Existentialism For Dummies

There was one time that I was pitching, in baseball. (This is a true story). This highly touted home run hitter came to the plate. He was a monster. He’d grip the bat in his hands like he was strangling it. I remember his shoulders seemed like a yard wide. He hit everything, far. The coach walked to the mound and told me to throw him nothing but curve balls. I guess he thought he wasn’t as good at hitting curve balls, far. So I started throwing him nothing but curve balls. I threw like 5 or 6 looping curve balls. He was fouling them off. I got to two strikes. The catcher again put down two fingers, the sign for another curve ball. I shook him off. And then I had to shake him off again, emphatically. I was going to throw a fastball. I threw the fastball up around his eye-level—the high heat. I knew that he knew that it was coming, because I’d had to shake the catcher off twice. He swung violently, right underneath it, and I struck him out. I remember the coach just looking at me as I walked back to the dugout.

I was a kid, but in that moment, my existence was justified. The fact that it doesn’t last doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. This is just an example of a more common phenomenon. I’ve had it from reading a book, watching a movie, meeting a person, hearing a song, and other things.

Camus tells the story of Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down again. The last line of that book is, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. Most people might think that Camus means that Sisyphus is happy. But if Sisyphus wants the rock at the top of the hill, then I can’t imagine Sisyphus happy, and I expect that Camus made his last line because he thinks existence would be nothing but a torment otherwise. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy, or else!”

I don’t need to get the rock to the top of the hill, if what that means is finding absolute truth, or some eternal unchanging X. I have the experiential fact of having a soul, and not a void within me. —Not always, but that it doesn’t last doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And I have had the experience of existence being justified. I’m not referring to anything someone couldn’t believe… it was just about refusing to throw a curveball that one time.

Any fool will feel good when he strikes out the batter … it’s what you feel when you don’t strike out the batter that’s significant.

You should have read more than the last sentence.

blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/authe … syphus.pdf

I didn’t say that Camus can’t imagine Sisyphus happy… I said that I can’t imagine Sisyphus happy. Before you start insulting someone, get clear about what they’re saying, please.

I didn’t say that I simply felt good, or even good at all, I said that I felt my existence was justified. —And it wasn’t about the baseball game itself.

You said :

Camus doesn’t think that at all. If he did, then he wouldn’t be an existentialist… he would not have written what he did.

Yeah, I know what you wrote. It translates to : ‘when I succeed, I feel good and my existence is justified.’
The philosophy of the mob.
Nothing could be farther away from existentialism.

Yes he would: that’s exactly what makes him the existentialist that he is. That’s the whole point of ‘the absurd’. If you demand an ultimate meaning/purpose to life, (by analogy, getting the rock to he top of the hill), you’ll never get it.

When I threw the fastball, despite being told not to, despite not being sure it was right but thinking it was, I was doing something that I thought would work, I was testing myself, I was exerting my free choice–even if it meant making a mistake. And I was doing it when the stakes, relative to who I was, were high. Nothing could have mattered more to me—whether I failed, or I succeeded. In that sense, I felt my existence was justified… because I was being who I was. I have had the same feeling in situations where I failed relative to my goal, particularly when I failed because I refused to compromise myself somehow. What you said about me is just wrong.

You have walked in, completely misunderstood me, which is fine in itself, but you’ve managed to rattle off some insults, and achieve nothing by it. Please, don’t respond to what I write. I’m going to be ignoring you.

vR has learned nothing once again. The stone rolls down yet again.

I always took Camus to mean that he imagined Sisyphus happy insofar as he considers the life he lived worth it. He owns his fate and regrets nothing. Sure, he’s condemned to keep pushing that rock, but all the while he is looking back fondly.

Also, I think VR is right in his assessment of the absurd—grasping for meaning in an ultimately meaningless existence.

deleted.

He’s not only looking back. He’s living life at the moment. He feels joy while performing the futile task.

If you are only looking back, then suicide is a reasonable choice to make.

That’s a pretty standard definition of absurd.

But this : “One must imagine Sisyphus happy, or else!”

We have to fabricate a happiness for poor Sisyphus or his life is just torment? He can’t be genuinely happy?

It was just about refusing. Or any other kind of choice you can make for the sheer joy of making the choice.

And that’s what existentialism is. And Sisyphus is also capable of refusing to pitch curveballs. That’s why we must imagine him happy. With all that pushing, he’s bound to find something analogous to shaking off the catcher’s sign and so forth.

You know, when I came here a decade ago, that quote about Sisyphus was my first signature, and I called myself Gamer because of Sisyphus, I imagined him playing a game with that stone. I figured I’d do the same, and find some people to roll stones with, knowing full well they’d topple down. I imagined Sisyphus knew, too, that the stone’s always going to fall. I imagined he dealt with it by being playful and creative and not taking it all too seriously. Further, I imagined that he began to feel that getting the stone to the top would be a kind of curse, a kind of death, because his game would end. So he began to devise ways of making sure the boulder fell, just in case the Gods tired and let him roll it up to the top as a sort of ambuscade.

