’s an important issue.

Go ahead, fit yourself in there somewhere. Then, given particular contexts revolving around meaning, morality and metaphysics [the Big Questions] note its relevance pertaining to your own interactions with others socially, politically and economically. Why your assumptions and not the assumptions of others? And how would philosophers go about determining which assumptions sustain the optimal assessment?

Here, however, any number of essentialists among us will interject, insisting that in regard to "meaning, morality and metaphysics" they and they alone wrote the book. Think Scriptures or Manifestos or Biological Imperatives. Indeed, some will even go so far as to append "or else" to their agenda. And then the part where others are excluded simply because they have the wrong skin color or belong to the wrong ethnic group or worship the wrong God or champion the wrong political dogma. 

For me, existentialism is a passionate protest against the prevalence of mere cold logic.

More to the point [mine] "mere cold logic" may well be beyond the reach of moral, political and metaphysical philosophy itself. It's certainly of limited use to this philosopher. Click, of course. I just acknowledge in turn I have no way in which to demonstrate that my own frame of mind here comes closer to the "objective truth" than yours. 

The basic axioms of existentialism concern the stature of man. An existentialist philosopher might commence his analysis of human existence by pointing out that while there are times a man feels supremely happy and confident, there are other times when he feels substantially less than human. Existentialism offers no consolation, it purely confirms the diagnosis: without God a person must give him self significance, because if he does not, no one will. This injection of importance is the role of Wilson’s ‘New Existentialist’.

And then the part where I suggest that Wilson himself "blinks":

"The final chapter is Wilson's attempt at a 'great synthesis' in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless pessimistic fallacy." wiki

Of course: optimistic or pessimistic about what? 

Philosophy Now wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2023 9:27 pm Kate Taylor recalls a ‘humanist’ classic by Jean-Paul Sartre.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/152/Ex ... aul_Sartre

Word A is a word B.

How thought provoking.