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Willard van Orman Quine famously observed that all the major areas of philosophy are questions asked by the average four year old child, namely:
The philosophy of religion is a particularly interesting area, in which philosophers pose all manner of impertinent questions and store up trouble for themselves in the future. Let us look at the proposition that God is omnipotent:
David Hume once noted that it is impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. For example, consider these arguments:
The first assumes that you want to stay dry, and that there is no other way to stay dry, that no hazards (like strong wind, lightning, or crowded streets) make the use of an umbrella a bad idea. The second assumes that you have a duty to your friend, that you have no more pressing duties or tasks (you haven't, say, left the iron on, or been entrusted to guard a psychopathic killer), that your friend deserves to be cheered up, that you are capable of the task, and so, and so on, and so on.
Daughter: Can I go to Anna's party tonight?
Mother: No, not on a school night.
D: But everyone else's mum lets them go!
M: You're not going, and that's final.
D: That's so unfair!
D: But everyone else's mum lets them go!
M: There are two assumptions there. The first is that everyone's mum does in fact allow them go, which, in the absence of detailed evidence, I am inclined to doubt. Secondly, you assume that because I am in a minority, I am incorrect. Yet there are many examples of holders of a minority view being correct. Surely you do not mean to claim that simply being in a majority confers truth?
D: I don't wish to claim that. But why do you think allowing me to go the party would be an incorrect decision?
M: Because you have school tomorrow.
D: You make the assumption that a late night would have an adverse affect my schoolwork. This I would deny; but we can assume that it is true for the moment. There is, however, a more serious assumption that you make. You assume that any disadvantages from my being a little tired from being up late will not be outweighed by the advantages that could be gained by my being at the party, such as increased self-esteem, social skills, and life experience. I dispute the primary importance you appear to attach to education and knowledge, and argue that these are only two virtues among many others, which are equally important for my personal development.
M: This may be so, but it doesn't show that the virtues of self-esteem and social skills should, on this occasion, outweigh education. And the less said about life experience, the better, young lady. If, as you say, the virtues of self-esteem and social skills and education are just three among many others, then the choice between them is simply a matter of judgment. You will concede that I am older and wiser than you are, and I am therefore better placed to make this judgment. Therefore, I conclude, I have the right - and, as your mother, the duty - to use this judgment in your best interests, which on this occasion is not to let you go the party.
D: But why?
M: You're not going, and that's final.
D: That's so unfair!
Whether this is an improvement or not, is, of course, a question of judgment.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that issuicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts toanswering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gesturescommanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which inhabit.Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, eveninstinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence ofany profound reason for living, the insane character of that dailyagitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of thesleep necessary to life? Hope of another life one must "desire" ortracery of those who live not for life itself but for some great ideathat will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.
Is there a logic to the point of death? Karl Jaspers (theimpossibility of constituting the world as a unity) leads me tomyself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point ofview, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can anylonger become an object for me "he is evoking those waterless desertswhere thought reaches its confines." At that last crossroad wherethought hesitates, many men have arrived, and then abdicated what wasmost precious to them, their life.
Great feelings take with them their own universe, even more so ofemotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and asdefinite, as remote and as present as those furnished us by beauty oraroused by absurdity.
One day the "why" arises, and everything begins in that wearinesstinged with amazement. Wariness comes at the end of the acts of amechanical life, but is awakens consciousness.
During everyday of an unillustrious life, time carries us. We live onthe future, longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in a man ought toreject it. After all, it's a matter of dying. That is the absurd.
Sensing to what degree a stone is foreign to us, with what intensitynature or a landscape can negate us... the primate hostility of the wordrises us to face us across millennia. That strangeness of the worldis the absurd.
At certain moments, the mechanical aspect of men's gestures, theirmeaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them.This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity is also theabsurd.
The mind's deepest desire parallels man's unconscious feeling in theface of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, anappetite for clarity. If man realised that the universe like him canlove and suffer, he would be reconciled. The nostalgia for unity,that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse ofthe human drama. But we fall into the contradiction of a mind thatasserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its owndifference.
This heart within me I can feel. This world I can touch. There endsall my knowledge, and the rest is construction. Here are tress and Iknow their gnarled surface; water, and I feel its taste. These scentsof grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world? Yet all the knowledge on earth willgive me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You teach methat this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to theatom and to the electron. You tell me of an invisible planetarysystem in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. I realize thenthat you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
This world in itself is not reasonable; but what is absurd is theconfrontation of this irrational and that will longing for claritywhose call echoes in the human heart. I want to know if thought canlive in those deserts.
Heidegger considers the only reality is "anxiety". To the man lost inthe world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear.But if that fear becomes conscious, it becomes anguish.
The phenomenologists deny the transcendent power of the reason.Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive; it isturning every idea and image, in the manner of Proust, into aprivileged moment. But it disappoints hope, opens to the heart awhole proliferation of phenomena, the waltz of which has about itsomething inhuman. Absurdity springs from a comparison between a barefact and a certain reality.
What Kierkegaard calls for is the sacrifice required by IgnatiusLoyola, the one in which God most rejoices: "the sacrifice of theintellect".
Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching - (the negationof thought). In the universe of the phenomenologists the worldbecomes clear and that longing for familiarity that man's heartharbours becomes useless. In Kierkegaard's apocalypse that desire forclarity must be given up if it wants to be satisfied. The absurd manfeels he is going to turn away. Past contradictions must bepreserved, not satisfied. He does not want preaching. The dangerlies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able toremain on that dizzying crest - that is integrity and the rest issubterfuge.
This hell of the present is his Kingdom at last. Abstract evidenceretreats before the poetry of forms and colours. Spiritual conflictsbecome embodied and return to the object and magnificent shelter ofman's heart.
He is asked to leap. He does not want to do anything but what hefully understands. He feels innocent. To abolish conscious revolt isto elude the problem. Revolt challenges the world anew every second.That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without theresignation that ought to accompany it.
Suicide does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. Suicide,like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme.
That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length ofa life, it restores majesty to that life. There is no finer sightthat that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcendsit. Doctrines that explain everything also debilitate me.
[Albert Camus]