If you are a woman and a philosophy student and you have an open minded Prof, you may ace the course with this novel idea which features a brilliant woman. Albert Camus in the myth of Sisyphus defends nihilism. He asks:
HERE is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did
right.1 That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of [4] profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.........................
Does the meaning of life for man initiate on the earth? All the battles that have caused so much horror in the world indicted that for the majority, the world creates meaning for our species. Yet the absurdity of the world indicates meaningless lacking any sort of reasonable morality. Morality becomes subjective
It all makes sense for all those who agree that the world is the source of both subjective meaning and absurdity. Consider how Simone Weil takes the minority position that the world is not the source of meaning for man. She takes us beyond the world by acquiring the ability for conscious attention to objectively move beyond the shadows which govern our lives and “see”
"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©
The world is a barrier. Can a person feel the absurdity of the world sufficiently to let it go and invite the experience of higher consciousness? Anyone with friends in AA for example has heard the effect of hitting bottom. This is a profound topic which should be spoken of in philosophy If the men are totally engrossed in arguing give a woman a shot. Rather than arguing who is right, what is gained by letting go and perhaps experiencing higher consciousness which offers the third alternative to the duality of nihilism. Some call the experience "revelation."