Can you imagine how lucky he felt, like a cat with a canary. Here he was meant to be cursed, but found a loophole. Shhhh

Yea, maybe it’s not a coincidence that existentialists tend to be some of the most phenomenal artistic writers… like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche especially, but also Camus, Dostoyevski I guess. There’s art there, even when the ideas themselves are bleak.

It’s been a while since I’ve read one of those bonafide existentialists, so maybe what follows isn’t really fair. Nevertheless, I feel like I’m being sold a choose-your-own-adventure story. I leave wishing that they would hook a brotha up, a bit more, with normativity. Maybe the point is to describe the inner life of creatures such as us so well that the reader is better equiped to make his own choices. If that’s it, then I get it. I recognize.

Dostoyevski is an odd case, he’s also a Christian mystic.

Then there’s Samuel Beckett making a mockery of choices. 6 of one…

 That is just the point. Choices. As if we were really free to make choices:  where the truth is, we are bound like Prometheus, sometime to oblige other people.

 Total freedom?  Was sysyphus free?  He had to roll the rock back, no doubt, the freedom in post world war europe was built on an embilloience of hope, upon the sleeve of overcoming tyranny, and the promose of communism's deloivery. It was all unresolved, but there was a warm breeze in the air in August 1944, and it felt like a coming up from a deep cavern into a Platonic sunshine.

The reason I feel this way, because for the first time in my life I feel that I must change:  change away from the godless despair, and turn toward the god who does not exist, but had to be invented.  This God is the God of selfless love.  It is a communal god hypothesized upon a projected brotherhood of man, and if we loose that god, we loose it all.

 It is not despair that drive us toward this aim,but the postmodern threat of a recurrent either/or.

I, Along with a lot of inauthentic people in the world, must come to terms with who we are, and give it up in supplication to the inherent god to come

Kierkegaard was a Christian. I think some people think that’s only as a ruse though.

I’ve never read him, so I don’t understand…

 I've read him: he is borderline between existentialism and post modernism:  his absurdist position is I believe meant as a kind of warning: about how we have to change thingsam. He is an absurd fatalist, and I don't believe he believes very much the freedom which manifests in choices..

Kierkegaard I belive isn’t musing about existentialistic Christianity, although. Sometimes he makes you wonder. His repetition inclines one to want to believe in the repeat of mystic traits, and enlightening people like Jesus. But maybe it’s because he was always a beacon of light for me from say sartre, for whom hell was other people.

An absurdist fatalist? That’s an odd combination. Anyways, if he’s a postmodernist, then confound him! Nah, but I probably won’t get him. I’m waiting for the post-postmoderism. Btw, have you ever read the “postmodernism generator”. It’s a computer generator that generates text, syntactically correct I think, but totally randomly. IOW, it generates articles that look like they’re meaningful, but are really totally, utterly, meaningless. Check it out if you haven’t: elsewhere.org/pomo/

In order to get past post modern , von rivers, the fatalism implicit in existential despair has to be overcome. This is simply I believe, not yet conceivable,even the few remaining existentialists, who have not swallowed the soulless ad campaign of a totally de constructed world.

Why the de-construction in post modernism? Because of the inability for most to even get to a phenomenological reduction.

The reduction itself is not so difficult, but what is found there is mostly unacceptable in the materialistic consumptive world. And the post deconstructionists are trying to form a way to get there, but all attempts remain strictly iconoclastic.

The new high technology we think will fill in all the missing element. Utilization of technology and it’s effects replaces the psychic effort to do it for one’s self.

It is so politically incorrect not to be up to par.

Yes, Beckett is a fatalist, he doesn’t seem to think that there is any hope of avoiding loosing out soul.

Our soul, our essence is defined by artificial choices, mostly out of expedience, affordability, rather then from a sense of responsibility. But it isn’t an either/or kind of process, there are shades of grey, and sometimes they are definable, sometimes making sense, but usually, people will let any doubt go by a sort of understood paradigm.

Read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling or do a search of his name under my posts’ archives if you want to see what type of Christian he was.

I don’t Think it was a ruse, however it was nothing like a ‘normal’ christian’s view he had. Dostoyevsky was more traditional. Interesting, just peeked at Wiki, and some people refer to him as a deist, but his views do not strike me as deist. Then later it mentions him being Orthodox. My impression was his beliefs did shift over time and his epileptic fugues played a strong role in his sense of the numinous.

Well, the Classic Waiting for Godot is a good start. Take an hour maybe. And it is entertaining, if ultimately bleak.