Absurdist Thinker Albert Camus on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Author and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash on this day in 1960, on a straight country road with an unused train ticket in his pocket. How absurd. 

Camus wrote that there "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." He told a sad & poignant story of a building manager who had killed himself because he had lost his daughter five years before, which greatly changed him and that the experience had “undermined” him. According to Camus "A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."

Though he once was a Communist, he dropped that ideology in favor of freedom.

"Because he was not a partisan in the Cold War between the U.S./NATO and the U.S.S.R, Albert Camus was an oddball.  As a result, he was criticized by the right, left, and center.  His allegiance was to truth, not ideologies.  He opposed state murder, terrorism, and warfare from all quarters.  An artistic anarchist with a passionate spiritual hunger, an austere and moral Don Juan, this sensual man of conscience and honor earned his reputation by a lifelong literary meditation on death in all its guises: disease (he was constantly threatened by tuberculosis), murder, suicide, capital punishment, war, etc.; deaths both 'happy' and absurd, sudden and slow.  His enemy was always injustice and those powerful ones who thought they had the right to make others suffer and die for their perverted purposes.  An artist compelled by history to enter the political arena, he spoke out in defense of the poor, oppressed, and powerless.  Among his enemies were liberal imperialism and Soviet Marxism, abstract ideologies used to enslave and murder people around the world." Edward Curtin

Some quotes from Camus:

"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude."

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money." 

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Political utopias justified in advance any enterprises whatever."

"The welfare of the people…has always been the alibi of tyrants…giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

"The tyrannies of today…no longer admit of silence or neutrality…I am against."

"The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the state. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action."

"Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but without law there is no freedom."

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State."

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration…It’s a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to get better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse."

"Liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals…the supreme good that governs all others."

"Is it possible…to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes."

"We have to live and let live in order to create what we are."

"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom."

"Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom."

"More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself."

Buy this book: The Folly of Socialism (40 Chapters) for 99 cents on Amazon

Philosopher Albert Camus on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Author and philosopher Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on this day in 1957. Camus wrote that there "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." He told a sad & poignant story of a building manager who had killed himself because he had lost his daughter five years before, which greatly changed him and that the experience had “undermined” him. According to Camus "A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."

Though he once was a Communist, he dropped that ideology in favor of freedom:

"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Political utopias justified in advance any enterprises whatever."

"The welfare of the people…has always been the alibi of tyrants…giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

"The tyrannies of today…no longer admit of silence or neutrality…I am against."

"The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the state. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action."

"Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but without law there is no freedom."

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State."

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration…It’s a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to get better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse."

"Liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals…the supreme good that governs all others."

"Is it possible…to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes."

"We have to live and let live in order to create what we are."

"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom."

"Without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom."

"More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself."

Buy this book: The Folly of Socialism (40 Chapters) for 99 cents on Amazon

Franz Kafka, Writer of the Absurd, on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: Franz Kafka, regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, died on this day in 1924. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers.

Both Albert Camus and Franz Kafka dealt with the Absurd, but Kafka targeted his idea of the Absurd on bureaucracies, and who has not had puzzling encounters in one form or another when it comes to bureaucracy. The only saving grace in Kafka's dystopia was that the bureaucracy was inefficient. "No one wants to inhabit a Franz Kafka novel. But the surveillance states he describes do have one thing going for them—incompetence. In Kafka’s stories, important forms get lost, permits are unattainable, and bureaucrats fail to do their jobs. Like the main character in Kafka’s unfinished story, “The Castle,” if you were trapped in Kafka’s world you could live your whole life doing nothing but waiting for a permit. But at least you could live. Incompetence creates a little space.

What is terrifying about Orwell’s 1984 is the complete competence of the surveillance state."~Sarah Skwire

Kafka's works recently went online thanks to the National Library of Israel, to which someone brilliantly responded, "If there’s one thing I think we can feel confident in, it’s that Kafka would hate having his work digitized online in a state-run archive run by midlevel bureaucrats of a nationalist state."

Some Kafka Quotes: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

― The Trial

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”

“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”

“We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”