Gary Childress wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:06 pm
I don't know if he's necessarily saying that "lot's of serious-minded people have a desire to die". I tend to think he's speaking for himself and his own existence (what he experiences in what he perceives to be an absurd world), and not trying to speak for others, at least I wouldn't think so.
Well, he's certainly speaking TO others, with a view to some experience he thinks they share with him.
I mean, why else do you write a book? If you want just to emote, you can always go off and scream your angst to the wilderness, and then come home and nobody's the wiser. But if you write a book, you're trying to tell the world something you think they're going to have reason to think is right, right?
Camus published. He put this out there.
I mean, I can say the world is an absurd place and I'm sure many would disagree but that might be my apprehension. Other people can think what they want. I can't convince them and I'm not sure I would want to.
I think maybe you're not embracing the full sense of what Camus means by "absurd," Gary.
Very clearly he means much more than that life
feels absurd
to some people. Rather, he's talking about the deep nature of how things really are, if you think about them realistically...or so he thinks. He supposes that the thoughtful person will, at end, believe both that life is meaningless inherently, but that people cannot endure life without meaning. And the dialectic between those two "facts," as he sees them, he calls "the absurd."
His claim there is ontological, not merely emotional. He thinks "absurd" is how things
really are, not just how some people feel about them.
If he does not mean that, then his whole argument becomes pretty trivial. It reduces to "some people (plausibly incorrect or mentally ill ones) merely
feel that life is absurd, and others (plausibly better-balanced ones) really think not."
I don't think that's a serious enough starting point to launch his argument, do you?